It's Curious City, where we take your questions about Chicago and the region, and investigate, report, explore, from WBEZ.

Hey, I'm WBEZ reporter Monica Eng, and I need to warn you that this story's got some frank talk about male nudity and some crude language.

Okay, picture this. You're a 14-year-old high school freshman boy. You're self-conscious, worried about fitting in. There's peer pressure.

And suddenly, you're standing buck naked with boys that are in your science class or the guy that sits next to you in your math class.

What Kennedy High School grad John Connors is describing here wasn't just some bad dream,

but a simple reality of high school swim class for millions of boys in the Chicago area.

His latest 1980, some schools were requiring boys to swim naked.

Yeah, I know it's kind of hard to believe today.

So I called up my old Lane Tech high school gym teacher, coach John Lewis.

Yeah, they swim in the nude.

The only ones that were trunks when they were on a swim team and they swam in the meat.

In their classes, they swim in the nude.

Yeah, nude.

That's what listener Mike Sanfilippo heard from his dad.

It just seems hard to believe that they actually did that.

So he asked Curious City,

When did that start? What was the reason for that?

And was this something unique to Chicago, or was it practiced across the country?

Well, first off, it did happen around the country.

But to answer the why part and how it

ended in Chicago, we're going to have to dig into how the policy was carried out and how it affected

students. This includes some students who say they are still bothered by it decades later.

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