This is high season for Joe Pecoraro. You will find him at the beach, asking the lifeguards how the new sunhats he ordered are working out. You will find him at the pool, watching the guards keep watch. You will find him cruising the lake in a Chicago Park District rescue boat, patrolling in case of disaster.
Seven days a week you will find him doing these things. You will not find him taking a family summer vacation; he has not done so once in his 44 years of working for the Park District. He says his wife is a ”beach widow.”
You will not find him eating lunch. He does not have time.
In 1949, Joseph A. Pecoraro took a summer job as a lifeguard at North Avenue Beach. He never left.
For 19 years, Pecoraro has been general supervisor of the Park District`s 31 beaches and 90 pools. He oversees the district`s swimming, water polo and lifeguard programs; and first aid, water-rescue and ice-rescue instruction. If it`s a public facility in Chicago and you can swim in it, it is Pecoraro`s turf.
On his way to the top, he made sure that he did everything required of his lifeguards. If they stood guard in the rain, he stood in the rain with them. To this day, if he is present when an instructor orders a class of lifeguard trainees to drop for 20 pushups, he drops for 20 pushups too.
About 23 million people visit Chicago`s beaches and pools each year. Pecoraro, 61, tours the facilities daily, often underwater. Lean and fit at 6 feet and 180 pounds, he swims regularly at Park District pools (he favors Kosciuszko, Eckhart and Shabbona). In the summer, he swims in the lake off North Avenue every day, and once a week he swims off the ledge between North Avenue and Oak Street.
He runs 4 miles a day along the lakefront, visiting Park District equipment and training outposts along the way in summer. He inspires awe among many of his troops. Robert O`Connor, 35, one of the beach and pool unit`s four supervisors, remembers the day in 1973 that he first laid eyes on Pecoraro, when he took his swim test to be a lifeguard.
”It was like, `That`s Joe Pec,` ” O`Connor recalled. ”That was the guy you`d heard about. He had blond hair and a gold supervisor`s jacket. It was very impressive.”
Eleanor Arens knows him. Arens has been feeding birds most mornings at North Avenue for 18 years, and recalls that her mother used to bring Pecoraro lemonade when he was a lifeguard.
”My mother was (an invalid),” said Arens, a legal assistant who lives in Melrose Park. ”On her 80th birthday, I gave her a birthday party on the beach. She was carried from her wheelchair to a lounge chair under an umbrella. We had tables and balloons.
”Joe Pecoraro and his entire staff pulled up in their motorboats on the shoreline of Beach 2 and came out and celebrated her birthday with her.”
A beach constant
The dedicated swimming public knows him too. A regular lap swimmer at Gill Park once grumbled in the locker room that the new swim schedule favored children at the expense of adults.
”It`s age discrimination,” she complained. ”I`m going to sue Joe.”
Everyone knew whom she meant.
Such is his fame that his wife of 35 years, Peggy, has taken to using her maiden name in her business as an insurance broker.
”It just got into too many conversations,” she said. ” `Is your husband Joe Pecoraro? Can you talk to him? I have a son who can swim. . . .` ”
”For part of each of the last six decades, if you went to the North Avenue Beach, there`s been one thing, aside from the boat house, that`s been constant,” O`Connor said. ”That`s him.”
Pecoraro grew up on the Northwest Side. His father worked for Florsheim Shoe Co. for 50 years making patterns and preparing them for sewing. His mother frequently took him and his younger brother and sister on the Montrose Avenue bus to the beach. There, young Joe found his calling.
”My mother said she could not get him out of the water,” recalled his sister, Peggy Brush. ”He would just cry all the way. She said he really should have been born a fish.”
He taught himself to swim when he was 5. He learned how to swim for real at Schurz High School, where he swam backstroke on the swim team. He was also on the swim team at De Paul University, where he graduated in 1953 with a degree in physical education.
By then he was a natatorium instructor at Austin Park. He began a graduate degree in education at De Paul, but he was drafted in 1955. He served one year in Japan, where he coached the 1st Cavalry Division Artillery swim and track teams to victory in meets for U.S. armed forces in the Far East.
He returned to civilian life and the Park District. ”There was no TV,”
he recalled. ”There was no air conditioning. People slept (on the beach). I remember working till 1 in the morning. If the crowd didn`t leave, I stayed.” Military-style training
Today, his lifeguards perform between 5,000 and 6,000 rescues a year, mostly in pools. Until last year, when a 7-year-old girl drowned at South Shore Beach, there had been no drownings at a guarded beach in 15 years. The last drowning in a pool was three years ago.
”He is universally considered one of the top experts in the field,”
said John Hendrickson, director of safety and health for the Mid-America Chapter of the American Red Cross. Pecoraro was a contributor to the American Red Cross Lifeguard Training manual.
”We`ve had people in from Japan, Germany, Australia, Ireland and England to study our system,” O`Connor said.
Pecoraro shows them around, proudly pointing out lifeguards he taught to swim. He is also said to be able to hold his own in after-hours liquid camaraderie-building sessions with the Australians, no mean feat.
”He is definitely one who believes in working hard and playing hard,”
O`Connor said.
Lifeguard training is patterned after the military. ”Are you having fun?” barked supervisor Kirk Kleist, whose T-shirt read, ”NO PITY,” to several hundred dripping lifeguard rookies in Eckhart Natatorium as Pecoraro watched.
”Yes, sir!” the shivering rookies shouted.
Discipline is crucial for rescuers, Pecoraro said; when a life is at stake, orders must be obeyed without question.
Moreover, Pecoraro sees himself as training not just lifeguards, but citizens.
”A lot of people look at lifeguarding as something you do when you`re young,” said Ald. Patrick O`Connor (40th), brother of Rob O`Connor and a former lifeguard who also was legal counsel to the United States Lifesaving Association when Pecoraro was president. ”Joe looks at it as an attitude that extends beyond the time you`re actually paid for being a lifeguard.”
When senior guards return in the spring to get their summer assignments, for example, they are not allowed to show up at North Avenue in shorts and T- shirts.
”We make them dress up,” Pecoraro said. ”If they come in looking like a bum, we don`t take them. You`re going for a job interview.”
Pecoraro said he expects his guards not only to rescue people on the job, but also to develop characters that prompt them to help people off the job.
They have not disappointed him; at this year`s graduation ceremony for rookie guards, Pecoraro presented lifesaving-association awards to two lifeguards who had exhibited bravery off duty. One had run after and stopped a man who had robbed an elevated station and tried to escape by bicycle. Another had chased a store robber from North Pier to Navy Pier, then rescued the man when he jumped into the water and started to go down.
”Kids have not changed in 40 years,” Pecoraro said. ”They`re good.”
Legendary rescue attempts
There were no women lifeguards until 1969, when the beach and pool unit decided to admit them. The change gave Pecoraro a rare insight into one of the central complexities of women`s lives.
”It is so hard to get swimsuits to fit women,” he complained. ”You can have two girls weighing the same, and they wear different sizes.”
Pecoraro has asked his instructors to watch for lifeguard trainees who are illiterate, and to treat them gently.
”If a kid is in class and doing well, and suddenly on the written test you get all the wrong answers, we quietly take them to one side and give them the test orally,” he said. ”You don`t want to embarrass the kid.”
Pecoraro once dived into 12 feet of muddy water at the water hole of the Waveland Golf Course in an unsuccessful attempt to rescue a boy who had fallen in.
Another time he dived into a dangerously cold, 44-degree lake off North Avenue to try to find a boy who had fallen off a pier on a deceptively hot spring day. He ended up having to fish for the boy`s body with a drag hook from a boat.
Rescue attempts like these have become legend. ”To get down to that depth, in that kind of water, without scuba, without a wet suit-that takes a certain kind of dedication, because you`re putting yourself in danger,” said Rob O`Connor.
In 1983, Pecoraro was elected president of the United States Lifesaving Association, a professional organization with 4,000 members, and served for eight years. His association with the group led to what he considers the highlight of his professional life: a meeting in 1986 with President Ronald Reagan in the Oval Office.
Reagan, a former lifeguard on the Rock River in Dixon, Ill., recounted rescue stories to fellow former lifeguards Pecoraro and the O`Connor brothers. ”After a while, we were getting nervous,” Pecoraro said. ”I know there were a couple of senators waiting. But he didn`t want us to leave.”
When they did leave, Rob O`Connor said, Pecoraro turned to the others and said, ”In the 40 years I`ve been here, all the guys I`ve worked with that have moved on have said, `Joe, when you going to get out of it?` But I`m the only (SOB) that made it to the Oval Office.”
The pleasure of that memory does not diminish the pain of the rare drownings in Chicago`s waters. Every year there are about 30 to 40 drownings in unauthorized swimming areas, most of them boating accidents. Pecoraro now assigns a skeleton staff to some unauthorized areas to keep watch, which he said has cut the number of drownings there.
”Every off-limits one upsets me,” he said. ”You know it`s going to happen. But you don`t want to settle for that.”
Pecoraro does not want to settle for anything. ”He is not satisfied with perfection,” said supervisor Kirk Kleist, who has known Pecoraro for 23 years.
It is a drive that mystifies and awes his daughter Mary Kelly, a lifeguard captain at Montrose Beach, the one of Pecoraro`s three children who followed in his footsteps.
”There`s even times when I get tired of it,” she said. ”But it`s just like a life force for him.”
