David Holbrook died.

David was my summer friend and the other half of our gang, The Ringneck Club, during endless boyhood days at the Tomlinson Run State Park swimming pool in the 1950s.

David was always there because his father, Napoleon “Nap” Holbrook, was in charge at the state park. Nap may have been park superintendent, but his wife Alta, it seemed to us, was in charge both at home and in the park.

The reason I spent so much time at the pool was that family members of anyone working there got free admission. For several summers in the late ’50s our father and mother both worked a variety of jobs at the pool – cashier, concession stand, basket room – because they needed the money. When our Miller grandparents began to fail, Dad had moved our family back home in 1955 to care for them and work the farm. He taught science at Chester High one year to fill a sudden vacancy, but otherwise had no regular job until he later got on as a clerk in the Cold Strip department at Crucible Steel in Midland.

Parking us two boys at the pool every day was an easy way to keep us loosely corralled while our parents worked. In grade school pictures my skin tone is brown as a nut. I could dive and swim like a dolphin. We continually searched the bottom of the deep end, by the diving boards, looking for coins swashed out of bathing suit pouches. I could hold my breath a long time.

David and I were the babies of families with older children; we got away with a lot of marginal behavior. Horsing around, though, cost me dearly in the form of two broken upper incisors. The front tooth I broke when I hit my chin on the diving board had to be capped. I remember spitting blood on the concrete as I walked to the concession stand to show mother what I’d done to myself.

The Ringneck Club name devolved from the large, black rubber bands that came around packages of frozen hotdogs at the concession stand, providing us with an unlimited arsenal. It was a boys-only gang that existed nowhere but the pool and usually was just the two of us. Occasionally we admitted friends, or recruited minions from among boys whose mothers treated the pool as cheap daycare for their hyperactive male offspring.

That black rubber band worn around our necks was a proud mark of membership in the gang; it also kept them handy for running battles or attacks on innocent bystanders, meaning girls. Stretched to Magnum Force and shot at close range, they delivered a satisfying sting to the bare flesh of abundant targets. They were the best rubber bands for shooting I ever had.

We also shot them to kill the flies that sunned themselves on one particular wooden wall of the concession stand. I was a deadly shot; still am. In my mind’s eye I can see that wall, plastered with fly wings and guts, right where people stepped up to get their fries, hot dogs, pop and candy. It may not have been sanitary but we kept the fly population in check.

The superintendent’s residence at that time was a small brick house near the group camp, whose cabins and halls were built by Depression-era CCC workers. (Tomlinson Run 4-H Camp is where I met my wife Honey, when Johnny Mayhew and I threw this cute little redhead into the swimming pool, but that is another story.) Surely I visited the Holbrook residence more than once, but I can call up only one in memory, the day when for unknown reasons David and I took off all our clothes and ran through the woods, naked and screaming with the sheer joy of existence. I think it was David’s idea.

I know it was David’s idea when we were riding in his dad’s park pickup truck, driving down from the upper pavilion, and David unlatched the passenger door and swung out on it. Nap yelled at him but I don’t recall any punishment.

My sister Col. Peggy lifeguarded at the pool a summer or two, probably in ’59 and’60. The lifeguards were outsized personalities to kids like David and me. His older brother Allen and sister Carol were lifeguards; so were Susan Shaw and a girl named Clarena (Valentine?) whom Allen later married. Clarena was a particular friend of my mother’s. Sister Peg numbered Jim Cameron among lifeguards in those days. Andy Standardi, a skinny, personable extrovert, came later but stands out in my memory. My favorite, a lot of people’s favorite, was Burt Evans, a big, handsome guy who, sister Peg remembers, was just out of the Coast Guard. He taught Red Cross lifesaving to teens including Peggy. Burt was a person who everyone seemed to care about and expected great things from. He became an educator; his life, sad to say, did not have a happy ending.

David Holbrook and I remained friendly but not close through junior high and high school. We lost touch in our adult lives, but I did know of his passion for immersion in early American frontier history and skills. I saw him a few times at the Pre-1840 Rendezvous camps he organized at the park. Deerskin-clad participants erected shelters, taught axe and knife throwing, and cooked over open campfires, sharing what life was like for trappers and settlers. When others wore their hair long hair to be hippies, David did to recall mountain men.

David attended our 55th Oak Glen Class of ’68 reunion three years ago, held at an outdoor pavilion in Tomlinson Run State Park. His poor health was very much in evidence, but he and I did get to sit down and talk for a bit; two old men, a stone’s throw from the swimming pool where we shared so many carefree summer days 60-odd years before.

I wish I had thought to ask him if he remembered the day he and I joyously cast off the thin skin of civilization to run naked and yelling though the woods, and if he did remember, did he know how it was we came to do that?

Not that it matters now, or ever mattered. What does, I suppose, is the feeling of pure freedom that washes over me now when I remember it, and makes me smile.