Short story about a nice little memory:

I swam on our city-league team for five summers, from ages 8-9 (my birthday fell within the season) through 12-13 y/o. At our organizational meeting, the coach told us kids and our parents that our team-swimsuit colors were green with a white side panel. He said, "Go to [Acme] Sporting Goods store downtown. They have tank suits in our colors in stock." ["Tank suits" was the generic term for Speedo-type suits back then; "Speedo" referred to that specific brand.] He mentioned that we might want to try on a couple of suits, till we found one that fit.

This meeting was on a Thursday, and practice started the following Monday. You didn't actually need the team suits for practice, as long as you had one by the first competition meet, but I don't think any kid wanted to show up at practice with something different. I know I didn't. Peer pressure, and all that. And besides, I wanted to get my tank suit! Nothing sexual; I was just happy and proud to be on a swim team, which I'd looked forward to for years. In fact, back then, kids (girls and boys) would wear their team Speedos to the pool for regular swimming, to show off the fact that they were competitive swimmers.

(By the way, age 8 was the youngest age-category for city league swimming. There are good things and bad things about having an August birthday; but one of the baddest things was realizing that, when the rules said "You must be 8 years old on August 1st to swim on a city-league team", they didn't mean "... later in August would probably be okay." It wasn't. @#$%^!!)

My mom was too busy to take me downtown, but my friend David and his mom were planning to go on Saturday, so I asked if I could come along, too. It was okay with his mom, and mine. So Saturday morning I rode my bike over to David's house.

I don't remember all the details of this story clearly; it was early Saturday morning, and I wasn't a morning person back then. David's mom drove us to the store and dropped us off while she went to run other errands. This was a very old-fashioned downtown store - high ceilings, wooden floor, crowded with stuff. We went in and told the clerk we were there for the [our neighborhood] city rec-league swim team, and wanted to buy our tank suits. I remember the clerk asking us our waist sizes, then he handed David and me 2-3 suits each. He told us we had to keep our underwear on while trying on swimsuits (required by law, I assume.)

The clerk pointed us to the "dressing room" in the back to try them on. The dressing room was the men's restroom. It wasn't a commercial-type restroom - i.e., it had only one toilet and one sink, and a door with a lock. We went in and David locked the door.

I remember us taking off our shorts to try on the swimsuits. Both of us wore white briefs. I pulled the first suit out of its box and pulled it on, over my briefs. It was definitely too big, so I pulled it off and tried on the next smaller size. David was doing likewise, except he started with a too-small suit and couldn't pull it up all the way. All this pulling on and off was causing friction, and I remember wondering if I would get a boner - I don't recall if I actually did. David was more modest than I was, and kept his back to me the whole time, so I don't know if he did, either. (In later years, he lost that modesty, and we became accustomed to seeing each other with boners. But I still wonder about that morning...)

We finally settled on the sizes that fit us best. David ended up with the middle-size suit of the three he tried on. I was small, and ended up with the smallest size of my selection, as I recall.

These tank suits back in the 70's were all-nylon, unlike today's spandex/nylon, and were cut slightly larger - higher waist, and came down lower on the thighs. They were more like regular white briefs in coverage and style, not so much like bikini briefs as Speedos are today. They came in a cardboard box. And the only two tank-suit brand names that I remember from that era are Speedo (of course), and White Stag. Our suits were White Stag. Funny, the details that you remember...

We unlocked the door and opened it. There was a man waiting outside - to try something on, or to use the facilities, I don't know which. He gave us an odd look. I still wonder what he thought two boys were doing in there with the door locked.

We went up to pay for our suits. I don't remember much detail here, except one thing: There were some other tank suits on the counter, the leftovers of somebody else's try-on-for-size, I presume; and they were in the American-flag pattern - red, white and blue vertical stripes, with white stars against the blue. I remember thinking "How come we don't get to wear cool tank suits like that, instead of boring old solid colors?" As it happened, later, when I swam on my school team, from 7th through 9th grade, we wore the exact same red-white-&-blue suits in competition. I still like those suits :).

We paid for the suits with the wrinkled-up wads of bills we'd crammed in the pockets of our shorts, and went out to wait for David's mom on the sidewalk in front. At this point, there occurred the only thing I'd call overtly sexual in the story. David said something about wearing his suit to practice, and I replied, "I'm going to sleep in mine tonight." He asked why, and I said, jokingly, "I think it will feel good against my weenie." He giggled, and we went on to something else.

PostScript: I didn't wear the suit to bed that night, but I did sleep in my tank suit a number of times when I was a kid. And they do feel good against your weenie!