Yuen: Minnesota men bare all about naked swimming in school

As a columnist, I’m always humbled by my lack of ability to predict which of my stories will resonate widely with readers. Thanks to online metrics, I can see which columns are voraciously clicked on and consumed, shared with friends and posted on social media.

Well, dear readers, you have spoken. And you care a lot about naked swimming.

Last month I explored the widespread practice of Minnesota middle schools and high schools requiring boys to strip down completely as part of their P.E. swimming class. The tradition of nude swimming in schools, inconceivable to us younger generations, endured in our state and beyond until the 1970s. Not only did that column go viral, but I received a voluminous heap of emails and phone calls from readers who said, “Me, too.”

I now have enough material to write a tome on school-sanctioned skinny dipping. But until my book debut, I can’t resist sharing more of these stories from naked-swimming survivors, with their permission.

One comes from a 1965 graduate of St. Louis Park High School. (He’s still mortified by the memories, so I agreed to leave out his name.) When he was in 10th grade, along the rest of his male classmates, he was ordered to jump into the deep end of the pool, totally exposed. He remembers it as one of the worst things that’s ever happened to him.

“I couldn’t swim. Even the words ‘deep end’ were scary to me,” he recalled. “I had to stand on the diving board, naked. It was cold in there, if you get my drift.”

Worse yet, he was terrified that girls could steal a peek at him through a gap near the bottom of the door to the pool entrance.

Before he jumped, “I said, ‘Here I go. I’m gonna die, maybe. It’s 50-50,‘” he said. “It was like a bad dream. But somehow I came to the surface. I lived. I lived!”

He’s made peace with the experience, and even acknowledges one good thing came out of it: He learned to swim.

A Twin Cities reader, now in his 80s, grew up with nude swimming at his junior high in Ohio. He said my column was the first time he’s ever read about this “weird practice.”

“I felt humiliated, if not traumatized, having to be naked in front of my contemporaries,” he wrote. “At the time, what was beyond strange for me was that the instructor made a point of undressing himself before the class. Almost a ritual. This felt off for me. I’ve not yet ascribed a specific pathology, if there is one, to his behavior.”

But others remember their naked swim classes with hilarity. One was 76-year-old Bruce Seal of Falcon Heights, who reminisced about his time in the pool at Hopkins High School. His P.E. instructor was known to yell, “All right boys, I want to see those periscopes!” Seal said. “I tried not to swallow water while I laughed doing laps.”

Bill Terry of Wayzata attended junior high in Edina in the ‘60s. Some of his most vivid memories took place even before jumping in.

“We were going through puberty at the time, and when we would have to line up along the pool walkway, it was crazy looking down the line,” he said. “There were hairy, 6-foot-2, well-endowed guys next to 5-foot shrimps all standing in line in our nakedness. I do remember laughing a lot, so I think that it was more fun than anything.”

Apparently, some P.E. teachers also had a similar sense of humor. At his school in St. Louis Park, Randy Mikkelson said his instructor liked to recycle the same joke every year on the first day of swim class after he lined up all the boys by the side of the pool for roll call.

“Suddenly he’d look up at the (empty) bleachers behind us, and say ‘Girls, what are you doing here now? Your class isn’t till next hour!‘” Mikkelson said. “All of us boys would dive for cover, and the teacher got a good chuckle.”

A common refrain I heard from men who were forced to do laps in the buff: We were never told why.

Many schools forbade boys from wearing swim trunks out of fear that fibers from the suits would clog the pool filters. Other districts fretted over the cost of supplying the swimsuits.

But it didn’t explain why girls were allowed to wear school-provided bathing suits and boys were not. I have to think this double standard, at least in part, can be explained by unfair gender-related stereotypes: Girls are modest and need to be protected; boys prefer frivolity and band-of-brothers camaraderie.

One Duluth school board member even penned a poem in 1973 in defense of naked swimming. “Spirits free prefer the nude,” he wrote. “It seems to fit the boyish mood.”

As other readers pointed out, many gym teachers at the time were military veterans who were accustomed to communal showers and swimming in the nude. They carried over their culture of unabashed nudity to the classroom.

For some, recollections of naked swimming triggered memories of abuse. Younger generations of Minnesotans may be surprised to learn that paddling was used as a form of discipline in our state, usually by the hands of the P.E. teacher.

One reader, Rick of Eden Prairie, recounted having to swim and play water polo in the nude at Central Junior High in St. Louis Park in the 1960s.

“After one class of uncomfortable contact with classmates, I chose to stay in the shower room rather than accompany my class. The physical education instructor noticed I was missing,” Rick wrote. “Finding me in the shower room, I was instructed to wait and received ‘the paddle’ on my bare bottom. I didn’t miss a class the rest of the quarter.”

Gary, who attended Maplewood Junior High in the mid-‘60s, said his gym teacher once punished a group of kids who were horsing around and running on the pool deck. The teacher brought out a paddle that was about 4 inches wide and 18 inches long.

“He told them to face the pool, bend over, and grab their ankles,” Gary told me. “All of them did. He came behind them, took a swing, and you could hear the crack of that paddle on their rear ends. He went to the next kid, and the next kid, and the next kid.”

After the teacher ordered the boys to turn around, the students who were still in the pool could see bright red, 4-inch-wide marks across their classmates' rears.

Another man, from North Dakota, recalled that his teacher’s instrument of choice was a fiberglass fishing rod that he would whack against a bare butt. That same teacher also required the boys to do jumping jacks around the pool, if you can visualize that.

Girls were not off the hook, even though they were allowed to wear swimsuits. At Eau Claire South Junior High School in Wisconsin in the 1980s, Jennifer Amundson recalls, the school provided suits that were color-coded by size: white, red, blue, green, brown and black. The skinniest, flat-chested girls were given white suits (that turned transparent as soon as they hit the water). Very heavy girls wore black bathing suits.

“It has been more than 40 years since I had that experience but I still remember which suits I had to wear and also the colors of various other classmates,” Amundson said. “These women are now accomplished doctors, writers, teachers, but back then we were just little girls trying to survive puberty without too much humiliation and that’s what the school did to us. ... We’re not over it.”

I also heard from men who gently pushed back on my column, offering their neutral to positive experiences with swimming naked in public schools. They also worry that the United States has trended toward a body-phobic prudishness, compared with Europe where people sauna and luxuriate in public steam rooms in the nude.

That’s fine, but the difference in my mind is the existence of choice. As a parent of two sons, I’m grateful that our notions today about boys and their feelings have expanded over time. When it comes to their bodies, boys deserve to set their own boundaries as to how much they share, just as much as girls. Thankfully, we would never tolerate mandatory nude swim classes today.

If you are old enough to have lived through naked swimming, though, make sure to tell your kids and grandkids about it. Otherwise, this strange chapter of our history could be lost forever.