Steamboat Springs — If I had a time machine, I’d eagerly go back to the days of the Great Depression in Steamboat. Not because I think the economy was better back then than it is now. I’ll take a double dip of recession in 2011 over the economic hardship of the early 1930s.

Still, I’d like just once to watch Ray Wood take that daily 100-foot plunge into the Old Town Hot Springs swimming pool.

What’s that? You’ve never heard of Ray Wood?

Neither had I until Wednesday night. Karen Connell hosted George Tolles at the pool for an eclectic talk about the history of the Heart Spring that supplies the hot water for the swimming pool. Connell offers a 12-week lifestyle course through her business, Body Design Coach, and is an avid swimmer who advocates aquatics for her clients.

Tolles also talked at length about the Lithia Spring on the west side of town, whose water he drinks daily. Tolles is among a passel of Hot Springs regulars who are devoted to an early morning constitutional to soak up the mineral waters before the daily crowds arrive.

“I was influenced by the late Dorothy Wither,” Tolles told his audience on the pool deck this week. “We all used to have our own key and we’d arrive at the pool at 5:30 a.m. and let ourselves in. We’d lock up on the way out.”

Annabeth Lockhart, in her 90s and still swimming at the pool daily, recalls the time when admission to the pool was 25 cents and the floating water toys were actual logs. The town kids attempted to balance on the logs while doing their best to knock one another off. Of course, there were no lifeguards in those days.

Tolles arrived in Steamboat in 1950 and wasn’t in the picture during the Depression when Wood made a daily dive into the pool from a 100-foot tower. But he tells the story well.

Before there was a Steamboat Springs Health and Recreation Association, Tolles said, the city of Steamboat Springs owned the Heart Spring and related pools. For the five years between 1930 and 1935, they leased the pools to the flamboyant Bill Gossard, who had made his personal fortune in the women’s undergarment industry in Chicago.

Just as he saw big bucks in garter belts and other female accoutrements, Gossard expected to profit from the marketing of the hot springs, which he dubbed the Rocky Mountain Miraquelle Spa. He also saw great economic opportunity in the bottling of the waters of the Lithia Spring, with its reputed calming effect.

Ray Wood and his wife were the proprietors of the restaurant at the pool in those days, and in an apparent effort to drum up business, Wood took off his apron each day, climbed to the top of the tower and took what must have appeared to be a death-defying leap of faith into the 9-foot-deep pool.

I know, a 100-foot tower sounds impossibly tall, but I wasn’t around to measure it and I’m not about to question a retired college professor like Tolles.

Gossard wintered in California. And his convictions about lithia water were so strong, Tolles told his audience this week, that he had his Buick sedan specially modified so he could transport the potent water to his winter home.

“He had the trunk lined with stainless steel so he could carry a good supply of lithia water to California with him each winter,” Tolles said.

Tolles is a believer in the benefits of Lithia water — he has been drinking a daily glass of the local tonic for 30 years.

“Lithium is a cure for manic depression,” he said. “It makes you mellow. It really does.”

I had my first glass of Lithia water Wednesday night, and I have tell you it tasted like rotten eggs. But I did notice that I felt like a mellow fellow as I cruised home through the traffic on U.S. Highway 40.

If you head out 13th Street this week in search of tonic from the Lithia spring, take some advice from George: Use your hand to wipe a little bit of mineral scum off the surface of the pool before you dip your plastic jug into the water. When you return to your home, refrigerate you lithia water until it is chilled.

And when you finally pour yourself a glass, squeeze the juice of a fresh lime or lemon into the glass. Not only will it counteract the sulfurous taste, it will release the bubbly effervescence of the mineral water.

Good health, and keep your feet on the ground.