NY’s Longest-Standing YMCA Employee is on the UWS: Teaching and Saving Lives For 54 Years

By Andrea Sachs

Hugo Salhuana, 71, is a modest man.

Although he has rescued at least a dozen people from drowning during his long career at the West Side YMCA, it makes him uncomfortable to talk about it. “I don’t want to keep a record of things like that,” he says. “I don’t want extra credit for something that is my job.”

Hugo, the head swim coach, swimming instructor, and lifeguard at the West Side Y on 63rd Street, admits with some embarrassment that when the organization gave him a plaque years ago to honor one particularly heroic rescue, he never displayed it: “It’s still in the box.”

This Valentine’s Day, Hugo will celebrate his 54th anniversary at the West Side Y, a longer tenure than any other staff member there or at any of the 24 branches of the YMCA of Greater New York. That’s a long time in the water, sports fans.

Hugo has instructed and guarded thousands of West Siders of all ages. As Kathryn Colglazier, Executive Director of the West Side YMCA, puts it, “It’s hard to imagine that any New Yorker has done more than Hugo to reduce the risk of drowning in our incredible city.”

If anyone was ever destined to become a swimmer, it was Hugo. He grew up on his grandparent’s farm south of Lima, Peru, 15 minutes from the Pacific Ocean. “I loved the water,” he recalls. “One of the things I liked the most was coming home from school, taking off my shoes and going out, walking barefoot, finding a creek or water hole, and playing with the rest of the guys.”

In the mid-1960s, when he was 11 years old, Hugo moved with his Peruvian mother to the Upper West Side. The two lived on West 71^st Street between Broadway and West End. “We had a one-bedroom ground apartment in a brownstone with a backyard, for $30 a week,” Hugo says. “After a year or so, the landlord wanted to raise the rent to $33. My mother yelled at him, and he took it down to $32.”

When Hugo’s mother bought him a membership at the YMCA for $25, little did she know that it would set her son on a path for life. “I started coming here to swim, to do gymnastics and just to be with kids my own age,” recalls Hugo. At that time, the organization was for men only, and members had the option to swim nude. (“Not my first choice,” he admits. “I was shy.”)  Hugo became a proud member of the Aquatics Leaders Club, which also allowed him to help instructors teach younger children to swim.

At 18 years old, he was hired as a lifeguard.

In the decades since, Hugo has fine-tuned the skills of innumerable Upper West Siders, guiding both neophyte swimmers and competitive ones on swim teams. The art of teaching young kids? “You cannot work them too hard,” says Hugo. “They only last a little bit here, a little bit there. Play has to be included now and then. You can’t be too strict with them.”  Because swimming is such a low-impact sport, he says, you can swim to any age. “One time, I had a student who was 100 years old. She just wanted a little coaching, so I did some private lessons with her for a month or so. I felt privileged. Not too many people get a chance to work with someone at that age, in swimming or any other sport.”

Hugo has lived on 98th and Broadway for 47 years. Naturally, he has seen some big changes on the Upper West Side. In the old days, he says, “the vibe was different, and it made me a little nervous to go past West 79th Street sometimes,” he admits. In those days, that was the deep end of the pool.

During his record-breaking YMCA career, Hugo has also had the opportunity to swim around Manhattan (“The water in the East River is not as clean as the Hudson”), to befriend foreign visitors to the Y and show them around NYC (“I’ve found out that the two favorite places for Europeans are Coney Island and the Brooklyn Bridge”), and to rub elbows with some celebrities along the way: “I got to meet John Kennedy Jr.,” reports Hugo. “He was taking private scuba diving lessons. He walked in with two big guys behind him with suits. I was the lifeguard. I shook his hand. I haven’t washed it yet.”

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