Jack Tolar's River Ranch Day Camp

The River Ranch Day Camp was an Austin Highway icon.  It was to be found a mile or so East of the Salado Creek bridge.  After driving through a small, unobtrusive easily missed steel cattle gate, you entered a unique oasis of about 20 acres of pure children’s paradise.  Founded in 1946, the day camp offered three swimming pools, a number of old, old houses that served as outbuildings for crafts and naps, a stable of horses, a huge pavilion for roller skating, and trampoline pits.  Most of the acreage was rough, perfect for prowling around and pretending to get lost in, or catching snakes (which we got to take home).  It was owned and run by Mr. Jack Tolar himself, who prowled the property all day long in his equatorial solar hat, supervising his counselors and swimming instructors (mainly his adult sons) and making sure that his charges were both busy and on schedule.  He was seriously into teaching people to swim.  Jack had witnessed too many young men drown during his World War 1 soldier days, and made it his life’s passion to do something about that.    

During his tenure, around 30,000 children learned to swim through his programs.  He was heavily involved in the Red Cross Life Saving Program and was founder of the San Antonio Aquatic Club.  Jack Tolar's granddaughter, Mandy Crowley, attended MacArthur and was a camper herself for years.  To see a short Youtube clip of Jack himself working at the pool with his campers, scroll down to Marlo's comments below for a link to the clip.

Mr. Tolar loved to impart his wisdom to any camper who would listen to him long enough.  His favorite example were the goats kept on the property to keep down the brush and stickers.  See those goats out there?  They earn their keep.  They eat stickers all day long.  No welfare goats on this property.  We would stare at him, wondering what he was talking about and why, then scamper away to swim or ride horses while the goats stared at us with their slitted eyes.

 

So what was I doing there?   Since my mother was now working summers too, we could no longer run wild and free down the alleyways.  Some type of daycare had to be found for us and it was sitting right there on the Austin Highway.  Going there was expensive and ate up most of her salary for the summer, but it was worth every penny.

The River Ranch Day camp was a carefully scheduled establishment that offered far more than swimming, but my what a place it was and how fun was that schedule!  The Camp was a vast and consuming playground and we marched from one fun activity to another.  The three huge swimming pools were filled with back to back scheduled packs of screaming children from 9:00 a.m. until 5:00 p.m., all learning to swim in a serious way.  Our group hit the pool at 9:00 a.m., wiggling into a go-kart rubber tire tube around our waist, and grabbing another to hold in front of us to kick down the length of the pool.   Swimboards were on the far horizon, so in those days, Jack made do with surplus tire tubes.  VERY young children learned with the bamboo pole method.  Terrified, they stood on the side of the pool with their tube around their waist and grabbed onto the end of that bamboo pole for dear life.  Mr. Tolar or one of his sons then pulled them into the deep end with the pole and quickly fished them out.  See?  That wasn’t so bad was it?  This was repeated until the fledgling swimmer was brave enough to jump in voluntarily and swim for the end of the pole, which was dangled within a couple of feet.  After about a week of this, most children had the confidence to jump on into the deep water and make it to the other side, without or without the pole, even from a diving board.  Basic diving came next.  The fledgling diver was positioned at the edge of the pool, one knee down on the pool edge, and one knee up.  Hands were crossed on straight arms in front, with the head between your arms.  Then you just slipped forward into the water.  It was pretty painless, especially since if you kept your head down as instructed, your nose didn’t flood.  Reluctant divers got a gentle shove from an instructor and a firm hand on the back of their heads to keep them down.

 For more experienced and confident swimmers, every swimming session began with poolside kicking, then jumping in and holding onto the poolside with back kicking.  Then it was ten laps of the American crawl and ten laps backstroking.  Then we could dive until we were pulled out of the pools to make way for the next group of kids.  Most of us lined up on the one meter board, but the older and more experienced campers awed us with their textbook jackknives off the three meter.  On occasion, one of our counselors (who were all expert swimmers) would demonstrate a perfect dive.  They were not above walking out to the end of a diving board and helping a camper with that first dive, either off the one meter or the three meter.

After a quick dry-off and a change back into our camp shorts, we headed out to arts and crafts, doing the classic lanyards, plaster mold painting and colored glue balls that we stuck toothpicks into.  After they had dried the next day, we strung them into necklaces which we wore with extreme pride.  Some mornings, we found reeds soaking and waiting for us.  With a little help from our more skilled counselors, we wove baskets.  The counselors would start them, and we would continue, wrapping around and around until the basket was completed, and tucking the inch or so of "ribs" into little scallops across the top.

 

After arts and crafts came the horses!  Jack Tolar’s had all sizes from the painted ponies: Cloud, Chickadee and Pedro, to Prince and Princess, a pair of huge beautiful bays.  We always hoped Prince and Princess would mate and produce a beautiful bay colt.   There was also Sunny, the “starter” horse who was so ancient that he dragged his hooves along the path, only about a foot ahead of death.  He was great for the four-year-olds.  He was a huge, swaybacked red horse, and on top of him we felt like we were up a tree.  But he moved along so slowly, we felt completely secure.  We all got at least 3-4 rides a day, and could choose what we were most comfortable with whether it was just walking the path or galloping at full speed.  One of the older campers, Harry, so loved the horses that he convinced Mr. Tolar to allow him to spend the entire day with them rather than all of the other activities.  And so, he became the unofficial and unpaid stable hand.  It was a win-win situation.  Jack got free child labor and Harry got to do what he loved, which was to saddle our mounts and lead them out into the riding pen, and then tuck them in come the late afternoon.  We soon nicknamed him “Horse apple Harry.”

Other daily activities included snake chasing and capture, capture the flag, playing in the algae in the stable water trough, rollerskating, and a snake man who brought his specimens in a burlap sack.  He would form the children into a circle and upend the bag of snakes.  The terrified serpents would slither in circles, surrounded by screaming campers.   Late in the afternoon, older children were allowed to hike unsupervised through the acreage in the Texas heat up to the Devil’s backbone.  On those rare days where thunderstorms were booming over San Antonio and we could not use the pools, Jack sat up a projector and screen in the pavilion and showed us home movies of his sons practicing their ten meter dives.  He would run the film forward, and then run it backwards as we watched his son Roger fly upside down  and out of the water, onto the diving board, and then sprint backwards to the ladder.  We screamed with laughter no matter how many times he showed it.

After a quick homemade sack lunch, usually peanut butter and karo syrup, summer cantaloupe slices and a nap, we were back in the pool for a second time in a day, with some pit trampoline jumping thrown in.  At the end of each summer, we were brown, fit and lean.

The River Ranch Day Camp story must end with the running of the horses, that is the horses who loved to run away.  Often on evenings and weekends when the horses were let loose to roam free on the property, they took it into their heads to get through the property fence and run down Austin Highway to the caliche pits.  Even ancient old Sunny joined the pack.  Jack Tolar would soon get wind of his errant beasts and would be off with members of the family to round them up and return them to the fold.  Sometimes the horses even ran away late in the day when the campers were still there.  If that happened, then 7-8 excited little boys got to leap into the back of Jack’s old pickup and join in the chase.