A Piece of My Mind: When Los Altos was Wet and Wild (Los Altos Town Crier, Feb. 7,2024)
When I was a girl in East Texas, I took swim lessons in the public pool from a Red Cross instructor. I was a good floater and treader of water, due to my persistent baby fat, but flailed desperately to swim across the pool just once in order to earn my Beginner badge. There were plenty of other flailers in the pool, though. Swimming was just something you did to cool off in the summer.
Then we moved to Los Altos, which at that time was a fairly new middle-class suburb. The lots were no larger than what I had known in East Texas, the houses no more spacious, but there was one key difference. Of our six closest neighbors, four had swimming pools.
On my first day at school, I marveled at the tanned students with hair tinged green from chlorine. New friends casually mentioned how they dove into their pool each morning before breakfast and did a few laps just to wake up. The school had a swimming pool. And swimming was a regular part of gym class.
In Texas, football had been the sport which determined who was Campus King. In Los Altos, it was swimming. I had not known that swimming could be a competitive event. I had never heard of water polo. But here was LIFE magazine coming to campus to do a feature about our student body President, Steve Clark, who for a brief time was known as “the world’s fastest swimmer” due to his record-breaking 100-meter freestyle times. The president of the LAHS California Scholarship Federation was also the goalie on the US Olympic water polo team. The LAHS swim team under coach Nort Thornton broke 13 national records out of 20. Thornton went on to coach Cal to two National Championships and is in the International Swimming Hall of Fame.
This all came back to me as I read of the abrupt closure in January of the George Haines International Swim Center in Santa Clara. The ISC opened during the golden age of Bay Area swimming. Though Los Altos High School ceased its prominence in the swim world when Thornton left for Foothill College and then Cal, the school continued to produce Olympians who swam at the ISC. Steve Clark trained there under George Haines for the 1964 Oympics, and won a gold medal. I was most recently at the ISC for a benefit for the US Olympic synchronized swimming team, which won a bronze medal in Greece in 2004,captained by LAHS alumna Lauren McFall.
There are still plenty of swimming pools in my neighborhood, but not as many children. I see plenty of students walking or biking to and from the campus with unusually colored hair, but none with that tell-tale chlorine green. A quick scan of Town Crier articles about high school sports turns up dozens of articles on football, soccer, basketball, and volleyball, but nothing about swimming or water polo. Does the demise of the ISC in Santa Clara reflect a general sag in swimming as a path to glory? Or are there are still students at LAHS who dive into a backyard pool every morning to wake up? I hope that tradition lives on, even if the ISC does not.
Allyson Johnson 