The Beach Boys: Chicago`s First Junior Lifeguards

Y E S T E R D AY ’ S C I T Y
The Beach Boys:
Chicago’s First
Junior Lifeguards
CHRIS SERB
n the early 1900s, the relatively new sport of recreational swimming gained popularity all over the
country. The city of Chicago and its local park districts (which were autonomous until 1934) cleared
much of the lakefront and built jetties and piers to capture sand and create beaches, then hired the best swimmers to serve as lifeguards. Most of these lifeguard
services operated on shoestring budgets, and a lifeguard
typically watched an entire mile (or 1,760 yards) of
beach, compared to about 150 yards today.
As lakefront swimming became even more popular,
most beaches hired more lifeguards. But World War I
and the influenza epidemic of 1918 caused a staffing
shortage, and the city faced a dilemma. Leaving the
shore uncovered or lightly covered certainly would lead
to accidents and deaths, but the city lacked the funds to
hire more guards—if it could even find any to hire. In
1919, the city’s superintendent of beaches, Tom Daly,
decided to form an unpaid junior lifeguard corps to help
watch the three biggest beaches: Rainbow Beach at Seventy-ninth Street, Clarendon Beach at Montrose Avenue,
and Rogers Park Beach at Touhy Avenue (also known as
Touhy Beach)—a corps that is still intact today.
The first city junior guards were an all-male, loosely
I
Around the turn of the century, Chicago’s new beaches, such as
Clarendon Beach (right) attracted hundreds of visitors but not
enough lifeguards to watch them all.
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Top: Youngsters enjoy the new sport of recreational swimming at Montrose Beach. Chicago’s 1916 Annual Report on Parks and Beaches
showed how flood lighting could illuminate the beaches at night (above left), and described what Chicago’s earliest lifeguards should wear
(above right).
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organized group. Each boy helped watch a designated
area of the beach before the season officially started and
during busy hours, and would report any trouble in the
water to the lifeguards. In reward for their services, the
junior guards received T-shirts and swim trunks; in their
free time, they also got to practice with rowboats,
canoes, and other equipment. Junior guards also had the
inside track on future lifeguard positions. At Rogers Park,
the first junior guard crew included Bob Dooley and Fran
Conway, who would both be associated with the beach
for decades.
Other than the T-shirts and the rowboats, junior
guarding was a somewhat sedate, thankless job in the
early days. With only twelve to twenty boys in the program in the early 1920s, junior guarding lacked the social
element for which it would later be known. The patrols
tended to be very tedious, consisting of hot days spent
watching a little stretch of beach while other youngsters
performed cannonballs off the Touhy Beach diving platform. Occasionally, however, the junior guards saw action.
In August 1924, the Casmere, a thirty-five-foot sloop
sailing from Belmont Harbor, got stuck on a sandbar
about fifty yards off Chase Avenue. As the surf pounded
the boat, the five passengers knew the Casmere would
break apart in minutes. Six junior guards—Bob Dooley,
Buddy Edwards, Bob Franks, Harry Sutherland, Pete
Obermeyer, and Byron Speares—launched the crew boat,
an old twenty-six-foot Coast Guard surfboat. Dooley and
his mates rowed over to the Casmere and, by rocking the
boat back and forth during each break in the waves,
freed the sloop in eight minutes, the first recorded rescue
made by Rogers Park junior guards.
Within a few years, Superintendent Daly’s junior
guard crews stagnated at Clarendon and Rainbow
Beaches, but the program took off in Rogers Park. One
reason for the Rogers Park program’s success could be
the fact that Daly lived in a city-owned house right
behind Touhy Beach; possibly he kept a closer eye on his
home neighborhood program. In 1926, Touhy Beach
boasted 30 junior guards, while Clarendon—the city’s
biggest beach—had only 14. The Rogers Park Beach program grew rapidly, tallying 64 boys in 1929, 90 in 1931,
and 160 by 1939. The boom could be traced to two factors: Rogers Park’s growth as a residential neighborhood
with many families, and beach director Sam Leone.
Leone, a short, muscular, chain-smoking Sicilian immigrant and World War I Navy veteran, arrived at Touhy
Beach in 1925 at age twenty-five, after spending five
years as a lifeguard at Clarendon. A high-school dropout,
Leone proved to be a capable administrator who pioneered many lifeguarding and lifesaving techniques. As
Leone himself put it, “We teach them to be happy in the
water and feel just as much at home in the lake as they
would in their own home.”
The 1916 Annual Report on Parks and Beaches ranked attendance at beaches and pools for the year. The number of Chicagoans
who swam recreationally increased more than 200 percent between
1915 and 1916, foreshadowing how popular the beaches were
about to become.
Leone was one of the first guards to advocate “preventive” lifeguarding—keeping beachgoers out of trouble
instead of making dramatic rescues on swimmers who
had already gone down. Leone also was the first Chicago
lifeguard to make use of a variety of new technologies to
aid rescue attempts. He pioneered the diving helmet;
portable resuscitators to inflate drowning victims’ lungs;
two-way radios for emergency communication; and use
of the “Aqua Lung,” now known as SCUBA, for rescue
and recovery. During his forty years at Rogers Park
Beach, Leone personally made more than five hundred
rescues, and his lifeguards and junior guards saved more
than ten thousand lives, while losing fewer than ten—a
record that, according to the Chicago Sun-Times, “was
believed to be unmatched anywhere.”
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Leone achieved these results by establishing strict
rules for both his lifeguards and his junior guards. He
required his guards to be at work on time, and to respect
authority figures. The hot-tempered Leone fired dozens
of lifeguards and expelled many junior guards for small
transgressions, although he often relented after making
his point. “Sam Leone was the Vince Lombardi of lifeguarding,” 1940s junior guard Ed Kahn said. “There was
no nonsense, and there was no arguing. Just his look was
enough to make grown men wilt.”
Despite his tough rules—or maybe because of them—
Leone won the love and respect of thousands of guards
over the years. Many former junior guards, now in their
sixties and seventies, still think of him as a second father.
“You always wanted to please him,” 1940s junior guard
Dick Shiman remembered. “If you were at the chin-up
bar and he happened to walk by, you’d want him to see
that you could do ten pull-ups.”
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Above: Rogers Park Beach drew many visitors in 1929. Below: A
Chicago guard practices a lifesaving dive off of a rowboat.
Above: At Rogers Park Beach, Sam Leone (in captain’s hat) spearheaded the junior lifeguard program, training neighborhood boys in
lifesaving techniques. While the regular lifeguard corps focused on
precision and discipline (above right), junior guards enjoyed more
recreational activities (below right).
When he took over the program, Leone quickly realized that the boys could only stand around and watch a
beach for so long. He kept the junior guards on beach
patrol part of the time, but he also set up a wide range of
other activities. Leone split the junior guards into teams
for rowing and swimming races and for softball and football games. Leone and his lifeguards taught classes in
swimming, sailing, basic lifesaving skills, artificial respiration, knots, and tumbling. They also set aside time for
fun activities: picnics on the beach; wrestling matches on
the diving platform; ten-mile rows to Wilmette Harbor
and back; “free-for-all” canoe races in which teams
would try to flip their opponents’ canoes; and rides in
the Alert, Leone’s patrol speedboat, reported to be the
fastest on the lake. “I wanted to swim, and row, and play
football, and wrestle,” said 1920s and 1930s junior
guard Tom Dolan. “There was always something like that
going on at Touhy Beach.”
Leone and his lifeguards developed a peer leadership
system for the program. The oldest boys, fifteen to seventeen years old, were dubbed Seniors—later renamed
Leaders—and oversaw activities for the younger junior
guards. They officiated sports, took the younger participants out in boats, and assisted with swimming lessons.
When lifeguards needed help watching the beach on particularly hot, busy days, they recruited the Leaders first.
The best Leaders usually earned a paid spot on Leone’s
lifeguard staff when they turned eighteen. “We try to
make the kids see a part of life they otherwise might not
become acquainted with, especially the older ones,”
explained Leone. “The leadership they show is very gratifying. I teach them and they come right back and do a
better job running activities than I could do.”
Leone dubbed the middle group, ages twelve to fourteen,
the Juniors; this group played ball games, rowed boats, took
swimming lessons, and enjoyed other activities supervised
by the Leaders. The nine-to-twelve-year-olds, the Midgets,
participated in many of the same activities as the Juniors,
usually on a less-intense level. Midgets, for example, played
T-ball instead of softball, and wrestled instead of boxing.
The Midgets were the youngest group until Leone added
another junior guard class in the 1940s: Atoms, for boys
between six and eight years old.
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Sam Leone (second row from bottom, furthest left), an
experienced lifeguard himself, used the junior guard program to introduce neighborhood boys to the wonders of the
beach. Consequently, the popularity of the Rogers Park
Junior Guard program soared.
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Eventually, Leone developed another designation for the junior guards—the “220
Club,” awarded to any member of the
program who could swim 220 yards
in the lake, or three full lengths of
Touhy Beach. The regular junior
guard program activities occurred only during the morning,
but 220 Club members could
stay for advanced water sports
during the afternoons—water
skiing, “Aqua Lung” diving,
sailing, and the free-for-all canoe
race. Leone required all Leaders to
swim the 220. In gratitude, he often
took the older group on annual out-oftown camping trips and gave them jackets
with the junior guard insignia. “When you got
that jacket, you were king of the neighborhood,” 1950s
and 1960s junior guard Pat Hall recalled. “Everybody
knew what it stood for. We were like the Marines of Rogers
Park—everyone in that program was a cut above.”
The typical day for a junior lifeguard in the 1940s and
1950s resembles today’s junior guard schedule. The program evolved from a lifeguard assistance program into a
lifeguard training program, which focused on developing
lifesaving and aquatic skills, but also featured sports and
recreational activities. Each day started out with roll call,
with all the Atoms and Midgets splitting into teams
named after their pro and college heroes: Cubs, Dodgers,
Eagles, Fighting Irish, Blue Demons. After roll call, each
separate team went to an assigned activity.
For water sports, teams split further into crews named
after some sort of fish—Eels, Pike, Smelt—and raced in
five-oarlock wooden rowboats, with one boy to each oar
and the crew captain as coxswain. Other teams sent their
crews out in canoes, and still others piled into the crew
boat—a massive old Coast Guard lifeboat that fit about
three junior guards to each oar and thirty to forty guards
total. When the time came to switch classes, Leone
towed the crew boat back to Touhy with the Alert. “You’d
try to go as far out as you could,” 1950s junior guard
Allen Hyman recalled, “because the farther you went, the
better the ride back in.”
Leaders gave lessons to improve the Atoms’ and
Midgets’ swimming styles. Midgets “jousted” by
standing on the fronts of canoes and hitting each other
with water polo balls tied to the end of broomsticks.
Teams held inner-tube races, games of water football,
underwater knot-tying drills, lessons in boat and oar
parts, and boat capacity drills, with fifty or so Atoms
piling into a rowboat until it sank.
On land, the junior guards played maul ball, capture
the flag, and other lawn games; practiced their tumbling;
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worked on pull-ups, penny-flips, and other
horizontal bar skills; wrestled; played
dodgeball and tetherball; worked on
their artificial respiration techniques; and practiced athletic
skills such as broad jumping,
high jumping, and throwing a
football. They also participated
in a fairly harmless variety of
boxing: “You had nine-yearolds with sixteen-ounce
gloves; one glove [was] bigger
than your head, and they [were]
soft as pillows,” 1940s and 1950s
junior guard Fred Zoes remembered. “To hurt yourself was almost
impossible.”
Almost—but not totally. One boxing drill
required juniors to fight each other blindfolded, with
one hand. “I hated that drill,” said Jerry Gavin, a 1950s
junior guard. “You couldn’t even see the other kid,
you’re blindfolded, he’s pounding on you. I got the crap
beat out of me more often than not.”
Top and middle: Junior guards proudly sported their badges and
jackets. The boys learned not just about swimming, but also about
other water sports such as sailing (above).
To accommodate all of the boys who wanted to join the junior guard program, Leone created the Atom division for younger junior guards.
Here an Atom commandeers a rowboat in 1952.
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In the late 1940s, Leone discovered a new-fangled
contraption: Jacques Cousteau’s Aqua Lung. “This goes
all the way back to the early days of SCUBA,” 1940s and
1950s junior guard Jim Miller recalled. “[Leone] basically
said, ‘Breathe normally, don’t come up faster than your
bubbles, and have a good time.’” Leone was quickly
hooked on scuba; the junior guard program bought five
of the devices, and the Aqua Lung became one of the
most popular features of 220 Club.
Another new sport, water skiing, also became a top
220 Club activity. In the late 1940s, Leone towed junior
guards behind the Alert on handcrafted skis from the
beach’s boat shop, cramming as many skiers behind the
boat as possible. Leone described, “I wish I had a picture
of a boy’s face when he first climbs into a boat or learns
to swim and water ski.”
Over the years, Leone added a few annual special
events to the summer program: a Junior Olympics Day,
with sprints, three-legged races, blindfold races, and
water balloon-passing relays; an Obstacle Course Day, in
which the guards had to run through inner tubes, jump
over oars, and crawl through ditches; an All-Star Softball
game, featuring the best Midgets from across the program; and the Scavenger Hunt, during which mixed
Atom-Midget teams searched for both everyday objects
(five live black ants, an unused match, a dandelion) and
offbeat items (a .22 shell, a guard’s foot print) within a
Morning program usually ended, as it does today, with
an extended “free swim” period. As the program lifeguards watched from lifeboats, the Leaders formed a
giant ring in the water, and two hundred or so screaming
Atoms and Midgets jumped in, playing in the waves and
splashing each other for ten to fifteen minutes.
In the afternoons, the 220 Club participated in
advanced water activities, including sailing, free-for-all
canoe races, flipping the crew boat, and searching the
lake bed with Leone’s homemade, hand-pumped diving
helmet. “You’d walk on the bottom; it was really
strange,” remembered 1930s and ’40s junior guard Tom
Burns. “A couple guys had to pump it for you, and if you
had some lazy guy up there who slowed down, the water
would come right up your nose.”
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Other water-related activities the junior guards enjoyed included crew
(above left, c. 1950) and waterskiing (above, in 1967).
In the late 1940s, Sam Leone
introduced his guards to a new
apparatus called SCUBA (left).
When Leone took his junior guards
waterskiing, he tried to fit as many
skiers as possible behind his boat,
the Alert, as seen in this 1960s
photograph (below).
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On Obstacle Course Day, junior guards would jump over oars, race
through inner tubes, and crawl over benches (above). Below: Eventually the junior guard program grew so large that Leone hired an
assistant, Fran Conway (front row, furthest right), who ran the
junior guard sports programs.
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two-block radius of the beach. In 1948, the junior
guards’ first Water Show featured swimming and rowing
races, a water skiing demonstration, displays of lifesaving
skills, and other demonstrations and events; the show,
which has been held every year since, regularly draws
several thousand spectators.
But all was not fun and games on the beach. The
Leaders made hundreds of rescues and assists over the
years, mostly by fishing out the younger junior guards
during swim lessons or an unexpected trip into deep
water. During their beach patrols, junior guards saved
dozens more lives. In June 1930, junior guards Frank
Milner, Jimmie Ramey, Frank Stockrighter, and John
Harvey rowed two miles into the lake to save two boys in
an overturned canoe. In July 1936, several junior guards
and lifeguards pitched in to save the Alert, Leone’s
motorboat, from certain destruction by a sudden gale. In
June 1940, junior guard Wilbur Gilbert rescued a man
who had attempted suicide by jumping off a pier. And in
August 1956, junior guards Bob Kennedy and Joe
Springer saved a woman who was washed under by the
waves.
The junior guard program eventually developed into a
program for the “whole boy,” with camping, field trips,
hobbies, and sports, that went far beyond what Superintendent Daly originally intended when he needed a little
The junior guard program did not stop when summer ended: the
young guards also played football (left, 1950) and went on camping
trips (above, 1951).
extra help on the beaches in 1919. Around 1930, Leone
hired his first year-round, permanent staffer, former
junior guard Fran Conway, to help direct the program.
Conway took the “permanent” designation literally—he
stayed at Leone’s right hand for thirty years. Conway, a
public school teacher, daily communicant at St. Jerome’s
Church, and lifelong bachelor, never moved out of his
mother’s house, but all the boys of Rogers Park Beach
considered him family, and vice versa. “He was gentle yet
firm, and he loved kids,” described 1930s junior guard
Jack Annetti. “Sam Leone was the man on the beach, but
Frannie Conway was your mentor.”
While Leone had overall responsibility for the junior
guard program, Conway oversaw most of the day-to-day
activities and administrative chores such as planning
schedules and making Leader assignments. Conway also
coached the beach’s sports teams (which were made up
of junior gaurds), winning city youth baseball championships in 1931 and 1933 and city basketball titles every
year from 1933 through 1939. No records exist for the
World War II years, but the Rogers Park athletes thrived
again after the war, going undefeated in football in 1947.
In the late 1940s Conway left the beach for a couple
years to coach at Wrightwood Park; Sam Leone’s son
Phil and former junior guard Jack Annetti briefly took
over Conway’s coaching duties. Their 1949 teams won
city titles in ice skating, baseball, track and field, softball,
volleyball, and basketball. The Touhy Beach athletes also
brought home special trophies for leading the league in
both overall athletic wins and participation. “This was
just a great place for sports,” enthused 1940s and 1950s
junior guard Jim Anderson. “It didn’t matter what the
sport was—skating, boxing, track and field, or whatever,
we won it.”
“Those were some of the best kids the beach ever
had—and there were so many of them,” Annetti
recalled. “If there was a volleyball tournament, we’d have
three teams when all the other parks would have just
one. If it was skating, we’d have one hundred skaters
show up. And the kids were winners—they had that
winning attitude, and that’s so important.” Conway
returned to the beach in 1950, and the Rogers Park
Beach athletes never missed a beat, winning city championships in softball, track, and other sports throughout
the decade.
Each summer, Leone and Conway assigned two or
three lifeguards to help them with the junior guards.
These included Bobby Bruns, who would become world
heavyweight wrestling champion; Ray Essick, a top collegiate swimming coach and longtime head of U.S. Swimming, which oversees competitive swimming programs
and organizes the Olympic and World Championship
teams; Tom Aykroid, a three-sport star at St. George High
School who later played football for Purdue University;
Dick Shiman and Dick Blackmore, who coached swimming and football, respectively, while teaching at Loyola
Academy; and Sam Leone’s son Phil, who died tragically
in 1954 after pulling his father and two fellow lifeguards
out of a car wreck. Beach legend has it that Oak Street
Beach lifeguard and Olympic swimming champion
Yesterday’s City | 53
Johnny Weissmuller briefly worked with the Rogers Park
junior guards before he headed to Hollywood.
Many famous Chicago sons spent their formative years
rowing and swimming at Rogers Park Beach, including
best-selling novelist Sidney Sheldon; television and radio
host Norman Ross (never a formal member, he said, but
always a beach rat); brothers Len and John Jardine, who
coached football at Brown University and University of
Wisconsin, respectively; real estate magnate Sheldon
Good; Dick Thornton, Northwestern University AllAmerican football player and a member of the Canadian
Football League’s all-time all-star team; and a wisecracking youngster named Sheldon Greenfield, better
known today as comedian Shecky Greene. Hundreds of
others became prominent in business, in coaching and
teaching, or on the police force or fire department.
“Some of our guys were really successful,” Good
recalled. “Sam would be proud of us all.”
Leone and Conway considered junior lifeguarding a
year-round activity, and they kept their young charges
busy during the fall and winter months. While Conway
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Above: The junior guard baseball teams, coached by Fran Conway,
easily won league and city titles. Below: In addition to all of their
recreational activities, the junior guards still learned lifesaving techniques, as these 1980s (now co-ed) junior guards demonstrate.
and Annetti coached the sports teams, Leone held regular calisthenics, boxing, and wrestling lessons and
sponsored youth tournaments. The boys took carpentry
and boat-building lessons, learned how to use bows and
arrows, watched educational movies, and went on field
trips to far-off places such as Washington, D.C., and
Florida, and local sites such as the Curtiss Candy Company, the Chicago Tribune printing plant, and the
Chicago Stockyards. One year, Leone gave taxidermy
lessons, and the boys prepared deer, owl, squirrel, rabbit,
and sparrow hawk specimens. “There was always something to do, even during the idle time,” remembered
1940s and 1950s junior guard Rich Pigott.
Leone converted Touhy Beach into an ice rink during
the winter, flooding an area about the size of a football
field. Leone, Conway, and volunteers from the neighborhood—mostly junior guard parents—scraped the ice
nightly, filled the divots left by skate tracks, and sprinkled and leveled the field, in the days long before Zamboni machines. After heavy snows, an army of volunteers
often worked all night to clear the rink. In the early
1930s, Leone installed floodlights, set up loudspeakers,
and played music for nighttime “couples” dances and
skating parties. The beach house served as a warming
station, with hot coals on the fireplace and coffee and
cocoa available. On pleasant winter days, Leone’s rink
would draw several hundred skaters.
Skating kept the junior guards busy during the winter
months, with skating lessons and team practices every
afternoon, weather permitting, and intramural and citywide skating meets. Fran Conway’s brother Dan was one
of Rogers Park Beach’s first city champions. The Touhy
athletes posted an outstanding record over the next
twenty-five years, winning several regional and citywide
skating competitions.
Fran Conway scaled back his work with the junior
guards during the late 1950s and early 1960s, first giving
up his fall and winter coaching duties, then cutting back
on his summer activities. Leone remained active with the
lifeguards and the junior guards until the summer of
1965, when he contracted lung cancer. He died on
October 8, at age 65. The following year, Mayor Richard
J. Daley rededicated Rogers Park Beach as Sam J. Leone
Park and Beach. In a city where most parks are named
after presidents, military heroes, and local politicians,
Leone is the only one named for a lifeguard.
The junior guard program remained strong after
Leone’s death, led by former junior guards such as Dick
Shiman, Allen Hyman, Dick Blackmore, Bob Jardien, and
Bob Diamond. The program ran much as it did in
Leone’s day, with Atoms, Midgets, Leaders, the 220
Club, and all of the special events and trips. The biggest
change came in 1970, when girls were allowed to join for
the first time, led by pioneering junior guards Eileen
The Rogers Park junior guards won trophies in multiple sports
(above, c. 1950). Below: Generations of junior guards enjoyed the
free-for-all canoe race (as seen in this mid-1980s photograph,
below).
Colleran, Lisa Goldman, and Cathy Rogers. The beach
briefly gained national attention in the mid-1970s, when
the CBS television show KidsWorld taped a segment on
the Leone junior guards, with Leader Brian Murphy
serving as guest host.
Beginning in the 1970s, the city’s other beaches and
pools, which had abandoned junior guards during the
Depression and World War II, gave the program another
try. By 1981, a handful of beaches and pools each had
about one or two dozen junior guards in their programs,
Yesterday’s City | 55
Thanks to the junior guard program, Chicago’s lifeguards had some backup when they needed help watching the city’s increasingly crowded
beaches, such as Oak Street Beach on this busy day in 1929.
56 | Chicago History | Summer 2000
and the Chicago Park District began holding a citywide
junior guard competition, with assorted swimming, rowing, running, and rescue races. The Leone Beach junior
guards, as the oldest and
largest program, dominated competitions for
the first few years. In
1984, Hartigan Beach—
just a half-mile south at
Pratt Boulevard and the
lake—and its young
coach, Mary O’Connor,
who recruited the top
swimming talent from
several northwest side
pools, upset Leone. Hartigan won the junior
guard games each year
until 1994, when O’
Connor transferred to
Touhy Beach and started
coaching the Leone
junior guards. Leone has
won the junior guard
games every year since.
The junior guard
concept also gained popularity around the country.
Los Angeles County began its own junior guard program in 1960; lifeguards there claim to have founded
the first junior guard program in the countr y, but
generations of North Siders know better. Over the
next thirty years, aided by both the United States
Lifesaving Association and the popularity of the TV
show Baywatch, junior lifeguarding spread along the
nation’s coasts. Today, almost ever y major beach
in the countr y has some form of a junior lifeguard
program.
In 1985, the United States Lifesaving Association
began holding a national junior guard competition every
summer. While Los Angeles County, New Jersey’s
Monmoy Beach, and Fort Lauderdale might evoke
“beach boy” images, Chicago produces champions. The
Chicago Park District’s junior guard teams, made up
mostly of Leone Beach junior guards, have captured
seven of the fifteen national titles to date, easily outpacing their ocean-based rivals.
The Leone Beach junior guard program continues to
thrive, drawing about 350 boys and girls each summer,
including many second- and third-generation program
members. Last year’s roster included youngsters Grace,
Claire, and Robbie Dooley, who enjoy swimming,
rowing, and watching the beach as much as the “original” junior guard, their great-grandfather Bob Dooley,
did eighty-one years earlier.
Junior guard horseshoe
champs, 1951. Through
Sam Leone’s leadership,
the Rogers Park junior guard program developed into a summer
recreational program for children of all ages.
I L LU S T R AT I O N S | 40–41, CHS, DN-073292; 42 above,
CHS, ICHi-29290; 42 below left and right, CHS, 1916
Annual Report on Parks and Beaches; 43 CHS, 1916 Annual
Report on Parks and Beaches; 44 above, CHS, DN-088419; 44
below, CHS, DN-0100134; 45 above, from St. Jerome Parish
annual report; 45 above right, CHS, DN-0100135; 45 below
right, courtesy of the Leone Beach Archives; 46–47, courtesy
of the collection of Allan Paterson; 48 top, collection of the
author; 48 center, courtesy of the Leone Beach Archives; 48
bottom, courtesy of Jack Annetti; 49, courtesy of Jack
Annetti; 50 top, courtesy of Jack Annetti; 50 above, courtesy
of Bud Bertog; 51 above, CHS, DN-0092908; 51 below,
courtesy of Jack Annetti; 52 above, courtesy of Allen Hyman;
52 below, courtesy of John Scotese; 53 left, courtesy of Jack
Annetti; 53 right, courtesy of the Leone Beach Archives; 54
top, courtesy of Jack Annetti; 54 bottom, courtesy of Bud
Bertog; 55 above, courtesy of the Leone Beach Archives; 55
bottom, courtesy of Bud Bertog; 56, DN-088433; 57, courtesy of Jack Annetti.
Chris Serb, a junior guard from 1980 to 1986 and a lifeguard since
1987, recently published a book, Sam’s Boys, on the history of
Leone Beach.
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