Comments & Curiosities:

Do you swim? I do. Every five years or so. It’s one of those things that take a certain amount of fitness and coordination. Don’t have either of those.

But a story this week from the Deep South, in Laguna Beach, caught my eye. It was a reunion of the Laguna Beach Lifeguard Assn., all veteran lifeguards, celebrating 80 years of lifeguard service in Laguna Beach.

One of them, John Ware, was a Laguna Beach lifeguard from 1938 to 1940 and is still hanging in there at 86. Very impressive, but it got me to thinking — how long have lifeguards been around?

At least 80 years, obviously, but exactly when was the first person told to go stand on that platform, watch carefully and make sure that the same number of people that go into the water come out, vertically. Anyone?

The correct answer is: about 100 years. And wait until you hear one of the reasons why lifeguards were invented, so to speak. It happened right here in our own backyard, but more on that later.

Going to the beach was not a big deal before the late 19th century. The ocean was something you sailed on or looked at from the shore. It wasn’t something you went in, until cities started to grow like Topsy, that is.

You’ve seen pictures of Coney Island or Santa Monica in the 1890s — thousands of city peeps packing the beach, trying to escape the heat in those goofy head-to-toe swimsuits, which were all-black, an excellent fashion choice when it’s 104 degrees. Most of those folks swam the same way I do — two minutes of wading in the surf followed by two hours of resting, with wine, cheese, a little French bread and berries when available.

Nobody was too stressed about safety until ocean piers started to pop up, including our own, around the turn of the century. Those were a big attraction and more people were heading for the beach, lots more. Drownings and near-drownings were getting to be commonplace, which wasn’t good.

The first idea cities and counties came up with, called “lifelines,” were an early example of the Law of Unforeseen Circumstances. Lifelines were big marine ropes anchored on the beach at one end and out beyond the surf on the other, with cork floats every few yards to keep them on the surface.

Once the lifelines went out, drownings and near-drownings went way up, which wasn’t exactly what cities had in mind. Poor swimmers, or worse yet, non-swimmers, felt totally safe bobbing their way out into the water as long as they had a good grip on the lifeline.

It worked like a charm, until a wave or a swell came along and knocked the poor or non-swimmer off the rope, at which point, someone who never should have been in the water to begin with was now 100 yards out, a scene that seldom ended well.

In the early 1900s, two surfside disasters captured the whole country’s attention and convinced cities and counties that it was time to get serious about what happens when thousands of people at a time head for the water and decide that a day at the beach is just, well, a day at the beach.

In the first case, 18 people drowned over one weekend in one city. Which city? Newport Beach, that’s where. Did you know that? I didn’t know that. You could have knocked me over with a feather.

A few years later, in 1918, San Diego wrested that horrific distinction from Newport Beach, when 13 people drowned in a single day at Ocean Beach. San Diego started the first lifeguard service in the same year, in Ocean Beach, Pacific Beach and La Jolla.

Those first San Diego lifeguards were police officers who also happened to be excellent swimmers, but the city quickly realized it couldn’t afford to pull uniformed officers from duty and hired their first professional lifeguards soon after that.

But San Diego was actually 10 years behind the city of Long Beach, which had established the first professional lifeguard service in California in 1908, made up of exactly one lifeguard.

Other beach towns relied on volunteer lifeguards, mostly young men that had no training and no equipment but could swim like a fish, or like the wind, maybe a fish in the wind. By the 1920s, professional lifeguards were becoming the rule up and down the state and those iconic wooden lifeguard stands were sprouting up like iconic wooden lifeguard stands.

Want some more trivia? We got it. Legendary surfer and Olympic swimmer Duke Kahanamoku lived in Newport Beach in the 1920s. It’s true. On June 14, 1925, a commercial fishing boat capsized in heavy surf at the entrance to Newport Harbor.

Seventeen crewmen drowned, but Kahanamoku used his long board to rescue eight others, shuttling them to safety one at a time then racing back on his long board to get the next man.

Two other surfers followed Kahanamoku’s lead and rescued four others. Newport Beach’s police chief at the time called it “…the most superhuman surfboard rescue act the world has ever seen.” I’m not sure the world had seen all that many surfboard rescues, but we know what he meant.

Finally, the summer of 1939 produced a weeklong, record-breaking heat wave, with one day topping 108 degrees. Just as thousands of people headed for the beach, the remnants of a tropical storm showed up with stiff winds, monster surf and riptides. There were a number of drownings on Newport beaches, both piers were damaged and all sorts of small craft in Newport Harbor were destroyed.

There you have it — lifeguards, long boards and Duke Kahanamoku. The beach can be fun but the ocean is nothing to toy with. If you don’t know what you’re doing, settle into that beach chair and have some more Cabernet. It’s safer. Aloha. I gotta go.