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Noted Author Remembers the Big Pool American author Allan Seager was born in Adrian, Michigan, in 1906 and died a few miles away in Tecumseh in 1968. As a young man he worked for the magazine Vanity Fair, and then taught in the English department of the University of Michigan for more than 30 years. He is best known for three novels "Amos Berry, Equinox" and "The Inheritance", and a biography, "The Glass House: The Life of Theodore Roethke." In 1954, he published a book entitled "A Frieze of Girls," with the subtitle Memoirs as Fiction. One critic noted that the subtitle is "an ambiguous phrase with a faintly sinister overtone. It can mean he is telling history as if the narration followed the form of a novel. But perhaps it means that he is lying about his past, either the subject matter or the tone he brings to it. In either case the reader has been warned." One of the stories, entitled "The Nicest Girl in Cook County" was originally published in "The New Yorker." It tells the story of a summer when Seager, a member of two national championship swim teams at the University of Michigan, worked as a swimming pool lifeguard. Although unnamed, the venue is clearly Saugatuck. The story is mainly about his acquaintance with a girl: It happened the summer before my senior year in college. I was working as a lifeguard at a swimming pool on the west coast of Michigan with a fraternity brother of mine... In the early summer, the water of the pool still grew cold at night and no one came in. Arno and I would get into his Model T and drive down to the Big Pavilion to dance. The big Pavilion looked out over the little harbor of the town nearby. It was bigger than any three barns I ever saw, and at night it was full of girls, all kinds of girls --from the town, the yachts anchored in the harbor, and the summer cottages up and down the beaches of Lake Michigan. The roof was the introduction. You bought a string of tickets and asked any girl you fancied for a dance. The girl that Seager took a fancy to initially turned down a request to dance from the lifeguards, but was persuaded by Everett Cartwright, a young boy the friends would let into the swimming pool for free and who eventually learned to swim, to engage in a couple of dances. The next day Seager was informed that the girl was the sister of Bones Egan, a well-known Chicago gangster. He admits to using a fictional name for the girl, the gangster's name is probably also made up. Apparently part of the contract for lifeguards was that they would sleep in a room at the pool building and get their meals at the hamburger stand there. One night after the supervisors had left the two boys "set out to prove that it was possible to make a malted milk thick enough that you could stand not a straw but a spoon in it." We packed the can nearly full of chocolate ice cream, added the powder and about a gill of coffee cream and stuck it on the machine. the machine spun and caught, spun and caught, went "oo-ah, oo-ah, oo-ah," and flew all apart. As a result they were asked to take their meals elsewhere. One of the new dining places of choice was "a summer boardinghouse in a town a mile away." One July day he was trying to find a shorter route to this dining place, and found himself "in the older part of town, away from the summer cottages, an alley of gigantic maple trees" when he passed a porch and was greeted by the girl. She offered him a drink, served by a uniformed maid. His friend later told him of encountering the girl's brother who had come into the harbor on a 50 foot cruiser from Chicago, with a boat full of men including an Italian hunchback who played the accordion. During the festivities somebody knocked a can of alcohol over the side, and the friend, stripped to his shorts and recovered it from 30 feet of water, a feat that brought him the offer of a job from the gangster. The friend told Seager, "They don't look any different. They're just a bunch of guys getting drunk on a cruiser. They were singing, "The Camptown Race" when I left, close harmony." The sky was a deep, clear blue, and the sun was so bright all the shadows seemed black. Before us in the water the children of the summer people screamed and splashed, watched by their mothers or drowsy nursemaids. Bone and his boys singing in the harbor seemed a platoon of soldiers in a rest camp.. . The summer was over and the two lifeguards went back to school. They had a few other encounters with the sister of the gangster, and once actually visited her in Chicago on the eve of a swim meet at Northwestern, but, do not mention returning to Saugatuck.