To the Editor:

Do you remember?

Swimming lessons at John Boyd Thacher State Park made up one of the best programs that the Red Cross had: Learn to swim.

Countless lives have been saved over the years. From 1967 on, as I worked there, they always had the lessons for the Hilltowns.

The joke that the maintenance people had for years was: We put an ice cube in the pool at 7 a.m. and when we went home at 3:30 p.m. the ice cube was still there.

The water that supplied the pool came from Thompsons Lake. From the pump station next to the lake, the water went to a storage reservoir of 100,000 gallons in the park. It was gravity fed throughout the park, for all plumbing.

The reason the pool closed was that it was losing a large amount of water each day. The leak was coming from the aging concrete at the bottom of the pool, and went over the cliff edge.

As a number of people would remember, when the pool opened at noon, the buses came up from Albany — 10 cents a person in the 1960s.

A number of people remember working at Thacher Park: lifeguards, bathhouse attendants, cashiers, and booth attendants.

I think they should still have swimming lessons, because it’s very important. A good number of people drown each year. Learning to swim would save your life or someone else’s.

Mike Vincent

Berne

Editor’s note: Mike Vincent worked maintenance for 42 years for state parks, from 1966 to 2008.