If you\u2019ve ever walked the halls of a big school with a well-respected principal, you know what it\u2019s like to stroll a stretch of Rockaway Beach with Janet Fash.<\/p>\n
\u201cHow\u2019s everything?\u201d she called to almost every lifeguard. \u201cHow ya doin\u2019? How\u2019s the chair? Good?\u201d<\/p>\n
One guard waved to Fash, who worked on this seven-mile stretch of Queens shoreline for 40 years. Another guard gave a little salute.<\/p>\n
A third, sporting mirrored sunglasses and orange trunks, jogged up behind us. \u201cJanet! I hadda come say hello.\u201d<\/p>\n
They chatted about the water (\u201clike an ice bath\u201d); about the seafood in Portugal, where Fash just completed a 62-mile spiritual walk with her sister; and about Fash\u2019s memoir, \u201cLifeguard: A Love Story,\u201d which comes out on June 23. She invited him to her book party at the Belle Harbor Yacht Club. He said he\u2019d try to come.<\/p>\n
\u201cLifeguards are one big community,\u201d Fash said as we walked away. Then something caught her eye. \u201cHold up a sec.\u201d<\/p>\n
She doubled back, approaching a lifeguard who was scrolling on his phone. \u201cHi there, excuse me? You should be looking up, not down.\u201d<\/p>\n
Chastened, the young man lifted his eyes to the ocean.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
She watched the neighborhood change \u2014 dilapidated hotels making way for luxury high rises, boardwalk hot dogs now sharing concession space with kale smoothies.<\/p>\n
In 1988, Fash was named New York City\u2019s first female chief lifeguard. She became a vocal critic of political maneuvering and corner-cutting that, she still believes, compromise the safety of swimmers.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe City of New York is really not running it the way they should,\u201d Fash said, referring to the thousand or so seasonal lifeguards employed by the Department of Parks and Recreation. \u201cThey could do a better job.\u201d<\/p>\n
Her proud and forthright memoir grew out of a story about her for Curbed, which is part of New York magazine. \u201cMost of the lifeguards I worked with wanted to be heroes,\u201d Fash writes. \u201cThe police called themselves New York\u2019s Finest, the firemen were New York\u2019s Bravest and the sanitation workers were New York\u2019s Strongest. We called ourselves New York\u2019s Wettest. It was a joke, but we did see ourselves as one of the city\u2019s core public servants, even if the rest of the city didn\u2019t always see us that way.\u201d<\/p>\n
Bert Kis, who reported to Fash in the 1980s, said, \u201cJanet would always remind us that people\u2019s lives were in our hands. She took that very seriously.\u201d<\/p>\n
Before we even set foot on the sand, Fash assessed the ocean from the boardwalk, scanning it like a reader facing a bookshelf.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s a north wind,\u201d she pronounced. \u201cThis is a beautiful day.\u201d<\/p>\n
Still, she cautioned, \u201cSee the foam over there? That\u2019s a lateral current. When the tide\u2019s pulling out, it can be problematic. I know from experience, working here all those years.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u2019s co-workers at Con Ed.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe arrived and it was wonderful,\u201d Fash said. \u201cYou walked down, jumped in the water.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
When I asked her to describe the beach in midsummer, she said, \u201cWall to wall people. Blanket to blanket. Music.\u201d<\/p>\n
When I asked her to recall her first drowning, she said, \u201cHe was a teenage boy. He went out so fast. It was devastating.\u201d<\/p>\n
When I asked her advice for floundering swimmers, she said, \u201cFloat on your back, relax, don\u2019t panic.\u201d<\/p>\n
Fash is, of course, fluent in lifeguard lingo. A \u201chorn\u201d is a first-year guard, subject to hazing \u2014 which, in Fash\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
A \u201cbathtub case\u201d involves a rescue before a swimmer is actually in trouble. \u201cDFD\u201d refers to a person who is \u201cdown for the day.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rockaway\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe price you had to pay was to buy a keg and throw a party that night,\u201d she writes. \u201cIt was a mock wake, where sometimes they would even bury the keg in the sand like it was a grave.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u2019s body to be found.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe almost want to be invisible,\u201d Fash said. \u201cWe don\u2019t want them to come to us because we feel we didn\u2019t get our job done.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cI hit my head against the wall so many times,\u201d Fash said. \u201cIt taught me a lot about writing letters and keeping people accountable.\u201d<\/p>\n
When she launched a lifeguard development program with the Department of Education, Fash said she was penalized by the Parks Department.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey made the public and me suffer by giving me less lifeguards,\u201d Fash explained. She was assigned staff who didn\u2019t know Rockaway Beach, which tends to be busier than nearby Belle Harbor, an affluent neighborhood where, she said, most residents know how to swim.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s like any other job if you\u2019re used to a slow area and you\u2019re thrown into a busy area,\u201d Fash said. \u201cMy boss would be like, \u2018They\u2019re all trained the same.\u2019 No, they\u2019re not.\u201d<\/p>\n
She gestured at the wide beach flanked by tall apartment buildings: \u201cThis is where the public comes to visit.\u201d (Parks officials declined to comment on her claims.)<\/p>\n