Visitors to Royal Palms on August 21 saw a particularly large paddle out, a touching ceremony by the surfing community to honor the passing of one of their own.
This seaborne memorial of some 200 surfboards was for San Pedro’s Derek Traeger, a county lifeguard, who was killed August 14 when his motorcycle was hit by a car on the 405. He was only 28, but from the outpouring of grief, he was already a well-established figure along Los Angeles County beaches.
Flag ceremony and memorial service for ocean lifeguard Derek Traeger at the Venice Beach Lifeguard Station. (photo: fire.lacounty.gov)
Traeger, who graduated from San Pedro High in 2012 and attended CSU Long Beach, was a six-year county lifeguard veteran, following nine years as a junior lifeguard and two years as a cadet. He was assigned to the northern part of Santa Monica Beach at the time of his death; the lifeguards formed a procession when his body was transported from the morgue to a funeral home in Lomita.
“Traeger understood better than most what it means to wear the red trunks,” according to a county lifeguard statement. “His passion for life, art, the ocean, and his lifeguard family was evident in every moment he lived.” The county thanked all those who attended the paddle out to “celebrate the life of a great waterman.”
Derek Traeger. (photo: LACFD Lifeguard Div./Twitter)
The Santa Monica Mirror reported hundreds of “heartfelt” messages on social media. One person wrote, “LACO Lifeguard division just lost one of its most influential, natural-born leaders. Traeger was a (darn) good lifeguard, a craftsman, he was a unifier, he led by example, and he didn’t shy away from any challenge he was faced with. I can only hope my kids follow Traeger’s path.”
Traeger, who also was a swim instructor, was a member of San Pedro High’s swim and surf teams. He was surf team captain, and after coaching him for four years, Richard Wagoner got to know him well.
“Derek was a wild kid when it came to surfing and skating,” Wagoner says. “He was one of the kids who would ‘bomb’ hills on a long skateboard and go for the big waves in the surf. He basically had no fear when it came to activities.
“But he was a gentle soul, always willing to be part of whatever needed to be done. Always competing in surf meets without needing to be asked twice, in the water for practice every day. He loved life and loved living life. My understanding is that he took that attitude into his job lifeguarding.
“There are few people like Derek. We are all the worse off with his passing, but all the better off that we knew him.”
Rebel Without a Cause
Balancing the sadness of in memoriam columns is the joy I get hearing from readers, which is why my email address always has been included at the end of every column.
Readers often supply column material, which happened again after I recently wrote about the Civil War veterans buried at Harbor View Memorial Park. It turns out that the 11 former Union soldiers buried there have a Confederate in their midst.
San Pedro’s Rebecca Moran, secretary and registrar of the local United Daughters of the Confederacy, wrote to tell me about William Hiddle Smith, who died June 5, 1917, at age 83 in San Pedro and is buried with his wife at Harbor View.
The simple marker has only their names and dates. According to Moran, Smith was identified as a Confederate veteran a few years ago when the UDC’s state chapters were involved in a project to locate graves of former Rebel soldiers buried in local cemeteries.
Smith was a sergeant in Company C of the 2nd Nitre Bureau in Mississippi. Now I always considered myself fairly knowledgeable regarding the Civil War, but I’d never heard of a nitre (or niter) unit. Wikipedia informed me that the Niter and Mining Corps supplied the Confederate Army with the minerals and metals needed for the war effort. (Niter is another term for potassium nitrate, also known as saltpeter, a major component of gunpowder.) Whether Smith actually participated in any combat will probably never be known, but we know he enlisted in 1861 and was discharged in 1865.
A native of Scotland, he had lived in San Pedro for eight years, probably to be with his children. Besides his wife, he was survived by a daughter and a son, who, according to the obituary in the News-Pilot, was a blacksmith working for the government on the dredger and at Fort MacArthur.
Smith’s obituary ends, “He was beloved by all who knew him.”
Much thanks to Moran. In addition to the UDC, she is affiliated with Daughters of the American Revolution, Daughters of the War of 1812, and the Jamestowne Society. I suspect we’ll be in contact again. spt
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