Column: The battle of the sandy beach versus the cement pond
Published 12:00 am Friday, August 15, 2003
Several weeks ago I found an editorial in the October 1953 issue of Albert Lea’s Community Magazine which clearly indicated that the city then must have had a real controversy regarding a place to swim. Some folks wanted a real swimming pool, or what was once called a &uot;cement pond&uot; on the &uot;Beverly Hillbillies&uot; television program. Other folks thought the city beach on Fountain Lake at the west end of Johnson Street was more than adequate for swimming 50 years ago. And when winter came, the local folks then had to contend with hard water (ice).
Now here’s that editorial in its entirety:
&uot;We were delighted to hear that at a recent Kiwanis meeting Ray Ostrander mounted his charger and shivered a lance against that persistent but insupportable idea that a swimming pool is cleaner than a lake.
&uot;Of course it’s possible to pollute a lake to such an extent that just about any swimming pool would be cleaner. We should know. We’ve done it in the case of Albert Lea Lake. But despite the pollution of Fountain Lake that does occur, we venture to assert that Fountain Lake is safer to swim in than the prettiest white-tile, blue-bottomed swimming pool filled with crystal clear water. We can’t understand why people who take all sorts of precautions against unseen germs expect the bugs to be absent from swimming pools because they can’t see them there. The waiting rooms of eye, ear, nose and throat specialists are full of patients with eye and ear infections picked up in crystal-clear swimming pools.
&uot;Consider the old-muddy-looking lake, though. It has hundreds of thousands of square feet of surface aerated by wind and ultra-violet treated by sun where a swimming pool 50×100 feet has only 5,000 square feet of surface. The swimmer in a pool shares a few thousand gallons of water with hundreds of other persons, all bringing bacteria of various sorts into the limited gallonage. The swimmer in a lake has hundreds of thousands of gallons of water to play in, and the bacteria get spread pretty thin in that much water. If you are in the high school auditorium and somebody sneezes there’s less chance of your catching that person’s cold than there is if you’re in a phone booth with the sneezer. This is a fair analogy of the lake and swimming pool situation.
&uot;We are certainly not opposed to Albert Lea’s having an indoor swimming pool. It would be a wonderful thing for those cold months when the lake can’t be used for swimming. What we object to is the attitude that the lake is no good and not worth spending money on. We suspect that a good many persons who moon over a swimming pool have this attitude.
&uot;The fact is that Fountain Lake is one of Albert Lea’s prime physical assets. (Albert Lea Lake could be too.) Letting it deteriorate is deliberately dropping an advantage to competing cities such as Austin. It is our conviction that our city administration was negligent in its treatment of Fountain Lake last summer. For want of a few dollars worth of copper sulfate and the labor to drag it through the lake this beautiful body of water was allowed to turn green. This is the kind of economy a person practices when his teeth are decaying and he won’t go to a dentist.&uot;
To this I’ll add the following four comments and/or explanations.
First, Ray Ostrander was a insurance salesman in 1953.
Second, I refuse to believe that local lake water is equal in purity to city water in a cement pond.
Third, there just weren’t any real cement ponds in Albert Lea a half-century ago. Today, we have indoor pools in several motels, at the Family Y, the high school, and certainly at the water park and outdoor pool between East Front Street and James Avenue.
Fourth, the present swimmer attendance at the municipal pool as compared with the city beach certainly proves an important point regarding the popularity of these two places today.
Now, here’s information about an entirely unrelated local topic.
Lowell Berg, the son of Skipper Berg, has converted all the 78-rpm records made by the Viking Accordion Band of Albert Lea between 1933-1941 into four compact discs. For more information regarding the CDs, contact Lowell at 16271 Bagley Ave., Faribault MN 55021, or call (507) 332-7029.
(Tribune feature writer Ed Shannon’s column appears Fridays in the Tribune.)