All in the family: Sons follow dad onto the OCBP

Lt. Gallagher’s boys grew up at the beach and grew up to become lifeguards

By DAVID NAHAN/Sentinel staff

OCEAN CITY – The Gallagher boys, Andrew, Gavin and Luke, grew up at 12th Street and Wesley Avenue. As kids, they used to follow their dad to work. 

Now all three have followed him into one of Ocean City’s longest-running and most visible of summer professions: lifeguard.

Paul Gallagher is a lieutenant on the Ocean City Beach Patrol. He started working as a lifeguard the summer after he finished college and moved from the Philadelphia area to Ocean City in 1984.

“After graduation it was either broke at the beach or broke in Pennsylvania. I figured poor is poor. I’ll stay here,” he laughed.

He swam in college with a friend from the resort and when that friend said he was going to take the beach patrol test that coming summer, Paul decided to “give it a shot.”

Thirty-seven years later he is still on the beach patrol and still enjoying what he does.

He is loving it all the more because his three sons are on the OCBP with him.

Lt. Gallagher is surprised how much time has passed since he first started sitting atop a lifeguard stand on an Ocean City beach nearly four decades ago.

“Somebody asked me that and I had to stop and think, where did 37 years go? It absolutely does not feel like 37 years. I like what I do,” he said. “That helps, too. I’m sure if it was something that you had to try to get through, time would have drug a little more.”

Paul said it is hard to explain what he enjoys most about his work. He likes that it’s physical and active. He likes the ocean and paddleboarding.

“If I had to put it in a sentence I don’t know if I could. I love that it’s outside and it’s taken on many phases over the years. I was a red shirt, then administration, so now I have 40 (lifeguards) that I’m in charge of as opposed to just my partner and my own crowd,” he said.

“Now the next chapter is my three boys that I have on the patrol. What I like about the job is it changes with each next chapter, but I love the beach, I love being outside. 

“If you’re going to be here, might as well get paid for it.”

For the first 16 years on the beach patrol, he “sat the stand,” which was taking care of the beach and beach-goers where he was assigned. Then he was promoted to senior guard, which is part of the OCBP administration, but there were a lot of long-serving senior beach patrol members in the administration so there was little movement up the ranks. He sat the stand for another nine years as a senior guard.

After 25 years on the patrol, he was promoted to lieutenant.

He has seen changes over the years even as the basic job of a lifeguard remains the same – making sure bathers are safe and are swimming only where it is safe. Changes include using green flags to designate safe swimming areas, using the torpedos they carry into the water to rescue swimmers instead of the old square cans that used to sit on a stand in front of the lifeguard stands (“they’re much more effective and easier to use”) and using paddleboards for rescues instead of lifeboats. The paddleboards are easier to launch, but boats can still be used for certain rescues. There also is a personal watercraft for each headquarters – at First Street, 12th Street, 34th Street and 57th Street.

Following in his footsteps

The lieutenant said his boys caught the lifeguard bug.

“It seemed like something they always wanted to do. They grew up with it. We lived at 12th Street and Wesley, so this was their beach anyway. Their dad worked here. I spent the last 20-some years right here,” he said about the 12th Street headquarters.  

“Andrew (his oldest son) from day one was always going to do it,” he said. “As Gavin got older, he seemed to show the interest too. Luke (his youngest) had his own thing going for a while. He was a surfing instructor and enjoyed it. If that was the way he wanted to go that was fine. I didn’t push him. And this past year he thought, ‘I think I’m going to do it.’

“Now we have all three and it’s tough to describe how cool that is to have them all – in your almost four-decade career – having them be part of it.”

The lieutenant doesn’t know if his sons will keep with lifeguarding as long as he has. That may will have to do with their professions. He retired after 32 years as a teacher in Stone Harbor, which left his summers free for lifeguarding.

“Depending on which path they take” may determine how long they’re lifeguards, “but they love it. It’s funny to hear Luke come home with his stories because I would come for years with my stories and the boys would hear them. Then Andrew would come home with his stories and then Gavin would come home with his stories.”

Andrew, who graduated from Ocean City High School in 2015, started on the beach patrol in 2013.

The reason he joined was simple. “Obviously, my dad. This is our beach,” he said. “Growing up and seeing them (lifeguards) sitting on top of the stands, they were like superheroes.”

The environment entices him to keep coming back. 

“The beach is the office. Not too many people can say that. It’s cool because this is where we grew up,” Andrew said. “Saving lives, and having people see where we live, it’s cool.”

He is working as an online entrepreneur, leaving him time to be a lifeguard. Ocean environments beckon even when the summer is over. “Hawaii is a possible destination in a couple of months. That or Puerto Rico. I went to Rincon last winter for 10 days and thought, ‘How am I getting back here?’ I was doing that and my friends invited me to Hawaii.”

He expects to be back in Ocean City for the summers.

“I’m trying to do it as long as I can …. Now I’m staying that we’ve got the whole team out here.

It’s awesome (having dad and both brothers here) … Now that we have everyone it’s awesome,” Andrew said.

Gavin joined the patrol in 2016 when he was 16. The 2018 OCHS grad is now a junior at Stockton University studying business management.

His influences aren’t a surprise. “My dad and my older brother,” Gavin said. “It’s awesome. First, just working on the beach. Getting to work with all of them now that Luke made it.” He couldn’t think of any downside to the job. After he made it on the patrol, he said, “I didn’t think of doing anything else during the summer.”

He said the job is memorable for the rescues, going to the lifeguard races with all the other guards, and “the funny stuff that happens every day.”

Luke, a rising senior at OCHS, also was influenced by his dad and his older brothers.

Last summer he didn’t feel ready to become a lifeguard.

“I was very small last year so I was kind of nervous to join,” Luke said, noting a surf instructor job came up so he hopped on that instead.

Then, with COVID-19 hitting this winter and spring, he had more time to train for the lifeguard test and decided to go for it. (He also grew close to Andrew’s height.)

Luke agreed with Gavin that the best part of the job is being on the beach and meeting people. 

“It’s such a great group of people in and out of work. It’s just awesome.”

He also wants to continue being a guard.

“I definitely want to keep doing this. Now that I’m all with my brothers and we’re all working together I definitely want to do it for a good amount of time,” Luke said, acknowledging something his dad said about what makes the job fun and interesting.

“Just being on the beach. The crazy stories you get. The runs (rescues). I was on a rescue with both my brothers and my dad. We were all involved. It was a super cool experience,” Luke said. “It’s definitely a lot of pressure, but it’s fun. Hopefully you keep the crowd controlled but when there is a run and everybody is running in it’s a super cool thing to do.”

Andrew agreed about the fun aspects and the responsibility.

“There is a saying, it’s pretty universal, it’s ‘lifeguards for life,’” Andrew said. “Here we only have a three-month window, but it’s a mindset kind of thing. Things do get heavy, there’s a lot of pressure, a lot of stress, but again, this is the office and this is home. That’s really cool.”

The OCBP has a record of not losing a person to drowning on a protected beach in more than a century. Over the years, the drownings that have occurred have been on beaches that weren’t protected or after hours, when the lifeguards were not on duty.

“To date we haven’t had one (a drowning), well over 100 years,” Lt. Gallagher said. “If you take the job seriously, you don’t want to be the one to lose one. It’s pretty amazing when you think about the numbers who show up here.”

He believes the last time there was a father and three sons, it was former Capt. Oliver Muzslay, who served with his three sons, Lance, Drew and Heath. Coincidentally, Drew was Paul Gallagher’s stand partner earlier in his career.

Now the legacy is lasting with the Gallaghers.

“At this point I don’t see any end in sight,” the lieutenant said about continuing to work the OCBP. “I’m healthy. As long as that’s the case. And now I have three more incentives to stick around.”