Column: How ‘Jaws’ changed our chumminess with swimming 50 years ago this summer

Insufficient things in my life have been as consistent as Jaws I have no friendships as old as my relationship with Jaws It debuted years ago this spring soon after Memorial Day and for those of us who spent summer breaks getting wrinkled in water it ruined the next eight weeks It was the first movie I saw in a theater or in my occurrence a drive-in Having grown up and regularly vacationed not that far from where it was shot whenever I catch a snippet of Jaws on TV even decades later I am partly watching a film and partly seeing family photos a childhood and home movies from New England beaches circa Boardwalk arcade games Unleashed dogs Suntan oil not sunblock Sublime lethargy soundtracked in one scene by a beach radio that s faintly wafting Olivia Newton-John s I Honestly Love You although trivia alert in the film it s a cover by Lynn Rose Garden Anderson as well as a devilish example of a -year-old Steven Spielberg s genius for detail Just as you hear it the song is cued to I m not trying to make you feel uncomfortable Jaws for me remains uncomfortable and bittersweet hilarious and rousing and though Roy Scheider s sons in the film supposedly have New York accents they sound much more working-class New England and when I hear them I perpetually get homesick I catch glimpses of free-range summer vacations one of those sons takes a dingy into a pond without supervision and mentally note coastal buildings and roads and landscapes irrevocably altered or no longer there Jaws for me is more of a documentary Every vote cycle I smile when someone posts a photo of the actor Murray Hamilton with a reminder The mayor in Jaws is still mayor in Jaws That stated from Cape Cod to saltwater-free Chicago perhaps for you the response was just as primal Jaws inaugurated the lifelong feeling that something s down there beneath us in the water wherever we were swimming even if we were wading in a neighbor s aboveground pool My daughter once eye-rolled me suspicious at my claim that Jaws kept people out of the water for years regardless of whether that body of water was the Atlantic Ocean Lake Michigan or a backyard swimming pool I assured her there s good reason Universal Pictures decided the tagline for Jaws needed to be Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water There s even a clinical name for the phobia that Jaws appeared to exacerbate among a population who maybe didn t know they had it to begin with Thalassophobia or the intense foreboding one feels around deep water and whatever exists under the surface Ask a film critic and they will confirm regardless of whether they agree Jaws gets routinely name-checked as one of the limited perfect movies in the entire history of cinema a movie so much about its own medium that in Pauline Kael wrote of running into a veteran director who was astonished by the young upstart director of Jaws The filmmaker disclosed that Spielberg must never have seen a play He s the first one of us who doesn t think in terms of the proscenium arch There s nothing but the camera lens Here s how that translated inside a theater Audiences floated at the lip of the ocean the waves casually slapping at the bottom of movie screens reminding them without spelling it out that something s below Here s how it translated after we left the theater A horror flick irrevocably changed our relationship to swimming Hitchcock s Psycho spoiled the long hot shower for a meager years but Spielberg ruined of the Earth s surface Related Articles Minnesota PBS station joins lawsuit against Trump administration over defunding What to watch for at the Tony Awards Broadway s biggest night Loretta Swit Emmy-winner who played Houlihan on pioneering TV series M A S H has died at Russell Brand pleads not guilty to charges of rape and sexual assault in London court Movie review Karate Kid Legends fails to reconcile competing storylines A limited weeks after Jaws opened a columnist at this newspaper taking this temperature of alarm reminded readers they had a better chance of being struck by lightning than being eaten by sharks Besides the true-ish story Quint tells in the film about the hundreds of soldiers killed by sharks after the U S S Indianapolis sank an exaggeration It wasn t hundreds it was or at preponderance Whew A inadequate months after Jaws opened the fear remained so real that another columnist noted The silver screen knoweth no salt-water boundaries Somewhere in the country a swimmer may well be looking for a fin in his chlorinated pool at this very moment Grabbing the feet of fellow swimmers was now a thing By summer s end humming DunDunDunDUNDUN was already a cliche Appealed by a reporter that summer if Jaws had already become indelible Roy Scheider could not have answered more wrongly Traumatic shocks in entertainment disappear Sorry Chief Brody but for years afterward reporters and editors at this paper received the occasional letter or phone call from tourists testing Oak Street Beach from visiting suburbanites seeking reassurance or just wondering Could Lake Michigan contain a shark or two Philip Willink a researcher for the Illinois Natural History Survey former senior biologist at Shedd Aquarium and co-author of the new Fishes of the Chicago Region A Field Guide remembers the movie creating all kinds of problems for regional fish biologists I used to routinely get calls from concerned parents wondering if it was safe to let their kids swim at Chicago beaches or was there a pitfall of shark attack There was not Still the other day I spotted a bumper sticker The Great Lakes Unsalted and Shark Free As Henry David Thoreau once wrote presciently I have no doubt that one shark in a dozen years is enough to keep the reputation of a beach a hundred miles long Endurance swimmer Louis Pugh swims near the Edgartown Harbor Light May in Edgartown Massachusetts He is attempting the first-ever swim around Martha s Vineyard ahead of Jaws year anniversary Robert F Bukaty AP Rumors are pesky creatures The big one that got going after Jaws was an urban legend about a boy named George Lawson who depending on who narrated it lost a leg to a shark in Lake Michigan or was eaten and never ascertained This did not happen But what did was at least one hoax as well as an episode biologists still debate The hoax In spring two fishermen pulled up a dead -inch-long shark off Milwaukee After their catch created a bout of agita along Lake Michigan a Wisconsin tavern owner admitted he had snagged a shark off Florida in and for reasons lost to history kept it in a refrigerator presumably biding time until his killer prank As in the last few days as a dead two-foot-long blacktip shark was uncovered near Traverse City Michigan again it was seemingly imported and then dumped or so says the Michigan Department of Natural Guidance Less clear-cut is what happened in on the Mississippi River in Alton Illinois Though sharks are largely a saltwater species fishermen working along the Missouri line pulled up a five-foot-long bull shark Photographic evidence points to a bull researchers at the time proven yes it s a bull But just last year a piece in the Detroit Free-Press described biologists as still split on whether that catch was just another hoax or more likely a terrific example of the adaptability of the bull shark Look don t listen to me try a professional fish man Kevin Feldheim of the Field Museum whose work focuses on the biology of sharks disclosed Various sharks bulls in particular can tolerate fresh water and do swim quite far up rivers Bulls are special But he s never heard of a bull navigating fresh water as far north as a Great Lake However as a child in the Los Angeles suburbs he did get interested in sharks because of Jaws It never affected whether or not he swam in pools Although the movie Piranha did Considering that s Piranha directed by a young Joe Dante and written by a young John Sayles was one of the first triumphant Jaws rip-offs I believe this is splitting hairs Irrational fear is not different from the panic sweeping beaches in Jaws There s truth involved When I was a kid a friend whose home stood on stilts alongside a cove on Rhode Island s Narragansett Bay which does see the occasional great white shark was convinced a great white ate his dog In truth it was likely a mako Whew again But also there s more perception than reality Another friend of mine an NCAA swimmer back in college often finds herself in a freshwater lake in New York When I am doing a long swim across the lake I often think of the Jaws poster and get myself all anxious Brian Samuels a Deerfield native and fishmonger at Dirk s Fish in Lincoln Park informed me I would not swim in constituents pools because of Jaws Not just that but across the street from my house a neighbor had a pool I was convinced beneath me in that dark water was a shark because of curriculum there had to be Even Gene Pokorny principal tubaist for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra who has played the infamously ominous tuba thumps in the Jaws figure at Ravinia Festival while conducted by John Williams its Oscar-winning composer does not swim in deep bodies of water period He reliably thinks of the guys from the U S S Indianapolis He also thinks of Tommy Johnson his late friend and lecturer who played the tuba on the Jaws soundtrack In fact Pokorny was there at the recording I remember it clearly and I remember the circumstances were horrendous I was there with three friends from the University of Southern California and we had managed to get permission to watch I was in my last quarter of college at the time We didn t really know anything about the film itself but I remember the recording session was late in starting because Tommy my tuba professor was also a regular instructor at a high school and it was rainy that day and the substitute who was coming to fill in for him was late Plus there s the traffic in LA So everyone is already there waiting when Tommy comes crashing in The whole orchestra is waiting Tommy makes his way toward the back row and John Williams just goes ARE you ready Tommy says Sure pulls out the music looks at it the red light goes on to record He did it cold There was a movie screen in the studio set to that first scene in the movie with the woman swimming at night in the ocean Tommy did not even have the right tuba that day but the double bassists came in and he nailed it perfectly It s what you hear in the movie one of the preponderance remarkable things He played tuba on tens of thousands of film and TV scores but this became his claim to fame I remember thinking how the images on screen were perfectly complemented by this music I remember watching with my mouth wide open Gene Pokorny principal tuba participant for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra shakes hands with conductor Riccardo Muti at the Chicago Symphony Center Feb Armando L Sanchez Chicago Tribune I can think of no better illustration of the power Jaws that retains Pokorny was present while its Hollywood mythology was being crafted and he still can not swim in an ocean As biologists have noted over the past years sharks ironically became the true casualties of Jaws villainized and exploited by industries that lobbed off fins for food The upside is that sharks also became symbols of ocean conservation a cause that Jaws author Peter Benchley espoused during the last years of his life before he died in In development you re wondering the Florida-based International Shark Attack File says that since less than people have been killed by great white sharks worldwide Not one of those people was swimming in Lake Michigan According to the Coast Guard s Great Lakes offices in Cleveland shark sightings across the Midwest are now basically zilch Still Willink of the Illinois Natural History Survey explained he was vacationing last year on the South Carolina coast when he noticed a fin slice the ocean surface not far from his son They had in recent weeks watched the film for the first time and though his son manifested no fear of swimming in oceans Willink s heart jumped into his throat The scene in which a mother is wandering hopelessly and in grief along the surf is seared in my memory That fin belonged to a bottlenose dolphin But my first thought was the movie Jaws cborrelli chicagotribune com