His father-in-law was a volunteer from the very beginning, now Cor Kloen is proud of the 50th anniversary of the swimming pool in Valthermond. He still remembers how it all started.
“The farmers were working here with the tractor and the dumper, digging things out. I consciously experienced that. And my wife did a lot of volunteer work here.” In short: the swimming pool is ‘in the family’, you could say.
For the anniversary, Kloen dived into the annals with the very first lifeguard Gerard Hesselink. The books of the swimming pool show how important De Zwaoi has been in the village. “It used to be the hub of the village in the summer. In the first year there were about 65,000 visitors. In the peak year of 1977 there were even 86,000.”
That’s history, Kloen knows that too. He sees that those days are over. “It is not like it was then, and it will not happen again. There is so much playing now, people can choose.” But he proudly adds: “But there are still 20,000 visitors a year, we can’t complain.”
The swimming pool is inextricably linked to the Veenkoloniën. This can already be seen from the typical name: De Zwoai. “You can of course recognize the Veenkoloniën by the knool, as we say here – the channels. And a boat sometimes has to turn around on such a channel. Then there was such an expansion in the wick, a side channel, and a ship could turn there. That was called the swing.”
The fact that the swimming pool is still connected to Valthermond is also evident from the large group of volunteers who keep De Zwaoi running. “That is really a very large group. Then you are just talking about seventy noses, that is a lot these days.”
De Zwaoi also tries to bind the youth. The children from the area are therefore also involved in the jubilee celebration. “Very nice, soon you will see two hundred beautiful little hops here. They will compete with each other under the name ‘School swimming’.”
This is how Kloen hopes to make a flying start, hopefully for the next fifty years. “That is our future. We have to get the pull here. We have to ensure that enough people come and stay here. But people also have to want it themselves.”