50 years afloat: Pool World celebrates golden jubilee under 93 year old, original owner

In 1976, a Spokane couple sat down with their teenage son one night and decided they wanted to open a pool business.

“My husband was an electrical engineer, but he sold large electrical equipment and he was on the road. His territory was Washington, Idaho and Montana, and he was tired of being gone. And we both liked to swim,” Lyla Henderson remembers. “We knew we had a lot to learn.”

Evidently, the Hendersons learned what they needed to. Pool World on Tuesday celebrated its 50-year anniversary with Henderson, now 93 years old, still at the helm.

With gold painted nails matching accents in her navy woven sweater last Tuesday, she looked every part the role.

“She collects the receivables and applies the payments on accounts and does bank errands and helps with Costco runs to keep the construction and service crews hydrated,” said general manager Grady Early. “She does all the fun stuff that no one gets to see, but we’re thankful for.”

Lyla Henderson said she comes into the office three to four days per week, working at a desk next to her daughter, Keriann Albert. She has a pool, spa and sauna at her house – an activity for every season.

“I think it keeps you young so you can live longer,” she said.

Pool World acts as one of Spokane’s only one-stop shops for pool and spa needs, employing 70-some workers across four Eastern Washington and North Idaho locations.

“We go from the start of construction, building your pool to being able to service it, maintain it, do repairs but then also have storefronts,” Early said. “Most businesses in the pool and spa industry might do one or two.”

Getting to this point, though, has been a long time in the making.

The Henderson family opened their first store on Sprague, just east of Pines, in 1976 with $15,000. It was a risky location at the time, without much business growth in the area. The family of four worked in the businesses, and they hired a single employee whom they called “Golden.”

Pool equipment and chemicals made up most of the initial inventory, but Kerry Henderson saw the importance of diversifying early on.

“At first, my husband said ladies are the buyers, and in those days everybody had plants in their home,” Lyla Henderson said. “So he got plants and started selling plants, and then we even got some plant food and put it in bags and sold it too.”

The plants only lasted around two years, but people came “back looking for that purple plant food” for years afterwards.

“But that was really the first step in making sure the business was diversified,” Early said, pointing out that even plants could fit into the realm of backyard products. “And so now, we’ve diversified into barbecues and cold plunges and saunas.”

When Kerry Henderson died in 2000, his son Mark took the reins. Mark Henderson took Pool World to a new level, Early and Lyla Henderson agreed.

“Mark was a very intelligent person that really understood the business side of things,” Early said. “And he was a true pool professional. There wasn’t anything he couldn’t learn or didn’t already know.”

Specialty engineering was Mark Henderson’s forte, and Early said that he worked on the design and engineering for U.S. Embassy swimming pools for a number of years.

Mark Henderson died in a bicycle crash five years ago at the age of 61. Lyla said that Grady stepped into his leadership role..

“He trained me,” Early said. “He really took me under his wing, and I wouldn’t be half the business manager if it weren’t for everything that he taught me.”

Early began working at Pool World at age 17 after learning about the business at a school career fair. He kept with the job as a student at Eastern Washington University, where he got his bachelor’s degree in business. He has been with the company for 17 years.

The pool industry in 2026 has a different flavor than it did in 1976. Pool trends change “just as fast as fashion changes,” Early said, and that is to say nothing of national and worldwide events.

When Mount St. Helens erupted in 1980, Lyla Henderson remembers a month without sunshine.

“I began to think that it wasn’t going to shine. I mean, that kind of thing never bothered me ‘till that,” she said. “And of course, all the pools had it either on their cover or all over the bottom of their pool, and people weren’t wanting to rush to do anything about it.”

The coronavirus pandemic, on the flip side, caused a business boom, so much that it took some products over a year to make it from manufacturers to the store.

“We sell everything in a backyard,” Early said. “During COVID, you weren’t allowed to go anywhere but your backyard.”

Early is next in line as the owner of Pool World, but Lyla Henderson has no plans to retire any time soon. She got a brief taste of the nursing home life 13 years ago when she was paralyzed from the neck down for a condition called Guillain-Barre syndrome.

“I didn’t go and have dinner with the people that were there because some of them were so negative. It wasn’t good,” she said of her time in the home. “I had to fight my way back from that, but the young man that is my caregiver has been with me ever since.

“And he works for Pool World, too.”