Days of Innocence: Springsteen, the Snack Bar & Endless Summers
By Kevin Shea
The first time I felt the true impact of rock-and-roll, that a song could be the soundtrack to a period in my life, was at Northwest Branch Pool.
It was Bruce Springsteen's `Hungry Heart,' and it was the summer of 1981, I believe. I was just 10 years old.
The song wafted through the summer air seemingly every day, usually from a boom box plugged in near the snack bar. I remember it especially during the long, lag days of August, when swim team was over and we all, young kinds and teenage lifeguards, wanted the summer to never end and for school to never start.
When I hear that song today, I am transported back to NWB in the early 1980s. I can see the swimsuits, the Op and flowery Jams bathing suits. I can see the faces of the guards I so looked up to like gods and challenging them to games of ping pong. I can see the scene at the snack bar, hoping to squeeze onto a choice spot on the then famous ``bench'' at the window.
We had a high dive back then, and to be able to flip off it was a notch of adolescent respect. My friends and I drank endless amounts of Shasta soda – the only kind the snack bar sold - and played “red rover” in the well.
Sunday nights often ended with family barbecues. Back then, the Wooters were a young couple with only one child. The guard managers let families stay late, after 9 p.m., providing a board member with keys was present.
It was before the gazebo, before the fence was even cut down near the junior pool there. We gathered at a cluster of picnic tables near the far side of the diving well. There were no pool lounge chairs. Moms brought their own and locked them to the fence.
The first time I did a flip on the low dive, Sheila Wooters “double bounced” me - during pool hours. I learned to swim a lap underwater with the help of “the guards,” who pushed me to do it until I did.
In the mid to late 1980s I was typical teenager and summer was about hanging out at NWB all day. My friends and I - too many to name – were at the pool all day, from after morning practice to evening practice. We would go from boys trading baseball cards at the picnic tables to a mixed group of boys and girls who started to do teenage things together.
And I had great times in the early 90s, managing the pool with Matt Rismiller, and later by myself, with a stellar crew that included Kevin Carter, Marty Young, and Geza Illes, a person I would be totally remiss for not mentioning in an essay about NWB life.
I would also save a life and meet my wife, at NWB.
The first was a Jackson Road elementary school kid who jumped off the low dive at an end-of- the-year school party and did not realize how deep it was. Minutes later, I was back on the stand, sipping coffee.
And in 1990, a 17-year-old girl named Kim Heyns took a dip I spotted her from the second guard chair. She wore a tropical-themed bikini as she stood in the 3-feet. We were married in New Jersey in 1997.
But the most memorable NWB days for was those early 80s. Before I was a teen at the pool, and before I was helping run the pool, I was a scrawny kid who soaked up the sun and the pool life at NWB, which was to me, the world.
The little slice of land between Rt. 29 and Lockwood Drive was it.
Like learning to play gin rummy while eating M&Ms and drinking (Shasta) root beer with guards like Kevin Ryan and Pat Tozzi on top of the concrete steps outside the office. I was not yet a teen and these guys were larger than life and they paid us kids mind. (As manager a decade later, I would hold court there, on the concrete steps, with Geza and others, as a new generation of kiddies sought us out as guards.)
Paul Zimmerman and Chris Tozzi seemed to manage the pool forever back then. I once played ping pong with Paul Zimmerman, easily 10 years older than I, for what seemed like an hour, and he kept talking how he wished some other song would knock Kim Carnes' “Bette Davis Eyes” off the top of the American Top 40.
A few years later, my friends and I loved hanging out with a guard named Jeff Davison, who used to let me read his Spin magazines and always talked music. He was the first to mention the band REM to me and how cool college radio music was.
The guards were not only fun guys, they were an education and early role models. I knew I would be a lifeguard someday, like the son who looks up to his father policeman and knows he will wear the badge.
I knew one day I would sit on the NWB lifeguard stands, basking in the sun, twirling a whistle, yelling at kids not to “run on the deck!”
It wasn’t just guards. There was me and my friends, and then a slightly older generation of kids, the Chris’ - Chris Appler, Chris Tang, Chris Byrdy and the ubiquitous Chris Rammling - swimmer, pool lawn cutter, and all around cool guy with a hot car who was our resident metal head. (I recall one early 80s day when Chris Byrdy, a few years old than me, lecturing me how the rock band Rush “should be my favorite band.”
Still others made up the NWB scene back then, like the Harrigans and Hares, McCarthys and Millers and later the Rismillers, Gartners, Smiths, Coles, Claytons, Henrys and Heyns, and of course, the Youngs. I am sure I am unintentionally leaving someone out. (Many of these NWB moms, mine included, still meet regularly for dinner, lunch, a lasting testament to NWB.)
In short, NWB was my innocence.
My summer days, and that of my two older sisters, Kathy and Maura, and my younger sister Meghan, was a routine many parents would not pull off today. Dropped off in the morning for swim team practice, we stayed at the pool all day, until our parents arrived after work.
We were not left alone - we had the guards and other parents to watch after us. NWB was family. And it worked..
In August, after swim team, we initially had a lot more fun. But then guards would leave for college and families started going on vacations. But on that last summer day, Labor Day weekend, the pool came to life. Everyone would come out of the woodwork for one last blast and the place was jammed. Two guards up all day. The radio pumped out rock hits, the guards let their guards down a bit, and the families gathered in the grass that last Sunday to eat, drink and talk about the summer. And I wished those days would never end.
And that is when I heard Hungry Heart, the backbeat to those summer days at NWB.
I recently heard Bruce Springsteen talk about writing his classic Born to Run album and how he wanted to capture the feeling of that “the endless summer night.” I am sure he would have written about NWB in the early 1980s if he was there.
I was, and it was great way to come of age.
Footnote: Kevin Shea now lives in Point Pleasant, NJ with his wife Kim and three young daughters. He works as a newspaper reporter, covering the police beat for the Trenton Times in Trenton, NJ.
Friday, March 17, 2006
Editor’s Note:
NorthWest Branch played an important role in the life of Kevin Shea when he was coming of age in Silver Spring, MD in the Seventies and Eighties. And Kevin played an important role in the life of NWB. Here, Kevin takes time out from a hectic professional and personal schedule to reflect on those wondrous years. In the end, NWB would bring him not only a great past but also would help him establish a terrific future.
Kevin Shea on the job today
The Summer of ’81
Kevin is 2nd from left
in the second row
