BILD reporter remembers |
A summer like it used to be
Bottrop – We didn’t need a long trip before.
We got a tan in Revierpark Vonderort in the Ruhr area, it was 1988, and waiting in line for the five you could think for a long time about the fact that despite the growing panic you couldn’t hold back. It was the biggest, the only worry in this seemingly never-ending summer.
The girls from the 8d lay right next to the pool, the way to their hearts led over this tower. They smiled at everyone who first had courage and then left the diving tower via the ladder. The cool ones wore adidas pants made of polyester, they dared to dive, which we called “twill”.
In the outdoor pool of my childhood there was a slide and a wave pool, a sunbathing lawn that by August had long been steppe, sunburned, dusty and battered by thousands of children’s feet. There you always had to lie close to the pool so that you could see and be seen, for example by the girls from 8d.
There was a lifeguard, his pants were white and his word was law. When he thundered, his eyes unfathomably hidden behind mirrored sunglasses, “Get the fries away from the pool edge!”, then you took the fries away from the pool edge.
I can still smell it, that mixture of frying fat, chlorine and Tyrolean nut oil, which we thought was sun protection, SPF 2. We ate Ed von Schleck for a mark and Cornetto Strawberry for one and a half, which spilled on the lawn in the heat and made the wasps happy . We still walked barefoot because slippers were uncool and sandals anyway.
Milli Vanilli, Girl You Know It’s True, blared from the portable radio with cassette deck. One of the clique always had the current “Bravo” with him, which said that you couldn’t get pregnant from swimming.
The memories of this wonderful outdoor pool summer merge into one long day, until the sun was behind the trees, the light became very soft and the wind became pleasant and a voice rattled from the loudspeaker: “The pool closes in 30 minutes.”
I got on my BMX bike, I didn’t know much about life yet, only that I would come back tomorrow and the day after tomorrow too. Inspired by this thought, I cycled home, my cheeks red from the sun and happiness.
The outdoor pool photos of the BILD readers
1966: Ina Henseler Beyenburg (then 13) at the Grevenbroich outdoor pool (NRW): “I’m the girl with the yellow bathing cap”
1972: BILD reader Wolfgang with his little sister, photographed by his father at the outdoor swimming pool in Knowledge/Sieg
1963: Rudi Breiteneicher in the Wacker Freibad Burghausen (Bavaria): “I was 4 then, my mother Johanna 40”
1992: Florian Breukelmann (then 4) from Nordhorn (Lower Saxony) in the mountain outdoor pool in Ochtrup (NRW)