POOLING THEIR TALENT
Thanks to discipline and hard work — plus a lot of fun — members of this senior synchronized-swim team are all in the peak of fitness
THE members of the Harlem Honeys and Bears synchronized-swim team happily chitchat as they float on their backs and link arms and legs to create a bobbing star atop the water. The formation begins to turn slowly, like a pinwheel in a light wind. “Streamline,” says coach Oliver Foote, moving the leg of a swimmer a few inches. “There you go!”
Minutes after this recent Wednesday morning practice, member Lettice Graham, 93, is already changed into a red sweat suit and standing in the locker room of the Hansborough Recreation Center in Harlem.
“It is the best exercise in the world; it’s like a therapy,” says Graham, an AT&T retiree from Harlem. She learned how to swim at Hansborough in 1986 at the age of 64. “Age is just a number. I tell seniors and children, ‘Get into the pool, it’s good for you.’ ”
Adds 86-year-old teammate Irma Sloan: “The water is very invigorating, it keeps you alive.”
The Honeys and Bears synchronized-swim team is for folks 55 and up. Some joined to get in shape, while others came for rehab. Joyce Clarke, 64, came to learn to swim.
“It was on my bucket list,” she says. “I wanted to swim my entire life but I was afraid of the water.”
Founded in 1979, the Honeys and Bears meet for twice-a-week practices. While open to both men and women, its two dozen active members are overwhelmingly female.
Several, like Elvira O’Garro, 93, have been members since the early years. “I feel great — I never had aches and pains all these years,” says O’Garro, a retired nurse.
The team performs throughout the summer at various pools, as well as running a free class teaching local children how to swim.
Clarke, of Canarsie, Brooklyn, joined up five years ago and commutes an hour and a half each way “on a good day” for practice.
“I’ve never met a group of people that keep me so motivated, keep me going,” she says. “The team took me on like a little sister.”
Monica Kohale, 62, is the team captain. “I just love that I feel like a little baby in the water, it makes you feel really young,” says Kohale, who wears a heart monitor for arrhythmia. “Nothing hurts when you’re in the water.”
Foote, 66, has coached the team for more than two decades.
“I’m pretty hard on the ladies but they understand, I want them to do the best they can do,” he says. “We’ve just got to get to business when we are in the water.”
Some on the team, like Suzan Johnson Cook, 58, a candidate running to represent New York’s 13th Congressional District, joined to start the day refreshed.
Honeys and Bears president Mary E. Williams, 76, arrived at her first practice in 1988 with arthritis so severe that she was facing a total knee replacement and used a cane to walk. Williams’ doctor told her that water would be the best therapy she could get. After joining the Honeys and Bears, Williams tossed the cane and ultimately never had the knee replacement.
“I love the water — it energizes you, it invigorates you,” she says.