CONTACT US
Erick Bengel | Features Editor
ebengel@dailyastorian.com
WEEKEND
BREAK
FOLLOW US
facebook.com/
DailyAstorian
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • FRIDAY, JULY 20, 2018 • 1C
Photos by Carla Oja
From left: Carla Oja holds a ‘No Parking Any Time’ sign, Marilyn Jylha, lifeguard Yvonne Sundstrom and a Bergerson Construction worker.
CAR SPLASH
A PUBLIC POOL WAS ONCE THE JEWEL OF TAPIOLA PARK
By HEATHER DOUGLAS
For The Daily Astorian
E
very summer, two weeks after
school got out, the 175,000 gallons
of chlorinated water gushing into
Tapiola Pool signaled, for me, the official
start of summer.
I grew up next door to the outdoor pool
during the 1980s and 90s. Built by the
Finnish community in the 1940s, the pool
enjoyed its heyday along the northern edge
of Tapiola Park for more than half a cen-
tury and is now the site of the Astoria Skate
Park.
Carla Oja, an Astoria resident, worked
at Tapiola Pool from 1973 until it closed in
1997. Swim instructor, lifeguard, pool man-
ager and second mom to legions of kids,
Oja also managed a crew of lifeguards,
many of them high schoolers in their first
summer job.
The park — named after the forest god
of Finnish mythology — was a hive of
activity for all seasons of life, from tod-
dlers in the adjoining “baby pool” to teen-
agers armed with lemon wedges, bottles of
Sun In and Hawaiian Tropic, to veteran lap
swimmers.
As in a George Seurat painting, picnick-
ing families reclined on blankets along the
grass hillside to the soundtrack of raucous
screaming, laughing, splashing and the
thumping sound of the diving board.
The original Daily Astorian coverage of the Oldsmobile that dove into Tapiola Pool
in 1989.
The teenage lifeguard on duty, Len
Chamberlain — a Portland resident who
grew up in Astoria — remembered thinking
that the curb at the intersection of Denver
and Florence streets above the pool might
stop the car.
“But it jumped that, and once it hit the
grass it started to speed up,” Chamberlain
said. “And that’s when I started to blow the
whistle to get people’s attention.”
“Then I called Carla, as they don’t really
train you for this type of situation,” he
added.
Bergerson Construction divers prepped
the car to be removed by crane, but first the
swimmers had to evacuate the pool. Lap
swimmer Marilyn Jylha, however, was “so
intent on completing her one-mile workout
she did not want to get out,” according to
The Daily Astorian’s cover story that day.
Perhaps the manner in which the car had
entered the pool allowed Jylha to ignore the
Oldsmobile Omega bobbing beside her as
she stubbornly continued her workout.
The unmanned car had come hurtling
down the grass hill, slipped effortlessly
beneath a chain link fence (which snapped
back to its original position as if nothing
had happened) and tumbled into the pool.
Chamberlain said it was fortunate that
the incident happened during lap swim
when fewer swimmers were in the water.
“It could have been a lot worse,” he said.
The end of an era
Vibrant social life
The pool opened at 6 a.m. for lap swim,
9 a.m. for lessons, 1 p.m. for open swim,
4:30 p.m. for another lap swim and 6 p.m.
for a two-hour night swim (not counting
teenagers who scaled the fence after dark
before a pool cover was purchased).
It would be impossible to measure the
impact that Carla and her staff at Tapiola
Pool had on the community in 24 years.
Even the loneliest latchkey kid whose par-
ents worked two jobs could enjoy a vibrant
social life from dawn to dusk. Admission
was 50 cents and only climbed as high as
$1.50 by 1997. A season pass was 20 bucks.
It was here that countless Astorians
learned to swim. All summer long, two-
week swim lesson sets had 45 kids switch-
ing out every 30 minutes, and these lessons
were very popular.
“We had two people at the front desk
on sign-up day and people manning the
phones. That’s how robust it was,” Oja
said.
Even outside the pool, staff took care of
kids, removing gravel from their knees and
patching them up — adhering to the Afri-
can proverb “it takes a village” long before
the saying became a common catchphrase
among politicians in the 1990s.
Memories
Though it was a sanctuary for kids,
grownups loved Tapiola Pool, too. Astoria
resident Nancy Hakala, an avid lap swim-
mer, recalled her favorite memories of the
pool:
“I miss swimming in the outdoors, the
Carla Oja and her son, Clinton Oja.
fresh air and watching the clouds and birds
above when doing the backstroke,” she
said. “I remember on more than one occa-
sion, while swimming on my back, watch-
ing an eagle with a big fish in its talons fly-
ing overhead, heading up the hill.”
Still, there was the bizarre. Chlorine
leaks forced swimmers to evacuate peri-
odically. Once, on a chilly rainy afternoon,
the aging thermostat was turned up to warm
the pool. When it failed to adjust back over-
night, the morning lap swimmers stepped
into a “hot tub” at 107 degrees.
Another time, lifeguards pulled off the
pool cover one morning to discover hordes
of garter snakes slithering wildly in all the
gutters.
And let’s not forget every lifeguard’s
nemesis: the sinister “brown trout” that
would clear the pool faster than anything.
‘There’s a car in the pool’
But nothing topped Tuesday, July 18,
1989, when I was 12 years old. “That’s
when it happened,” Oja said.
Just as afternoon lap swim began, Oja
went home to take a break. She was just
about to sit down to eat when the phone
rang: “There’s a car in the pool.”
She returned to find a silver and teal
1981 Oldsmobile floating in Tapiola Pool.
The car — owned by Astoria-Svensen
resident James Annat — had, he claimed,
allegedly lost its transmission while driving
up Florence Street, which prompted him
to exit the car and push the vehicle to the
side of the street to avoid being hit. A man
nearby had tried to help him push the car
from behind. Annat was quoted later: “I just
lost the transmission going up the hill and
started going backwards.”
In 1993, at age 16, I joined the
Astoria High School swim team. Oja was
my coach. Tapiola Pool was still open but
hobbling along with aging filters and con-
crete that would periodically fall off in
chunks.
Astoria lacked an indoor pool at the
time, so our team took the bus to the Sea-
side pool everyday for practice. I started
to favor swimming competitively indoors,
and, as old memories gave way to new
ones, I began to forget about the pool I had
loved so fervently in middle school.
The Astoria Parks and Recreation
Department closed Tapiola Pool in fall 1997
with a pool party to say goodbye and give
people a chance to enjoy it one last time.
By the time the indoor Astoria Aquatic
Center was completed in 1998, I was in col-
lege, and my former swim team finally had
a home pool. Still, the end of the Tapiola
Pool era felt bittersweet.
Speaking with Oja brought me back to
those cold rainy afternoons at Tapiola when
steam rose off the surface of the warm
water, when I tilted my head to the clouds
and let the cold raindrops hit my face. I
recalled lining up on those forest green
steps on opening day, a rolled-up towel
under my arm and two quarters in my hand.
“I drive by now and wish that pool was
still there,” Oja said. “If I played the lottery
and won, I’d put it back.”
As we ended our conversation, I moved
around the table to say goodbye to Carla.
Smiling, she held out her arms, pulled the
41-year-old me into a tight hug and said,
“Oh my little swimmer.”