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Jun 27, 2023

Nude swim classes for males were once common at U.S. public pools

Two male University of Maryland alumni have separately recalled to me the

Two male University of Maryland alumni have separately recalled to me the following: At the University of Maryland College Park in the late 1960s and early 1970s (if not earlier), the male physical education classes in swimming were conducted with the students swimming in the nude. Could this possibly be true?

I attended Maryland in the early ’70s and took swimming and can attest to the fact that swimsuits were provided to the female students. There was certainly no nude swimming in our classes.

— Mary A. Allen, Columbia, Md.

"It's like a secret fraternity," said Michael Oberman, describing the band of naked brothers he encountered in his swimming class as a freshman at the University of Maryland in 1965.

"It's like this bonding thing," said Patrick Clancy, who entered Maryland in 1963.

In those days, physical education was a mandatory class at Maryland and passing a swim test was required for graduation.

"You didn't get out unless you could swim," said Clancy, who like Oberman lives in Columbia. "And the history of that was the great maritime tradition of the state of Maryland, its connection with the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean and the great port of Baltimore."

The university, Clancy said, took great pride in what was a fairly rigorous swimming test. That's why so many students took swimming. Before starting the swimming portion of the PE class, male students were told all they needed to bring to the pool in Cole Field House was a towel.

And so at Clancy's first swimming class, all 30 or so students were naked as the day they were born.

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Said Clancy: "I remember asking the teacher, ‘Why are we doing this naked?’ I’m not making this up, the guy looks at me and says, ‘Lint.’

"I said, ‘Excuse me, I thought I heard you say, ‘Lint.’"

The teacher's response: "Yeah, it's lint."

The concern, the instructor explained, was that swimsuits would shed lint, overloading the pool's filtration system.

"We were 18-, 19-year-old guys," Clancy said. "It was a curiosity among us. It's not so much that people were offended. It just didn't make sense to us. We never got a really adequate response."

It also seemed a double standard: The teachers wore swimsuits. And the female students who took swimming at Preinkert Field House — which housed the women's pool — wore bathing suits that were presumably as linty as anything men might wear.

"There was this kind of comical thing about it," said Clancy. "I remember mentioning it to my dad: ‘Hey, Pop, I’m taking swimming in PE and we all swim nude.’

"He said that was not unusual for male swimming facilities. My dad was born in 1919. It apparently was not an uncommon practice."

That's correct. In 1926, the American Public Health Association issued recommendations for the design, construction and operation of public swimming pools. Along with information on pool dimensions, filtration, changing rooms and types of emergency equipment to have on hand, the document advised: "At indoor pools used exclusively by men, nude bathing should be required. At indoor pools used exclusively by women, bathing suits should be of the simplest type."

No reason was given for the recommendation but it appears to have been hygiene-related. There are seven paragraphs on bathing suits and towels and how the pool, not the swimmers, should provide them and launder them. Patrons apparently couldn't be trusted to keep their equipment clean.

Pools around the country, including those operated by the YMCA, Boys Clubs, and schools and colleges, followed the APHA's lead.

This was not without controversy. In 1961, parents in Menasha, Wis., complained about the nude swimming mandate at the high school pool. School officials defended the practice, saying, among other things, that it was good experience for the military, "where the disregard for privacy is real and serious."

In 1967, school officials in Janesville, Wis., gave the lint excuse when parents wondered why boys’ junior high classes were still conducted in the nude. The Janesville Daily Gazette quoted a doctor who said he’d seen many boys suffering from self-consciousness. "These boys are underdeveloped and are ashamed to disrobe with the other boys," he said.

The APHA had eliminated the nude-swimming suggestion in 1962, but the practice continued in some places until the early 1970s.

It was a different time back then, said Silver Spring's Bill Sumner, who graduated from Maryland in 1969.

"You’ve got to put it in the context that we had all been through high school where after every gym class you went in the shower," he said.

Clancy said the swim-instruction program at Maryland was top-notch. "We had a pretty good time in the swimming classes," he said.

Michael Oberman still remembers the grade he got in his swimming class.

"I got a C, because when we had the final exam, we had to dive," he said. "I got a note from my doctor excusing me from diving because of vertigo. I didn't have vertigo. I had a friend who was a doctor. I just didn't want to be diving naked."

Said Oberman: "After that semester, the next thing I signed up for was bowling and fencing, because I didn't have to change out of my clothes."