Eastside pool ending 55-year run, neighborhood tradition

photo by: Mike Yoder

Missi Pfeifer, who has been a primary organizer and fundraiser for the County Fair Swim Club, 2119 Maple Lane, looks over the pool that has been part of the community for over 50 years. Pfeifer says because of the costs required to operate the pool it will be closing for good.

Missi Pfeifer admitted on a recent afternoon that it made her sad to look at the County Fair Swim Club pool.

The pool at 2119 Maple Lane, about a block from Kennedy Elementary School, in eastern Lawrence wasn’t very inviting on the gray, overcast day. Scattered along its deck and walls were gaps of missing concrete, some of which had fallen into the algae-tinted green water filling the pool’s deep end to a depth of about 10 inches.

photo by: Mike Yoder

Missi Pfeifer, who has been a primary organizer and fundraiser for the County Fair Swim Club, 2119 Maple Lane, looks over the pool that has been part of the community for over 50 years. Pfeifer says because of the costs required to operate the pool it will be closing for good.

But it’s not its current condition that is the cause of Pfeifer’s sadness. The pool looked like that every year before volunteers prepared it for the coming season, she said, displaying on her cellphone a photo taken a year ago of a freshly patched and painted pool.

“It does clean up really nice,” she said, before scrolling on to another photo of the pool filled with smiling neighborhood children.

Those smiling faces are at the heart of Pfeifer’s sadness. Volunteers won’t be patching, painting and otherwise preparing the pool and its adjacent kiddie pool this year for a Memorial Day opening. After 55 years, the pool’s gates have been closed for good.

The issue isn’t the pool’s condition or her willingness to manage it another summer, Pfeifer said. The need to raise from $10,000 to $15,000 annually to pay for such things as paint, insurance, chemicals and taxes has become too much of a burden, Pfeifer said.

“Running the pool was no problem,” she said. “I love running the pool. In all the years, we’ve never had any problems with the kids. It’s the fundraising that got to be too much for one person.”

The fundraising effort required Pfeifer to solicit funds from larger donors and organize regular fundraisers.

“Cookie dough sales, silent auctions, movie nights, bake sales — I don’t think there’s anything we haven’t done,” she said.

The pool has survived close calls in the past. It was rescued on a couple of occasions when it received the pot-of-gold award from the Lawrence St. Patrick’s Day Parade, most recently two years ago when she was laid up with illness.

The pool’s fate closes a chapter of Pfeifer’s family history. She grew up in the neighborhood, swimming at the pool that her mother, Charlotte Hastings, managed for about five years three decades ago.

Betty Erickson, longtime County Fair Swim Team treasurer, said that developers — Bob, Bud and Al Moore — built and donated the pool to the neighborhood in 1961. To maintain and operate the pool, homeowners paid a $225 annual assessment, which allowed families pool memberships. Erickson and her late husband, Clarence, and two children were among the first-year members of the pool across the street from the family home.

“Everybody got to know each other because of the pool,” she said. “It was just different than other neighborhoods.”

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The neighborhood changed with the passing decades. More and more homes became rentals, and their residents didn’t pay the annual membership fee. By the time Pfeifer took over its management 15 years ago when she and her husband, Rick, moved across the street, there weren’t enough members to pay for maintenance. There are now only five remaining stockholders in the pool, she said.

Under Pfeifer’s management, the membership arrangement was ended. The pool started charging an admission fee of $2 for a full day and $1 for those arriving after 5 p.m.

“We’ve never raised the fee,” she said. “Basically, we’re the cheapest summer day care in Lawrence. We had 50 to 100 kids here on hot summer days. We had kids bring bags of pennies to pay admission. I’ve had kids come to me and say they couldn’t afford the $2 or even the $1 admission. I’d have them pull weeds or take out trash to earn a pass in the pool.”

As it had from the beginning, the pool continued to foster a sense of community in the neighborhood, Erickson said. She got to know children she would never have met, and they got to know her by name, she said. There was further neighborhood bonding through evening picnics, at which the pool would treat kids to hotdogs and drinks.

Erickson now wonders what will become of the neighborhood without that glue.

“As long as that pool stayed open, there wasn’t going to be any graffiti in the neighborhood,” she said. “That little pool gave people so much more than it ever took. It was so much better than kids running the streets with nothing to do.”

Many of the neighborhood children who frequented the pool aren’t going to be able to travel downtown to the Lawrence Aquatic Center, Erickson said.

“I go over to the west side and see a lot of parks and the Indoor Aquatic Center,” she said. “There’s no pool for the kids on the east side.”

The pool and surrounding property are on two lots at the corner of Maple Lane and Fair Lane. Pfeifer said the stockholders would meet to decide what to do with the property, which the Douglas County Appraiser’s Office values at $60,000. She doesn’t think there is going to be much demand for the property.

“The single biggest thing is it has a pool sitting in the middle of it,” she said. “That’s going to be the hard part.”

Meanwhile, she is attempting to make peace with the end of a family and neighborhood tradition, Pfeifer said.

“I know there are going to be a lot of disappointed parents,” she said. “It makes me sad. It holds a lot of good memories. It’s going to be missed.”