Still saving lives at the age of 73
From his wooden perch overlooking the shoreline, Gerry Lambert stood up and eyed three teenagers caught in a rough ocean’s sudden riptide.
“We got a little situation,” Lambert said calmly to his fellow lifeguards resting behind the stand.
At 73, Lambert is the oldest lifeguard at Tobay Beach, an oceanfront expanse on the South Shore of Long Island, N.Y., where he has been working since the late 1950s.
He blew his whistle at the teenagers and took off his hat and sunglasses, but relaxed after seeing the swimmers safely regain their footing.
“An experienced lifeguard knows when to go and when not to go” on a rescue, said Lambert, one of the oldest active lifeguards at a public beach in the Northeast. Most ocean rescues result from swimmers’ being pulled out by riptides, or narrow “sucks” of water washing back out from shore in one spot, a condition that a veteran ocean lifeguard can spot immediately, Lambert said.
“When you get waves crashing in at high tide, the backwater rushes back out in certain spots,” he said. “Kids can get swept off their feet, and even adults can get caught in it.”
The image of an ocean lifeguard is often of a young bronzed god. But many, like Lambert, work well into their senior years, returning to the beach summer after summer for as long as their bodies hold out.
In Lambert’s case, his right knee has been replaced with a titanium one and he is in remission after a bout with prostate cancer a few years back.
“Once you develop a waterman’s lifestyle, you keep coming back,” Lambert said.
Lambert worked for decades as a union electrician in Manhattan, but early on he began taking summers off to work the beach job.
Lambert and his wife, Cathy, moved to a landlocked part of Florida15 years ago, but he alone drives back to Long Island each May for another summer of lifeguarding.
Lambert is not even the oldest working lifeguard on Long Island. Jones Beach also has a few in their early 70s, and the Hamptons has John J. Ryan, 82, a lifeguard training co-ordinator for the Town of East Hampton.
Ryan said he considered himself “a lifeguard for life,” and he said he still kept watch at the Amagansett Beach Association club, which he manages, “but I don’t get wet anymore — I haven’t made an ocean rescue in 15 years.”
Many a lifeguard’s career is ended by the stopwatch, in the dreaded pool sprints that are part of ocean lifeguard recertification.
Lambert, whose recertification next summer will require a 45-metre pool sprint in 35 seconds or less, said he began working at the beach in 1958 selling hotdogs at the snack bar. He said he planned on working as a lifeguard until he fails the pool test.
“I keep coming back because of my love for surfing and the beach,” he said, “and the great memories of my early start down here.”