YMCA swimming pools

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ICMa

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Boys were required to be naked at YMCA swimming pools till 1950s. What do you think about?
 
we took swimming lessons in the Y through the 50s and no such rules pertained, check your sources. what do I think about it? it think we get a lot of trolls on this forum
 
Apollos said:
Yep, I call you on this one too. Document or retract.
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My dad often talks about nude swimming lessons at the Y when he was a youngster during the late 40s and early 50s. I know University School, a private school in Cleveland, is an all boys school and swim classes were held nude through the 30s, 40s, and 50s. It wasn’t all that uncommon.
 
Young man
there’s a place you can go
I said, Young man,
when you’re short on your dough…

This is a non-topic, methinks. EVEN IF it were true, so what?

Y…M…C…A
 
Funny, I never knew the YMCA was run by Caligula.
Almost certainly an urban myth.
 
mcteague said:
Funny, I never knew the YMCA was run by Caligula.
Almost certainly an urban myth.
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I don’t really know about the Y. We took swimming lessons though at a rec center and we had to rent the bathing suits—that is, all of them had to be tank knit suits in the 50’s.

However, I know a lady WAC who served in World War 11 who told me the way the learned how to swim WAS in the nude, and this of course was in the 40’s. It was literally “sink or swim”,

Don’t know if that is the case now though.
 
I went to an all male college in the 50’s. Our gym swimming classes were always nude. One of the requirements for graduation at that institution was the ability to swim. Don’t know if it still is.
 
Joe_Kelley said:
I went to an all male college in the 50’s. Our gym swimming classes were always nude. One of the requirements for graduation at that institution was the ability to swim. Don’t know if it still is.
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Maybe having a rudder helps you swim straighter.
 
Some 60 years ago, as I started high school, I lived in a summer resort community in Maine. We worked summers as caddies on the golf course. Noon time we would go swimming off a dock at the end of the first hole; swim suits would have been laughed at.

One day we were surprised to see a yacht headed into the dock. :eek: The only thing to do was grab our clothes and run for the woods. It was the State Governor and his guests. We made the youngest guy go up and caddy for them. 😃
 
ICMa said:
Boys were required to be naked at YMCA swimming pools till 1950s. What do you think about?
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Different times, different social mores. Used to be, swimming was often considered an activity to be done in a single-sex environment and it was often done in the nude. I suspect in the 50s, this more was at the tail end of a transition more common to what we see today, which would explain the differening memories as to what was common in the 50s.
 
tafan said:
Different times, different social mores. Used to be, swimming was often considered an activity to be done in a single-sex environment
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There is the key if there is anything to this question at all. When modesty mattered swimming was not mixed. Now the line between what we have and swimming naked is almost nonexistent with some of the swimming suits out there and on top of it all it is males and females together. How is that good?
 
Newbie2 said:
Young man
there’s a place you can go
I said, Young man,
when you’re short on your dough…

This is a non-topic, methinks. EVEN IF it were true, so what?

Y…M…C…A
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I can’t tell you how much I hate the YMCA song. :eek:

But I agree, even if it is true, how is it a moral theology question?
 
This still did happen in the Chicago area Ys in the 60s.

Source: my memory
 
Standards of male modesty - at least in some contexts - have changed over the last few decades. In my Catholic high school in the ‘60’s, boys had a gang shower, and girls had individual cubicles. My Protestant cousin got to go to our local Y at that time, and boys’ swimming lessons were definitely in the nude. Any boy who balked at swimming or showering that way would have been regarded as the worst kind of sissy.
 
I went to a summer camp run by the Y as a child decades ago, and every morning we had to take a morning dip in the lake - in the nude. We didn’t think anything of it.

Then, in a private high school I attended, we showered after sports, also in the nude.

We think of being less prudish today, but in some ways we are the opposite.

My guess is that the change may have come about in large part because of more attention given to homosexuality. When I was a kid, I wasn’t even aware of gays. Even when, as a teenager, I became aware of gays, it received no public attention as it does today. So, we paid nudity among males no particular attention.
Probably that was healthier back then???
 
Roy5 said:
I went to a summer camp run by the Y as a child decades ago, and every morning we had to take a morning dip in the lake - in the nude. We didn’t think anything of it.

Then, in a private high school I attended, we showered after sports, also in the nude.

We think of being less prudish today, but in some ways we are the opposite.

My guess is that the change may have come about in large part because of more attention given to homosexuality. When I was a kid, I wasn’t even aware of gays. Even when, as a teenager, I became aware of gays, it received no public attention as it does today. So, we paid nudity among males no particular attention.
Code: 
Probably that was healthier back then???
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In ancient Sparta people would engage in sport naked. The point was to discourage excessive modesty, and encourage pride in physical appearance. Since then something happened to make people ashamed of their bodies. Sadly, I think that something is called Christianity. Or a least that has been the affect of some of its teaching.
 
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