Bliss, Remembered by Frank Deford Read Free Book Online Page A

just said bathing suits. But the only one I had besides that faded cream number was light blue with some kind of overlapping red and green circles. Mr. Foster said he couldn’t take me seriously in those get-ups, so Mother and I found a proper black one. It was wool, the way they made them in those days, very modest of course—high in the front and, well, high in the back, too, with kind of a little skirt. It was constructed more for modesty than for speed.
    But, of course, everything is relative. “Now,” Mr. Foster said the first day I showed up in it, “you look like you mean business.”
    And so I began to work out with him. Like I told you, Teddy, he wasn’t a real coach. He’d been a good swimmer in college and a camp counselor and what-have-you, but, still, he sure knew more about swimming than anybody else around, so I counted myself lucky. He also had an instructional primer, which he consulted. And he gave it to me, so I could take it home and read it myself. I won’t go into any of the who-shot-John about what he taught me. Suffice it to say that I followed his advice and what the book said, and I could tell right away that I was getting faster. I could tell that I was pleasing Mr. Foster, too. He was some kind of administrative officer at the college, and working with me gave him an interesting hobby. But he didn’t let me get carried away. I think you could say he was circumspect.
    Most importantly, though, I kept improving, and one day right before Thanksgiving, he said, “Trixie, does this really matter to you?”
    I said, “Yes, sir. I want to be good.”
    “Well, if you keep working as hard as you have, and you stay dedicated, and you don’t get too involved with some boy, I honestly believe you can make the Olympics.”
    I was flabbergasted. I barely knew what the Olympics were, and I certainly had no idea where they were taking place. I thought maybe they were permanently situated in Los Angeles, like Hollywood was, because I knew that’s where they’d been last time, in ’32. I knew that much, and that Babe Didrikson had been the big star, which I thought was neat, because she was a woman. I’d never heard of another woman in athletics. So, Mr. Foster was satisfied with my enthusiasm, and he told me there was something called the Eastern Interscholastics in March up in Philadelphia, and we were going to point for that.
    I worked so hard at my swimming that I kinda irritated my friends. Every day, after school, I’d have the bus drop me off at my mother’s office downtown, and either she or one of the agents would run me over to the pool at the college, or I’d take her car and drive over myself.
    Either way, I became something of a lone wolf.
    My best friend was Carter Kincaid. She was the most grown-up girl around—hot stuff. Carter had her wits about her, too. Her father had a large farm, and so he was weathering the Depression better than most, and Carter was determined to go to college. She wanted to become a teacher. In those days, there wasn’t all that much a girl could do, apart from being a secretary. Well, then there was teaching or nursing. That was about it.
    Carter was gonna go to Towson State Teachers College. There was a college on the Shore, Salisbury State, but Carter was like my mother. She wanted to be hell and gone from the farm. In fact, Carter wanted to be hell and gone from the whole Eastern Shore. Towson State was right outside of Baltimore, and so she had her sights set on the bright lights of the big city. Baltimore might as well have been Paris as far as we were concerned.
    Our junior year in high school—that’s when I started swimming—Carter began going out with Tommy Witherspoon, who was very cute and the captain of the baseball team. Tommy’s best friend was Buzzy Moore, and he was cute enough too, and he had a mad crush on me, and Carter and Tommy wanted us to double-date all the time. If it was going to a party or a movie at the New Lyceum Theatre