Yuen: Why were boys required to swim naked in Minnesota schools?

Last month I shared with you the most awkward hallmarks of my ‘80s and ’90s childhood. I assumed, naively, that communal showers after P.E. and rubbing our teacher’s pantyhose during story time would be among the weirdest rites of passage that kids have ever had to endure.

Men in their 60s and 70s reached out to me with the equivalent of “hold our beer.”

The first email I received was from my own colleague, features reporter Richard Chin, who grew up attending public schools in Muskegon, Mich. As he explains, swim classes were segregated by sex — and the boys were required to swim naked.

“Looking back on it, the vibe was kind of weird: A fully dressed male adult gym teacher making a bunch of naked adolescents lie on the pool deck and do porpoise slides into the water,” he recollected. “People don’t believe me when I tell them that a public school required kids to swim naked, but you’ll probably hear from other people that it happened to them.”

Sure enough, I did. From southeastern Minnesota to the Twin Cities suburbs and the Iron Range, Minnesota men wrote in, remembering this aspect of childhood in vivid detail. The rule apparently did not apply to girls, who were allowed to wear bathing suits as they learned the front crawl and backstroke.

The practice of mandatory naked swimming was hardly unique to our state. If you were in the dark like me, you can read all about the custom of “nude swimming in U.S. indoor pools” on the internet; an entire Wikipedia page is devoted to it.

Scott Ostman had no idea that the phenomenon extended beyond Virginia, Minn. He thinks it was the rule for all boys in seventh to 10th grade to swim in the nude until about 1975. “Can you imagine in a million years something like that ever happening today?” he said. “Yet, it was a thing for years up there and seemingly no one questioned it.”

Ostman had found a loophole, though. “Fortunately, I had eczema on my legs that I would vigorously scratch to the point of visible discomfort where a quick stop at the school nurse’s office would earn me a pass to allow me to merely watch from the stands,” he said. “True story. It was horrifying.”

“It sounds insane, right?” chimed in another reader who grew up in Rochester. “I’ve told this to everyone, but no one believes me. At my 50th class reunion, some of the guys from our class even talked about it and how bizarre it was. It’s like something out of a movie.”

Mark Hodapp says naked swimming was hands down the strangest memory he has from attending Woodland Junior High in Duluth in 1965. “Needless to say, some uncomfortable situations arose,” he said. “To this day, no one has been able to tell me why they had that tradition.”

To get to, er, the bottom of the story, I called Minnesota-based journalist and filmmaker Robin Washington, a host for Wisconsin Public Radio and former editor of the Duluth News Tribune. In my rabbit hole of research I unearthed a piece he filed for NPR in 2006 aptly titled, “Naked in High School: Bad Dreams Do Come True.”

Washington grew up in Chicago and in the early 1970s attended Lane Tech, a prestigious college prep school. As a self-described “natural sinker,” he was quickly sorted into the swim class for beginners. I shouldn’t say he was completely naked; he was allowed to hoist an inner tube around his midsection and wear a bathing cap atop his head.

“They didn’t want your hair — from your head, anyway — getting into the pool," he said with a laugh.

To understand the roots of nude swimming in pools, especially for men and boys, it helps to know that people have been skinny dipping in natural bodies of water since time immemorial, Washington said. When schools and YMCAs started to build pools in the 1920s to combat drowning, they feared that dirt and grime from people’s clothing would contaminate the pools and spread germs and disease.

This was also still in the early days of filtration, and pool operators worried that fibers from wool bathing suits — yes, this was before the invention of nylon and polyester — would clog the filters.

As WBEZ Chicago reported, the American Public Health Association issued a recommendation in 1926 that said “nude bathing should be required” at indoor pools used exclusively by men. (Women should wear bathing suits of simple materials such as wool or cotton, the guidance said.)

Even after the invention of synthetic fabrics and as our understanding of germ theory evolved, however, old ways stuck. Boys continued to strip naked in swim class, while the girls were allowed to wear swimsuits. The double standard continued for decades.

By 1973 in Duluth, public sentiment had shifted. The school board voted to require junior high boys to wear swimsuits, just as the girls always had. The Duluth News Tribune announced the news with this lead to its story: “Sexism has drowned in Duluth public swimming pools.”

The practice had come under fire after parents complained that naked swimming was immodest. A poll of junior high boys found that more preferred wearing swim suits than not, but most didn’t have a problem with nude swimming. The leading proponent of the change on the board was Ruth Myers, a prominent voice for American Indian education in the state and an Indian boarding school survivor. She found it objectionable that boys would have to swim in the nude “when one does not have a choice.”

The board voted 5-3 to purchase swimsuits for the boys after a spirited discussion. “Our job is to educate, not clothe people,” said one of the dissenting board members.

It’s not to say girls did not endure injustices in adolescence. I heard from another reader, Kate, who grew up in Eau Claire, Wis., in the 1950s. It was a time when “adolescents were kept in the dark about more things than you can believe,” she recalled.

When her seventh-grade P.E. teacher explained to the girls that showers were mandatory, there was only one way they could get out of it, “and you all know what that is.” (God forbid she explicitly tell them it was if they were on their periods.)

“I thought the reason was having a cold,” said Kate, who remembers skipping showers when she had a stuffy nose. “When I had my period I minced my way through the wall sprinklers wearing my sanitary belt. (You probably didn’t experience those.) I think it took me six months to catch on.”

But back to naked swimming. For Washington, the journalist who grew up in Chicago, there was one bright spot in his memories from that chapter of his life. He was identified as one of three “worst cases” who foundered in the pool. The teacher promised the class a free swim day if one of the three could swim the width of the pool.

The others sank, but Washington paddled furiously to the end, to the cheers of classmates chanting his name. “I was a hero,” he said.

But that doesn’t make up for the humiliation so many endured, Washington said. He remembers others crying as they were hazed by the older boys who inspected the students' wrists to make sure they were clean enough to enter the pool. Some were repeatedly sent to re-shower.

“It would be lawsuit city to even suggest that this would happen today,” he said of naked swimming. “You couldn’t do it, you wouldn’t do it, and it was traumatizing. I’m amazed it lasted as long as it did.”

The practice is all but forgotten, except in the minds of those who lived it. Younger generations are moving through the world complaining about how bad we had it with communal showers and the rope climb, unaware that our forebears swam naked in P.E. Many were unfazed, like Rick Haley, who swam nude as a child at the downtown YMCA in the 1960s. Now 70, he says, “it didn’t seem that weird to me.”

When I asked my own 79-year-old dad about it, he nonchalantly recounted that he had to prove he could swim the length of the pool while nude, but not until college. How could I have never heard this story?!

Despite all of Washington’s achievements in journalism, his reporting on naked swimming has followed him everywhere. He thinks it surfaces every several years when members of a younger generation learn about it, bewildered, and turn to Google. Every handful of years, podcasters and reporters reach out to request an interview. He jokes that it might as well be featured in his obituary (“Robin Washington, journalist who swam nude in high school”).

Apparently, he was in terrific company.