If you’ve ever walked the halls of a big school with a distinguished principal, you know what it’s like to stroll down Rockaway Beach with Janet Fash.
“How’s everything going?” He called almost every lifeguard. “How are you? How is the chair? Is it good?”
A guard waved to Fash, who had worked for 40 years on this seven-mile stretch of Queens shoreline. The other guard gave a small salute.
A third, wearing mirrored sunglasses and orange tights, came running after us. “Janet! I came to say hello.”
They talked about water (“like an ice bath”); about seafood in Portugal, where Fash completed a 62-mile spiritual journey with his sister; And about Fash’s memoir, “Lifeguard: A Love Story,” which will be published June 23. He invited her to his book party at the Belle Harbor Yacht Club. He said he would try to come.
“Lifeguarding is a big community,” Fash said as we left. Then his eyes fell on something. “Wait a second.”
She turned back to a lifeguard who was scrolling on his phone. “Hello, sorry? You’re supposed to look up, not down.”
Punished, the young man raised his eyes towards the sea.
Fash, 66, started lifeguarding while he was in college. Even as a rookie, he defied the stereotype of lazy teenagers whistling silly until something better came along.
For Fash, this job was a calling, an escape from the weekday job at a Wall Street brokerage firm and then a break from her teaching job during the summer. She met her 36-year-old husband on the beach at 106th Street; Rescue operations were carried out while pregnant; Taught both my children to respect these waves.
He noticed changes in the neighborhood – 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, still believing that it compromises the safety of swimmers.
“New York City is not really running it the way they should,” Fash said, referring to the thousands of seasonal lifeguards employed by the Parks and Recreation Department. “They could have done a better job.”
Her proud and candid memoir evolved from a story about her for Curbed, 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 New York’s Bravest, and the sanitation workers New York’s Strongest. We called ourselves New York’s Wettest. It was a joke, but we saw ourselves as one of the city’s premier public servants, even though the rest of the city didn’t always see us that way.”
Bert Kiss, who reported for Fash in the 1980s, said, “Janet was always reminding us that people’s lives were in our hands. She took it very seriously.”
Before we set foot on the sand, Fash assessed the ocean from the boardwalk, scanning it like a reader facing a bookshelf.
“The north wind is blowing,” he said. “It’s a beautiful day.”
Still, she warned, “See the foam there? That’s a side current. When the tide is going out, it can be problematic. I know from experience, working here for so many years.”
Fash grew up in Park Slope, Brooklyn, one of seven children. When she was 10, her parents rented a bungalow on 93rd Street in Rockaway on the recommendation of one of her father’s colleagues at Con Ed.
“We arrived and it was amazing,” Fash said. “You went down, jumped into the water.”
Recalling this era in his book, Fash includes notes of mischief and nostalgia. In person, she has the same factual presentation as the middle and high school teacher she once was.
When I asked her to describe the beach in the middle of summer, she said, “Wall to wall people. Blanket to blanket. Music.”
When I asked him about his first drowning he said, “He was a teenage boy. He drowned so fast. It was devastating.”
When I asked him for advice for struggling swimmers, he said, “Swim on your back, relax, don’t panic.”
Of course, Fash is fluent in the lifeguard language. The “Horn” is a first-year guard who is subject to harassment—which, in the days of the Fash, ranged from cruel to humiliating to criminal. One of her friends was forcibly stripped of her bathing suit; Another was admitted to hospital after being covered in poisonous paint.
“Bathtub cases” involve the rescue of a swimmer before he or she actually gets into trouble. “DFD” refers to a person who is “depressed all day long”.
Fortunately, Rockaway’s most devastating adjective has been lost in the sands of time. When someone drowned on your watch, Fash said, you were called a murderer.
She writes, “The price you had to pay was to buy a keg and throw a party that night.” “It was a false vigil, where sometimes they would bury the cask in the sand as if it were a grave.”
As we sat near the pier where he made his first rescue, Fash described the workload, a major theme in his memoir. He talked about teenagers crying for a friend who had drowned. Parents wait on the boardwalk to find their child’s body.
“We want to be almost invisible,” Fash said. “We don’t want them to come to us because we feel like we didn’t do our job.”
Over the years, Fash has lobbied for better equipment for guards, including wings, binoculars, walkie-talkies, and jet skis; swimming lessons for neighborhood kids; Mandatory sea exercises for guards in training (not just swimming in the pool); A lifeguard manual shared among all shoreside staff; and separation of union leadership and management roles to ensure fair promotion.
“I hit my head on the wall a few times,” Fash said. “It taught me a lot about letter writing and holding people accountable.”
When he started a lifeguard development program with the Department of Education, Fash said he was punished by the Parks Department.
“They upset the public and me by giving me less lifeguards,” Fash said. He was assigned staff who didn’t know Rockaway Beach, which remains busier than nearby Belle Harbor, an affluent neighborhood where, he said, most residents know how to swim.
“It’s like any other job if you’re used to a slow area and you’re put in a busy area,” Fash said. “My boss would be like, ‘They’re all trained the same way.’ no, they’re not.”
He pointed to the wide beach surrounded by tall apartment buildings: “This is where people come to visit.” (Park officials declined to comment on his claims.)
In 2024, Cleo Chang interviewed Fash for Curbed. not long after that story came outSean Manning, now a publisher at Simon & Schuster, reached out to see if Fash might be interested in writing a book.
At first she was apprehensive: “I said, I’ll have to think about it. I wasn’t sure how much of a commitment it was.” She was enjoying retirement – yoga, pickleball, visiting her condo in Rincon, PR, where she swam with other retired lifeguards.
Finally Fash came up with the idea.
She met with her co-author Chang for a series of interviews in Queens and Rincon. They talked about Fash’s family, her rugby days, her refusal to obey male superiors, her development as an activist. He took breaks for pickleball and surfing.
Chang said, “It was the best book-writing experience anyone has ever had.”
When Fash read the first draft she cried. She cried again while recording the audiobook, which shows both her determination and her Brooklyn accent. Fash’s voice shakes with pride as he describes his many entanglements with the parks department.
“I have no balls at all,” she reads. “I’ve got iron ovaries.”
Manning, a college rower who still body surfs occasionally, said, “People don’t often look at lifeguarding as hard, important work. Janet makes it clear how physically and emotionally demanding the job is.”
Tough, and sometimes gritty: We see Fash chasing a man who robbed a hot dog vendor; Co-workers are smoking cocaine in their shack; And a band of lifeguards, known as the Justice League, are investigating a longtime union boss who is the villain of the story.
While swimming on the sand, Fash is greeted by 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 lifesavers. It was afternoon, but already some hardcore people were approaching the bar.
“Oh my God, all the pina coladas,” Fash said, remembering his youth.
She pointed to a wall of photos from bikini competitions and a photo of her friend Steve Belson, a veteran lifeguard and firefighter who died on 9/11.
On the other wall, just inside the front door, were some old lifeguard shots. In a photo taken around 1985, Fash is holding a hot dog in one hand, a beverage in the other and his whistle hanging from his wrist. He is clearly in his element.
These days, Fash feels the physical toll of all those years on the beach. He has developed bursitis from pulling people out of the water. His knees are no longer the same as before. He was treated for melanoma in 2018.
Still, Fash writes, “I feel ageless in the water.”
And she continues to contribute with the lifeguards.
“Keep them alive,” she says like a mantra. “Keep an eye on the water and keep them alive.”