So Long And Thanks
for All The Fish

Dolphin Swim Club closes
to make way for pharmacy

By Greg Rohloff
Business Correspondent

All last summer an offer made to Tim Joe for his part of the corner at 34th and Western weighed on him.

Photo by Greg Rohloff All Dried Up: Tim Joe stands at the Dolphin Swim Club, which will be no more.

For 37 years, he operated the Dolphin Swim Club and Tim Joe's School of Judo-Aikido, where he taught fitness and fun to generations of Amarilloans.

CVS Corp. wanted a corner for a fifth store and asked him if he was ready to retire. In recent years, he had set up a schedule so when the pool closed in late summer, he could take a month off to recharge.

But the offer, which also hinged upon Mr. Gatti's owner Madison Scott's willingness to give up his pick up and delivery kitchen in the building next door on Western, was tempting. Joe's grandchildren live in Denver, and with the swim club operating daily, summer trips to see them were all but impossible.

"I always said the only thing standing between this place becoming a parking lot was me," Joe said.

He weighed the decision all through the summer, fall and into winter, finally relenting as his 72nd birthday approached.

In mid-January crews started demolishing the grounds that had been neatly manicured each summer to give the Dolphin its unique flair. Swimmers did not rest on a concrete patio beneath an aluminum awning. Breaks were taken in the shade of the three towering pines along the pool's edge and the elm trees scattered across the lawn, creating the same ambiance as when the club operated as the Olsen Swim Club before Joe purchased it.

As first-time visitors drove up to the club, their skepticism disappeared quickly because of the lawn and trees that buffered the club from the traffic noise on the other side of the fence along 34th.

Jan Allwein, a teacher in Copperas Cove, recalled her 15th birthday party at the pool. She had gotten to know Joe at the Maverick Club where he volunteered with Allwein's father, the late Ed Gilvin, in working with the club's young wrestlers and gymnasts.

And although she had only planned to invite about 60 people she had known through swimming and the Maverick, she said some 300 teens from throughout Amarillo came during the evening.

"You knew Tim wanted you to be fit," Allwein said. "He taught a lot about health and nutrition."

Joe said his main regret is the likelihood the trees will be cut down as the 1.5 acres are cleared.

Instead of swimmers out for fun, construction workers will arrive each day this summer. And at back-to-school time, instead of the pool closing for another season, the pharmacy will open.

The Olsen Swim Club was the city's first private pool, Joe said. Because it was only open for three months of the year, it proved to be a financial struggle.

Joe was teaching gymnastics and trampoline in space rented from Nard Cazzell on Civic Circle and was looking for a summer job when the club went up for sale.

Although he had never operated a swimming pool before, he purchased it in the summer of 1969.

When Cazzell took the space back on Civic Circle for his rapidly expanding gymnastics school, Joe was confronted with a dilemma: How could he keep up the pool while establishing a new location for a martial arts school?

When he visited a friend in Houston who owned a martial arts school, the friend advised him to incorporate the school into the space at the swim club. By the following year, the school was running.

Joe said operating two businesses at the same location gave him an opportunity to study how to run each business properly and to improve both.

As Amarillo's southwestern expansion began in the 1970s, the corner went from semirural to being in the heart of the city. Each business fed into the other. In those days, Joe said, children would come to the pool, often accompanied by a mom who did not have a job outside the home, and stay all day. When summer ended, enough children were interested in the martial arts to return through the fall and winter before dropping off with the approach of summer and swim season.

"I didn't plan it that way," Joe said, "it just worked out that way."

While keeping children interested in the martial arts classes on a year-round basis was difficult, classes for adults continued through the summer.

The major change with the swim club during the past 30 years was the trend toward two-income families. The trend meant the pool was becoming a babysitting service, requiring Joe and his staff to monitor more closely children who may not have known how to swim or were being watched by a sibling only slightly older.

When CVS approached him, they made it clear they needed both pieces of property to make the location work for their store, Joe said.

And so he weighed the decision, realizing the timing was right, and came down on the side of practicality.

"If I had made an emotional decision, I wouldn't have sold," Joe said.

Although he is 72, Joe looks much younger, thanks to the routine through the years that kept him active. And while the pool will soon join Western Plaza and the old Amarillo Tennis Club off Plains Boulevard as landmarks that are now only memories, Joe hopes to re-establish the martial arts school once he finds a new location.

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Posted: January 31, 2008