Lifeguard Gets Belated Honors for ’34 Rescue

HUNTINGTON BEACH —  Bert Harding Jr., 75, can barely see. He is hard of hearing, suffers from diabetes, and has a disc problem in his back that makes it hard for him to get around his Munster Street home.

But this is the man the Huntington Beach Community Services Commission will honor next month for his rescue of two men who nearly died when their boat ran out of gas and was ripped to shreds by the crackling surf.

It was no septuagenarian miracle. The rescue happened back in 1934, when Harding was 17. He has waited more than half a century for this recognition.

“I never so much as got a thank-you note from the city,” said the retired oil tool mechanic, real estate broker, and acrobatic pilot.

At the time of the rescue, Harding was “surfing my merry way and didn’t much care” about plaques and citations, he said.

But oversights have a way of gnawing at a man through the decades. At the urging of a friend, Harding decided to push his own cause half a century after the fact, and city officials agreed it was better late than never to reward his efforts.

“I get very emotional about this,” Harding said as his eyes filled and a tear fell onto photocopies of articles about the rescue and letters about the award. “I’m very proud.”

The rescue came late in a Sunday afternoon in the summer of 1934. He was resting on the beach after hours of riding the waves when he heard the phone ring at the lifeguard station. There was no lifeguard to be seen, so Harding, an off-duty lifeguard, answered.

“I thought it might be trouble,” he said. “And I was right.”

Within minutes, Harding dived from the end of the pier into the choppy ocean, swimming about 50 yards to reach a broken-down, 25-foot fishing boat, which was being tossed around by huge breakers. He climbed aboard to find two frightened young men who said they couldn’t swim.

Harding tied ratty canvas and cork life preservers around the necks of 21-year-old David Russell and 22-year-old Charles Wright, both from Inglewood. He coaxed them to jump and told them to hold tight to the red, torpedo-shaped rescue copper buoy that Harding was pulling by a seven-foot rope.

As the waves broke, Harding grabbed the men’s collars, and told them to “kick like hell.” To keep their mind off the danger, the trio sang 15 rounds of “She’ll Be Comin’ Round the Mountain.” Meanwhile, the sea tore the boat to shreds.

Two hours later and two miles down the beach, Harding pulled Russell and Wright to safety.

“I was too young to be scared,” the 6-foot-2, silver-haired man recalled. “Didn’t have enough sense.”

Although an executive at Standard Oil Co., where Harding’s father worked, said he would nominate the teen-ager for the Carnegie Foundation’s heroism award, nothing ever came of it. The city “hushed it up,” according to Harding, because no lifeguard was on the beach when he took the call.

So nearly 60 years later, at the urging of lifelong friend Al Watkins, Harding went down to the city’s lifeguard station to ask for his just reward.

Sure enough, Marine Safety Capt. Bill Richardson found record of the rescue in his archives. He asked the city’s Community Services Commission to make a special award for the retired rescuer.

“They didn’t do what they should have done and we’re trying to set it right,” Richardson said.