This week at the doggie daycare has been tough. We’ve been completely full of boarders - these dogs are not our regular dogs, and they’re anxious. Our regular dogs know us, know the other dogs, and know their humans will pick them up before dinner. The boarders aren’t sure when they’ll see their humans again.
I was struggling through a day in the yards with the dogs, when a co-worker came up to my fence and asked, “Would you like a pool?”
One of the features of our doggie daycare is swimming pools. They’re just plastic tubs that we drag to the outdoor portion of our yards and fill with water from the hose. But the dogs love them. Of course I said yes!
But it took me back. Some of my earliest memories involve my dad inflating a five-foot diameter pool in the backyard, filling it with the garden hose, and setting me in it. When I grew up we didn’t have air conditioning. The Nebraska summers were hot. There was nothing better than getting into the shocking cold water of our tiny pool.
This made me curious about the origins of pools in general.
Around 3,000 B.C.E. the first swimming pool was created in Mohenjo-Daro, in what is now Pakistan. It was 23 feet by 39 feet, lined with bricks, and coated with a tar-based sealant.
The first heated pool was built sometime between 38 and 8 B.C.E. by Gaius Maecenas in his garden in the hills of Rome. That makes me think of the time I went to Bath, England with my friend, Tammy. Those baths - created around a hot spring that had been a sacred place for millenia before the Romans arrived - were built circa 60-70 C.E. What was amazing about those baths was the heated floors. The Romans had built hollow clay pipes beneath the flooring. Some sort of minimum wage workers (or worse) no doubt stoked the fires that fed the clay pipes that kept the Roman tootsies warm.
Swimming pools became popular in England in the mid-19th century. By 1837, there were six indoor pools with diving boards in London alone. The Maidstone Swimming Club is believed to be the oldest surviving swimming club in Britain. It was formed in response to concerns about drownings in a nearby river. Apparently bystanders would see someone in trouble in the river and jump in to rescue them, not bothering to remember that they themselves did not know how to swim. The swimming clubs were organized to teach swimming and practice rescues.
When the modern day Olympic Games began in 1896, they included swimming races, and this contributed to the popularity of swimming. The first swimming pool on an ocean liner went to sea on the White Star Line’s Adriatic in 1906. You may recall that the Titanic was owned by J.P. Morgan’s White Star Line.
According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the largest swimming pool in the world is in Chile - the San Alfonso del Mar seawater pool in Algarrobo. It is 3,323 feet long and has an area of over 20 acres. It was built in 2006.
There is a lot of information on regular swimming pools, but what I’m interested in today is inflatable pools. Those pools that were cheap enough that anyone could have one in their backyard. Those pools that were the salvation of our long hot summers before anyone had air conditioning.
The inflatable pools came out in the 1940s. It seems as if Americans came home from WWII and just wanted to sit in their backyards, drink a beer, grill some burgers, and watch their kids splash in the water.
In 1947 Doughboy Plastics created a line of “splasher pools”, beach balls, and inflatable toys that you could buy at the local drug store or the five-and-dime.
In the 1960s the plastic got mod colors and additional inflatable parts. They sold inflatable slides and inflatable ladders. The pools got bigger - some of them reached five feet deep and held tens of thousands of gallons of water. That’s a long way from the tiny pool my dad used to blow up in our backyard.
And it’s a long way from the plastic pools we have at the doggie daycare. For a dog or a kid, a couple inches of water is all the depth you need. Happiness comes from just getting wet, splashing your friends, maybe jumping and sliding along the plastic. The Washington Post claims that inflatable backyard pools made a big resurgence during the pandemic - that people were buying little kiddie pools and filling them with water on their roof decks in the city. I’m not surprised. I hope they let their dogs use them.
Meanwhile, in our soap business, we’re going to hold a few weeks of sales. We’ll put a different bar on deep discount each week for the next several weeks. This week’s featured soap is sandalwood. This link will take you directly there: https://www.serenasoaps.com/product-page/sandalwood-3-oz-or-more
