Real Stars of the Beach Man the Watchtowers

High atop their wooden towers of power on the sand, they are recognizable by their killer abs as much as their red swimsuits.

Los Angeles County’s lifeguards watch over 55 million beachgoers, winter and summer, on 72 miles of coastline from Malibu to Catalina. They make more than 10,000 ocean rescues a year, pulling people out of the surf, downed airplanes and sinking boats, or away from blazing piers.

Their most famous rescue: Marilyn Monroe, and all because of Hollywood’s longtime liaison with Los Angeles lifeguards -- one of whom saved her on a movie shoot.

Lifeguards routinely work as stuntmen, but when “Baywatch” came along they got a starring role. The syndicated TV show, which premiered in 1989, was created and produced by a lifeguard who is also a screenwriter, Greg Bonann. It endowed lifeguards with more fame, and bare skin, than they displayed in real life.

The county has employed lifeguards since 1929, and volunteers had patrolled the beaches decades earlier. “The father of modern lifeguarding” was a Hawaiian-born surfer, according to Arthur Verge, a 33-year veteran lifeguard who captures the legacy of this sun-bronzed band in his new book, “Images of America: Los Angeles County Lifeguards.”

Like most lifeguards, Verge has another career: He’s a history instructor at El Camino College in Torrance. Some of his colleagues are physicians, attorneys, business leaders, police officers and firefighters.

“As a teacher you get to change lives and as a lifeguard you get to save lives,” Verge said in an interview.

In a way, the Pacific Electric Railway brought pioneering surfer George Freeth to Southern California. When the company completed a line to Redondo Beach in 1907, rail owner Henry E. Huntington hired him to draw a crowd and lure would-be property buyers.

Even experienced swimmers were drowning at alarming rates. Potential buyers feared for their children’s safety and were reluctant to buy near the beach.

Freeth wowed beachgoers with wave-riding feats on a 10-foot, 200-pound wooden board.

Later that year, Verge wrote, a lifeguard drowned during training in Venice. Freeth, determined to give them better guidance, organized the Venice Volunteer Life-Saving Corps.

In December 1908, Freeth was wave-watching on Venice Pier during a storm when he saw five Japanese fishing boats buffeted by wind and waves. Realizing the sailors were in trouble, he hurled himself into a gigantic wave and swam through the gale to help. Freeth heaved himself into one vessel with two men aboard, took the helm and piloted it to shore, where his four-man crew of volunteers helped beach the boat.

He plunged in a second time, swimming with a lifeline that he anchored to another boat. He went back to shore and helped reel in the boat. A third time, he swam into the freezing surf, righting a capsized boat and helping its crew back to shore.

When the swells subsided 2 1/2 hours later, Verge wrote, Freeth and his volunteers rowed out in a dory to rescue the men in the remaining boats. In all, they saved 11 fishermen that day.

Freeth received the Congressional Gold Medal for heroism, and the grateful fishermen gave him a 50-dollar gold piece and a gold watch. A prestigious invitation appeared too: He and his volunteers proudly marched in the 1909 Rose Parade.

In 1929, as Los Angeles’ population swelled, the city and county separately formed their own permanent year-round lifeguard services. Santa Monica followed in 1932. All three services had merged by 1975, creating the largest professional lifeguard service in the world. Today, it’s part of the L.A. County Fire Department, employing 132 full-time and about 650 seasonal lifeguards.

Lifeguarding can veer from boredom to excitement, ecstasy to agony.

On the rainy night of Jan. 13, 1969, a Scandinavian Airlines System DC-8 with 45 people aboard was preparing to land at Los Angeles International Airport. As the pilot attempted to ensure that the landing gear was properly deployed, he lost track of his descent. Too late, he realized the jet had dropped dangerously low. He tried to pull up but the airliner crashed into Santa Monica Bay, breaking in two and killing 15 people.

Lifeguards clambered aboard the 28-foot rescue boat Baywatch Redondo and headed the nearly seven miles out to sea. One crew member was standing on the wing when they arrived, and surviving passengers and crew were on the fuselage or in the water. Lifeguard “Jeep” Shaeffer, who was also a TWA pilot, led two other lifeguards into the front section of the fuselage, with water up to their chins, to ensure that everyone had escaped. Thirty people survived.

Five days later, a United Airlines Boeing 727 had just taken off from LAX when an electrical failure sent the plane nose-first into the sea. Lifeguards rushed to the scene but found that the 38 passengers and crew had perished. Seats, luggage, clothing, a teddy bear and body parts floated around the wreckage. “It was an absolute horror,” one of the lifeguards said later.

That was by no means the first horror in lifeguarding annals.

On July 27, 1947, chief lifeguard Myron Cox arrived at Hansen Dam Reservoir in Lake View Terrace to help search for two missing children, Raymond Thomas, 9, and his sister, Patricia, 6. Their parents had been preparing lunch with friends when the youngsters vanished.

The next day, Cox found Patricia’s body. Minutes later, another lifeguard found Raymond’s.

But the job isn’t all tragedy; there’s the ecstasy of rescue, and camaraderie too.

Verge remembers wild parties at “Burnt Pants Beach” in Malibu -- so named when a tipsy lifeguard walked over hot coals to show off and fell on his bottom. So popular were these unofficial lifeguard events, especially in the 1940s and 1950s, Verge wrote, “that a wide range of outside guests joined in the fun,” including Marilyn Monroe, whose boyfriend was lifeguard Tom Zahn.

Earl Warren, the governor of California from 1943 to 1953 and, later, chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, enjoyed many luaus and went on several fishing trips as the guest of his good friend, lifeguard Capt. George “Cap” Watkins. In the early 1950s, Santa Monica officials suggested that Watkins retire because he was in his late 60s. The governor “personally intervened, letting the personnel officer know that he ‘should rethink his position or else,’ ” Verge said.

As for Monroe, in 1954 she was working on “River of No Return” in Canada’s Banff National Park when she slipped on a rock and fell into the fast-moving Bow River. L.A. lifeguard Norm Bishop, who was working as a stuntman, plunged in and grabbed her, keeping her afloat. The stunt director and actor Robert Mitchum piloted a raft downriver to get them.

Twentieth Century Fox publicists were quick to credit Mitchum with rescuing Monroe. “Mitchum ... tried to correct the error,” Verge wrote, “but given the power of the studio’s publicity agents, it was to no avail.”

Verge’s book can be purchased at www.arcadiapublishing.com. All proceeds go to the Los Angeles County Lifeguard Trust Fund for Public Safety and Education.