Musings: Our swimming pool is coming back

The announcement in the I-T last month that ground broke for Sonoma Valley High School’s new swimming pool included a quote from district superintendent Dr. Adrian Palazuelos: “This is going to be the jewel of the Valley.”

I know of at least one person who would have happily cheered and agreed with Dr. Palazuelos – my dad, Robert Lynch, publisher of the Index-Tribune from 1949 until his death in 2003.

He was also editor of the paper for most of those 54 years, including during the mid-century decade when he led the community-wide effort to build a swimming pool at our only high school.

Dad loved to swim. He was a competitive swimmer in high school and firmly believed that a community like ours without its own pool was unthinkable.

So, in 1956, he wrote the first of many editorials proposing a fund-raising effort to build a community pool. In 1960, after four years of editorials, Musings columns and arm-twisting, a Sonoma Community Swimming Pool Project Committee was formed. Sonoma Valley High School athletic director and longtime football coach Clarence A. Edsall was named chairman of the subscription committee. The goal was to raise $50,000 to build the pool at the school.

Dad enlisted the support of every service organization in the Valley. Early supporters included the Kiwanis Club, Sonoma Valley Business and Professional Women’s Club, Rotary Club and the local chapter of Red Cross.

It took nearly 11 years from Dad’s initial proposal, but thanks to broad-based community support and lots of small individual donations, the drive was successful.

The pool opened for use in 1967 by the high school, and by the entire community on weekends and during the summer. It served the high school students, swim clubs and the community for almost four decades.

By 2000, however, the school district was having lots of financial challenges, and the maintenance of the 33-year-old pool was getting expensive. Without notice to the community, it was bulldozed in the summer of 2005 over a weekend while nobody was watching. Sonomans lost their only public pool, one that they had donated money to build.

Perhaps it is a sign of the times that it has taken more than 15 years to replace it. But the people of Sonoma voted several years ago for a bond that included bringing back their community swimming pool.

My Dad would be proud that the people living today in the community he loved and served for more than a half-century still believe in the importance and value of what he and many Sonoma Valley citizens struggled to create in the 1960s.

He will be there in spirit when the first toe enters the water of the 21st-century vision of a community pool.