50 years at Jones Beach

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Lee’s paternal grandparents were put to death in the Sorbibor extermination camp in Poland the year he was born, but his parents were luckier: His father spent a couple of months in a labor camp in northern Holland, and his mother, who was not Jewish, was spared a trip to Germany to work in a munitions factory when she became pregnant — exactly as planned — with Lee. Even before he arrived, it turned out, Lee played a small role in the Allied campaign against the Nazis. “My father called me the Saboteur,” he recalls.

The Hahns immigrated to the U.S. in 1947, when Lee was 4, and settled in Queens. There, his father, unable to afford the extensive inventory that an American leather-goods shop required, learned the real estate business, with limited success. And in a family that didn’t have much, Lee started working.

As a boy he delivered papers and mowed lawns, and developed into a talented swimmer. He competed in freestyle and backstroke at Jamaica High School, and worked his first two summers as a lifeguard at the Silver Point Beach Club, in Atlantic Beach. He met Gerry there in 1961, noticing her as she swam toward his stand. “He was handsome,” she recounts with a smile, “so I gave him a show.”

The following year he came to work at Jones Beach, for $1.53 an hour. In those days lifeguards wore uncomfortable black wool suits with orange stripes and shoulder straps. Guy Lombardo and the Royal Canadians accompanied the musical productions at the Jones Beach theater. And Hahn recalls catching an occasionally glimpse of the park’s founder, Robert Moses, making his way down to the beach from his office in the West Bathhouse.

The lifeguards had the same mix of real-world pursuits that they do now: they were teachers, firefighters, peace officers, college students. Hahn considered studying law or architecture but decided on education, and graduated from St. John’s University with a teaching certificate in 1964. He taught American and European history for 36 years at Jonas E. Salk Middle School and MacArthur and Division Avenue high schools in Levittown, retiring from Division in 2000.
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