This Florida swimming pool took a shot at standing out.
Homeowner Louis Minardi has owned an eye-catching pool shaped like a six-shooter revolver for about 40 years that has his neighbors wondering what type of loose cannon they’re living near.
“Neighbors that have bought houses around here have all come by,” the 67-year-old Odessa resident — who aptly lives on Gunn Highway — told Fresh Take Florida. “They’re all, ‘Is this guy a whack job?’”
The oddly shaped pool was built in the 1980s after Minardi wouldn’t let his kids swim in a nearby alligator- and snake-infested lake without wife Raye watching over them with a shotgun from the deck, according to the University of Florida’s student news service.
An old high school friend and contractor convinced Minardi to let him create the custom 55-foot-long pool.
The plans that late friend and contractor Albert Jones III presented were of a 1950s-era, Western-style Ruger Blackhawk, which is known for its long barrel. Jones even detailed the tiles on the pool’s bottom to distinguish the firearm’s different components, including the trigger and ammunition chamber.
A Jacuzzi was installed in the hammer of the “gun,” and the tiles around the pool were coordinated to match the color of a revolver’s brown handle and silver body.
“You swim your lap down the barrel,” Minardi recalled Jones, who died in 2010, telling him. “It gets deeper on that end. You can flip over from it, and then you can swim back.”
The pool had been resurfaced over the years, though its shape remains the same.
Minardi, who opened a now-closed gunsmithing business in 1976 and had his first gun – a double-barrel shotgun – in middle school, said the pool has been a gathering place for friends and family, who have used it to teach their kids how to swim.
The homeowner, who has had a lifelong passion for guns, stressed firearm safety is important if a person wants to carry one in the Sunshine State.
“If you’re qualified, mentally able to have one and protect yourself, I think you ought to have one if you want one, whether you keep it at home or you carry it with you,” Louis Minardi said. “But it’s like everything. It’s educating. It’s educating the people about the guns, how they work.”
With Post wires