A lifetime of swimming and service

By WIll SHEElINE wsheeline@liherald.com

When Barbara Holzkamp took a lifeguarding course in 1960, she had no idea that that it would result in a six-decade-long adventure in teaching others to swim.

Now at 81, the Glen Head resident has taught three generations of Sea Cliff, Glen Head and Glen Cove children and adults the skills of swimming, making her perhaps the most prolific swimming instructor in the history of the North Shore.

swim.” been working closely with the prosecution, asked Seybert for additional time to review the documents, requesting that the next court date be no earlier than the end of August. The judge agreed, and scheduling Santos’ next appearance for Sept. 7.

After graduating from Oneonta in 1963, she married her husband, William, and the young couple moved to Suffolk County, where Barbara worked at Sachem Central School District as a teacher. She also worked at the Tekakwitha Girl Scout Camp in Hampton Bays for two summers.

In May, Santos was released on a $500,000 bond and surrendered his passport after he pleaded not guilty to 13 counts of wire fraud, money laundering, theft of public funds and making materially false statements to the U.S. House of Representatives. Although he had stated that he would rather face jail time than release the identities of the bond’s co-signers, the court unsealed their identities: Santos’

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Holzkamp grew up in Glen Cove, where she learned to swim in the local harbor. She said she was always a strong swimmer, and in her freshman year of college at SUNY Oneonta she took the lifeguarding course that changed her life — and the lives of hundreds of people she eventually turned into swimmers.

RICHaRd GalatI

Glen Head resident

Throughout her early years as a swimming instructor, Holzkamp taught people how to swim not in pools, but in the ocean. At Tekakwitha, and in her subsequent work at the Glen Cove YMCA and as waterfront director for the Smithtown YMCA, none of the locations had pools, so she had to make do and work with swimmers in local harbors and park beaches.

“At college you had to have passed a swimming course in order to graduate, so when I took the class I also took the lifeguarding class,” Holzkamp explained. “I immediately started teaching people how to

While working at the YMCAs, Holzkamp said, she taught children and adults, and even one woman who was 84. She remembered one young man who took her course because he wanted to join the Navy, and another elderly man who wanted to learn so he could swim with his grand -

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