It started on a hot and humid afternoon at the California Park Swimming Pool. We had gotten wet, cooled off a bit, but no one seemed to have the energy to just get up and go home, or even go back into the pool. 

           “You know,” one of my friends suggested, “they have swimming in the Olympics. I saw it on TV. We could do our own Olympics right here.”

           “We” were 10-to-14 year-olds, roughly from the same neighborhood, who came together for pickup athletic events as the “Rockwell-George A.C.,” the name taken from the intersection gathering point from which we would set off in search of a worthy opponent at a local park or playground to play baseball, softball, football, tackle or touch.  

           It was 1952, and the Olympic heroes of the hour were not swimmers, but runners, jumpers, and vaulters.  The names of Olympic champions (Harrison Dillard, 110-meter hurdles; Mal Whitfield, 800 meters; Bob Richards, pole vault; Bob Mathias, decathlon, etc.) were, for the moment, as common in playground debates as Stan Musial, Otto Graham, or George Mikan, in baseball, football, or basketball. 

           “We could have races, across the width or the length of the pool. We could have crawl and backstroke.“ (The only butterfly we knew about was the Monarch flying kind.) 

           “Boring,” was the general response.

           “We could do diving, too, off the high and low boards.”

           “How do you win at diving?”

           There was some hesitation, for no one had any idea of what a winning dive might look like.

           “Well, off the low board, we could see how far you can jump off the end of the board, and on the high board, we can see who can make the biggest cannonball splash.”

           The diving component was greeted with high enthusiasm, but there was a hitch.

           “Who will be the judges?”

           “The V.G.s will do it.” (A “V.G.” was a “voluntary life guard,” officially, extra pairs of eyes to assist the paid life guards and, unofficially, a very nice way to meet girls.)

           The clincher was the inclusion of dibble dabble as the culminating event of our pool Olympics.  We had been playing dibble dabble all summer, at the deep end of the pool near the diving boards. 

           The game was simple: A diver, holding a popsicle stick in his hand (or in between his toes), placed the stick on the bottom of the pool. As it slowly floated toward the surface, contestants would dive in and attempt to capture it. Any number could play, but roughness obviously increased with the numbers. The popsicle stick diver was ineligible to capture it, but he acted as a referee to disqualify contestants from that round who jumped into the pool before the dibble dabble stick rose clearly into view. The person who succeeded in capturing the elusive popsicle stick received a point and became the next diver. Eleven points made one the winner of the game.

           It was such a rousing success that we decided to carry our water games to the land and, thus, the grand 1952 Rockwell-George AC Olympics were launched.  On the mile-or-so walk from the pool to our neighborhood, we excitedly added (and sometimes rejected) potential events.

           We were quite ignorant of the Tour de France  (and even if we had heard of it, it would have sounded suspiciously foreign), but we developed our own series of bicycle races, to be run on our neighborhood streets, where auto traffic, in those “good old days,” was minimal.  There were two sprints, conducted on George Street, between Washtenaw and Talman. One was starting with the contestants in the saddle, and a second was where the contestants started about 20 yards from their bicycles, and when “go” was shouted, they sprinted to the bikes, being held upright by our assistants, and took off on the fly. There were around-the-block races (separate races of one, two, or four times around)–west on George Street, north on Talman,  east on Wellington, south on Washtenaw to the finish.

           The grand finale of our Olympic Carnival was, of course, the track & field events. We had to improvise, for items such as shot put, discus, and javelin were not among our standard sporting arsenals. 

           Only coaches had stopwatches, and those of us who had wristwatches did not have second hands, for we did not anticipate that we would be timing Olympic events.

           There was an alternative, however. Mrs. Kunz’s delicatessen, on Washtenaw, had a clock in the window with a second-hand and all of the longer track events, therefore, had to start and end at Mrs. Kunz’s deli. 

           The shorter running events (40 to 100 yards), which we didn’t bother to time, were held on George Street, or at Brentano playground.  A timer was needed, however, for events that involved running the bases, for these obviously had to be run one at a time.  One of the contestants clandestinely borrowed his father’s stopwatch for the occasion, but he never let it out of his hands, for it was considered to be a family treasure.

           The running events, in general, were simple matters to conduct. Someone said, “On your mark; get set; go!” And, if it were a longer race, we checked the time on Mrs. Kudzu’s clock.

           Field events, staged mostly in a vacant lot at George and Elston,  were a bit more challenging.  The pole vault competition, for example, was cancelled when the pole (a nondescript stick, about 12 feet long, borrowed from someone’s garage) broke on the first contestant’s attempt at vaulting.

           The long jump (standing and running) was easy.  The “foul” line was marked with a rag, and the distance of the leaps were marked with stones. The high jump was no problem: 

two non-competitors (usually younger brothers deemed too immature to be serious contenders) were “allowed” to hold the ends of a rope which competitors attempted to leap over, scissors-fashion (the prevailing high-jump method before the western roll and the Fosbury flop).

           Ah, but the other field events!  Improvisation, however ingenious, was not always successful.  For the shot put, we used a brick; for the discus, a round garbage can lid;  and for the javelin, a broom with rocks tied in a sack at the broom end. These were all awkward and clumsy, but that didn’t stop us from designating winners in those events.

           Bat-and-ball events (still not recognized as Olympic sports) were held at Brentano playground, and put most of us into more familiar territory.  We had throwing events, for accuracy and distance, with a baseball and a 16-inch softball; fungo batting, with the 16-inch, for distance, and an event that’s created spontaneously at the playground: bat-throwing (usually considered a sin, or an act of gross incompetence) for distance.  There were also a variety of races involving running the bases of the softball diamond: sprinting the 45 feet from home plate to first; seeing who could circle the bases the fastest, etc.

           We even had our own version of the Pentathlon competition, consisting of bicycling 20 miles (from Logan Square to around Dyche Stadium in Evanston, and back), swimming a mile in Lake Michigan, a shot-put (with a brick, of course), a standing long jump, and we concluded with running a “marathon,” a race of about about three miles, up one side of Logan Boulevard, and down the other.. The Pentathlon was the least popular event, for some reason, and only a hardy few competitors managed to complete all five events. Most did not want to even attempt the swim,  the bicycle race, or the marathon. 

           Our most creative event, the steeplechase, was the one that also got us into the most trouble.

           We noticed that there was a long stretch of houses along Washtenaw Avenue, north of George Street, that had hedges or short fences, running from the sidewalk to the stairs of the houses. We marked out the course, concluding the race with about a 25-yard sidewalk sprint, so the runners could be timed at Mrs. Kunz’s clock.  

           Since runners were not required to leap over the obstacles, it was deemed acceptable to crash through the hedges or knock down an inconvenient fence. After a half-dozen or so competitors had run the course, the Washtenaw front yards began to look as though a small tornado had ripped its way down the street. 

           The Washtenaw neighbors did not see our Olympic heroics in a favorable light, however, and vociferous complaints were registered against the perpetrators.  

           The glorious Rockwell-George A.C. Olympics were thus brought to a close, not with “The Star Spangled Banner” and a medal-awarding ceremony, but with angry telephone calls to our parents, denouncing the All-American Olympic victors as barbarians and vandals. 

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