I'm Jason Toon and I didn't swim much as a kid - but when I did, it was in a short, round metal tub. This week, Shoddy Goods, the newsletter from Meh about the stuff people make, buy, and sell, looks at how the jankily improvised swimming pools of my childhood became an Insta/Pinterest darling.
Chlorine, shmlorine When I was growing up in St. Louis, there were three kinds of backyard swimming pools. There was the swanky in-ground pool. There was the somewhat less fancy but equally coveted above-ground pool. Both were rare extravagances in a town that was only warm enough to swim for a few months a year - and too hot to go outside for any reason some of that time. And then, at the bottom of the hierarchy, came what we kids called the metal pool, what the adults called a galvanized pool - and what the world calls a stock tank pool. As the name implies, it was a big round tank, maybe 2-3 feet deep and 6-8 feet in diameter, manufactured for farm animals to drink out of. No chlorine, no filter, no pump, no liner of any kind, and certainly nothing like a concrete foundation. Just a bunch of untreated hose water heating up in a rapidly rusting, jaggedly welded metal tub, like a giant tuna can. We working-class kids loved it anyway, of course. But among more aquatically endowed snobs, the galvanized pool had another set of names: "hillbilly pool", "hoosier pool" or "hoosier hot tub". (In St. Louis parlance, a "hoosier" is a slur for a redneck, with apologies to the people of Indiana.) Imagine my surprise, then, as over the last several years, stock tank pools got downright gentrified. How did the distinctly downmarket "hillbilly pool" turn into something that has (wince) influencers? Before it was pool How and when these tanks first crossed over from the farm to the backyard isn't totally clear. But there are a few clues. In the 1950s, some of the tens of millions of America's new suburbanites came from dense cities, finding themselves with more outdoor space than they'd ever had before. Others came from the countryside, where they'd have been familiar with stock tanks and maybe cooled off in them. Home swimming pools of all kinds boomed along with suburbia. But not everyone could quite afford a more permanent pool, or wanted to devote so much of their property to something they couldn't use year-round. So what I picture is this: one family in the neighborhood visits Grandma on the farm. She can't take care of cows anymore and nobody else wants to live there, so she doesn't need the tank. They tie it to the roof of their giant Buick and take it back to the city for the kids to splash around in. It's a hit with the kids on the block! So it catches on with other families. The trend caught on with at least some of the farm-supply industry, too. Here's a 1954 ad from a Taylorville, Illinois dealer repurposing Butler stock tanks as swimming pools.
Spoiler: there were rough places to injure the kiddies During the 1960s, a major St. Louis hardware chain started running ads for "galvanized swimming pools". In the rest of the country that term usually meant a more standard above-ground pool with steel walls and vinyl liners. But these are just repurposed stock tanks, which still retain the name "galvanized pool" in St. Louis. You can find people using the term all these decades later in classified ads and reminiscences of their youth. But by whatever name, they were all over the place by the end of that decade. My mom's family had a stock tank pool by the mid-1960s - the same one, in fact, that we inherited 20 years later. And so many kids swimming in a piece of industrial equipment that wasn't intended for swimming made for a shared experience, sometimes a painful one.
Tanks for the memories When I asked my friends and family for their memories of galvanized pools, two themes emerged. One: those pools could mess you up. Rusty edges. Chunky welding seams. Unforgiving rivets. Sun-heated steel. A few choice quotes are enough to paint the ghoulish tableau.
The other big theme: they were still pretty fun. For most kids, any swimming pool is better than nothing.
These pools never really went away: multiple friends of mine either still have one, had one recently, or have friends who do. But a funny thing happened while we were splashing away in our rusting, unfiltered galvanized pools: they got trendy. Last one to be cool is a rotten egg As with the first time around, the stock tank pool revival started as a grassroots thing (literally, if you didn't step into a bucket of water to rinse your feet first). The first nouveau STPs popped up on social media in the mid-2010s. But this time, it would be given a massive boost by one big retailer. Tractor Supply Company, with over 2000 stores across the country, was well-placed to become de facto official supplier to the stock tank pool revival. They embraced it, tagging livestock tanks as swimming pools on their website and publishing an influential how-to guide (now lost to the Internet memory hole).
These "hillbilly pools" done loaded up a truck and moved to Beverly And, you know, that's great. People are being creative and getting into a hobby and working with their hands and making the most of their circumstances and all that. I really am not in the yum-yucking business. Objectively, these new stock tank pools are safer and cleaner and more comfortable than the corroded, unfiltered ones of my youth. They're also more expensive, more routinized, more high-maintenance, more commodified. The original stock tank pools were an improvised re-use of a cheap, throwaway item. They could be rolled out in a minute, filled with a hose in an hour, and put away when it got cold. Now they're so popular, suppliers sometimes have waiting lists, and so complex, there are professional installers (who also sometimes have waiting lists). But I guess that's the way things go. Today's cheap, democratic innovation becomes tomorrow's ever-pricier establishment totem. (See also tacos, jeans, track suits, bicycles, comics, pretty much every form of music, etc.) Hey, at least there's one bougie trend I can say I was into before it was cool.
I’ve never had a pool bigger than the larger inflatable kinds you can put up for a warm weekend, but I’m always dreaming about the paradise of an in-ground pool / hot tub set-up. How about you? Grow up with a pool, or just have a friend or neighborhood spot you could use? Catch up with us in this week’s Shoddy Good’s chat. —Dave (and the rest of Meh) Dive into these refreshing Shoddy Goods back issues (but be careful, they're not that deep):
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