‘These Old Guys?’ Short on Lifeguards, New York City Finds New Recruits

NEW YORK — It was late afternoon at the pool in the Jesse Owens Playground in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, and the heat had climbed into the mid-80s. Children, some in bold pink neon swimwear and others in white cotton tank tops, streamed into the water. It wasn’t long before splash battles broke out. Laughter mixed with the thumping music from a block party outside.

Then a whistle cut through it all. Perched in his lifeguard chair, Daniel Kalmann pointed to a small child scampering a little too quickly over the wet concrete. The lifeguard stood out among the young swimmers: He wore orange shorts and an orange bucket hat, and he looked like someone’s grandfather, way older than anyone else at the pool. With a scraggly white goatee and his life’s story tattooed on his sun-tanned arms, he could easily be taken for a veteran lifeguard who has protected swimmers for countless summers.

But no. This is his first summer in the chair.

“Some of them see me as the stern authority figure with my whistle,” he said. “I’m the rookie here.”

Until this year, the oldest rookie lifeguard in the city had been 64, but to address the shortage, the parks department expanded its recruiting efforts. As a result, 183 people enrolled in the notoriously challenging training program this summer, and Kalmann, who was certified and hired in June, was among four other rookie lifeguards over the age of 64. At 69, Kalmann isn’t even the oldest. (There is a 70-year-old lifeguard posted in Manhattan who didn’t want to draw attention to himself.)

Each has his or her own reasons for picking up the whistle. They will be paid more than $21 an hour, but they also share a sense of service that drove them to sign up when a historic shortage of lifeguards threatened to close the city’s pools and beaches. “I love it,” Kalmann said. “No device on me, just looking, looking, looking.”

The shortage, which many other cities are also grappling with, is mostly driven by low pay, a difficult qualifying test and an overall lack of interest in what many see as a summer gig for teenagers. The 2020 lockdowns also sent seasonal workers seeking more stable jobs. On top of that, New York is negotiating a new contract with the union that represents lifeguards. As a result, it opened its swim season in May with just 480 lifeguards. Normally, according to a spokesperson for the parks department, New York City needs about 1,000.

Kalmann was vaguely aware of all this. Last year, he noticed sections of McCarren Park’s pool roped off when he visited from Queens with his family. It wasn’t until his sister-in-law prodded him that he thought to do anything about it. He had scaled back on his credit card processing business and had quit his other job as a bicycle tour guide in March. He always liked extreme athletic challenges “that most people consider somewhat insane,” he said, so lifeguarding had an appeal.

But more than that, he said, he wanted to serve, a lifelong virtue he attributes to his parents who were Jewish Holocaust refugees. “There’s not a whole lot of things when you come to a certain age where you can make a huge impact,” he said. “Here, I believe I can make at least a small impact.”

Kalmann grew up one of four boys in the Netherlands. At 19, he flew to New York for a theater internship and adventure. It was July 1973, and almost immediately, he got into an argument with a taxi driver; he relished every moment of it. Within a month, he recounted, he met John Lennon outside Phebe’s Tavern on the Bowery. He turned 20 that day and the Beatle wished him a happy birthday, he said.

A few years later, on a camping trip, he came upon three brothers thrashing in a river, clearly distressed. Kalmann jumped in and pulled two of the men to shore. The third slipped under the black water and disappeared. He dove back in again and again, he said, but never found him. “I tried very hard,” he said. “I just didn’t have the skills.”

That day haunted him. He stayed out of the water for about a decade. The memory stayed dormant until his sister-in-law’s comment took hold of him. “I want to do right by what I couldn’t have done that time,” he said.

Lifeguard hopefuls pass a qualifying test to secure a spot in the four-month training program to prepare them for the final tests. For about three hours every week, they learn water rescue techniques, first aid and CPR. It was there that Kalmann met Mary Jacobus, a 65-year-old public school social worker who was retiring in July, and Liang Sung, who, at 66, was looking for something to keep him busy after losing his Chinese-language news job in 2020. They trained alongside 81 others, many of them teenagers. All the workouts and training in the pools proved exhausting.

“We’re really old to do this job,” Sung said.

Initially, Jacobus’ friends warned her that it was too dangerous and pointed out that she would be working more hours as a lifeguard than she did as a social worker. But like Kalmann, she felt a deeper calling. She is the daughter of a Lutheran pastor and grew up doing volunteer work before entering social work. “I just really wanted to be helpful,” she said.

Jacobus overheard some of the younger trainees talking about the Regents exams they would be taking the next morning — they were still in high school. “They have a big whole life that they were going through,” she said.

Although they were all strong in the water, the older swimmers knew the training would be arduous. Jacobus has swum since her childhood in Minnesota, splashing through thousands of lakes, and was once a lifeguard as a young woman. Sung described growing up in a seaside town in China where he plucked sea creatures from the ocean floor. He still regularly swims at Orchard Beach in the Bronx.

One morning, Kalmann and Sung were taking turns rescuing each other in a large pool in Flushing Meadows when a younger lifeguard raced over and interrupted to ask if they were OK. “I said, ‘We’re training to be like you,’” Kalmann said. “He looked at us like, ‘These old guys?’”

After their 16 weeks of training, they each faced the notoriously difficult final swim test. To pass more applicants, the city extended the time they had to swim 50 yards from 35 seconds to 45 seconds. Sung sailed through the new time requirements, but Kalmann and Jacobus had to try multiple times. Kalmann went so far as to shave off his goatee to cut just a few more seconds. “I figured, that’s drag, right?” he said. “My kids refused to talk to me for two days after that.”

They are now among 800 people charged with protecting New York City’s swimmers.

On her first day at the P.S. 20 pool in Brooklyn, Jacobus spotted a small girl bobbing toward the 3-foot deep end, her nose barely above the waterline. “She got that panicked look in her face,” Jacobus said, so she gently pulled the girl back to safety and asked if she wanted to try again. The girl caught the equally panicked look in her mother’s eyes and burst out: “No! No! No!”

“She never came back,” Jacobus said of her one and only rescue so far. “The rest of it is Band-Aids and boo-boos.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/12/nyregion/senior-lifeguards-shortage.html">The New York Times</a>.