About 65 African American children were kicked out of a Huntingdon Valley, PA swimming pool because they "would change the complexion.... and the atmosphere of the club." This quote is actually from a written statement released by The Valley Swim Club's president, John Duesler. According to a public statement to the press later released by Mr. Doucheler-- I mean, Duesler, racism did not play any factor in this.

It said, in part, "Unfortunately, we quickly learned that we underestimated the capacity of our facilities...." I think he meant to say "overestimated", but whatever. Nevermind that several children reported hearing pool members complain about them, including one lady saying "Uhh, what are all these black kids doing here?!"

The children were there as part of a weekly summer day camp activity, which had already been paid for and approved by the pool owners. I guess they just naturally assumed the kids would be white....

The full story as reported by the local NBC affiliate can be found here:  http://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/local/Pool-Boots-Kids-Who-Might-Change-the-Complexion.html


Now that you know the story, let's run this through the good-ol Kris Craig Analysis Machine. The pool owner claims that race did not play an issue. He claims that the pool simply did not have sufficient capacity to accomodate the day camp children. I believe I can disprove this claim, right here and now.

I looked for the pool club's website (http://www.thevalleyswimclub.com), but all that came up was the statement I quoted above. I was hoping to find some information regarding their membership policies, club rules, schedule-- and, most importantly, pool capacity. I found some links to internal pages that might have this info, only to find that every single one of them had been taken down.

Fortunately, it would seem that they also underestimated the power of Google. It took a little digging, as most of the caches were already showing snapshots of the site in its current state, but then I struck gold:

http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:lKgt9xK-TWgJ:www.thevalleyclub.com/facilities.html+http://www.thevalleyclub.com/&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us


In case the link above expires, the page has a brief description, a map with contact info, and a rather long list of high-scale amenities. At the very top of that list: "A 110,000 gallon L-shaped swimming pool".

Bingo! Though I'd have preferred to get the exact length and width of the pool, this information is enough for us to extrapolate a reasonably close estimate of the pool's size. I went back to Google and found the equation for determining gallon capacity of a rectangular pool:

Gallon Capacity = Length(ft) * Width(ft) * Depth(ft) * 7.9

Here's where I got it from:  http://www.patiostore.com/poolmath.html


We already know the gallon capacity (110,000). The average depth of most pools is typically around 48". Let's be generous, and say the pool averages 5 feet (60") in depth. What I did then was divided 110,000 by 7.9, then again by 5 (depth), and that leaves us with the square footage of the pool.

L * W = 2,785

SqFt = 2,785

Let's play with some real world numbers and see if we can estimate its length. We can use this to check our work. And since we know it's an L-shaped pool, it's reasonable to assume that the pool stretches more lengthwise with a limited width, so we can reasonably assume based on this that the pool would not be more than 15 feet wide.

Therefore, we can just solve for L.  Here's what we get:

L * 15 * 5 * 7.9 = 110,000

592.5L = 110,000

L ~= 186


186 feet in length! That's one big mother<expletive deleted> pool!! Let's check our work real quick before we continue (length times width):

186 * 15 = 2,790


When you account for rounding, it's a perfect match!

Ok, so let's move forward. How does this help us? Well, after fondling Google for awhile looking for how to determine maximum pool occupancy based on length and width, I found a couple sources that stated you can have one (adult) swimmer for every 15 square feet. Here's a source:

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090512052044AAY4mQ7


15 square feet per adult, that sounds about right. So, did these bastards really exceed capacity with 65 children diving into the pool? Well, let's find out:

Capacity = SqFt / 15

Capacity = 2,785 / 15

Capacity ~= 185 adults


185 people?!  So, in other words, this pool was able to accomodate nearly three times as many adults as the number of children who were using the pool that day. This means that, in order for the pool to reach anywhere near capacity, there would've had to be approximately 120 other people in the pool at the same time as these kids! This is a private club. Most public pools I've ever seen don't get anywhere near that many people swimming at the same time. What's the most you've ever seen? On a busy day, maybe a few dozen? Mostly kids?


The Verdict: This one's really a no-brainer. The guy lied when he said these kids were kicked out because the pool just couldn't handle that many of them. The people who run the pool probably went to the trouble of deleting all the files on their webserver in order to avoid someone like me from being able to prove that.

Bottom Line: These assholes are a bunch of snobby, white-trash racists. They should sell the club, then use that money to book passage on the next train heading back to the 1950's. Truly disgusting. 'Nuff said.