Written by Tabitha Evans Moore
Photography by Tony Patterson

“Age is only a number,” says Phyllis Brock, instructor of the Lynchburg Pool’s popular Wet Hens Water Aerobics class, as we sit on a bench just outside the Lynchburg Gazebo. She’s wearing a two-piece olive gingham set with pearls. You can tell she’s a woman who takes pride in her appearance — and in everything else she’s built here.

Phyllis and her husband are both natives of Athens, Alabama.

“It was a great little town,” she says. “And we prefer little.”

After their daughters graduated high school, the couple started driving up to Lynchburg most weekends to go fly fishing on the nearby Elk River, trading a tent for a camper when sleeping below freezing lost its charm.

“It just seemed like as soon as we crossed the state line, the weight of the world came off of our shoulders,” Phyllis says.

Still working at Redstone Arsenal at the time, she and her husband bought property after more than a year of weekend trips. They moved here about 25 years ago — and never left — settling at first in the Lois community, in a house built to hold two families, so Phyllis could care for her aging parents. After her parents passed, the couple downsized to Crest Drive, behind the Lynchburg Nursing Home.

While caring for her father, Phyllis found her way to the class she’d eventually make her own, the Lynchburg Pool’s Wet Hens, a popular summertime water aerobics class. Her father suffered from Parkinson’s at the time, and Phyllis says the Wet Hens class helped him significantly.

“I saw how much he enjoyed it, and I wanted to see others get to enjoy it too,” she says.

The class already existed when Phyllis took it over — a lifeguard from the pool had been running it.

“They did a great job, but I thought that it needed more pep in the step, needed a little tiger in the tank,” Phyllis says. “So when the opportunity presented itself, I just decided to take it over.”

She ordered her own books and built a new program from the ground up.

“The ladies here are very energetic, and they take care of their households, and they deserved more out of a program,” she says.

{Editor’s Note: The Humans of Lynchburg series is inspired by the Jack Daniel’s Postcards from Lynchburg ad campaign. It explored the everyday folks that make this place special, and that’s our aim too. It’s free to all readers thanks to underwriting from our friends at The Jack Daniel Distillery. }

THE WET HENS & THE ORIGIN OF THE NAME

The name Wet Hens grew organically from the class itself. It’s not an attempt to be clever.

“We had a crowd of ladies, and they were out there and they were just talking and cackling and everything,” Phyllis remembers. “And I just said, y’all just sound like a bunch of wet hens cackling out here. And the name just stuck.”

Three mornings a week — Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, nine to ten — anywhere from 10 to 25 women gather in the pool for leg lifts, lunges, water dumbbells, and resistance work with foam noodles. Some drive in from Tullahoma, others from nearly Fayetteville.

“The goal is just to keep them moving,” Phyllis says. “I think that’s the secret of life’s longevity — you just don’t give in to the moment you retire, sit in a chair, and waste the day away. A lot of seniors will wind up isolating themselves.”

It costs three dollars a class, requires no swimming ability, and runs under the watch of two lifeguards. What keeps people coming back, more than the exercise, is each other.

“It is just a social activity with movement built into it,” she says.

One piece of the program deserves more attention than it gets, in Phyllis’s telling. The county recently equipment the pool with a wheelchair lift chair — installed last year after roughly two years of effort. It exists with the singular goal in mind — to make the public pool accessible to all.

“I wish it was utilized more than what it is,” Phyllis says. “The community really doesn’t know about the lift chair.”

She has floated the idea of coordinating with the Lynchburg Nursing Center’s rehabilitation programs to schedule dedicated times around it. She’d also like to see others, like people with disabilities, including children, get supervised access to the pool.

“We have a lot of handicapped people in our community, children especially that I think if they came with a caregiver, and utilized the lift chair, they could get some mobility and enjoy some resemblance of a normal life like other kids do during the summer.”

“Aging is just a word.”

Phyllis turned 70 on July 10. Asked what the milestone feels like, she doesn’t hesitate.

“I don’t feel any different at 70 than I did at 40,” she says. “Aging is just a word. It’s not an activity.”

She points to an aunt, 88, who still walks five miles a day despite two decades of congestive heart failure, and another aunt, 94, still going strong without driving anymore.

“It’s what you make of it,” Phyllis says. “And here in Lynchburg, there’s a lot of opportunities to get out and socialize.”

Outside the pool, Phyllis stays busy chasing four grandchildren around Lynchburg — Jayden, Jrake, Jeorgia and Elise, ages eight to seventeen — between football games, baseball games, and trips to the farmers market. Antiquing is a regular pull, too.

“I love to junk,” she says. “I like to look and junk and get out and meet people. I don’t meet a stranger. I introduce myself and just go right on. I think it’s an attitude. You can be a recluse and just waste away. My activity is staying active.”

Asked if a particular student’s transformation stands out to her — someone who came in struggling and left changed — Phyllis won’t bite.

“They all are special. Every one of them,” she says.

Pressed for just one name, she holds her ground.

“They’re just all special, wonderful ladies. I don’t have a single one.”

It is, in its own way, the most Phyllis Brock answer she could give — the same instinct that built a program around everybody moving at their own pace, refusing now to rank the people in it.

“You get out of Lynchburg what you put into Lynchburg.”

What does she love most about Lynchburg, 25 years after she and her husband crossed that state line and never left?

“It’s the closeness,” she says. “You don’t meet a stranger. Everybody just welcomes you with open arms.”

Then, she circles back to something close to a motto.

“You get out of Lynchburg what you put into Lynchburg,” Phyllis says. “If you sit at home and sit on your laurels and don’t get out and socialize, then you are not going to get much out of Lynchburg. But if you come out and you socialize and you talk to everybody and get involved in the community, you get a lot out of this community.” •

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