Oral History: Bob Sherman – October, 2005

Summary:

Bob Sherman was interviewed by Julie Sullivan in October, 2005. Bob taught and coached divers and swimmers for over 30 years at the Sherman Swim School, which he founded in 1961. He was also a physical education teacher in the Orinda School System. A champion diver himself, Bob trained divers at UC Berkeley as well as at his own school. Two of his students went on to earn championships in their age groups at the international level. Bob continued to compete as a diver into his eighties.

Oral History:

“I couldn’t have run my school in just any location,” Bob Sherman reflects on his 40-plus years in business in Lafayette. “It needed the right type of community. Lafayette is an excellent place to be in business.” Bob ran the Sherman Swim School on Carol Lane, practically a Lafayette institution, for more than thirty years before turning the business over to his son, Steve, in 1993.

“I bought the business from Frank McGuigan, a former national champion, in 1961,” Bob says. “He built the original pool. He tried to do it full time, but when I bought it I continued teaching.” Bob is a retired physical education teacher with the Orinda School System.

“I was in the red for two years, then it picked up. I was originally going to put a pool in my back yard to give lessons when the neighbors all rebelled. That’s when I found out Frank was selling this property. I knew the area from my work with local youth associations, and I knew I could make a go of it.”

Bob, who was born in Oakland in 1927, began swimming at age six. “I’d go up to Diamond Pool in East Oakland nearly every day in summer. I worked summers life-guarding for the Oakland Recreation Department at different pools, including Lake Anza and Lake Temescal,” he remembers. “That was when I was at Oakland High. I was too young, but they took me. They’d take anybody during the war. I got my background in swimming and diving during the early 1940’s, when I life- guarded at the Athens Athletic Club in Oakland. I enlisted in the Navy in 1945 and served nine months, then went to college on the GI Bill.”

From 1947-51 Bob dove for City College of San Francisco and San Francisco State, winning consecutive Far Western Conference championships. He graduated from San Francisco State, then got his MA and did graduate work in physical education at the University of California, Berkeley. He was drafted for the Korean War in 1951 and served fifteen months. He and his wife, Shirley, were married in 1956. They have four children and fourteen grandchildren. All the children were involved in swimming, and Steve, who runs the swim school, was an All American diver and won a scholarship to Brigham Young University. “All my kids were divers. My daughter, Lisa, was an All American high school diver. What a wonderful background, learning to handle children and their parents and learning to handle time, because we had to watch the clock,” Bob adds.

Bob taught physical education for a year in Eureka before moving to the Orinda schools, where he retired after twenty-six years. “I started the Red Cross swimming programs in Orinda and Lafayette,” Bob explains. “I started the Sleepy Hollow Swimming Association program and the LMYA (Lafayette Moraga Youth Association) swimming program. I was on the ground floor in the Lafayette area when I bought the swim school. I knew people, and I knew teachers I could get. There was only one other swim school in Walnut Creek at that time.”

From 1975-80 Bob was the diving coach at U C Berkeley. “I had the swim school in the summer, Cal in the spring, then teaching the rest of the year. I started off with three employees. I added the diving pool, the wading pool and the spa. We had a maximum of ten teachers at one time. Finally I gave up the Cal job and retired from teaching early, because the school became so productive,” he remembers. “When the Dollar Family, who owned Dollar Ranch where Rossmoor is now, moved to San Francisco, they kept coming here for swimming lessons. I had people from San Francisco and San Rafael coming in for diving. I think I had someone from Sacramento at one time. We held the Junior Olympic Diving meets at the school from the 1960’s to the mid 1980’s, so we had people coming from all over Northern California.

“My claim to fame is probably having trained two international age group diving champions, Patty Lindh and Scott Reich, two local kids. Patty won the age sixteen and under international diving championship. Scott went on to become an Olympic diving coach for three Olympics.”

As he nears eighty, Bob continues to dive competitively in the Masters National Diving Championships. “One of my divers told me about the program that started about twenty years ago,” he explains. “I had a shoulder operation, so I couldn’t dive for ten years, but I started in the Masters eight years ago. My first meet was the World Masters in Oregon in the 70-75 age group. Since then I’ve started tower diving, and that’s my strongest event. They don’t allow us to go head first off the ten meter, which is the highest. I’ve been winning that in my age group about ninety percent of the time. Usually five or six people compete on the tower, because they combine two age groups, 70-79.

“My glory was the international meet in Edmonton, Canada, in July 2005, where I did the best diving in my Masters diving career. I got a gold in the three meter and the tower and the Synchro, which is two people diving together in tandem. This woman from New York in the 65-70 age group and I were third out of twenty-five couples in all groups age twenty-five and over. It was like a hole in one in golf, beating all those younger, better people.”

Originally, swimming was taught in group lessons. “Now over ninety percent of the lessons are private,” Bob explains. “That works out better, because the attention span of a child is about twenty minutes. There’s not an indoor pool around here, except perhaps in Richmond,” he says. “I covered one pool with a bubble one year, but it was like being in a sauna. It was just too hot, and I had to take it down on windy days. There are better ways of doing it now.”

The diving pool at the swim school has a spotting belt, enabling the teacher to control the diver. “We also have a spotting rig over a trampoline,” Bob adds. “I can teach faster on a trampoline than on a board, because the students stay dry and repeat the dive right away. The other highlight we have which is fantastic is an air bubble in a balloon at the bottom of the pool, which softens the landing, especially for a difficult dive. When a kid smacks in flat water, he’s going to get a mental block, whereas with this right away mentally, he’s much more aggressive and will try things he wouldn’t normally try.

“The cost of insurance has just about wiped diving out of public pools,” Bob says. “You never see high boards, and even on the low board, they’re not allowed to do fancy dives or back dives. It’s very unfortunate.”

In his forty-plus years in business in Lafayette, Bob has seen many changes. “I really miss the Seafood Grotto restaurant. I remember Pete, and we sure liked Petar’s restaurant, and Mickey MacPherson who had the tire repair shop.

“I remember when they had a helicopter port in Lafayette. Steve, his older brother and I took a ride from Lafayette to Richmond for Steve’s birthday, then landed on the roof of the Oakland Post Office. I remember my wife was pregnant, and we were on the freeway (Route 24) just after it was put in. We got stalled in a traffic jam, and a cop was next to me. I asked if he could rush us to the hospital, and we went on the soft shoulder on the wrong side of the road half the time.”

Bob acknowledges Lafayette was easier to get around in back then. “I remember I wanted to put up a big sign behind the swim school, and the planners wouldn’t let me. I didn’t like it at the time, but now I appreciate the reason. Lafayette is classy but still feels like a small town and is very livable. It doesn’t look like Walnut Creek or Concord.”

Excerpted from “Voices of Lafayette” by Julie Sullivan. This book is available for purchase in the History Room.