COLUMN ONE : Lifeguard Pool Is Drying Up : It was once the summer dream job. But because of the low pay and hard work, more teen-agers are looking elsewhere, leaving cities in hot water.
Miguel Alvarez isn’t just the first kid on his block to get a summer job down at the beach. He’s probably the only one who even tried.
“When I tell people I’m a lifeguard, they don’t really seem very interested,” said Alvarez, 18, as he gazed over the shimmering Lake Michigan shoreline the other day. “Only when I tell them I’m taking home $7.10 an hour do they seem even a little bit interested.”
Money? Is that what it’s come to? Isn’t this a summer dream job? Aren’t young bronzed gods and goddesses still beating a path to the lifeguard stands of America faster than you can say “last one in the water’s a rotten . . . ?”
What would Frankie think? Or Annette? How about Gidget?
Well, if they were teens of today, they’d probably view a lifeguard job as some kind of beach-blanket bummer. In some cities, guards are getting harder to find these days than an unspoiled stretch of sand, forcing cutbacks in pool and beach hours or squeezing already strained treasuries to bankroll pay hikes and other incentives.
Louisville, Ky., entered June with just half the 81 guards it needed to open its 15 pools, and only managed to scrape up the rest by saturating local media with offers of free Red Cross lifeguard training. Recreation officials in Cincinnati delayed the opening of three city pools this summer by three weeks because there simply weren’t enough guards to staff them.
In Nassau County on New York’s Long Island, participation in lifeguard training classes slumped from 1,500 in 1989 to only 950 this year. The resulting guard shortage trimmed swimming hours at most public pools back from 12 to eight hours a day, making it impossible for many people to cool off with a dip after work.
Even sunny Southern California is not immune. With starting pay topping $2,200 a month, the Los Angeles County Parks and Recreation Department still can field an adequate supply of qualified applicants for its 560 seasonal and 125 year-round beach lifeguards, said Chief Lifeguard Don Rohrer. But in Orange County, pools at high schools in Garden Grove and Costa Mesa have been closed for the summer because not enough people can be found to staff them.
“Up to about three or four years ago, we always had more than enough people who wanted to get a job,” said Al Kiefer, a lifeguard supervisor with the Chicago Park District. “I don’t know what the problem is. Now every kid who’s qualified gets hired.”
The problem, even the most dedicated of lifeguards admit, is that their’s isn’t the glamour post portrayed in movies and on television. State safety laws and the demands of liability insurers have forced many cities to toughen hiring standards.
Just to qualify for a job, applicants have to pass a Red Cross lifesaving certification program that many cities make youngsters pay for themselves. In Chicago, as in many other places, job-seekers must submit to a week’s worth of tests of their swimming, rowing, running and first aid skills. One test requires prospective guards to scamper across a hot beach lugging a 50-pound sack of sand across their shoulders.
A lot of kids can’t cut it. Wayne Bain, a recreation official in Cincinnati, said 69 applicants showed up for a recent lifeguard training program. “After the first hour,” he said, “we were down to 15.”
Even when they pass, lifeguards say, they soon discover there’s no time for chatting up members of the opposite sex. It’s just plain hard work, and often not very lucrative.
“You can’t sit there and soak up the sun and pick up girls,” said Alvarez, now in his third summer of work at Chicago beaches. “You got to be watching people all the time. You do a lot of yelling. ‘Come on in. Stop doing that.’ It gets pretty stressful.”
Chicago pays more than most cities for its guards, but many places offer little more than the minimum wage--scant reward for a usually seasonal position that still demands a battery of physical and skill tests of applicants and frequently requires them to save lives.
Eric Powell, the 23-year-old chief lifeguard for the resort town of Carolina Beach, N.C., said his staff of 25 guards have already made some 60 rescues this year in the fierce Atlantic Ocean riptides. Rewarding as that may be, Powell said its hard to keep people on staff when they’re paid only $5 an hour and spend all too much of their time dealing with rowdy drunks or obnoxious parents who expect guards to baby sit their children.
“People are realizing, ‘Wow, I’d rather be flipping hamburgers or selling shirts in a store for the same money,’ ” Powell explained. “We’ve already lost a couple of lifeguards to higher paying jobs with Domino’s pizza. I don’t blame them.”
Brian McDowell, one of those Domino’s defectors, said he’d love to come back someday. But for now, the 19-year-old McDowell said, he can make at least twice as much racing with a pepperoni with extra cheese as he can racing to the rescue of a swimmer in distress. “I’ve run with the rescue squad, I’ve got medical training and I’m probably going to be a paramedic at some point in time, but right now the reason I’m at Domino’s is because of the money,” he confessed.
In Des Moines, prospective guards have to spend up to $90 to pay for certification programs that take 35 hours to complete. At that, all they can earn is $4.35 an hour. McDonald’s and other fast food restaurants in the Iowa capital pay at least $5 an hour. Small wonder that 70% of last year’s guards didn’t reapply this year, the largest turnover ever.
But low pay is only part of the puzzle. “When I was a lifeguard, it was enjoyable,” said Mark Hurley, the Des Moines city aquatics director. “Now we have two pools where every day there’s a war. They don’t want to respect authority. . . . Now you tell a kid to stop running, and the kid tells you to jump in the lake.”
Since early June, Hurley said, police have been called 16 times to quell disturbances at the pools, and 11 youngsters have been ordered by the courts to stay out of the parks.
Another reason for the shortage: supply. “The baby boom has gone bust and there are fewer teen-agers,” said Melinda Minks, the director of aquatics for Kansas City. “We don’t get them because they’re not there to get.”
Kansas City has been able to fill its guard quota this year. But Minks said that by the sultry dog days of mid-August, the municipal pools will be forced to revert to a weekend-only schedule because college students who are guards will begin to trickle back to school.
Cities and park districts are tinkering with a variety of incentives to ease the crisis. Topping the list, of course, is more money. Some cities now waive fees for training programs. In Dade County, Fla., which includes Miami, recreation officials have begun an intensive recruitment drive to fill slots at 20 neighborhood pools. They go to high schools and career fairs and send out special mailings to all colleges in the area.
Chicago and Dallas are among the cities trying to capture the imagination of preteens with Junior Lifeguard programs. Junior lifeguards assist the real guards with tasks like laying lane ropes and putting out pool equipment. “Maybe it’ll plant the idea in their head that they can be lifeguards when they grow up,” said Dallas park district official Barbara Schriefer, who admitted the idea was a long shot. “It’s gotten to the point where I’ll try anything. I’m practically going, ‘Look, I’ll pick you up at home and teach you how to swim myself.’ ”
Ocean City and Atlantic City in New Jersey, Orlando, Fla., Myrtle Beach, S.C., and Allentown, Pa., are just some of the East Coast cities and resorts that have even begun importing lifeguards, according to Jeff Ellis, who runs a Houston-based firm that coordinates lifeguard training programs.
“Out of 15,000 we trained (this year), at least 1,000 are non-Americans, many from the Eastern-bloc countries,” Ellis said.
Shortages are widespread, but by no means uniform throughout the country or even in a specific locale. Dade County may have trouble finding help to work at the pools, but beach jobs in South Florida still retain some cachet. Miami Beach, for example, employs a permanent lifeguard staff of 56 adults--not teen-agers--and pays them up to $27,000 a year, plus pension rights and other benefits. When Miami Beach had five openings to fill not long ago, more than 75 people applied.
Thanks to the deeply ingrained beach culture in Southern California, Los Angeles County also has a comfortable supply of people to draw on to staff its beaches. But Rohrer, the county’s chief lifeguard, said he is seeing fewer top-notch swimmers apply for summer guard jobs these days, in part because they have to train year round for high school and college competition.
“When I see our neighbors having problems, its just a matter of time before we have problems of our own,” Rohrer predicted.
Times researchers Tracy Shryer in Chicago, Edith Stanley in Atlanta, Anna Virtue in Miami, Lianne Hart in Houston and Tien Lee in New York contributed to this story.