GRAND ‘OLE SAMUELL GRAND

Were it not for William Worthington Samuell, East Dallas’ recreational landscape would look vastly different today. The sophisticated surgeon was a city legend, who bequeathed all of his real estate holdings, about 900 acres, to the City of Dallas when he died in 1937.

In a succinct 21 words, Samuell’s will instructed the city to spend the $1.2 million gift (nearly $20 million in today’s dollars) on city parks and recreation. Samuell was known as a lover of the outdoors, who enjoyed walking his dogs across his robust piece of land, a legacy he wanted to see continue after his death.

Critics have complained that the city didn’t live up to Samuell’s request when it fought for the right to sell some plots of land rather than build parks. But the crown jewel of the Samuell bequest was Samuell-Grand, an 81-acre East Dallas park that included a baseball diamond, tennis courts and, as of August 1953, a pool.

It was the same year city officially closed White Rock Lake to swimmers; residents were eager for another place to cool off since Tietze was not large enough to handle the entire neighborhood. The year after Samuell-Grand opened, citywide pool attendance spiked to 611,253, up from 494,624 the year prior.

Since then, pool attendance has ebbed and flowed, but the numbers at Samuell-Grand always were strong enough to keep the swimming hole open, even as dozens of other city pools were shut down. And now, the pool is headed for the biggest upgrade in the neighborhood with a $5 million facelift (see page 51).

While families often have had to drive to the nearest large swimming pool for respite from the heat, there was a time when neighborhood wading pools were a feature at most of the city’s small parks, including Buckner, Exall, Garrett and Park View in East Dallas.

In fact, in the 1920s, two attendants, a male and a female, were assigned to each pool, enforcing rules that allowed boys (ages 7 to 14) to swim from 4 to 5 p.m., while girls had to wait for 5 to 6 p.m., according to the 1921-23 Parks and Playground System Annual Report produced by the city.

In the late teens and early 1920s, the City of Dallas put a huge investment into its parks department, building 10 wading pools all over the city at a cost of about $3,200 each (or $40,000 in today’s dollars). What’s more, each of those 3.5-foot-deep pools had to be drained, cleaned and refilled with 35,000 gallons of water daily, creating extensive work for the city’s maintenance department.

But no one can say the citizens didn’t love and use the pools regularly. Wading pool attendance was listed at 9,333 at Exall Park from May to September in 1923, while Buckner drew 9,348, according to the report. That works out to more than 65 swimmers a day in the micro-pools. So popular were they that the city kept building them, and by 2000 had amassed a collection of 26 sprinkled across Dallas parks.

That was the year the Centers for Disease Control cracked down on wading pools, after a child in Atlanta died from contracting E. coli after swimming in one. While larger pools are built with filtration systems to keep them clean, wading pools run the risk of becoming breeding grounds for bacteria in the stagnant water, even though it was changed daily, health experts said. In February 2000, the park department announced plans to close all 26 of the city’s wading pools, sparking an immediate backlash.

People were protective of their petite park pools, and vocally opposed the idea of losing them. Park officials countered that the wading pools were all at least 50 years old and would require about $4 million to bring them up to new state codes aimed at preventing disease outbreaks. Former Mayor Laura Miller was the most vocal opponent of the plan, and went about finding her own funding stream to protect four of the wading pools, specifically Arcadia Park in her Oak Cliff district. Despite the effort, the wading pools eventually closed.