LIFEGUARD: A Love Story, by Janet Fash with Clio Chang
There was a time when lifeguards at Rockaway Beach held “death parties.” When a beach goer drowned, whoever was on duty was condemned as a “murderer” and forced to buy a keg for a “mock wake” that night. As Janet Fash writes in “Lifeguard: A Love Story,” her salty and illuminating new book about being one of New York City’s chief lifeguards from 1988 through 2025 — the first woman to occupy that role — “sometimes they would even bury the keg in the sand like it was a grave.”
Rockaway Beach, Fash’s office for more than four decades, is the city’s only open ocean coast, so its lifeguards tend to be the city’s best: fast and strong enough to get from the chair to a distressed bather in seconds. Accessible by subway, ferry and bus, the beach is also visited by millions of people every summer. Not all of them know how to swim. A single day can require dozens of rescues.
When Fash started lifeguarding in 1979, at 19, the city’s parks department did not provide counseling for its employees. Death parties “were sinister, but they were also a way for us to commiserate,” Fash writes. “We were young and we didn’t know how else to deal with the culpability of death.”
Were they culpable, though, or were their superiors, who were often absent from the beach altogether? Through the book’s first third, such questions are only circling, like distant shadows of fins in the surf. The author begins, instead, with her coming-of-age story.
Writing with the journalist Clio Chang, Fash is great company. Raised in Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood by Scottish immigrant parents, she joined the Prospect Park Y.M.C.A.’s swim team, had a “big mouth” and “was always the wild one” in her family of seven siblings.
The summer she was 15, her parents rented a bungalow on a stretch of Rockaway Beach nicknamed the “Irish Riviera,” where she befriended a first-year lifeguard named Barbara who took Fash under her wing. They went to bonfire parties (“Caveman Conventions”) and local bars. Fash could hold her own. When a male lifeguard pulled down her tube top at Fitzgerald’s, she whacked his head with her Dr. Scholl’s sandal and yelled: “I’m from Brooklyn!”
Joining Barbara’s “shack” four years later, Fash found herself in a fierce New York subculture that had risen like a sun-tanned swamp creature from the city’s farthest edge. Its members “wanted to be heroes” and had “a kind of intoxicating camaraderie.” But misogyny and harassment ran rampant. When Fash became one of Rockaway’s first two female lieutenants in 1985, a male lifeguard crassly accused her of trading sexual favors for a promotion. Fash punched him in the face.
She loved the job anyway. She recruited her sister to the force, and met her husband, a firefighter, on the beach. She liked Rockaway’s cultural mix — the surfers (“those angels in the ocean”), the food (Uma’s! IYKYK) — and how much lifeguarding mattered. “We were doing something both mundane and extraordinary,” she writes. “We were the difference between life and death.”
The book’s big turn, from a fun beach read to a shocking saga of corruption and the author’s crusade to stop it, comes after Fash watches a boy get sucked out to sea by a rip current. “It was so sudden that his head looked like a balloon flying out,” she writes. “There was no in-depth investigation afterward,” but the event left her shaken. She vowed to implement her own safety measures to prevent such an incident from happening again.
Six years into the job, she also began to question lifeguard mismanagement, and found herself repeatedly “coming up against the same person: Peter Stein.”
A potbellied lifeguard from Coney Island who wore pink shirts, slicked his hair back and never went in the water, Stein was the longtime president of Local 508, the city’s union for lifeguard supervisors. When Fash was coming up, he became the “citywide lifeguard coordinator,” a managerial job that should have made him ineligible to be in the union he led. “Stein was slowly amassing control of the entire lifeguarding system,” Fash writes.
She spends the rest of the book delivering her blows. According to Fash, Stein was “paranoid,” power-obsessed, Machiavellian. He gave top jobs to his henchmen and together they ruled without accountability. Lifeguards “had nobody to report their bosses to when they suffered abuse,” which many did.
There’s more. Stein tried to block drowning investigations, Fash says, and controlled who passed or failed lifeguard school, resulting in chronic lifeguard shortages that led to more tragedy. (A 1994 city investigation found that in five out of the nine drownings that had occurred since 1988, there weren’t enough lifeguards on the beach as mandated by law.) So Fash, with help from the Rockaway community and other lifeguards (her “Justice League”), battled for reform against Stein’s “mafia.” War ensued.
As a former teenage lifeguard who surfs in Rockaway, I have long heard that the city’s lifeguard union was mobbed up, but I assumed this was hyperbole. Gangster lifeguards seemed too Hollywood to be true.
Fash’s book shows the rumors weren’t far off. An inside source to this gripping, essential tale, Fash also lucidly explains why her fight to end preventable drownings is unfinished. She doesn’t want teenage lifeguards to feel like murderers ever again.
LIFEGUARD: A Love Story | By Janet Fash with Clio Chang | Simon & Schuster | 227 pp. | $28
The post New York City’s First Female Chief Lifeguard Tells All appeared first on New York Times.
