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LOWELL -- For decades, mystery has shrouded "the pool."
Rumors have swirled into urban legends since the old Lowell High School, with the year 1914 chiseled into its concrete frontispiece, was built atop a hill on Oakley Avenue.
Underneath the hill, they say, a swimming pool was constructed below the school building, now Lowell Middle School.
Did it ever exist? Did it have a movable floor over it, like the pool in the famous Donna Reed/Jimmy Stewart scene in "It's a Wonderful Life?" Did someone really drown in it?
With the construction of a new $40 million middle school set to break ground elsewhere June 2, it was time to investigate.
Yes, there really was a swimming pool.
Deep inside the building
Last week Principal John Alessia lead a group into the bowels of the three-story red brick building for a look.
Two lucky eighth graders, Ashley Starcevich and Kelsey Lukasik, who overheard Alessia as he headed down the hall toward the pool, begged their way to a peek at the darkened legend.
There's only one way to get to it, through a heavy iron trap door in the floor not far from the original front east door on the building's north side.
Terry Johnson, a custodian in the building for 30 years, unlocked the massive door and pulled it upward, rusty hinges creaking, cobwebs quivering, just like in a horror movie.
We descended down the concrete steps to a room littered with rubble, that even with an overhead light was cavelike and creepy.
To the left was a wall of vintage brick cut with two large arched doorways, each one obviously an entrance to a boys' room and a girls' shower room. The plumbing was still in place and holes where showerheads once were dotted the walls.
There was nothing else in the shower rooms and the room at the bottom of the stairs except an ancient door pulled off the hinges.
The door belonged to another opening to what may have been the pool.
Or was it?
Town historian Richard Schmal, who graduated from the school in 1934, said the pool was small.
The room, roughly measured during the tour, was about 16 by 30 feet, with a concrete stoop on the opposite wall. The floor appeared to be concrete but with something dark oozing up out of it, "House on Haunted Hill"-fashion.
Steel beams were installed in the rooms to shore up the foundation during a 2000 renovation project, Alessia said.
"I heard a girl went down here and drowned and they forgot to take her body out of the pool and they put cement over the pool and closed it forever," Lukasik said.
The story, Alessia said, "Perpetrates itself around Halloween." In the spirit of fun school officials and custodians don't dispel the myth.
Some of the custodians claim to have heard trumpets playing and footsteps in the building at night. One former custodian refused to go on the third floor after 9 p.m.
"It's kind of eerie at night," Johnson said.
Schmal believes the pool, which had been covered in ceramic tile, was never used for swimming.
"I saw it as a pool," said Schmal, who also heard the drowning rumors. "It never had water in it, though. They never had machinery to put water in it. At the time Lowell had sulphur water and the machine wouldn't have lasted long."
The rumors about a false floor over the pool appear to be true. According to Schmal, it wasn't a permanent floor, but a removable one.
"When they didn't have the floor in you could see the pool any time you wanted to," Schmal said. In fact, the floor was removed so students could use it for basketball, because the school had no gym until 1928.
"Many of my classmates played ball in the pool," Schmal said.
When the temporary floor was in place, a woodworking class and an agriculture class met over the pool, Schmal said.
Tri-Creek's director of operations, Nathan Kleefisch, who's been with the school corporation 10 years, is also familiar with the stories of the pool.
"I heard it was used about a year and then it was closed down," Kleefisch said. "I heard somebody drowned in there, but I can't confirm that."
Kleefisch though the pool may have closed due to a maintenance issue.
Mary K. (Merchant) Bruce, class of 1954, whose father-in-law was a member of the first graduating class, recalls sneaking down to the pool area with other students after play practice. "It was a big hole," Bruce said. "I remember tile, I thought it looked blue and white. We were in theater and we went in there because we were bored."
Bruce remembered seeing the wood floor over the top of the pool.
"It was a substantial floor," she said. "I never heard rumors of anybody drowning. I hear that they actually swam in it, though."
But Bruce also heard the pool had started to crack and that with its small size and a growing school population it wasn't feasible to repair it.
Zern Hayden, who graduated in 1949, remembered his agriculture class using the aging pool for its initiation rites.
"They blindfolded everybody and took them down there, but they had to lead me down on crutches because I broke my knee," he said.
When the new middle school is completed the 1914 section of the existing school will likely be torn down, Alessia said.
Starcevich, standing amid the rubble and stale air, said she was kind of disappointed.
"I expected to see a pool," she said.
Notable entries from early Lowell High School yearbooks (1916, the El Aitch Ess, thereafter the Lowellian)
LOWELL -- Who better to ask about the mystery of the 1914 Lowell High School swimming pool than one of the school's most famous alumna -- actress Jo Anne Worley of "Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In" fame.
In a telephone interview from California, Worley said she remembers being told about the pool story in school, but little else.
"I heard there was a pool and that it was covered over," Worley said, adding she never saw it.
"People said, 'Yes, there was a pool," and 'No, there wasn't a pool,' '' Worley said. "It doesn't make sense that somebody would drown in it and then they would close it. You wouldn't close it for one drowning."
Unlike others who sneaked down to see for themselves, Worley said she was too busy working at Roberts' Cafe --later the Pelican Cafe and Conella's Cafe -- on the corner of U.S. 41 and Indiana 2. The building was torn down in 2007.
Worley, currently starring in the musical "Wicked," said she never performed in a play in school, but excelled at the school's annual variety show, where she cut up the audience with her pantomimes of popular tunes.
"I learned how to do that from working at Roberts'," she said. "There was a jukebox there and I did the midnight shift on the weekend."
When nobody was around, Worley would lip-sync to the records.
As a freshman at Lowell, she was voted school comedienne but she never told teachers of her plans to become a performer.
"They would have told me to be a teacher or something else, instead," Worley said.
"All I knew was that I wanted to make people laugh," Worley said. "But I didn't let anybody know that's what I wanted to do. I just kept it to myself, left town and went my own way."
Go to Schools -- Lowell Middle School, "Pioneer History Index," for further information.
Return to Lowell History.
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