Do you remember how the showers were turned on in the Coffman "locker room"? As you faced the showers, on your right was the stair well. The first five or six steps were down and away the showers. Then there was a left turn and a few more steps the another left and stairs. Then you were facing the dark tunnel maybe twenty feet long that led to the pool. That tunnel usually had several inches of near frozen water on the floor, which you kicked up onto the pallid, boney, naked back of the boy in front of you seconds before the boys behind you kicked it up onto your back. Back to the locker room. To the left were the showers, but straight ahead was an ancient iron railing designed to prevent most boys from falling twelve feet to the unwashed concrete floor covered by several inches of near frozen water. Had you fallen, while you were lying on your back looking straight up, you'd see fifteen feet above you a valve. The handle on that valve was a single bar, like a wrench attached to the valve about twenty inches long. By turning that crank, you turned on the water. To reach that crank, a naked boy had to stand on the lower bar of the railing, brace his legs against the upper bar, and then lean out a yard over the concrete floor fifteen feet below. Then the bar could be grasped and pulled, turning on the water. After cold water turned warmed enough to bear, twenty-five boys rushed into the shower room designed for ten. Most of us huddled in the middle while the big boys claimed positions beneath the ten shower heads. We "showered" in the water that deflected off their bodies, great, hairy hillocks of muscle. One minute later we would race down the gritty stairs and into the unlit tunnel to the pool. I do not remember very many boys being injured between the showers and the pool. Usually the outcomes were limited to abrasions, humiliation, and memories of an experience so wretched that the images blaze forth fifty-five years later.