Robert “Domino” Speca has set world records for domino toppling. The Ocean City Beach Patrol guard intends to set a new world record, 333,333 dominoes, this year.

OCEAN CITY – Back in the day, he was a competitive swimmer, a star at the University Pennsylvania. After graduation, he trained for and competed in 14 Ironman triathlons. He traveled to Hawaii and other exciting locales and appeared on the Wide World of Sports.
He’s competed in over 150 marathons, and even completed the torturous Western States 100 Mile Trail Run. He’s coached swimmers who have won Gold medals. A model of endurance and athleticism, Robert “Domino” Speca - a legend on the Park Place beach - began his 31st summer as a member of the Ocean City Beach Patrol this year.
A physics teacher in the Marple Newton school district, Speca embodies patience and discipline too, having set the original Guinness Book of World Records record for domino toppling in 1974. In the ensuing years, others have topped him, and he’s come back and topped them.
Should someone want to sponsor him, Speca, who established the record with 11,111 dominoes and last held the record with 111,111, is looking to set a new record with 333,333 dominoes.
“That would triple it, and it’s a nice round number,” said Speca, who needs to top 305,000 dominoes to set a new record.
“Domino” is a nickname given to him by his Penn fraternity - Delta Kappa Epsilon, DKE - brothers. So what is it about his favorite pastime, setting up elaborate designs with dominoes, only to topple them?
Speca acknowledges that, for some, it ranks right up there with goldfish-eating and flagpole sitting, but for him, it’s all about the hypnotic thrill of watching – and hearing - the dominoes fall and the complicated engineering and physics necessary to make it happen.
It goes beyond figure eights, ramps and triple and super peel offs, when you’re doing live television, filming commercials and entertaining crowds, you need mechanics; high dives, mousetraps, Tarzan swings, inverted cascades, elevators and even “Six days to Sunday” and “Up the Mountain,” because dominoes really can fall up.
He launched the domino-toppling craze that began three decades ago, appeared on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, That’s Incredible, On the Road with Charles Kuralt, The Arsenio Hall Show, Super Dave Osbourne, Reading Rainbow, Mr. Rogers and the Ellen Degeneres Show. He’s written a book, “Championship Domino Toppling” and through his efforts, set up dominoes on the Great Wall of China and knocked them down with Ted Pryor and Jackie Gleason.  
Dominoes came into his life as a sophomore at Marple Newton High School when his teacher Mr. Dobransky asserted that the math induction theory – a deductive method of proof holding that if the first number in a proposition proves out, every other number in a long line will prove out - was analogous to having an infinite number of dominoes fall.
“He said proving it was not unlike pushing over the first domino,” he said. “If you had an infinite row of dominoes and they started toppling, they would never reach the end, even though they fall 100 times faster than they are set up.”
“I wanted to prove the theory,” he said.
Speca was hooked for life. He was intrigued enough to go out that afternoon and buy four boxes of dominoes. He hurried home and cleared off a table in the den and lined up 112 dominoes.
“Click, click, click …” was all it took. “What if I set them up in an even longer line?”
His ambitions grew as his domino collection grew. Pretty soon he was out of the den and in the basement, a large territory to try all kinds of new things. In three years he collected 5,000 dominoes.
“I discovered that one domino could knock over two or three others, in different directions,” he said. “Dominoes can fall uphill and can split off in two lines to ensure the continuation of the chain.”
He introduced different sizes of dominoes to achieve greater effects, once bicycling seven miles to Kiddie City after wiping out the local stores.
The dominoes were falling at a rate of 35 per second, and soon the Speca’s, Angel and Bob, were entertaining hundreds of people who came to see the latest toppling. A newspaper story in the County Leader led to an appearance on the Tonight Show. Carson told Speca that he loved to topple dominoes too.
From there, he established the world record. The number 11, he said, was his “lucky number” and he likes things in multiples of 11. With nothing to shoot for, as he was entering unchartered territory, he chose 11,111. It took 11 hours to set up over 400 boxes of dominoes, which included, among other things, the American flag, ram’s horns, figures eights, DNA chains, triple intersections and sweeping curves.
Fate and the science of momentum were with him and he set the record, but the publicity alerted some like-minded geniuses in Seattle, who topped him with 13,832.
Speca built a 15,000 domino chain for David Frost Presents and then topped himself with 22,222 dominoes that took him 19 hours to set up. That put him in the Guinness book for 1977.
“The game of one-upmanship went international,” he said.
A Brit topped him with 33,000, he came back with 55,555 at the Palestra on the Penn campus and helped underwrite his college education with television and shopping center appearances.
“Not only was it fun, it was lucrative,” he said. He’s earned money and raised thousands of dollars for charity.
He set up 100,000 dominoes at the Manhattan Center, which took 11 days to prepare. Speca stood back and let them go merrily on their way until a card fell from the pocket of an ABC cameraman, striking a domino and starting an independent chain.
“I froze in disbelief,” he said, as the final act happened without him. Fortunately, he lost only 2,500 dominoes and still set a record with 97,500.
In Denver, in 1981 he set up 111,111, his largest topple to date.
Speca said domino toppling requires immense amounts of science, discipline and patience. He majored in astronomy, the physics of the universe, a big plus, but he credits his parents and teachers for instilling discipline.   
Dominoes took him a long way, but looking for something more permanent, Speca sought a teaching job and landed at Academy Park High School in Sharon Hill, Pa. A few years later his old science teacher retired, creating an opening at Marple Newtown.
“It was like ‘Welcome Back Kotter,’ I’m back where I started, teaching the kids of people I went to school with,” he said. “Sometimes I hear ‘you used to date my mother.’”
He lives in Conshohoken, Pa., with his wife Mary Rose, “Moser,” and a Golden Retriever named Cheyenne.
Teaching blends with lifeguarding seamlessly, said Speca.
“The last day of school I teach, the next day I’m on the beach,” he said. “Summer ends, one day I’m guarding and the next I’m teaching.”
No matter where life has taken him, Speca has returned, summer after summer to Ocean City. Even in his glory days, Speca had doubts he’d still be sitting a stand so many years later.
He was a rookie guard in 1979, and an unlikely one at that, but he needed to train to stay competitive.
His fraternity brothers encouraged him to give it a shot. After all, he broke school records in the pool, why not try the ocean?
“It’s kind of weird,” he said. “I burn easily and I don’t like the heat. I stay in the shade. I’m not a ‘gotta ride a wave kind of guy,’ I don’t like salt water. I like chlorinated water and pool decks. I don’t like sand. I want linen on the beach. Everything most people crave, I don’t like.”
“I wasn’t born with sand in my shoes,” he added.  
So what is it about guarding that lures him back?
“People,” he said. “I like the camaraderie. I like my fellow guards and I like the people on the beach. That’s why I love guarding.”
Leah Varvaro is a junior at West Chester University and his stand partner on the Fourth of July. She said working with “Domino” is fun.
“He has a lot of stories,” she said. “He’s really funny, and sometimes he sings and dances.”
Over the years, Speca has gotten to know many of those whose lives he protects day in and day out, summer after summer. He’s watched children grow up, and sadly, some of his closest beach buddies die off. Of his fellow guards, he said they’re all the best and he would do anything to help them.
“Once a guard, always a guard,” he said. “It’s like a fraternity.”
‘I’ve had an interesting life,” he said.
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