Robert Potter on living in Laguna Beach, his love of the ocean, and qualifying for the Laguna Beach Lifeguards. Recorded at Laguna Beach Library
Laguna Beach, California.
Transcript
Transcript
My name is Rob Potter. I came to Laguna Beach when I was four years old.
My family actually had a pretty older history here. My mother, her name was Katherine Tiffany (sp ?), her family made quite an impact in the lamp business and also in the jewelry business back East. And, she was kind of a debutante and she was hanging out in Laguna Beach way back when in the twenties and thirties when the Hollywood people were coming down here, with Mary Pickford, and the Festival of Arts started on the beach down there.
And my grandmother had a house in Emerald Bay, and when my mother divorced my dad in 1963 we moved up there on Cypress Beach and kind of began my love affair with the ocean.
My first time in the water was at Diver’s Cove and it was really fun.
And, then my mother married a local guy named Cy Painter who owned the Shoals Hotel, which is at the bottom of Bluebird Beach steps, next to the condominiums and next to the Surf and Sand there. And so I grew up on that beach there from the age of about six until about sixteen. And, so Laguna’s always been a wonderful home for me, and it’s a very very unique city and town, as you know.
Well, the lifeguarding thing. Growing up at Bluebird Beach up the hill there we had quite a few Laguna lifeguards that were locals to Bluebird Beach, and when I became a lifeguard they kind of put you at your beach if you are a local. So, up there was Charlie Ware, Conley Ware, Emery (sp ?) Ware. And, I don’t think, I’m not sure if Digger Ware was even a lifeguard, but there was a lot of lifeguards. Bruce Morton, Peter Morton also, were lifeguards.
So, we used to watch them growing up. And I was very much involved in swimming in high school, water polo actually primarily, for me. And of course everyone on the team, you know: what’s your summer job gonna be? Are you gonna work at Swensen’s and make ice cream? Or, are you gonna make sandwiches at Gina’s? Uh, no, I’m gonna stay on the beach. It was a really great job. It paid well. So, that was kind of, you set your sights on that. And of course we had all done, most of us actually, had done, what they call Junior Guards, which is a little training, and you learn the basic beach safety, which most locals here know those rules and information pretty much by heart, and through their own experiences on the beach.
And, I mean, I did pretty good. I think, I remember, I went into the training at about tenth overall in the timing. Because a lot of the swimmers, pure swimmers, they’re good in a pool, but you put them in the ocean, there’s a certain way you gotta swim that’s kind of a water polo way, where the head’s up and your kicking, and you have to get down and you go flat. And you gotta check your bearings. And the swimmers would just go like this, they’d veer off course, they’re not used to the salt water, the chop. So, they can be pure swimmers, but could they go through? And then there’s also the fins, they didn’t know how to use fins. Fins you go very deep.
And, all the guys from Bluebird, Peter Morton, Conley and I were always one, two, three in the, whenever we had a fin swim, I don’t care how fast they were the other ways, when it came to fins we could really fly, at least in my training sessions. So, that was a unique aspect of the beach thing. But, they wouldn’t guarantee you a job. If you’ve been a rookie, they already know you’re pretty much going in. But, they don’t tell you that. You’re really working hard for the training.
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