Swimming lessons at the YMCA
Growing up in Columbus Ohio as a kid I took swimming lessons every summer and we had to be nude.I loved it and wish they would bring it back
I grew up in Norfolk Virginia and we had nude swimming at the YMCA also. By the time I moved to Indiana in the early 70's, nude swimming was gone.
Like you I loved nude swimming at the YMCA. I actually never thought of it as something special at the time, because all males swam nude at the Y. It was mandatory, but even if it wasn't we would have all probably elected to swim nude anyway. Swimming nude just made sense.
Probably why in the old days they called it bathing, instead of swimming. Girls wore bathing suits, not swimming suits. Bathing was nude. No one would have thought to get in a bathtub with clothes on, so no one thought anything about getting into a pool nude.
I soooooooo miss those days.
boys would swim totally naked in front of the girls and that was normal?
Now to answer you, separate from the YMCA.
Yes boys swam nude with girls in suits and it was normal. Not at the YMCA or other males only camps of course.
But at the local swimming hole we did. In backyard pools we did.
Not all the time of course, but it did happen. Boys of that time period were brought up without modesty. Modesty was for girls. To be a man, you did not have modesty.
That actually still exists today. Go to a nudist facility, and there will be more males than females. Many husbands wish they could get their wives to go with them, but they won't. This is of course an American thing. The way I understand it, Europe doesn't have the same modesty hang ups that exist here in America.
I was a regular at my local YMCA during the 'transition years' and like you, the boys fought the change to "suits required" as long as possible.
There are so many reasons that wearing a suit was a pain, but mostly I think we just figured there was no reason to bother, why change the rules?
Boys today are shy mostly because they never had the opportunities that we did growing up.