The Great Swimmin' Hole Scandal

Sun-browned, vivacious Young America, with a thousand busy, bubbling defiant emotions hard-swallowed in enforced solemnity, stood bright-eyed and open-visaged at the bar of justice in Judge Staser’s court Monday morning—a vivid answer to the legal complaint of having slipped, shiny and shivering, from bathing suits to B.V.D.’s, unveiled to the public gaze. It may be that, as eyewitnesses wove tales of guilt around the offenders, the mind of the gray-bearded justice was perplexed with mental reviews of law books and penal codes, but his twinkling eye and shadowed smile spoke rather of a memory romping back to those dear barefooted days of summer freckles and fun. At any rate, Young America went its way fettered only with the solemn admonition that the traditions of “The Old Swimmin’ Hole,” sacred though they be, are not quite so sacred as the rights of society and that steamboats and clothes enjoy a prior right of way at the public docks. “But it’s the only swimmin’ hole on the river and there is no place to dress unless we go away over to the bushes,” protested Young America. Here, then, is some work to be done. We simply “gotta” build a dressing house at the swimming hole. We owe as much to the kiddies of the town and to the memory of those kiddies who swam where God gave a little less water and a little more bushes.