Page 60 - WTPVol.XI#4

The soundtrack in my head oddly went to the Big Bopper singing “Hellooo Baby!” when the prize fish hit my lure. It was a rainy day in the summer of 1971. I was in my seventh year as head guard at what would soon become Seven Presidents Beach in Long Branch, New Jersey, but in ’71 it was still Gaskin’s Beach, with Conover Gaskin in charge.
I’d let the other guards go home and stood alone in medium-rough, waist-deep water, casting near the rocks. My rod bent into a big bow and line started tearing off my Mitchell 305. What was this monster? It felt too big for a blue. I was hoping for a trophy striper, but it seemed stronger and faster than any I’d hooked before. Perhaps too much for my equipment.
Now, we all were paranoid about sharks. That atavis- tic terror had manifested itself just that morning as
I watched with my binoculars and one of my guards, Cathy Corcione, swam her laps between the jetties.
I was pretty protective of Cathy that summer she worked at Gaskin’s. She was one of the first women
to guard the ocean. An Olympic swimmer in ’68, she could swim circles around the rest of us, yet I avoided sending her on the more dangerous rescues.
Like almost everybody else in our crew, I had a crush on Cathy—a blonde sunrise, smart and funny too. “Green-eyed Lady” became my song of summer. She was only 18, between her freshman and sophomore years at Princeton. I was 23, back from San Francisco State before my last year in grad school. She had a boyfriend and I an open marriage. I picked her up on my motorcycle each morning for a ride to the beach and we huddled under the lifeboat in stormy weather. At the end of each day when the last bather had left, she’d jump off the stand and run giggling down the beach. I’d follow, tackling her at water’s edge. One night I lured her to a beach party and, after beer and joints, almost kissed her.
~
“Can’t See, Can’t Hear, Can’t Swim—A Lifeguard’s Tale.” That’s the title Cathy proposed for what you’ll read here. We just recently got in touch after a four decade hiatus. Facebook sucks in a lot of ways, I know, but connecting with old friends and former students has been a blessing. I saw Cathy’s post a couple years back and asked, “Remember me?” She replied, “You’re unforgettable.” You can guess the song that started in my head. A welcome reprieve
from the one plaguing me that morning, which had started out nicely enough as the classical “Dance of the Hours” but morphed against my will into Allen Sherman’s “Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah.”
Anyway, last week Cathy, legendary swim coach and notable artist on the Shore, posted a painting titled “Gaskin’s Beach,” with this caption: “I lifeguarded there after my freshman year in college... when girls weren’t lifeguards.... A motley crew like no other life- guards back then, we would have rivaled The Office as a series, with Bruce Richards at the helm....”
This led to a phone call catching up on two blessed lives, fulfilling work, and loving families. And stories from that summer.
I need to point out that contact lenses were expen- sive back then and I did not intend to lose mine in the surf. So, if I absolutely had to go on a rescue, I would stop to take out my lenses before proceeding vaguely towards my blurry goal, sometimes flip-flopping on the fins I paused again to put on.
More often I’d send another guard. We had three full- time and several others for the crowded weekends with the non-swimming Portuguese from Newark. Occasionally Con would send down his buddy Tony, who usually helped at the gate. Tony was a funny, chubby guy in a guinea tee (sorry if this is no longer pc, but that’s what my Italian friends, including Tony, called them). When he came down to help guard, he’d take it off and his big white belly would shine in the sun. But the oddest thing about Tony as a lifeguard was that he could not swim. I’d give him a hat and
a whistle and plop him next to me on the crazy big stand that Con had hammered together. Sometimes during a mass rescue I’d tell him, “Tony, pull the line, but don’t get too near the water.”
The other two full-time guards, along with Cathy and me, were John Frenville and Kevin Wild. John was a strapping kid who wore hearing aids in both ears. Unlike me with my lenses, he took his aids out to
be ready for rescues, of which he made many. He called me “Brewsh.” Kevin, or “Wildman”, was a short, tough, handsome kid with curly blond hair, who wouldn’t take shit from anybody, especially bigger guys. Now, before I continue, let me get the sad part over. Both passed long before their time, John in a car accident and Wildman—well, a mutual friend re- ported to me some twenty years ago, “Kevin died the
53
The One That Got Away
Bruce richarDs