Duke

The long combers of the Pacific were holding their usual stately parade into Laguna Beach, Calif. Luxuriating on the sands lay seminaked figures, brown with bathing, supple with youth, ripple-thewed from exercise. Watching the rollers lazily, the loafing ones would watch little figures scooting shoreward at the forefoot of a comber, lying flat in the foam or poised excitingly erect on flying surf boards.

Out through the surf put a gasoline launch, the Thelma, with a fishing party aboard. The beach crowd watched her careen on the breakers, herded to the water's edge when the boat capsized. Good swimmers ran splashing out, split the first wave with a dive, plowed off to the rescue.

In the lead swam a figure darker than the most deeply sunburned, an Hawaiian duke, Kahanamoku of Olympic fame. Before him, as he swam, he pushed his long surf board.

Five of the capsized fisherman had drowned before the swimmers reached them, but it was no trick at all for Kahanamoku and his followers to buoy up 13 survivors, drag them across their boards, catch a wave and rush their gasping passengers ashore in relays. The exhibition bore out, surprisingly soon, a recent pronouncement of the U. S. President (TIME, June 1, THE PRESIDENCY), that swimming "in itself constitutes a useful accomplishment."