Lifeguards Observe L.A. Rite of Spring

One spins salsa, opera and world music CDs as the host of public radio’s eclectic “Cafe L.A.” Another teaches electrophysics and is an associate dean of the School of Engineering at USC. A third is an emergency room doctor. Yet another takes the edge off a hard day at local nightclubs, flailing paint on canvas in a unique brand of performance art.

The first time you meet any of these four men, though, could very well be while you are flailing and gasping for air, waiting to be pulled from a riptide off Venice or Zuma Beach.

When they aren’t at the beach, Los Angeles County lifeguards do the darndest things. Their collective resumes alone should be enough to explode the myth of the lifeguard as a lazy, sunbaked ne’er-do-well.

But there is more.

For most of this century, Los Angeles’ ocean lifeguards have been building a legacy quite remote from the stereotypical lolling Lothario of the shore. Theirs is a world of fierce competition, super-familial loyalty and abiding tradition.

In the chilling surf off Santa Monica today, all those imperatives will merge as the county lifeguards renew one of the most important and enduring rites of their heritage--the 1,000-meter spring swim.

About 165 candidates are expected to plunge into the ocean this morning and test themselves against 57-degree water, 3-foot swells and some of the toughest competitive swimmers they will ever know. Only the 40 fastest will have a chance to join the club and ascend into one of the county’s powder-blue towers. The rest can find a place on the sand.

To be one of 600 red-suited county guards is to fall in the lineage of the state’s original beach rescuers, to carry the responsibility of a nearly flawless safety record and to be numbered among the best in the world. And, oh yes, it is to shoo dogs off the beach, break up fistfights and take endless photographs with fans of television’s sex-charged “Baywatch.”

“On the beach we are the doctors, we are the policemen, we are the animal control officers. We clean the windows in the tower every morning and then go out and save people’s lives,” said lifeguard chief Don Rohrer, a 44-year veteran. “It spans it all.” The backbone of the lifeguard service is the permanent staff, all but two of them men, who make up to $56,851 a year and substantially more if they rise through the ranks to lieutenant, captain or chief. Part-time, or “recurrent,” guards make up to $19 an hour and work as few as four days a year or as much as 40 hours a week. Both the full- and part-time salaries are believed to be the highest for lifeguards in the nation.

But the good money is just part of what helps attract a slew of professionals, PhDs and entrepreneurs into the field, many of whom worked their way through school on the beach.

Tom Katsouleas, the USC physics professor and dean, relishes the camaraderie of the lifeguard service and is exhilarated that, at 37, he is swimming faster than when he was a junior college All-American. But the force driving him back to the beach each summer is more visceral.

“There is no greater adrenaline rush than tearing a [rescue] can off the tower, running down the beach at full speed and diving in the water to save someone,” Katsouleas said. “That is what has kept me coming back.”

County lifeguards on average rescue about 9,000 people a year and lose just four to drowning, out of 60 million beach visitors. Some rescues come when least expected.

Arthur Verge tells of a quiet evening two years ago at Will Rogers State Beach in Pacific Palisades. It seemed no one was left in the water. Verge, 40, believes now that it was only God who helped him see a man hundreds of yards away and then find his motionless body even though it had sunk beneath the surface. Resuscitated on the beach, the victim walked away.

“When I got back to my car that night, I just broke down and cried,” said Verge, a 23-year veteran and El Camino College history professor. “I was shaking all the way home. After all those years, I really knew what lifeguarding was all about. I had really made a difference.”

Despite the paramilitary organization of the guards, they welcome the maturity and even iconoclasm of veterans, unlike other agencies that rely on lower-paid teenagers who might not grasp the seriousness of the profession.

Tom Schnabel, the host of “Cafe L.A.” on KCRW-FM (89.9) and Paul Silka, the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center physician, work several days each summer. Norton Wisdom is a full-timer who can be found in his Topanga studio, painting giant trapezoids in oil, when he isn’t patrolling the shores of remote, wind-swept Zuma Beach.

“It really is beneficial to have the 30- and 40-year-olds in the water,” said Silka, 34. “It adds a perspective on the beach.

Wisdom, 48, said his 30 years on the beach have made him a better lifeguard, and a better artist. “Just looking out at the ocean, this huge monolithic form--there is no way around it, it has helped me simplify my own form and make an absolute minimum statement in my art,” said Wisdom, paint still embedded under his fingernails from a nighttime art performance.

Assertive individualism dates back to the region’s original professional lifeguard, George Freeth.

Freeth was already a renowned surfer and swimmer in his native Hawaii in 1907 when railroad baron Henry E. Huntington, vacationing in the islands, discovered the young man and persuaded him to come to a budding California community called Redondo Beach. The Hawaiian was billed as “the man who could stand on water” and was soon attracting thousands to his surfing exhibitions at Redondo.

He trained the West Coast’s first professional lifesavers and invented the red, torpedo-shaped safety “can,” a flotation device, that is now standard issue for virtually every ocean lifeguard in the world.

“Freeth was our George Washington,” said Verge, who is writing a lifeguard history. “It was serious business then, and it is serious business today.”

The 1990s equivalent of Freeth would be Craig Hummer, 30, the preeminent ocean lifeguard competitor in the United States, a champion in swimming, paddleboarding and four other events.

Cut in the classic blond, chiseled mold of legend, Hummer is a model and budding actor, one of many lifeguards who have appeared on “Baywatch,” the most popular television program in the world.

“ ‘Baywatch’ has been great because it has shown the whole country the professionalism of lifeguarding,” Hummer said. “There is enough substance there to make the show worthwhile.” Most county guards agree with those sentiments, although they find their new higher profile inconvenient and sometimes blush at the show’s racy plot lines.

In the first 15 minutes after she opened up Tower 19 near Venice’s Muscle Beach one recent weekend, seasonal lifeguard Lotte Smits van Oyen was approached by four groups of tourists, wanting to pose for pictures. “Like ‘Baywatch,’ yes?” said one man from Germany. The other fans came from London, Paris and Sweden.

The short photo interlude has become standard procedure for the county’s lifeguards.

“I try to do it with a smile, because it’s good public relations,” says Smits van Oyen. “But sometimes it’s distracting and I have to tell people ‘no.’ ”

Not even a good-will photo session should divert her from obeying the service’s mantra: “Watch the water!”

“Baywatch” acclaim isn’t always evident closer to home, where lifeguards still must explain to incredulous relatives why they haven’t gotten a “real” job.

The questions for Tom Olson, 45, grew especially intense a year ago when he chucked his principal occupation, commercial real estate sales, in favor of a lifeguard career.

“My friends in real estate said, ‘You are going to do what?’ There was disbelief in their voices. They thought it was a phase, a midlife crisis, and I would be back to real estate in a few months, because it is so . . . rewarding,” said Olson, laughing at the last thought.

That kind of psychic tie to the profession is what left the county’s lifeguards so demoralized last spring, when the state took over the operation of eight state-owned beaches, including Malibu Surfrider and Manhattan Beach.

County lifeguards lost 91 positions and feared they would lose many more if state lifeguards (who start at $5 less an hour) were hired onto the region’s other beaches. But the county guards marshaled community support, hefty campaign contributions and lobbying in the state Capitol to reclaim the beaches.

The temporary setback only redoubled the sense of renewal this spring as the county lifeguards awaited today’s qualifying swim. Many veteran lifeguards will find their way to Central Section headquarters next to the Santa Monica Pier to check out the rookies.

Like all county guards, 15-year veteran Angus Alexander recalls vividly his qualifying swim and his finish--sixth out of 356 entrants. “This swim is one of the most traumatic things that they’ll do in their lives,” said Alexander, a lieutenant. “It’s a first job for most. It’s the start of a new life.”

True to their forerunners, those who gather for the start will be a mixed crew with one common denominator--intense swimming competition in high school, college and beyond.

There will be Alexandra Konok of Nova Scotia, who has not only guarded beaches in her frigid homeland but who just returned from a stint on the beaches of Australia. And there will be Charlie Jeffries, 32, a commercial furniture salesman, attempting to recapture the summers of his youth, when he guarded on the Jersey shore. “I thought those days were over,” said Jeffries. “I can’t tell you how great it’s been . . . the chance to do it all again.”

And there will be, according to their applications, a chef from France, a woman who organizes cheerleading camps and a blossoming model, who desperately wants to join her boyfriend as a county guard.

At practice swims over the last month, several candidates rushed gasping from the icy water, seconds after diving in. One man finished, only to collapse into a blanket, where he shook uncontrollably for half an hour. Yet the idea that anyone would be allowed a wetsuit, goggles or fins is scoffed at by veterans. “You don’t have time for those in a rescue,” they say.

As they look on today, the old salts will recall how much bigger the surf was and how much colder the water on the days they qualified. And they will talk a little, no doubt, about the day Hummer went “faster than anybody before or since,” winning by 40 seconds.

“Everybody wants to be there to reminisce and to see it all get started again,” said Alexander. “It rings to the very core of our nature and what we do.”