A big-wave warning was issued at Magic Sands Beach, as previously mentioned here about my recent trip to The Big Island of Hawai’i, and a strong rip current carried a swimmer further and further from shore.
The lifeguard on duty, sitting in a towering chair, called out with a bullhorn for the man to come back in. Either the command was ignored, or the swimmer was unable to heed it, and he was pulled deeper out to sea.
Before tense seconds could add up to a New York minute, the lifeguard – imagine David Hasselhoff in the old TV show “Baywatch” and you have an accurate portrait – flew down from his perch, ran and dove into the surf, and swam like he was challenging for an Olympic gold medal.
David Hasselhoff as Mitch Buchannon in “Baywatch.”
“Baywatch” originally aired from 1989 to 1999, but my mind raced all the way back to “Quarrywatch” in the 1940s starring my dad as the fictional Mitch Buchannon in red swim trunks.
During summers in high school through medical school, Pop was a lifeguard at Muzzy’s Lake, a flooded rock quarry in Urbana, Ohio. He started out earning fifty cents an hour.
“That beat the heck out the twenty-five cents an hour I made at my first summer job when I was fourteen, pumping gas at Blue Synoco,” Pop, now 95, recalls vividly. “Gas was sixteen cents a gallon – I remember that because most customers bought a dollar’s worth which was six-plus gallons.”
At Muzzy’s he eventually worked up to one dollar an hour and notes: “That was good money!”
He earned it. One single summer, between Memorial Day and Labor Day, Pop made 46 saves. Understand, Muzzy’s attracted upwards of a thousand people a day on weekends. Combine those crowds with a gently sloping bottom that in one blind step dropped off suddenly from friendly chest-deep water to 30-plus feet and you had the deadly ingredients for drowning.
Once, far outside the buoys marking off the swimming area, a car rolled off a towering bluff at the far end of the quarry and plummeted into deep, deep water. As it sank, Pop – an intercollegiate swimmer – raced freestyle to the crash site and dived down to the ear-popping cold depths in hopes of rescuing anyone trapped inside. It took three lung-burning tries before he finally located the car.
Thankfully, it was empty.
When a tow truck arrived at the scene, Pop dove down, down, down a fourth time to attach a chain so the car could be pulled out. It was a “Baywatch”-like episode in real life. Indeed, in photographs during his final years lifeguarding at Muzzy’s Pop seems chiseled from quarried stone at 6-foot-3 and 205 pounds and comes into black-and-white focus like Mitch Buchannon with a crew cut instead of longish curls.
In more than half a dozen summers in the tower chair, Pop – and his best friend and co-lifeguard, Dunny – had only one death occur during their Quarry Watch. A young boy, with a congenital heart problem it turned out, quietly sunk down underwater. There was no splashing, no struggle, no telltale sign of trouble for a lifeguard to see.
Meanwhile, the boy’s parents were not keeping a watchful eye and eventually sounded the alarm too late. Their son tragically drowned in less than three-feet of water that he could stand up in.
Happily, the Magic Sands Beach lifeguard towed the struggling swimmer to shore with the aid of a small torpedo-shaped buoy.
Isn’t it funny that traveling on vacation not only creates new memories, it can also rekindle old ones.
To be continued…
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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn
Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn. His SIGNED books are available at www.WoodyWoodburn.com.
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