Michael Smerconish: Contrary report from the swim club

7.14.09

By Michael Smerconish - Daily News
Philadelphia Daily News

Daily News Opinion Columnist

SEARCH Google News for "Valley Swim Club" and you'll get more than 2,000 hits.

All purport to get to the bottom of what happened at the club on June 29. But a woman I'll call "Jan Dee" managed to scoop the throng of reporters with some insight beyond what the protesters who descended on Tomlinson Road in Huntingdon Valley over the last week thought they had. She was poolside that day.

Jan (not her real name) has been a resident of the Huntingdon Valley area for almost a decade, though this is the first summer she's spent as a member of the Valley Swim Club.

Her account - provided in a straightforward manner in two phone conversations and a long e-mail - is interesting in that it conflicts with accounts provided by the campers, counselors, club president and media circus.

Jan told me her time at the club that day overlapped with the last 45 minutes of the campers' visit. "I have no knowledge of anything which may have occurred beyond the pool deck and any interaction between other pool members and the children," she said.

"No accounts, though, seem to refer to what I do know."

INDEED. So what did happen?

First, the scene she encountered. Jan estimated that on most weekday afternoons, no more than half a dozen kids and a handful of adults would be in the pool at any time.

On June 29, though, she and her two grandsons found a "sea of children" in the shallow third of the pool. "It was very crowded, I do have to say. But . . . I usually sit by the side of the pool," she said, to keep an eye on her 6-year-old grandson. "And that day in particular, it was important for me to watch him because there were so many children in a small space."

Despite the crowd, Jan noted, the scene was far from chaotic.

She said two lifeguards were on duty on either side of the pool. At least two camp counselors joined the campers in the water. A third supervisor organized the campers when it was time for them to leave.

Nor did Jan detect any confrontational environment during the 45 minutes she shared the pool area with the club's new guests. Far from it. She remembers the kids in the pool speaking "so nicely" with each other and with her 6-year-old grandson.

Some of the younger campers were tickling and making faces at Jan's infant grandson, "causing him to squeal with laughter," she said. "It was a welcome distraction from my usual day of attempting to keep him from putting every leaf and pebble on the pool deck into his mouth."

Despite the crowd, Jan marveled at the orderly way the kids filed out of the pool and left the club. The third supervisor got the girls out first, then the boys.

Only one female camper resisted, Jan recalled, and even she quickly fell into line after being told she'd lose future swimming privileges. "Their exit was orderly and safe, and I was impressed by how well-organized the camp was run," she said.

"With the campers gone, my grandson was, as on all other weekdays, one of only a couple of swimmers in the pool." Jan heard no confrontation as the campers departed for the day.

She wasn't present for any subsequent discussions about their presence between club members in the days that followed.

In fact, she didn't hear anything about the incident until, listening to the radio more than a week later, she learned about the explosive situation that it had turned into.

If she displayed any emotional response to the events of June 29 and the reverberations thereafter, it was that the scores of media accounts "all sidestep the fact that the children were having a great time" at the club on June 29.

"If I were a parent of a child who was there that day, I would want to know that my children were happy, were playing, which is what they were," she told me.

"And I'm afraid now that the message being sent to the children is, 'Don't believe what you actually experienced that day. Believe instead that the people there were cruel to you and that we all hated you.' "

Not once did Jan purport to know the real reason behind the club's decision to void its contract with the camp. Maybe we'll never know for sure.

But her account might be the just the latest example of the power perception can wield over reality in our politically correct, media-frenzied world.

Where counselors subsequently reported seeing Valley Club members removing their children and crossing their arms in disgust by the side of the pool, Jan "watched and enjoyed a pool filled with happy, laughing, splashing kids."

Where the club president feared an unsafe, out-of-control situation, Jan saw counselors and club employees handling themselves and the kids for whom they were responsible in an orderly fashion.

And where many in the media describe an airy "private suburban" club gated off from the outside world, Jan sees a surrounding neighborhood that boasts of "a very strong population of service workers - blue-collar workers - from the far Northeast."

"And I would say that's who

I see attending the pool," she added. Too bad the cameras got there too late to capture any of that. *

Listen to Michael Smerconish weekdays 5-9 a.m. on the Big Talker, 1210/AM. Read him Sundays in the Inquirer. Contact him via the Web at www.smerconish.com.