The New Guy Gets a Great Assignment

The New Guy Gets a Great Assignment

By Dan Henry

2010

“This is a god’s beach” pronounced veteran guard, Jack Lincke, in a not unfriendly tone, although he did seem to be suggesting that it was highly unusual for a first-year guard to get such a prized assignment. St. Ann’s was, after all, very popular with the local beach-goers and the lifeguards as well. Not a particularly boastful sort, as I recall, I think that his reference to the deities had more to do with his rating of the beach than any exalted self-opinion. His many loyal fans, however, from the mothers who felt confident that their children were safe under his watch, to the lovely young ladies clustered around his tower, would no doubt have agreed that he was, at the very least, the king of that beach.

There was more that made it a too-good-to-be-true work schedule for a new guy. Two days at St. Ann’s, two at Oak Street and one day walking relief. A busy beach with a lot going on, a chance to watch some first class surfing while on the job at another, and one day giving each guard at the beaches either south or north of Main Beach a thirty minute break was a fine arrangement indeed. I think that it was my brother-in-law, Dale Ghere, who created that assignment for me. Maybe I lucked into it because he was spending a lot of time directing the rookie guard program that year.

In any case, the 18 year-old kid from an inland suburb (derided as “the flatlands” by the locals - a term whose origins I never fully understood) was thrilled to be a lifeguard in Laguna Beach with any sort of assignment at all. I was a decent swimmer, with four years of water polo and competitive swimming experience and I loved to spend as much time at the beach as I could, but I was far from being a competent “water man”. But by the start of the summer season in 1967, extensive, well-designed training provided by veteran guards, many of whom were also teachers in their other lives, had me feeling pretty confident that I could handle most things that might come my way.

That brings us to one day early that summer when my Mother brought my younger brother and a Japanese exchange student for a day at the beach at St. Ann’s. It was a perfect, blue-sky day with a light to moderate swell and a beach full of water and sun worshipers. For a few hours, I went through the standard routine: scanned the water, walked up and down the beach on an occasional patrol, and took a swim or two to keep myself alert.

One of the many topics included in our training was the identification of rip tides (“rips”) and an understanding of the methods used to escape them. St. Ann’s was probably a case study for the training because it had one of the more consistently active and easily identifiable rips in town: that river of foam heading straight out from the beach through a gap in the rock reef after a set of waves of any size at all was easy to see.

So when I looked up to see a young man attempting to swim toward the shore with a flailing stroke and not making any progress, I was excited, but not surprised. I jumped out of my tower, popped my rescue tube when I got to the water, got my duck feet fins on without fumbling too much (as least that’s how I remember it now) and swam toward the tiring swimmer that I now recognized as our guest from Japan. Later I learned from my Mother that she was also excited to see me taking off on a rescue and then much more urgently concerned when she looked around and figured out that it was our exchange student who was moving steadily toward Catalina in the St. Ann’s rip.

The rescue itself was actually uneventful, with the tired exchange student happy to grasp the offered tube as opposed grabbing me or taking any of the other undesirable actions described in our training. I swam toward the beach at an angle away from the rip and we made it back without going over the falls or making a particularly awkward exit from the water. I was happy to have made a successful rescue (possibly my first) and Mom was both proud of me and relieved that we had avoided an international incident.