This is where I grew up in the summer.  Rock Lake was a kids dream that will never be known  by today's pampered prodigies.   No one on the East Coast had anything like it.   Dave & Sam Wilan  loved us kids and we thought the world of them.   I personally believe that the opening of cheaper "Government owned" pools and lawyers put the Wilans out of business.    Sue-happy people often get more than they asked for and in this case they prevented thousands of future kids from ever experiencing the wonder of Rock Lake.

Its 400-by-200-foot dimensions qualified it as one of the largest concrete-bottom pools in the country. Businessmen C.A. French and George Caldwell carved the pool out of a former Spring Hill rock quarry. High rock walls on two sides hinted at the site's heritage.

Despite the opening splash it made, French and Caldwell sold the pool to a real estate company in 1942. Joe Wilan, who had been managing the property for the real estate agents, bought it four years later.

Wilan had operated a swimming hole on Coal River, Lower Falls Beach. Bad weather in the summer of Depression-era 1931 bankrupted the Lower Falls business.

But Joe and brothers Dave and Sam were to make much more out of Rock Lake.

Dick Reed of WCHS-TV broadcasted weekly "record hops" from the upstairs portion of the pool's sprawling clubhouse.

Rock Lake captivated the imagination, with its slides, spraying fountain, trapeze and miniature churning sternwheel. Folks used to travel from other states to swim there.

Swimmers jumped off a platform in the deep end, to be catapulted into the water from a tilted trampoline.

"They were just accidents waiting to happen," reflects Mike Haynes, who bought the pool property from Sam Wilan in 1992. "You couldn't do those kinds of things today."

The Wilans ran a tight, clean ship. Joe Wilan docked lifeguards' pay for each cigarette butt he found.

The Wilan brothers owned an assortment of business concerns in and near Charleston. A motel. A drive-in. A restaurant. Vending machines. Parking lots. Gasoline stations.

Though for years he owned the only large pool in town, Sam Wilan, 85, describes the profit as "lousy."

"You were working against the weather all the time." Still, Rock Lake used to pack them in. One day brought 4,000 people, Sam Wilan said. People knew better than to try to get in on July Fourth weekend.

In 1964, 10 years after the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed segregated education, the Wilans forbade blacks from entering their grounds.

Homer Davis, 77, and Paul Gilmer, 76, helped lead the charge. Both men are ministers. Gilmer still pastors Vandalia Baptist Church, and Davis is the state director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

At first, Sam Wilan said he didn't want to talk about the integration struggle.

"I saw enough of that trouble, " he said. "It's dead. Let it die."

When pressed, however, Wilan maintained that money drove the decision. White customers told them they'd quit coming if the gates were opened to blacks, he said.

"We were under enormous pressures from white people," Wilan said. "We were running a business, not a social experiment."

Protesters formed a human wall in front of the ticket window, causing those who wanted to swim to step over them or be carried. Others would stand in line all day, forcing the Wilans to turn them away. They would return to the back of the line and wait their turn again.

None of the protesters resorted to violence.

Did the Wilans, a Jewish family, feel that morality competed with their interests?

"Hell, no," Sam said. "We didn't go into people's morals. In our other businesses, we had colored people and we were on
good relations with them."

The Wilans maintained that federal civil rights laws did not apply to them because they were a privately owned business.

Finally, in July 1967, the Wilans relented and allowed the first blacks to swim.

"It had the effect of opening up the whole Valley,"  (Black leader) Davis said. "After that, we didn't have any problems with discrimination in public places."

A deluge of black swimmers never materialized at Rock Lake.  Davis, Gilmer and other black leaders had made their point.

"When we did let them in, they never came," Wilan said of black protesters. "All they ever wanted out of that place was publicity."

Many whites quit going to the pool because they didn't like the tension.  When it ended, they never came back.

Rock Lake's business never recovered, though other factors helped explain it.

Government-subsidized pools popped up all over the Kanawha Valley, charging low prices the Wilans couldn't compete with.

Taxes and insurance also ate into profit, Sam Wilan said.
"You'd get sued every time somebody stubbed their toe."

Rock Lake Pool finally closed in 1985. The Wilans had tried to sell the property, as a pool and also as government housing. They simply held on to it, keeping everything in working order.