Down Home NC members in Franklin County are organizing to ensure that the County Commissioners include funding for a new county run indoor pool facility in the 2026 budget. The following is a letter to the editor that was submitted by member Will Hinton to the Franklin Times and published on Wednesday, April 30th, 2025. You can see the published letter here. The version below has been lightly edited for length.
In this Easter Season I am reminded of the words of the Apostle Paul, who said, “We walk by faith and not by sight.” Grace is an offering of unconditional love and kindness from God, bestowed upon us even when we do not deserve it. God usually uses folks in our lives to make this gesture, but one of the most important presences of Grace in my life was not offered by a person, but instead was offered to me in a form of a simple moss and algae covered wooden ladder.
I should have drowned when I was 9 years old in 1966. I was at the end of a pier that jutted out 250 feet into the Chowan River in the small Bertie County town of Colerain. I grew up in Gates County across the river and I did not know the other kids at the end of that pier that day. They all jumped in the water, and I, lacking good judgment, jumped in also. I had played and jumped around in a pool but I could not swim. I mean I had watched The Wide World of Sports on tv, so I must have thought it didn’t look that hard, and I would catch on quickly. I was a kid who made a dumb decision which almost cost me my life.
I remember the current. I remember sinking and never hitting any bottom. I remember gulping the murky brownish greenish water. I remember fighting with my arms in the wet darkness. I remember knowing I was in the most danger I had ever been in in my short life. I will never forget when my right hand ran into that slimy wooden ladder six feet under the water that had never seen the sun. I climbed up and sat on the pier shaking, with none of the other kids even being aware of what I had gone through. I was scared and ashamed of myself. No child should have to experience being so close to drowning, matter less actually drowning. The nature of the anguish in our lives takes different forms, yet there is no more painful trauma than to hear of a child drowning last month in our usually slow moving Tar River which crosses through the heart of Franklin County.
I feel that now is the time for our Public School System, our County Commissioners, our three municipalities, public donors, and our Federal Government resources to join together and make realistic plans to construct three outdoor pools near our three Franklin County High Schools before another loss of life confronts us.
My daughters are grown now but when they were little girls some of my earliest and most difficult conversations with them were to explain the words public and private and why it was that we had to go to the public pool in Wake Forest for them to learn to swim. Most reading my thoughts here have probably been baptized, a sacred immersion in the water. As I have I have been thinking about public pools in our Franklin County I have come to see this issue in terms of a secular type of baptism, a joining of support, a building of community trust.
Swimming is already a competitive sport for our three public high schools. Offering the lifelong skill of swimming to our children would be a wonderful attraction to new families moving here. Aquatic rehab is increasingly used for a wide range of injuries. Now is the time, for the young and the old, for the competitive swimmers and those who are just learning, to be given an opportunity to conquer our collective fear of the water. My opinion is that it is hard to fear a man if you learned to swim with him when you were both little boys. This is 2025 not 1965. If in your heart you do not understand the role of healing which public pools can play in our county, then I fear you my friends are continuing to be victimized by our collective historical trauma of racism. Our better angels call us to reach higher, to do better and you know we can.
I am respectfully yours,
Will Hinton
Franklin County Chapter / Down Home NC
