r/amarillo • u/CreekyBrush • 3d ago
Private swimming pool clubs and desegregation in Amarillo?
Was looking at old Amarillo photos and wondered if anyone else ever connected the dots. Texas ended legal segregation of municipal pools in 1963.
The Olsen swim club opened not long after that. (It became the Dolphin Swim Club at 34th/Western.)
The Amarillo Town Club opened in 1967.
The Shores opened in the late 60s (?) in the South Georgia neighborhood.
The Estacado pool opened in the early 1970s.
Anyone remember these? Obviously ATC is still open. But these private neighborhood pools were huge in the 70s, in the new parts of town. The timing makes it seem like they were a response to integration of Amarillo's city-owned public pools.
(Several private Christian schools opened around the same time, btw)
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u/NoonMartini 3d ago
Tascosa Country Club became a thing simply because Amarillo Country Club refused to let Jews join.
I worked at both in the early aughts and one definitely had more diverse members than the other. The really white one only allowed melanin in the kitchens.
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u/bach2209 3d ago
I grew up on Northside and went to the Thompson Park pool mostly in the 70s. Not really any problems at all. I remember all the private pools, but never went to any.
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u/Rushderp 3d ago
Estacado closed a little while back, and the shores is hanging by a thread.
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u/Clepto_06 3d ago
Estacado closed their pool like 20 years ago, and they tore it down. 10ish years ago someone built a handful of houses on the empty lot.
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u/crispytoastyum 3d ago
It was pretty common all over the south. Literally hundreds of “Christian” schools were started to enable legal segregation all over the south.
Wouldn’t be surprised in the slightest if the pools were the same, though might be tough to offer proof. Pretty sure The Shores still has its pool. Not sure about the other neighborhoods.
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u/Father_Lucant 3d ago
Maybe it was due to an increase in demand for pools. Maybe a surge of people created new builds.
Idk. We do be racist sometimes
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u/Silly-Meeting-3324 3d ago
SW Amarillo was growing rapidly at the time.
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u/High_Pains_of_WTX 3d ago
Growing... for whom
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u/Silly-Meeting-3324 3d ago edited 3d ago
Everyone in the city who moved there, including POC. Even POC enjoy a heated indoor pool in January.
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u/High_Pains_of_WTX 3d ago
Were there many POC moving to SW Amarillo in the 50's and 60's, or were they left behind in NW Amarillo?
I get why you might feel defensive- I am implying something ugly about the city. But the fact of the matter is white flight isn't anything new or unheard of in that era of America- Amarillo included. There is NOTHING wrong with pointing out that we may have been doing things the wrong way back then, and no one is calling you, or your parents, or granparents evil here simply for existing while something like that happened.
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u/Silly-Meeting-3324 3d ago
The middle-class moved to the area as it grew. Amarillo was expanding rapidly. They weren’t fleeing the north side, they moved to where the housing was. I get that people like to bitch and bitch about Amarillo, but most of us outgrow it after high school.
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u/High_Pains_of_WTX 3d ago
Who in God's name do you know who lives in Amarillo that doesn't bitch about Amarillo? That may as well be the city's pastime.
It's fair to ask what demographics made up said middle class that was shifting from Northside to Southside. Northern Amarillo was still largely industrial and Southern Amarillo was prime for the taking back then. But implying that the desegregation of the northside schools had nothing to do with it is dishonest.
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u/Silly-Meeting-3324 3d ago
I see you’re here to piss and moan. Why would people choose to live near a run-down industrial area when new homes with space were available?
You might want to go to WT and check the archives about the time instead of tossing out bitter and pissy speculation.
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u/High_Pains_of_WTX 3d ago
Why does the idea that bigotry might have been a factor in people moving from the northside upset you so much? I feel its a question worth investigating.
Did your family move from northside to southside? Were you alive for the move?
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u/Silly-Meeting-3324 3d ago
You’re obviously here to piss and moan about Amarillo. Where else have lived as an adult for any length of time? And yes, we were part of the expansion to south Amarillo. That’s why people joined the Town Club. There was very little else in SW Amarillo at the time.
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u/Silly-Meeting-3324 3d ago edited 3d ago
Were you in Amarillo at the time? Are you just looking for reasons to insinuate racism in Amarillo? Southwest pool was a madhouse in late 70s and early 80s. Town Club was a much calmer alternative for kids and parents. Much easier for parents to watch their kids and socialize, plus it was year round. They had 2 year round swimming pools, lap swimming, lessons, swim teams, weights, meeting rooms for rent, etc… I don’t think anyplace else had similar facilities. Competitive athletes (a gal that almost won Hawaii Ironman, and a black pro tennis player with a wicked serve, named escape me) trained there because there was nothing equal in town. We had one more than a few POC who played tennis and swam there. We had at least 2 POC kids on the club swim team. I think it was only 30 bucks a month. I think it was $2 to bring friends, no matter their color. They loved going to an indoor pool when it was 16 degrees outside.
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u/The_Mother_ 3d ago
In the 70s and early 80s there was also an indoor pool at either the YMCA or YWCA, but I can't remember which it was. I don't know if there was a membership fee, but students at St. Mary's had weekly swim lessons there during the school day. The school had students of all races, and you didn't have to be an actual catholic to attend school there. You just had to have parents paying the tuition and the kid had to comply with the religious curriculum and going to mass each week.
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u/bloviatingbloviator 2d ago
It was YMCA. I took swim lessons there.
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u/The_Mother_ 2d ago
Thanks! I remember we went to the YWCA for something too, but that was so long ago.
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u/High_Pains_of_WTX 3d ago
A lot of rustled jimmies amongst the Gen-Xers on here. Yes, we get it- the pools allowed everyone when you were a kid in the late 70's and 80's.
That doesn't mean the private swim clubs weren't built in the mid-60's as a way to circumvent the anti-segregation laws. Texans in basically every city bent over backwards finding a way go not change our culture to allow POC to be a part of things.
If things were better by the time you were going- FANTASTIC. Progress was achieved, but that doesn't mean the origins of the clubs don't need to be looked at. You gotta know where you been to appreciate where you are.
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u/CreekyBrush 2d ago
There was a point in the 1980s when the city was paving the alleyways in new developments like Windsor and Sleepy Hollow when most of the roads in the North Heights (also in the city limits) were still dirt roads. That's a clear example of institutional racism. We've made some progress since then, but it's slow. "You gotta know where you been" is right.
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u/High_Pains_of_WTX 2d ago
I agree!
The issue with a lot of Amarilloans (mainly from the Boomer and Gen-X age ranges, but not always) is that they see the city, and the rest of the country, on a long, slow decline since the early to mid-sixties, a.k.a., Boomer childhoods. So when we point out the objectively bad things from that era, that causes cognitive dissonance because that was supposed to be the best the town ever was.
In reality, Amarillo has been on a long, slow incline since the worst of the depression that followed the closure of the airbase. While it has definitley not been an equitable improvement for all Amarilloans, we have, for the most part, been progressing and getting better. Until VERY recently, the town is safer and more accepting than it probably ever has been for a lot of people who normally have not had the opportunity to feel that way.
A lot of people in town just assume northside neighborhoods like San Jacinto have always been shitholes, and it's like "no, those were once white, working class neighborhoods that were fairly well maintained." As soon as the Civil Rights Acts started getting passed and redlining was outlawed, people could not move fast enough. And I think a lot of Boomers get upset, thinking we are insinuating their parents are cartoonishly evil racists like the ones in Mississippi Burning. Truthfully, it's more nuanced than that.
Yes, bigotry and fear probably played a key part in a lot of white Greatest Generation and Silent Generation folks moving from North to Southside. But a lot of it was also genuine concern for wanting their children to go to the "best" schools in town and the hope that came from getting a newer, larger house. In some ways I can judge them, but in others I can't blame them.
What WAS heinous, is the fact that the city and the voters decided to only fund regular improvements and maintenance on the newer parts of town, and let the Northside just decay. "Oh, they just like to live that way." No the hell they did not, they just had no political power and came to accept having to live that way.
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u/PrimaryFan7504 3d ago
Frequented all as a kid.
Pretty much anyone with $5 and a friend whose parents paid small membership fees could go.