Mark Woods: After 60 years, Beaches Aquatic Center exudes sense of place and time

The outdoor pool, six 25-yard lanes and a deep end of 12 feet, was built 60 years ago. Since then, Atlantic Beach has seen a lot of change, and many of the old haunts are long gone. But the Beaches Aquatic Center remains.

Tucked in just north of Atlantic Boulevard, behind a strip mall with an LA Fitness, everything about the pool and concrete block buildings exudes not only a sense of place but of time. The vehicles in the small parking lot have evolved through the decades, but even with a few modern touches here and there — the Ring security cams near the entrance, the robotic vacuum circling the bottom of the pool, the pumps handling the 220,000 gallons of water — the Beaches Aquatic Center still feels like the thick concrete donated by B.B. McCormick & Sons in the 1960s.

A simple, solid, chlorine-scented blast from the past.

It’s 2023. But go to the entrance at any hour — the pool is open 24/7 to members — put in the combination, pull the gate open and step into the Beaches, circa 1963.

A sign just past the gate reminds you of the pool’s simple rules.

Swimmers, sign in, shower. (No excuses). Thank you, BAC Board.

If this pool could talk, well, it might sound like what will happen Saturday morning.

To celebrate the 60 years, there will be an old-timers swim meet. People have said they're coming from as far away as Palm Beach and the Panhandle, really not so much to compete for anything but to celebrate and remember everything.

In addition to food from Gregory Paul’s, there will be a table with Claxton Fruit Cake — which will be a flashback for those who have memories of Fletcher High coach Wimpy Sutton making them sell the fruitcakes for fundraisers.

This event also is meant to remember Sutton, who died in 2017 at age 90.

The longtime Fletcher High swim coach helped raise money to have the pool built. It was where his swimmers trained and competed until 1977.

When the high school built a new pool, and as the Beaches continued to change, the Beaches Aquatic Center easily could have become another one of the places that existed only in photos and memories. What happened to avoid that?

To answer that, you don’t need the pool to talk. You just need to meet its personification, 81-year-old Bill Williams.

'A nice little club'

Williams and June, his wife, handle much of the day-to-day operations of the BAC. Contrary to what some think, they don’t own the place. Bill Williams says it’s owned by a trust.

“I get paid a good salary here,” he said, smiling as he made a zero with his thumb and index finger. “I don’t make any money. I’m just the head of the board and the president of the organization.”

Not that these titles really tell the story of what he does here. Which is a little bit of everything. And to say he can talk is an understatement.

Ask him how he first ended up here and you might get a 15-minute answer that meanders through his childhood in Brentwood (one of his neighbors was Jake Godbold), his graduation from Lee High, his disdain for medical school after a couple of years at the University of Florida, his career with IBM, the first time he saw June — she refused to give him her number — and how they ended up married with three children, two boys and a girl. Which leads to the pool.

They were drawn to it the way thousands of parents were — for swimming lessons and swim teams for their children.

“One day June called me and said, ‘I found a nice little club,’” he said.

Bill first went there simply as a parent. He recalls they were having a problem with a sump pump. He went out and bought one for about $50, installed it and didn’t ask for any money. He says he got a call about a week later about another problem. When he fixed that one, other board members said: “We want you to join our board.”

By the 1980s, the pool had more serious issues than repairs. Williams says, under the ownership at the time, it was $72,000 in debt. In 1987, there was talk of selling it to the city. He feared that would only be the beginning of the end of it. He wanted to look at the books, to try to figure out a way to continue.

“There was a meeting of the general membership and that’s when they went ahead and voted me president of the organization and manager,” he said. “In two years time, I had us completely out of debt.”

Forty-six years after he first showed up at the pool, he’s still there.

'I hope it's here forever'

As he gives a tour of the facilities, he waves to a couple of swimmers who have arrived to swim laps, calling them by name, then telling me a bit about each of them.

If “Cheers” is the sitcom bar where everybody knows your name, the BAC is the swimming pool where Williams seems to know everybody’s name, plus more.

Asked when people swim here, he points out the day’s sign-in sheet. The first name written was written on the sheet a little after 1 a.m.

“He says he can’t sleep, so he comes and swims,” Williams says.

Williams continues to read the names on the list, telling a bit about each of them. A Navy commander. A school teacher. A Realtor. And so on.

He and June have seen generations of swimmers come here as kids, some eventually returning with their own children and grandchildren. There’s a bumper sticker on the door leading into a locker room that says: “My Child Learned to Swim at the B.A.C. Pool.”

He points to this part of it — children learning to swim — as what made him want to stay involved with the pool, even after his kids were no longer using it. He wanted to prevent a repeat of a tragedy from his childhood. Two of his cousins in Live Oak had drowned trying to save a young swimmer in a lake.

So when he first organized swim lessons — with tiers of beginner, intermediate and advanced classes — he says, “I lied a lot.”

He explains what he means by this. When he heard a parent or grandparent say after their child had completed one level that they would wait until the next summer to do the next, he knew what it often really meant. They coudn’t afford the next class. So what he’d do was say they had an opening in that class that needed to be filled, to balance out the class size. No cost.

There have been some changes through the years. He opens the door to an exercise room, at the far end of the pool deck, with an eclectic mix of equipment. An old Universal weight machine, treadmills, stair climbers and — what Williams points to with pride — a Schwinn Airdyne exercise bike, the kind you can find listed on eBay as “vintage.”

He cranks the pedals to show that it’s still working, creating a breeze.

“I bought it at a garage sale for $10,” he said. “Took the thing apart and oiled it. That was about 25 years ago.”

He also points out the new Mitsubishi air-conditioner that’s quietly cooling the room. But in many ways, the Schwinn seems fitting. In a Peleton age, the BAC is an Airdyne, aged into something vintage.

When French filmmaker Alexandra Simpson — who grew up coming to Atlantic Beach with her father, a Jacksonville native — decided to shoot her first feature film at the Beaches this fall, she wanted to include the pool.

If the pool feels like a setting made for a movie, then Wimpy Sutton feels like a character out of one.

When Charlie Snyder was asked to paint something for the silent auction at the 55th reunion of the Fletcher High Class of 1968, he ended up settling on the coach who helped raise funds to build the pool.

“He was such an icon at the beach, a role model, a coach, a teacher, a deep-sea fisherman … this guy was good at everything,” Snyder said. “And it’s funny, he looked better in a pair of trunks than any human I've ever seen. I mean, he was a stud. And he had this crazy dark tan all the time. … So it was fun to try to accurately depict him when he was in his prime.”

Snyder painted a picture of Sutton standing on the pool deck in swim trunks, crew cut, sunglasses,  a stopwatch dangling around his neck.

Bill Williams got outbid for the original. He’d hoped to get it for June, a Class of '68 grad. But now they have a couple of replicas at the pool. Combine the paintings with the Claxton Fruit Cake and a bunch of old-timers and there undoubtedly will be all kinds of memories Saturday morning, along with some swimming.

Standing near the entrance gate the other day, Williams said that everybody asks why he’s spent so much time here. It might have started with his own children and the memory of the cousins who drowned. But at this point, it’s clearly more than that.

“I love it,” he says. “I hope it’s here forever.”

mwoods@jacksonville.com, (904) 476-0397

This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: After 60 years, Beaches Aquatic Center pool a chlorine blast from past