A Poolful of Guppies and Wails
Little children cry when they meet Marjean Tinoco. They arch their backs, kick their chubby legs and shriek, “No, Mommy, no!” as she reaches for them with outstretched arms. Eyes wide with fright, they recoil and hide their faces while she asks their names, their pets’ names, their favorite stuffed animals’ names, anything to break the ice.
Marjean--like Madonna and Jewel, she lives strictly on a first-name basis--doesn’t take any of this personally. She has been a swimming instructor for 50 years, and “screamers,” as she calls her more panicky pupils, go with the territory. Ignoring the pleas and protests, she calmly carries a new group of 20-odd whimpering toddlers and preschoolers into the pool one at a time and sends them gliding face down through the water with a gentle nudge on the head.
“Yeah! You did it! Give me a high-five,” she says to a 2-year-old boy wearing a disposable swim diaper who gamely slaps the hand raised in front of his still-quivering lower lip. “No tears in my magic pool,” she chides a 3-year-old girl in a rainbow-colored tank suit who gets submerged mid-scream, surfaces without a splutter and then immediately resumes yelling for her mother.
When another moon-faced girl of about 3 attempts to flee, Marjean plucks her from the stairs, places the child on her back and tells her to hold on tight. “I love you,” she murmurs. “Now stop crying. You’re scaring everybody.” With the girl still clinging to her neck, she grabs two more reluctant recruits and launches their prone bodies toward one of her assistants.
And so it goes for the next hour. By the end of their maiden class, few of the kids are still crying. Many of them are exhausted. All of them know who’s in charge. “If you don’t get their heads under the first day, you lose them,” Marjean says, dismissing the plaintive scene with a shrug of her deeply tanned shoulders. “They’re crying anyway, and by the third day, they are going to like it, and they are even going to like me.”
In Ventura County, where she has lived since 1968, Marjean’s work with the young and the fearful has made her a local legend. Adults who remember learning to float at her side--and the lollipops she doles out at the end of each class--bring their own children to her when they are ready for lessons. She has taught through six pregnancies, two divorces, the births of seventeen grandchildren and 11 U.S. presidencies without ever taking a year off.
Babies--she’ll start them as young as 2 weeks of age--are her specialty.
Although she has worked in country-club pools, amusement-park pools, and pools located in the backyards of private homes, Marjean’s base of operations for the last five years has been the Wagon Wheel Motel, a kitschy turquoise lodge off the Ventura Freeway in Oxnard. The motel’s owners offered to give her exclusive use of their paw-shaped pool, which had been condemned by state health officials, four days a week if she paid to fix it up. She keeps the water warm--between 90 and 95 degrees--to help soothe the kids’ nerves, and charges $165 for the first eight hours of instruction. Marjean’s Swimland is open nine months a year, and during the summer its owner spends 11 hours a day in the water, often without a break. She presents quite a picture: this 66-year-old grandmother in a blue-and-white gingham one-piece who is both strict taskmaster and reassuring presence. She has a gap-toothed smile, lank, shoulder-length hair that chlorine has streaked a waxy shade of yellow, and an ample, pear-shaped figure just right for riding piggyback. Whether cajoling, encouraging or scolding, she speaks in the languid drawl of someone who is permanently on vacation.
Going After Results
“Marjean is a low-blood-pressure kind of person,” observes Tami Holland, who enrolled her 5-year-old son and 4-year-old daughter in Marjean’s school this summer. “She has an aggressive approach without an aggressive attitude, and that is how she gets results.”
To be sure, it takes a certain level of determination--not to mention emotional detachment--to submit one’s offspring to Marjean’s swim-or-sink methods. On a recent Monday, the day she starts her new classes, a 4-year-old Ventura girl named Carina was sprawled fully dressed on the concrete next to the pool. When Marjean asked why she wasn’t in the water with the other guppies, the girl’s mother, Elizabeth Felix, explained that Carina refused to take her clothes off.
“Who’s the adult here, Mom?” Marjean said, meaningfully raising her eyebrows. Felix hurriedly peeled off her daughter’s clothes to reveal her bathing suit and plunked the yelping girl on the steps. “She’ll be my best swimmer. You wait and see,” Marjean called merrily as she planted Carina on her back and moved away from the edge. After one thwarted escape and several loud assertions of “I want to go home!,” the girl, still hooked onto Marjean’s hips, settled into sad-eyed silence.
Nearby, other mothers sat reading paperbacks or chatting on plastic chairs. A few were in the pool playing with babies who had started with Marjean as infants and could already jump into the water, swim a few feet and grasp the side with their tiny hands. It was all a bit much for Felix. “I’m ready to rip my hair out, throw up, pull her out of the pool and go home,” she sighed. “But it will be over soon.”
Her tough-love style and insistence on having kids go underwater right away has earned Marjean her share of detractors. Some parents walk away after the first day, concluding that they’d rather invest in another pair of floaties than endure the tears. Instructor Brad Allen says that before he joined the Swimland staff three years ago, other swimming teachers told him Marjean was “too mean.” Allen agrees that although Marjean’s approach is unconventional--”You would never go to the Y and hear them tell a kid, ‘You better just do it,’ “--he argues that you can’t quarrel with her success.
For her part, Marjean knows what her reputation is and she doesn’t object to it. “I agree I’m a stern teacher, even with little children,” she says. In fact, her own children call her “Mean Marjean the Swimming Machine.”
More than anything else, Swimland’s beginners program is designed to get children acclimated to the water. For the first two weeks, new students attend class for an hour a day, four days a week. The lessons consist primarily of their getting passed back and forth between Marjean and one of her assistants, with rudimentary kicking, paddling and floating skills added as they gain confidence holding their breath and keeping their eyes open. By their last day of the eight-lesson course, which takes place over two weeks, they are expected to jump into the deep end and make their way to the side of the pool.
Taking Baby Steps
The American Red Cross, which developed the swimming course used at most public pools, has similar aims for its infant and preschool aquatics program. But the means by which they are achieved differ from those at Marjean’s school. Forcing a fearful child to enter the pool, for instance, is not part of the Red Cross lesson plan, and neither is submerging a child who is crying.
“If you are doing that, you are drowning your child. It’s not a positive reinforcement,” said Lourdes del Rio-Valdes, a spokeswoman for the Red Cross’ Greater Los Angeles chapter. Instead, the organization advocates encouraging new swimmers to take baby steps--starting out with splashing their faces and blowing bubbles with just their mouths underwater until they are ready to put their whole faces in.
Many parents who have entrusted their children to Marjean’s ministrations, however, said they were willing to endure the discomfort of hearing their kids so unhappy for the sake of making them safer around water, an objective that was given new urgency in June when a 7-year-old boy drowned at a Holmby Hills pool party. After hearing his mother’s stories of how Marjean taught him to swim when he was 4 months old, Eric Gates, 30, of Ventura, enrolled his 17-month-old daughter, Lauren, in her school this summer. “I don’t consider her water-safe, but she can hold her breath for half a minute now. If she fell in, it would be time enough for someone to get her,” he said.
But though drowning is the leading cause of death among 1-to 2-year-olds in such warm-weather states as California, Texas, Florida, and Arizona, the American Academy of Pediatrics does not recommend formal swim instruction for children under 4. Until that age, youngsters do not have the motor skills necessary to become proficient swimmers, and preschool aquatics programs may give both children and their parents a false and potentially dangerous sense of security, according to the academy.
For her part, Marjean thinks the Red Cross approach “is falling short” by failing to make children do something they can in fact do. “All children want to swim, and they feel they can’t swim unless we push them,” she said, adding that with her technique of skimming students along the surface in a flat position, children actually take in less water than with the Red Cross’ vertical immersion method.
She is equally comfortable writing off the views of the nation’s pediatric establishment. “A lot of children drown before the age of 4, and so you want them to be able to go across that pool and know what they are doing,” she says.
As with most authorities on a subject, Marjean traces her devotion to her chosen career to her own childhood experiences. When she was 5, she contracted polio and spent the next three years relearning to walk wearing leg braces. Her mother died when she was 10, and the religious grandmother who helped raise her after that taught her to challenge herself. “When I said I couldn’t walk, Grandma would swat me on the butt and say, ‘In Jesus’ name you will walk,’ ” she says.
Because polio was thought to be a waterborne disease, however, Marjean, who lived in a small town in Oregon, wasn’t allowed to swim until she was 15. Her first instructor, a handsome man seven years her senior, told her she would never be much of a swimmer because she lacked coordination. To prove him wrong, she set out to earn her Red Cross certification and within a year was giving lessons herself. At 18, she married her former instructor, and they opened their first swimming school.
Days Spent in the Water
She has spent her days standing in 3 1/2 feet of water ever since. “The day my youngest son was born I taught 12 hours, and four days later I taught 12 hours with him in the water right with me,” she says. These days, she occasionally thinks about retiring but says she hasn’t yet found a successor who is as comfortable working with babies and toddlers as she is. “To stay in the water as long as I do you would think I was nuts, but I love it so much, I don’t want to get out,” she says.
As it turned out, Marjean’s predictions about the trajectory of her students’ progress--from unwilling captives to happy splashers--proved mostly correct. By her third day, Carina walked into the pool without a backward glance and sat on the steps patiently playing with some plastic pool toys. “She’s like a different kid,” the girl’s mother said with obvious relief. A short distance away, a 6-year-old boy who had been among the most vociferous of Monday’s screamers still looked scared but contentedly yielded to the teacher’s embrace.
There was one holdout, however, a 3-year-old girl who sobbed when she was on the pool’s edge, sobbed when she was on Marjean’s back, sobbed when she was playing on the steps with another girl. Marjean shrugged and pulled her close. “Your turn, phony baloney,” she said, sending her off to another instructor and catching her on the return trip. “You did it! Yeah! Give me a kiss?” The girl complied, and then--still sobbing--scanned the pool area for her mother. “Mommy, did you see me?” she called. “Can I get out now?”