If you’ve ever walked the halls of a big school with a well-respected principal, you know what it’s like to stroll a stretch of Rockaway Beach with Janet Fash.
“How’s everything?” she called to almost every lifeguard. “How ya doin’? How’s the chair? Good?”
One guard waved to Fash, who worked on this seven-mile stretch of Queens shoreline for 40 years. Another guard gave a little salute.
A third, sporting mirrored sunglasses and orange trunks, jogged up behind us. “Janet! I hadda come say hello.”
They chatted about the water (“like an ice bath”); about the seafood in Portugal, where Fash just completed a 62-mile spiritual walk with her sister; and about Fash’s memoir, “Lifeguard: A Love Story,” which comes out on June 23. She invited him to her book party at the Belle Harbor Yacht Club. He said he’d try to come.
“Lifeguards are one big community,” Fash said as we walked away. Then something caught her eye. “Hold up a sec.”
She doubled back, approaching a lifeguard who was scrolling on his phone. “Hi there, excuse me? You should be looking up, not down.”
Chastened, the young man lifted his eyes to the ocean.
Fash, 66, started lifeguarding when she was in college. Even as a rookie, she defied the stereotype of the lackadaisical teen idly twirling a whistle until something better came along.
For Fash, the job was a calling, an escape from weekday work at a Wall Street brokerage firm and then during summers off from her teaching job. She met her husband of 36 years on the beach at 106th St.; carried out rescues while pregnant; taught her two children to respect these waves.
She watched the neighborhood change — dilapidated hotels making way for luxury high rises, boardwalk hot dogs now sharing concession space with kale smoothies.
In 1988, Fash was named New York City’s first female chief lifeguard. She became a vocal critic of political maneuvering and corner-cutting that, she still believes, compromise the safety of swimmers.
“The City of New York is really not running it the way they should,” Fash said, referring to the thousand or so seasonal lifeguards employed by the Department of Parks and Recreation. “They could do a better job.”
Her proud and forthright memoir grew out of a story about her for Curbed, which is part of New York magazine. “Most of the lifeguards I worked with wanted to be heroes,” Fash writes. “The police called themselves New York’s Finest, the firemen were New York’s Bravest and the sanitation workers were New York’s Strongest. We called ourselves New York’s Wettest. It was a joke, but we did see ourselves as one of the city’s core public servants, even if the rest of the city didn’t always see us that way.”
Bert Kis, who reported to Fash in the 1980s, said, “Janet would always remind us that peoples’ lives were in our hands. She took that very seriously.”
Before we even set foot on the sand, Fash assessed the ocean from the boardwalk, scanning it like a reader facing a bookshelf.
“There’s a north wind,” she pronounced. “This is a beautiful day.”
Still, she cautioned, “See the foam over there? That’s a lateral current. When the tide’s pulling out, it can be problematic. I know from experience, working here all those years.”
Fash grew up in Park Slope, Brooklyn, one of seven children. When she was 10, her parents rented a bungalow on 93rd St. in Rockaway at the recommendation of one of her father’s co-workers at Con Ed.
“We arrived and it was wonderful,” Fash said. “You walked down, jumped in the water.”
Recounting this era in her book, Fash includes notes of mischief and nostalgia. In person, she has the just-the-facts delivery of the middle- and high-school teacher she once was.
When I asked her to describe the beach in midsummer, she said, “Wall to wall people. Blanket to blanket. Music.”
When I asked her to recall her first drowning, she said, “He was a teenage boy. He went out so fast. It was devastating.”
When I asked her advice for floundering swimmers, she said, “Float on your back, relax, don’t panic.”
Fash is, of course, fluent in lifeguard lingo. A “horn” is a first-year guard, subject to hazing — which, in Fash’s day, ranged from cruel to humiliating to criminal. One of her friends was forcibly stripped of her bathing suit; another was hospitalized after being slathered with toxic paint.
A “bathtub case” involves a rescue before a swimmer is actually in trouble. “DFD” refers to a person who is “down for the day.”
Rockaway’s most damning epithet has, thankfully, been lost to the sands of time. When someone drowned on your watch, Fash said, you were called a murderer.
“The price you had to pay was to buy a keg and throw a party that night,” she writes. “It was a mock wake, where sometimes they would even bury the keg in the sand like it was a grave.”
As we sat on a jetty near where she made her first save, Fash described the weight of the job, which is a major theme in her memoir. She spoke of teenagers, crying for a drowned friend. Parents on the boardwalk, waiting for a child’s body to be found.
“We almost want to be invisible,” Fash said. “We don’t want them to come to us because we feel we didn’t get our job done.”
Over the years, Fash has lobbied for better equipment for guards, including fins, binoculars, walkie-talkies and Jet Skis; swimming lessons for neighborhood children; mandatory ocean drills (not just pool swims) for guards in training; a lifeguard manual to be shared among all waterfront staff; and a separation of union leadership and management roles to ensure fair promotions.
“I hit my head against the wall so many times,” Fash said. “It taught me a lot about writing letters and keeping people accountable.”
When she launched a lifeguard development program with the Department of Education, Fash said she was penalized by the Parks Department.
“They made the public and me suffer by giving me less lifeguards,” Fash explained. She was assigned staff who didn’t know Rockaway Beach, which tends to be busier than nearby Belle Harbor, an affluent neighborhood where, she said, most residents know how to swim.
“It’s like any other job if you’re used to a slow area and you’re thrown into a busy area,” Fash said. “My boss would be like, ‘They’re all trained the same.’ No, they’re not.”
She gestured at the wide beach flanked by tall apartment buildings: “This is where the public comes to visit.” (Parks officials declined to comment on her claims.)
In 2024, Clio Chang interviewed Fash for Curbed. Not long after that story came out, Sean Manning, now the publisher of Simon & Schuster, reached out to see if Fash might be interested in writing a book.
At first she was apprehensive: “I said, I gotta think about this. I wasn’t sure how much of a commitment it was.” She was enjoying retirement — yoga, pickleball, visits to her condo in Rincón, P.R., where she swims with other retired lifeguards.
Eventually Fash came around to the idea.
She met with Chang, her co-author, for a series of interviews in Queens and in Rincón. They talked about Fash’s family, her rugby days, her refusal to take guff from male superiors, her evolution into an activist. They took breaks for pickleball and surfing.
“This was the best first book-writing experience anyone could ever have,” Chang said.
Fash cried when she read the first draft. She cried again while recording the audiobook, which showcases both her determination and her Brooklyn accent. Describing her many tangles with the Parks Department, Fash’s voice vibrates with pride.
“I don’t have balls at all,” she reads. “I’ve got iron ovaries.”
Manning, a college rower who still occasionally body surfs, said, “People don’t often see lifeguarding as the strenuous, important job it is. Janet makes it clear how difficult this work is, physically and emotionally.”
Difficult, and sometimes gritty: We see Fash chasing down a guy who robbed a hot dog vendor; co-workers doing cocaine in their shack; and a band of lifeguards, known as the Justice League, investigating the longtime union boss who is the villain of the story.
Ambling off the sand, Fash greeted a boardwalk barista by name, then a former neighbor who runs the Rockaway Film Festival. We headed to Connolly’s, a wood-paneled watering hole that used to be owned by the grandfather of one of Fash’s lifeguards. It was early afternoon, but there were already a few die-hards bellying up to the bar.
“Oh my god, all the piña coladas,” Fash said, reminiscing about her youth..
She pointed to a wall of photos from bikini contests and to a picture of her friend Steve Belson, a veteran lifeguard and firefighter who died on 9/11.
On another wall, just inside the front door, were a few vintage lifeguard shots. In one, taken around 1985, Fash is holding a hot dog in one hand, a beverage in the other and her whistle dangles from her wrist. She is clearly in her element.
These days, Fash feels the physical toll of all those years on the beach. She has bursitis from hauling people out of the water. Her knees aren’t what they used to be. In 2018, she was treated for melanoma.
Still, Fash writes, “I feel ageless in the water.”
And she continues to put in her two cents with the lifeguards.
“Keep them alive,” she says like a mantra. “Watch the water and keep them alive.”
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