A Beach Legend Calls It a Day : Lifeguard: Bruce Baird, the ‘ultimate water man,’ retires after 40 years on the sand and countless rescues. He’s afflicted with leukemia and colon cancer.

LAGUNA BEACH —  Robust, dirty-blond hair and blue-eyed, Bruce Baird is simply a legend on Orange County beaches.

“The ultimate water man,” says Newport Beach Chief Lifeguard Ken Jacobsen. “When your kids are in trouble out in the water and the surf is big, you call Bruce.”

Friends know him as the guy with the upper body strength of the Terminator, and legs like a bird.

But this larger-than-life beach boy, a Paris-trained gourmet chef who has spent nearly 40 years standing guard on county sands, is terminally ill. Fighting leukemia and colon cancer, the 56-year-old Baird, chief guard at Laguna Beach since 1973, has retired.

Baird, who in one day in the early 1950s saved 37 people from the raging surf off the Balboa Peninsula, said his decision to leave was based on the advice of his doctors and his own belief that he is “physically unable to live up to the standards I set for myself.”

Though his retirement became effective July 1, friends and co-workers are scheduled to honor him today at the Sandpiper Bar, one of the guard’s favorite rock ‘n’ roll haunts.

“I’ve hauled enough bodies out of the Santa Ana River and Newport Bay,” Baird said on an overcast Friday morning near the landmark, white lifeguard station on Laguna’s Main Beach. “I’ve been around death most of my life. I’m not afraid of dying. I think it’s a real waste of time to think about dying.”

Nevertheless, Baird said he was forced to deal with his own mortality last Christmas when doctors discovered a malignant tumor on his colon. Without treatment, doctors told him he had about six months to live.

“When I found out, I went out and had a martini and I hadn’t had one in 30 years,” he said, laughing. “After that, I hitched up my pants and went back at it.”

The tumor was removed in February and since that time Baird said he had been undergoing radiation and chemotherapy treatments at Hoag Hospital in Newport Beach. Having received the maximum number of radiation treatments, Baird said that he is continuing with chemotherapy and is being treated with another cancer-fighting drug.

Although much recent attention has been called to the vulnerability of lifeguards to skin cancer and other forms of the disease because of exposure to the sun and the possibility of contact with pollutants contained in the coastal waters, Baird said he and his doctors believe his condition is not related to his life’s work.

“The leukemia is probably congenital and the colon cancer is just bad luck,” Baird said.

With the treatment, doctors say, Baird now has between two and five years to live.

“It seems to be working. It (the treatment) makes me a little ill. But I’ve enjoyed these past six months. I went to Europe with my girlfriend and I can play golf. I can’t sit around and worry about it. I’m just enjoying life.”

But there is no doubt that the disease has changed Baird in some ways, at least in the eyes of his friends.

“In some ways, they treat me like someone with HIV,” he said. “They feel sorry for me. They don’t really know what to say.”

And partly because of his health, the relationship with his girlfriend does not include marriage.

“I feel I really don’t have much to offer her. I feel fortunate the treatment isn’t killing me. And when someone gives you a definite number of years to live, it certainly gets your attention.”

Except for brief periods, it seems that Baird has always been just a sprint away from the ocean.

A 1952 graduate of Newport Harbor High, he grew up on the beaches of the Balboa Peninsula. In high school, his reputation as a “strong, competitive swimmer” is easily recalled by Jacobsen, who watched him cut through pools at local swim meets.

“He is a fantastic athlete,” said Max Bowman, a friend and president of World Life Saving headquartered in Huntington Beach. Bowman said Baird has been an avid solo competitor and half of two-person rowing teams that have crossed the water between Santa Catalina Island and Long Beach.

“There’s isn’t anything he can’t do,” Bowman said.

After graduation, Baird attended Claremont College where he studied business and continued to lifeguard in the summer at Newport Beach. And after a stint in the military, he went back to the beach and worked as a manager in a number of Southern California restaurants before taking his wife and baby to Paris in 1960, where he enrolled in cooking school.

He opened his own place--the Little Kitchen--in 1965, where for three years he served up continental cuisine in Dana Point. But business slowly wilted because of construction along the coast and he went back to the lifeguard tower for good in 1968.

About 10 years ago, Baird said he quit counting the number of rescues he had made when the tally hit 1,000.

“He has a tremendous upper chest, like that (Arnold) Schwarzenegger, and he has bird legs,” Jacobsen said. “When he’s swimming, his head and shoulders are completely out of the water. He didn’t even have to kick.”

Now out of the sun and water, Jacobsen and others say Baird’s reputation only grows larger.

“He’s a classic piece of work,” said Chuck Harrell, who with his brother and mother runs the Sandpiper. “He doesn’t let anything bother him--he just cruises. He’s one of the last original nice guys.”

Baird’s boss, Laguna Beach City Manager Kenneth C. Frank, said he can’t recall a single complaint from beach visitors in more than a decade. He described Baird’s training of the 80 summer guards and three winter staffers as “excellent.”

Added Jacobsen: “A super, super person. The guy who’d give you the shirt off his back and the last dollar out of his pocket. I just love the guy.”

Divorced for 2 1/2 years, Baird said his former wife and four children are aware of his condition but are not close.

Since his retirement, he said he will give himself a month “to find out how (bad) retirement life is.”

In time, he says, he might consider starting a survival course for corporate executives, a spinoff of a program he helped teach at Laguna Beach High School, where students learned wilderness survival skills on Catalina Island.

He also wants to work himself into shape to participate Aug. 5 in the national lifeguard championships at Lake Michigan in Chicago.

“I’m a partier,” Baird said in his soft-spoken manner. “I’ll probably live it up and spend all my retirement money and still be alive and have to find work to keep the money coming in.”

His humor comes easily even though he’d rather not be the subject of an interview.

“Maybe talking like this could help some other people,” he said. “You can cry all you want, but you can’t change anything. You accept it and go on.”