That was when Penrose Pool was supposed to open for the season - if everything went right.
Perhaps in other places - in Lower Merion or Yardley or Swarthmore, or in the dozens of other pleasant suburbs that surround the city - the opening of the local pool is taken for granted.
This is not the case at 12th and Susquehanna, where the Penrose Pool sits amid apartments and rowhouses and PHA high-rises without air conditioning.
"This ain't about money," said Elbert Crump, 23, the lifeguard working without pay to ready the pool for use. "The children here need to be in this water."
There are 80 community pools in Philadelphia, many in the sweltering inner city. And the opening of each one is a little miracle.
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Getting a pool open is, first of all, a mechanical challenge. The bulk of the city's pools are 30 or 40 years old, and they deteriorate over the winter. They are vandalized, as well.
Fencing is cut. Copper piping is stolen. The pool itself is often trashed. There have been cases of whole dumpsters, and even automobiles, having to be hoisted out of city pools before they can be filled with water.
"The whole physical and mechanical end of it is an immense challenge when you're dealing with 80 pools," says Michael DiBerardinis, the city's recreation commissioner.
And then there is the matter of lifeguards.
"Ten years ago we were hiring lifeguards who couldn't swim," says Bud Wilkins, an acting district manager in the Recreation Department. "The reasoning was, you have a pool that only goes up to five feet, and the guy you're hiring is 6-foot-2. Well, that's no good. To be a lifeguard now, you've gotta be able to swim."
The Recreation Department hires five or six for each pool - nearly 500 total. They make $7.20 to $7.75 an hour, and their salaries make up the bulk of the $1.86 million it costs the city to operate pools for the summer.
