Every Decade is Golden - Matt Fisher

Matt Fisher

1962 -1965

Written in 2004

Writing about my four years as a lifeguard has not come easy. Mainly, I think, because nothing extraordinary happened during my tenure. I was just one of the many faceless teenage rabble with just enough physical and social skills to get the job. In return, we were given just enough responsibility so as not to endanger ourselves or the public at large. It was better than work, but to be honest, the city paid accordingly. The leadership of this mob was made up mostly of PE teachers. It makes sense, when you think about it, since most of us were just out of high school and still understood that teacher/student dynamic of groveling and fear.

The routine was pretty simple. Most of the time you didn’t have to show up until 10am. Training days were really fun though they did start at the ungodly hour of 9. In four years, I never missed the “Red Hat” though my response time increased with each year. In my first season (1962), Tom Dugger gave me a two day suspension for not assisting a senior citizen get out of the water at Treasure Island Trailer Park. In my defense, I thought the crawl technique was the proper MO for seniors, plus this particular one owned the park and his complaint registered. (As I get older, the crawling part seems like a pretty good strategy.) I made a number of PR rescues, and a couple that were for real. In my official capacity, I saw one floater whose demise was directly related to a heart attack and not lifeguard ineptness.

I was ignorant enough to believe I was living in a perfect time. The golden age of Athens was nothing compared to the beach culture of California in the early sixties and Laguna was its epicenter. The ocean’s bounty endless, the water warmer and the surf cleaner than at any time in recorded history. And god knows, the women superb, you could ask anyone. I probably would have gone to my grave believing my own hyperbole had I not had the fortune to draw clean up duty after the annual bacchanal know as the “Life Guard Luau.”

The “jeffe” for this event was D.O. Jacobsen. Jake had a truck that could get to dump. As I recall, I did the heavy lifting and Jake drove. But what stuck with me were his stories of old Laguna. He told them while driving to and from the dump. Jake came of age in the late forties and early fifties. His stories including Hodge Podge Lodge, the wonder dog Bo Diddly, and the meanest sumbitch, Emil Hilario, to ever hit town were a revelation. The point is, every decade is golden if you are young and lucky enough to work at the beach. At least I hope so.

Footnote by Dale Ghere

Marilyn always referred to Matt as “THE CHARMER”, because he had a great smile and a smooth way with the women.

The BIG GUYS - Robin Williams

The BIG GUYS

By Robin Williams

August 2004

Guarded 1956-1958

His name is “Jake” Jacobsen and he was a big guy. His name was Dean Westgaard and he was a big guy. These were big lifeguards with real muscles that they did not need to blow up with weight lifting and steroids. They were built that way naturally. They were the Captains and they were the bosses. We took orders from them.

But, they never really gave orders. They used thought communication. You either received their thoughts telepathically or you worked your whole time as a lifeguard without knowing what you were doing. They were teachers in local schools and they knew how to communicate without talking. They just looked at you. You got the message. If you did NOT get the message, a slight smile would appear on the lips of Dean Westgaard. THEN you would get the message…BLAM…it would come crashing into your mind. “Oh my gosh, he just told me that I need to quit talking about my girl friend, get out of the Main Tower and off to my beach.” That kind of thing.

“Jake” sometimes used the concrete noun for the abstract quality. Like “Wheaties” for “swim power.” And “Mardi Gra” for the adulation you receive when you rescue a woman in front of her whole family.

One day early in the morning while Jake was busy putting out the equipment on the Main Tower, he said something without looking at me. He just kept dragging out boards and flotation devices and he said….”Heard you pumped your wheaties and used your grays yesterday and Mardi Grawed yourself all over Crescent.”

This meant that he heard that I swam out into multiple rip tides and used my brains to rescue a lot of people and one of the rescues was the wife of a Laguna Beach Police Officer and her family was there watching the whole thing.

Hurricane surf was pounding the coast and I had rip tides working both ends of the cove and the crowds just didn’t get it. They kept entering the water and immediately were pulled out to sea. I raced back and forth, up and down the cove from one riptide to the other and pulled people in by their hair. “Get on your back!” I shouted and then grabbed their hair and back swam them to shore using only my fins for power. This went on all day long. I had plenty of energy and I loved every second. We didn’t have the floatation tubes the guards use today but I did have my Churchill fins.

Then I saw a sight I did not want to see…dozens of people waving for help in both rip tides and two people waving for help right in the center of the cove. That was absolutely too many people in trouble. I was then overloaded. She is going to eat up all my time that I needed to run from one rip tide to the next. I ran to my tower, called the Main Tower for help and then raced out and got to the woman just before the next line of monster waves arrived. She said, “Are we going to make it?” I thought, why does she think we are not going to make it? “Of COURSE we are going to make it,” I told her. Then I added, “But you are going to have to do exactly as I tell you. I am going to take you under the waves if they come before we get to shore. When I tell you to take a deep breath, you must do it.” “All right,” She said.

I looked up and here they were. Lines of monster waves. We had no time to make it to shore as the water was rushing out to meet the first wave and pushing us out fast. “Take a deep breath NOW!” The first monster crashed right on top of us.

We banged and rolled around under water and I tried to keep our bodies in the roiling mass instead of getting clear of it. I wanted to use it to move us closer to shore. That worked…when we surfaced we were in waist deep water and I stood her up. The entire beach was standing up and watching us. Thousands of people were standing in a semi-circle watching the rescues. It was the 4^th of July and everybody on earth came to Crescent Cove that day. They filled the entire cove and stood phalanx like from the cliffs right down to the wet sand. I turned to make sure we were not going to be pounded by the next wave and noticed that her bra was down around her waist and her breasts were exposed for the whole beach crowd to see. Since this was not the French Riviera, I quickly lifted her bra back where it belonged and delivered her to her family. They disappeared quickly into the crowds and I went racing off to the north rip tide to swim out and pull people in by their hair.

This was more fun than I could stand.

By this time the big guys from the main tower arrived and I hand picked who was to swim out in the south rip and directed them and they all took off like lightning. Three or four came with me and we cleaned out the two giant rip tides of frightened swimmers in less than ten minutes. They could not believe how fast they were swooped out to sea. Their eyes bulged in fear.

NOW, the crowd seemed to come to their senses and nobody entered the water again that day. The action was over. Chad Burton and Bill Sorrells added their style of mirth by putting on a show for the crowd and pretending they couldn’t breathe. Phil Jones was motioning for the crowd to give him money, holding his fins out as a collection cup. There was more humor in these guys than all the stand up comics on the planet. The big guys hung around with me for an hour or two and then returned to Main Beach in the jeep and left me alone once again. The crowd was still laughing over their antics hours later.

Next morning after a cup of coffee with Dean and Jake at the Main Tower, I walked back to Crescent where I was the lifeguard for that week and picked up the telephone from my tower’s lock box and reported in to the Police Station dispatcher. “Williams at Crescent,” I said. The officer on the other end of the line said. “Check, got it.” Then he said, “I want to thank you for saving my wife yesterday.” My heart jumped. Her husband is the dispatcher? Does he know that I put on her bra? I almost choked on my own phlegm. “Oh, was that your wife?” “Yes,” he said. “She is all right but she really got scared. My mother in law took her home after you rescued her and she sat in the back yard for hours just talking about it.”

Gulp. Whew! Maybe her mother was smart enough to not tell the Police Officer what really happened with the bra incident. And I am fairly sure the woman did not know it happened at all. But there were about 1000 people on the beach who had more entertainment than they deserved!

The summer droned on after that huge hurricane surf of the 4^th of July of 1957. I worked my way back down the beaches, one week on each beach, until September rolled around and they appointed me the winter lifeguard for the City of Laguna Beach. Two guys went fishing in a canoe about a mile off Boat Canyon on a bright sunny day in February and capsized. And that’s another story for another time.

Oh, and one more thing. The big guys…invented the phrase “Maximize your human potential.” They did it by just looking at you without saying much. You got the message through the ether. Hope you get a chance to meet “Jake” Jacobsen some day. If he doesn’t say anything, just wait. You’ll hear him speaking to you in the silence. Or…maybe you won’t.

Robin D. Williams

August 26, 2004

Laguna