Pool Queue
By Stefene Russell
Photograph courtesy of the Swekosky-Notre Dame College Collection, Missouri Historical Society Photographs and Prints Collection
The pool looks like it’s full of agricultural canal water, and a sign on one of the pillars carries a stern warning against spitting—it spreads TB! But the Mullanphy Pool (it was on 11th, between Cass and Mullanphy) was a curious but dramatic mixture of Roman and Southwestern architecture that provided the perfect theater in which to watch one’s little girl take swimming lessons. With their wet braids tucked under waterlogged bonnets and their blouses and bloomers floating weightless underwater, the girls pantomimed diving for the camera in a shy, hesitant way that resembled praying; you might, at first glance, pick up a subtext of river baptism, though if these little girls were imagining being reborn as anything, it was as mermaids or movie stars like the athletic Pearl White, a farmer’s daughter from Green Ridge, Mo., who was all over the screen that year in The Perils of Pauline. Whether she was falling off cliffs and train trestles, fighting off reanimated mummies or kicking pirates in the business end, Pearl White always did her own stunts ... and never waited around for the guy in the moustache to save her.
