Lifeguard: A Love StoryBy Janet Fash with Cleo Chang
There was a time when lifeguards held “death parties” at Rockaway Beach. When a beachgoer drowned, whoever was on duty was denounced as a “murderer” and forced to buy a keg for a “fake wake” that night. As Janet Fash writes in “Lifeguard: A Love Story,” her salacious and illuminating new book about being one of New York City’s chief lifeguards from 1988 to 2025 — the first woman to hold that role — “Sometimes they’d even bury the keg in the sand as if it were a grave.”
Rockaway Beach, home of Fash for more than four decades, is the city’s only open beach, so its lifeguards are the city’s best: fast and strong enough to go from chair to distressed bather in seconds. This beach, accessible by metro, ferry and bus, is visited by millions of people every summer. Not all of them know how to swim. Dozens of rescues may be required in a single day.
When Fash started lifeguarding in 1979, at age 19, the city parks department did not provide counseling for its employees. Fash writes, “Death parties were horrifying, but they were also a way for us to express sympathy.” “We were young and we didn’t know how to deal with someone convicted of death.”
However, were they to blame, or their superiors, who were often absent from the beach? For the first third of the book, such questions are merely circling, like distant shadows of feathers on the sea. Instead, the author begins with her own coming-of-age story.
Writing with journalist Cleo Chang, Fash is great company. Raised in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn by Scottish immigrant parents, she joined the Prospect Park YMCA’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 part 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 make her hers. When a male lifeguard at the Fitzgerald pulled down her tube top, she hit him on the head with her Dr. Skoll sandals and shouted: “I’m from Brooklyn!”
After joining Barbara’s “shack” four years later, Fash found himself in a fierce New York subculture that had emerged like a sunburnt swamp creature from the farthest edge of the city. Its members “wanted to be heroes” and had “a kind of intoxicating camaraderie”. But misogyny and harassment occurred on a large scale. When Fash became one of Rockaway’s first two female lieutenants in 1985, a male lifeguard absurdly accused her of trading sex for a promotion. Fash punches him in the face.
Anyway, he liked this work very much. She recruited her sister into the force, and met her husband, a firefighter, on the beach. She loved Rockaway’s cultural mix – the surfers (“they’re angels in the ocean”), the food (Uma’s! IYKYK) – and how much lifesaving means. “We were doing something both mundane and extraordinary,” she writes. “We were the difference between life and death.”
A major turning point in the book, from a fun beach adventure to a shocking saga of corruption and the author’s crusade to stop it, comes when Fash witnesses a boy being swept out to sea by a strong current. She writes, “It was so sudden that his head looked like a balloon flying away.” “There was no thorough investigation afterwards,” but the incident shocked him. They vowed to implement their own security measures to prevent such an incident from happening again.
Six years into the job, she also began to question the mismanagement of lifeguards, and found herself repeatedly pitted against “the same person: Peter Stein”.
A pot-bellied Coney Island lifeguard 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 moving up, he became “citywide lifeguard coordinator”, a managerial job that made him ineligible to remain in the union he led. Fash writes, “Stein was gradually gaining control of the entire life support system.”
She spends the rest of the book getting into a fight. According to Fash, Stein was “mad,” power-obsessed, Machiavellian. He gave top jobs to his henchmen and together they ruled without any accountability. Lifeguards “had no one to report to their bosses if they encountered abuse”, which many did.
There is so much more. Fash says that Stein tried to block drowning tests, and controlled who passed or failed lifeguard school, resulting in a persistent shortage of lifeguards that led to more tragedies. (A 1994 city investigation found that in five of the nine drownings since 1988, there were not enough lifeguards on the beach as required by law.) So Fash, with the help of the Rockaway community and other lifeguards (his “Justice League”), fought for reform against Stein’s “mafia”. War broke out.
As a former teenage lifeguard who surfed in the Rockaways, I’d long heard that the town’s lifeguard union was organized, but I assumed it was exaggeration. The gangster lifeguards seemed too Hollywood.
Fash’s book shows that the rumors were not far-fetched. An insider to this gripping, essential story, Fash also candidly explains why his fight to end preventable drownings is incomplete. She doesn’t want teen lifeguards to ever feel like murderers again.
life saver: : love story | By Janet Fash with Cleo Chang | simon and schuster | 227 pages. | $28
