Joel Williams

Guest Blogger, Dayna Williams-Capone: First Job at Riverside Pool

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As summer sadly slips away, I can’t help but remember the Augusts of my youth, when I tried valiantly to get in as much swim time as possible before Riverside Pool closed for the season, boarding up with its concession stand and basket room, my hopes and dreams of becoming the next Rowdy Gaines or Steve Lundquist. Of course, my friend Dayna Williams-Capone, sister of guest blogger Joel Williams, was one of the lucky ones, she actually worked at the pool. A few weeks ago, I asked her if she had an interest in writing about those days, and she graciously agreed. So, please enjoy this account, you can almost smell the chlorine, watermelon Now & Laters and iodine laced baby oil with every sentence.

First Job at Riverside Pool

Ever since Ray and I started talking online in early June about our hometown I have been thinking about my first job and how I view that experience today in comparison to my image of myself and feelings about that job when I was 15. It was fun getting in touch with a couple of people I worked with back then and by doing so I realized how differently each one of us remembers (or forgets) a past shared experience. Thanks Ray for giving me a chance to share this.

Riverside Pool in Independence, Kansas is a place I remember with a sense of excitement and contentment. Opening day at the pool was what I daydreamed about during those final May days of school. It was the place to meet friends and be a bit more independent. Starting in about 5th grade, my mother would often drop me off at the pool on her way back to work from lunch and pick me up at the end of her work day.

The summer I was 15 I got a job at the pool working in the concession stand along with a good guy friend of mine. It was a perfect first job as I would spend my mornings and late evenings playing tennis at the courts next to the pool and then head over for work. It was a not so perfect job as I spent my time waiting on bratty children trying to decide if they wanted a Chick-O-Stick or Tangy Taffy while the lifeguards flirted and paraded around in their latest swimsuits.

I had an in for the job as my dad and the pool manager were friends who both taught at the local community college. Having my friend to keep me company and knowing the manager were a big plus because I found the older and cooler lifeguards and the jock who ran the basket room (where you checked in your towel or extra clothes) to be intimidating. Those 2 – 3 summers at the pool taught me a lot about people and self-confidence and what it meant to be or not to be one of the cool kids.

The lifeguards were at the top of the social ladder at the pool followed by the jock in the basket room and bringing up the rear were us kids in the concession stand. Our job was to look the other way when the lifeguards came in to pilfer Zero or Snicker bars out of the refrigerator or to be their audience as they discussed last night’s party, a new boyfriend or how sunburned they were getting. The biggest compliment to receive from the lifeguards was to be dragged out of the concession stand and thrown in the pool. It didn’t happen often, but it meant they really liked you. Those summers I was the sounding board and observer to unrequited love, hangovers, an unplanned pregnancy, engagements and leaving home for college.

The most exciting event during my summers at the pool was the year I was invited to the end of summer party at one of the lifeguard’s rental house. I couldn’t believe my good fortune to be a part of the cool kids club and how was I ever going to have this experience without letting my parents in on all of the somewhat questionable things that might happen there. There was going to be beer and purple cold duck in those little glass bottles. People would be smoking who knows what and they had driver’s licenses and cool sports cars.

I went, I saw, I drank enough beer to have no effect. Afterwards I spent the night with my close friend and I’m certain we dissected all my adult experiences. My friend who had a menthol smoking older sister with a wild side understood my need to experience this party, but also the uncomfortable feelings of not quite knowing how I fit in.

Looking back on that party it was more of an opportunity for everyone to prove to everyone else how worthy they were. Each person was there to show off his/her gifts. It could have been the gift of making great ice cream, telling the best jokes, drinking the most beer, being the most daring by having the illegal contraband, being the best dressed or having the cutest date. Because of our youth it all became a competition, we weren’t ready to appreciate each other’s gifts, to overlook faults, to build each other up.

At 15, fitting in was important and it was very difficult to be the person I was growing into. Sometimes in our adult lives our 15 year old selves emerge and bump into each other. Experience and wisdom sometimes help mitigate our feelings of inadequacy and competitiveness. Other times it’s easy to fall back into old habits. I’m much happier now than at 15, but still enjoy remembering all of the interesting and difficult things I experienced in that small town in Kansas.

Guest Blogger, Joel Williams: Independence. Does that mean Freedom?

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imagesA few days ago, I asked Joel Williams, a longtime friend and another Independence, Kansas product, if he would like to be a guest blogger here.  We have much in common, but the one thing I think that binds us together is our interest, perhaps one could say devotion, to all things related to William Inge.  I love what he had to say and I know you will, too.  Here it is:

 

Independence. Does that mean Freedom?

Like Ray, I grew up in Independence, Kansas. Like Ray, I’m a fan of William Inge, playwright and novelist (1913-73).

What I don’t know is if Ray is looking for the same things in the work of Inge that I am. What am I looking for? Oh, of course I’m looking for the familiar, for signs of the past, for explanations of human behavior, especially those humans in Freedom, Kansas, Inge’s version of my hometown. I’m also looking for what my particular experience growing up in Southeast Kansas did to and for me. A decade or so ago, I bashfully told a friend about William Inge and my hometown, downplaying its significance, and he buoyed me up, comparing his experience and saying, “No one ever made art about Reston, Virginia.” I doubt the literal but not the essential truth of that statement. It made me take a deeper look at the matter.

When I was about 13 years old, my mother took a night class at Independence Community College (once attended by the playwright himself) that had Inge as its subject. She came home and discussed the class, the teacher, her fellow students, and, finally, the plays and the novels. I took an interest, slowly understanding that his work was all about people I knew. My parents pointed out the houses around town that figured in the plays. As adolescence proceeded and I came to regard my hometown as a closed, insular environ worthy of escape, I got even more curious about Inge. I learned that he performed his own escape act, moving away while casting his eyes back toward Independence and keeping his hands on the typewriter.

Every few years, I find myself going through a self-imposed Inge Intensive. I haul out “Four Plays,” then force my partner Roger to sit through a dinnertime viewing of Splendor in the Grass. Recently, I ordered my own copies of My Son is a Splendid Driver and Good Luck, Miss Wyckoff, and read them before flying back to Independence for the Inge Festival. Do enough of that reading and all you think is, funny, there wasn’t much freedom in Freedom – all those old maid schoolteachers accepting or rebelling against the strictures of small-town life and beauty queens dreaming of hopping a train to Tulsa to get together with shiftless bad-boy ramblers.

So, what are the results of growing up in The Real Freedom? I suppose that being surrounded by actual Kansas schoolteachers, beauty queens and bad boys while comparing them to their analogues on stage and screen made me acutely, intimately appreciate what an artist can do with words on a page and actors on a stage. Compared to other small-town natives I know, I think I see my hometown as something of a stage set, a place where Human Drama Happens. And I do occasionally find myself putting my life experiences into the narrative frame of an Inge play – oh stop it Joel, you’re acting just like Sonny! If I can’t have Bud I’m gonna go crazy, crazy!!! And when I think about the reason why I left Independence, I guess I was afraid of becoming a kind of old maid schoolteacher and yearned to run off to the city on a boxcar. So I did.