Dick also enjoyed lots of water for swimming purposes:
“Your Kik-back story on swimming brought back plenty of memories of swimming experiences of long ago. Over at Medical Lake at the tent camps every summer Davenport residents drove over in their Model T Fords, Buicks, and Chalmer autos to enjoy the summertime camping and swimming in Medical Lake. The water was so full of minerals that you could just about float. We skinny kids had a hard time to swim anyway and the buoyancy helped a lot. There were very few expert swimmers in those days. The swim suits covered most of the body and many with long legs which came down to the knees... Another place people from many towns in Lincoln County enjoyed swimming was Sprague Lake. It wasn’t long though that the carp took over to a great extent and muddied up the water....Some enterprising fellows seined carloads of carp from Sprague Lake [and] shipped them to New York City where they sold them to markets where they made some kind of fish paste.
"It is sad that there were so many early pioneers and children who were lost by drowning in lakes and rivers. Gottlieb Reinbold lost two daughters that were wading in the Spokane River backwater, got out too far where there was a jumpoff and were drowned. It was told that Gottlieb ran his horse so hard when he heard the news about his daughters that the horse collapsed and died on the way to the river.’’(The sudden death of the Gottlieb horse was greatly exaggerated.)
Dick wrote in length about events that happened at China Bar and other old swimming holes that nature had carved out for us. He loved horses and also wrote a lot about his friendship and experiences with these animals. Dick never owned a bicycle or a motorcycle when in his teens, but he said, "A fast Sorrel pony got me around real fast, in fact the galloping on the paved Morgan street at nights was probably just as disturbing to the townspeople as the motorbikes are today.”
"Remembering Dick Myers" Kik-Backs No. 3, page 38, part 2, (previous) (home)
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