Category: Life On The Jersey Shore

DR HELEN JONES

2/3/2018

In the mid 1970s, I worked for two years as the Director of a grant-funded Oral History Project on Women in Medicine at the Medical College of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia (formerly the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania and the last medical school in the country to go co-ed; currently part of the Drexel University College of Medicine). In that capacity, and as co-editor of a book that included several oral history interviews resulting from that project, I learned quite a bit about the history of women in medicine in the United States and the obstacles these pioneers encountered in their attempts to achieve their career goals. I am, you might say, something of an expert.

So I felt more than a little sheepish when it only recently crossed my mind that my childhood pediatrician, Dr Helen E Jones, was a part of that history; and that even being her patient, at a time when only a tiny fraction of physicians were women, was an unlikely feature of my childhood. I immediately recognized this topic as a potential blog entry. Almost as immediately, I recognized that despite my vivid visceral memories of Dr. Jones - her strawberry blonde curls, her small physique, her all-business demeanor, and of course all those injections! - I knew next to nothing about the biographical details of her life or the hardships she must have endured to obtain her credentials and establish a thriving medical practice in a small coastal New Jersey town.

Having gotten as far as I could with google and the archives of the Asbury Park Press, I consulted two main additional sources. One was my friend Sandra Chaff, Archivist-Director of the MCP Archives and Special Collections on Women and Medicine at the time I worked on the oral history project, who was fierce about finding and preserving documents, photographs, and artifacts relating to the history of women physicians. The other was a Facebook Shark River Hills nostalgia site several of whose members were also patients of Dr Jones and were generous in sharing their recollections.

I am now happy to report that with a little help from my friends (thanks, guys!), I have cobbled together at least a blogs-worth of information about the elusive Dr Jones. And I am especially happy to post it on February 3, National Women Physicians Day, celebrated on the birthday of Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman to graduate from medical school in the US and a trailblazer in promoting medical education for women throughout her life.

* * * * *

Helen Elizabeth Jones was born on October 15, 1918 in Scranton, PA, the middle of three children of Horace I Jones and Norma A Johns Jones. When Helen was three, the family moved to Asbury Park, where her father taught at Asbury Park High School for many years. Her mother was a musician and teacher who ran her own private school.

After her graduation from Asbury Park High School, wishing to see more of the country, she enrolled in premedical studies at the University of Michigan. She also joined the Psychology and German clubs during her days in Ann Arbor and pursued music and dramatics as well. During her summers at the Jersey Shore she worked as an assistant at a first aid station at the beach.

In September of 1940 she enrolled in Temple University School of Medicine - one of around 10 women in a class of 104. “Gone are the carefree college days,” intoned Dr John B Roxby in his welcoming speech. “You have chosen a great but difficult path, and the travail which lies ahead is of a quantity which may defy your present imagination.” Along with the demands described by Dr Roxby, additional clouds hung on the horizon. The prospect of American entry into World War II loomed larger every day and became a reality at the end of 1941, with the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The Wagner-Murray-Dingell bill of 1943 was as unsuccessful as succeeding socialized medicine proposals but nonetheless caused uneasiness and fear of the unknown.

Skull (Temple Medical School yearbook), Dec, 1943, Helen E Jones.

Helen’s graduation photo appears in the December 1943 yearbook - possibly on an accelerated schedule to accommodate a wartime need for medical personnel. The accompanying text notes that she was known as “Jonesy” to her close friends and that her special interests were in pediatrics and obstetrics,

During the latter half of her senior year she interned at the Chestnut Hill Hospital in Philadelphia. Following graduation she interned at the Jersey City Medical Center.

At the end of 1944, she started posting notices in the Asbury Park Press that her offices at 617 7th Avenue, located in her home in Asbury Park, would open for business on January 2, 1945, with office hours 2-4 and 7-9pm, and on Sundays by appointment.

Asbury Park Press, 0ct 11 1954. This photo shows Dr Jones (center, holding baby) exactly as I remember her.

In addition to her regular pediatric practice, over the years she took on additional duties, serving on the staff of the Jersey Shore Medical Center in Neptune for nearly 30 years, as school physician in Ocean Township starting in 1957, and as pediatrician to the Asbury Park Well Baby Clinic for 20 years. She was a member of the American and New Jersey Medical Societies and the New Jersey Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Asbury Park Press, Apr 30, 1974, shortly before her retirement.

In 1974, Helen’s brother-in-law accepted a position in California and Helen decided to head west with him and her sister. "I'm worn out physically," she told the Asbury Park Press of her nearly 30 years as a pediatrician, adding that her own physician had advised her to give up her private practice. “It was impossible to retire here," she continued. "I did try to cut down, but it didn't work. Children don't get sick according to a schedule. Pediatrics is a day and night, seven days a week profession. Out in California I will be working eight hours a day, five days a week."

Dr Jagdish Bharara took over her practice in New Jersey, and Helen sold her house in Deal Park.

On May 19, 1974, Helen began her new 40-hours-a-week “day job,” which involved working with what were then described as “retarded and emotionally disturbed children” at Camarillo State Hospital. At the time she arrived, Dr Ivor Lovaas, a pioneer in the application of behavior analytic techniques to autistic children, was at the peak of his career at Camarillo State, so whether or not she worked with him directly, it is impossible that she wasn’t touched by his somewhat controversial use of both rewards and punishments to encourage language skills and reduce self-injurious behavior. It would be interesting to know what she thought of his research-oriented approach, in contrast to the treatment model that had guided her own career.

Helen Elizabeth Jones died on December 17, 1993 in El Dorado, Placerville, California, at the age of 75. Four years later Camarillo State Hospital permanently shuttered its doors.

* * * * *

One of my fellow denizens of Shark River Hills volunteered: “I remember…the shots in the butt!” Another posted this recollection: “I always went into a panic as soon as I smelled the rubbing alcohol. I broke away from her assistant once and ran around the exam room with the syringe hanging off my butt.” Except for the added fillip about the syringe, this funny-but-sad scenario exactly mirrors my own recollection of my mom and Dr Jones's assistant chasing my little sister around the room as she too made a desperate attempt to escape the dreaded needle.

Although I was too wimpy to engage in such hijinks, I had my own personal nickname for Dr. Jones that still comes more naturally to my tongue than her given name: “Fanny Jones” (yes, for the obvious reason). If you think you detect an undertone of affection in that sobriquet, you would be quite wrong. And yet she never did me any harm; indeed, she probably saved my life on more than one occasion. The only thing I can say in extenuation of my youthful animus is that I remember her as rather severe, so the pain she inflicted was not much tempered by warmth or playfulness.

No one likes having a shot, but I cannot remember this level of needle-phobia in the days when I took my own daughters to the doctor. Did we have to endure more shots in those days? I may be exaggerating but I can’t remember a visit to Dr Jones that didn’t include at least one shot. Although the number of vaccine-preventable diseases is larger today than when I was a child, combinations such as diphtheria-pertussis-tetanus didn’t come into use until 1948; the shots and their boosters were given separately. Smallpox inoculations continued to be administered (remnants of my scar are still visible) until the late 1960s and beyond, even after the disease had been eradicated worldwide. The long-awaited vaccine that finally ended the terrors of polio became available in 1955, but the orally-administered version didn’t make its appearance until 1961. So - for awhile, yet another shot.

Non-routine shots were also commonplace - for example, tetanus boosters after injuries, such as I received after a dog bite when I was ten. (Telltale marks where Dr Jones cauterized the wounds can still be seen on my chin and neck - more battle scars!)

Although the antibacterial properties of the Penicillium fungus had been recognized for decades by the time the Scottish biologist Sir Alexander Fleming succeeded in culturing and concentrating it in 1928, it wasn’t until World War II that a form stable enough to be mass produced for clinical use was developed. Overuse of this miracle drug probably began almost immediately. I became seriously ill with bronchitis and pneumonia when I was in the first grade and Dr Jones arrived at our home every morning for two whole weeks (yes, Dr Jones made house calls!), clutching her black doctor’s satchel, to give me an injection. More than my fair share - so little wonder, perhaps, that I felt traumatized by my encounters with her!

Alternatively, is it possible that shots actually hurt more back then? Just about around the time I began my career as a pediatric patient, glass syringes with interchangeable parts, already a staple of medical practice, began to be mass-produced. Not until the mid-1950s were disposable plastic syringes introduced, eliminating the problem of contamination from improper sterilization; might they also have had a smoother action that reduced the ouch-factor? Or do newer manufacturing techniques produce finer and sharper needles than were available in the 1940s? Does modern medical training focus more on minimizing or distracting from the pain of injections? Just spinning out ideas here, but descriptions by diabetics of changes in insulin injections over time lend credence to the possibility that shots are less painful now than they used to be.

* * * * *

What led my mother to choose Dr Jones? I doubt she actively sought out a woman physician, but obviously it didn’t put her off, either. My guess is that when my sister was born in late January of 1945, Dr Jones - having hung out her shingle just three weeks earlier - attended her in the hospital. Perhaps my mother was dissatisfied with her current pediatrician, or perhaps she was attracted by the prospect of joining a new and relatively uncrowded practice. Perhaps she just plain liked Dr Jones, who, despite her failure to win me over, clearly had a way with mothers. Said one grateful mom when Dr Jones retired, "She takes the time necessary to examine the child and encourage and reassure the parents…. Quite simply, she is a good doctor in the highest sense of the word."

* * * * *

Helen Jones and the choices she made were typical of women physicians of her day. Although women overall were not welcome in the medical profession, pediatrics was considered a “soft” specially and therefore better suited to women than specialties engaging in heroic treatments of “really sick” patients, or involving surgery. Moreover, women who married were taken less seriously; unlike men, they were supposed to be “married” to their profession.

By the time Helen graduated from medical school, to be sure, these patterns were starting to crack a little. As a result of World War II, women were working outside the home in larger numbers, a trend that undoubtedly helped Helen build her practice. Helen was also fortunate in having as a role model a mother who ran her own business at a high professional level. Nonetheless, Helen played it safe, opting for a “soft” specialty and remaining single. Failure was probably not an option,

This is not in any way to imply that her choice of pediatrics was simply a matter of expediency. "Medicine is demanding,” she said, “but the thing that makes it all worthwhile is seeing a child grow up well and happy…. You become close to the children and they're almost like your own." She maintained a deep conviction of the larger importance of her work: "They will be the heads of state, one way or the other. You look at a little baby and realize that everybody who comes in contact with that child is going to have an influence on the development of his personality and character.”

Devoted as she was to her profession, Helen was not completely devoid of outside interests and activities. One of my Facebook “informants,” whose cousin worked for many years as Dr Jones’s receptionist, said that Dr Jones shared her home in Deal Park with her sister and brother-in-law, which afforded some presumably welcome companionship. Her mother’s daughter, she was an accomplished musician who played piano and organ. Other hobbies included collecting stamps, with an emphasis on those featuring opera and the history musical instruments; and caring for her two Yorkshire Terrier stud dogs, one of which took a first at the Westminster Dog Show in Madison Square Garden.

Did Helen’s busy pediatric practice - stampeding kids and all - add up to a full and rewarding professional life? Did her hobbies enrich her nonworking hours? Did she miss having children of her own or did she enjoy a little calm and quiet when she returned home in the evening? Did she indulge herself in a few precious moments at the piano communing with Chopin, or did she just drop into bed exhausted? Did her second career working with special-needs children and scaling back to a 40-hour work week in an easier climate give her a new lease on life?

I wonder.

I offer this blog entry not as a love letter, exactly, but as an expression of gratitude for the medical care I was fortunate to receive as a child and as an apology for the ill will I harbored against Dr Jones for no other reason than that she always seemed to be brandishing a needle.

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OUR PETS

1/20/2018

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We always had pets - at least one dog and one cat, and often more. A few of them show up in the famous Stodola Christmas cards.

Goldie and Penny - a holiday handful

I am ashamed to confess to having possibly contributed to the Stodola cat census via an acquisition method that could best be described as “Look what followed me home.” Never mind that I was covered with scratches from the process of persuading a reluctant feline to “follow” me home. I suppose I may have ended up keeping one or two of these kidnapped unfortunates; most, however, were truly feral animals that were mercifully (for all concerned) released back into the woods.

* * * * *

Before I was born, my parents adopted a kitten and pup duo my mom called Nip and Tuck. I don’t really remember them, but I do know that was the last time my mother ever had a chance to name our pets. After that my father took over, and he reigned supreme till we kids were old enough to join in the name game.

None of those cute pair names like Nip and Tuck or Salt and Pepper or Whisky and Soda for him! Rather, finding something catchy to call our pets was only a starting point for the prolonged discussion by which, through some cabalistic process, we eventually arrived at their true titles. So it turned out that Perky the tabby was really Percopolis, Penny the little car-chasing spaniel was Lady Penelope Penny van Pennysworth, Laurie the goofy boxer was Laurelita von Sniffnwoof, and Goldie, our gentle giant of a yellow tom, was actually John Timothy McGoldrick.

My dad came by this practice honestly. I can’t remember a time when his own mother didn’t have a calico cat capable of prolific reproduction, and although we always knew each in this long succession of creatures as "Orrie," their collective official name was Aurora Borealis. My grandmother charged $5 for each of Orrie's kittens, claiming they were much easier to place if you sold them than if you gave them away; somehow, to my mother's eternal amazement, my grandmother succeeded in selling out every litter.

* * * * *

Sharing!

My mother always claimed not to like pets very much but anyone who watched her with them knew better. (Not that we children could believe anyone could possibly dislike the little guys. It wasn’t till I was an adult with kids of my own that I learned how much work they could be, especially dogs, even if you adored them. Guess who sheltered me from that knowledge!)

One dog-related task that I always participated in enthusiastically, however, was a regular Saturday morning session that somehow turned into a bizarre father-daughter bonding ritual. No one had ever heard of Lyme disease then - perhaps it wasn't even a recognized diagnosis yet - but living at the Jersey Shore meant lots and lots of ticks, and the ones we knew best were dog ticks. When the season started in the Spring, my father filled a glass jelly jar with kerosene and then sat on the cellar stairs with a dog between his knees, tweezers in hand and his daughter at his side, watching with abject fascination. As the season wore on, the jar would become filled, with both the athletic little black ones that had barely had a chance to latch on and the large bloated white ones that had been gorging on dog blood for days. By the end of the season my father would happily display his trophy collection to anyone unwary enough to feign an interest in the process.

* * * * *

Of course we had a succession of nameless fish and turtles, but can you call a box turtle a pet? Every summer we found a few good-sized box turtles lumbering along the roadside - easily distinguished from their surly snapping cousins by their much sweeter faces and dispositions. We kept them in a box for a few days, painting our initials on their backs and feeding them lettuce, then released them and waited to see if they would return the following year. That seldom happened - though I once found one with someone else's initials!

Other non-pets included the fireflies we kept in jars by our bedside, watching dreamily as they lit up the room after dark.

Beyond that, my many rather elaborate efforts to catch and adopt wildlife were uniformly unsuccessful. For some reason a squirrel was at the top of my wish list. No one ever explained to me that our pets were bred to be infantilized, and that wild animals could not readily be tamed; or if anyone did I didn't listen.

* * * * *

One of my all-time favorite pets was Archie the parakeet. Parakeets (or budgerigars) are small parrots living wild in the drier regions of Australia. They have been bred in captivity since the 1850s, but for some reason a parakeet craze swept the nation in the 1950s and early 1960s. Our Asbury Park Woolworth’s was literally atwitter with colorful creatures awaiting adoption - green (the wild type, like Archie), but also blue and yellow and white that had been bred for variety. I longed for a parakeet the moment I saw their comical little faces, and since in our house longing was usually the prelude to receiving, sure enough, the coveted cage awaited me on Christmas morning.

How I loved Archie!

Although we were familiar enough with marine creatures, birds had never before been part of our family menagerie, so without warning I was introduced to the mysteries of cuttlebone, sandpaper tubes to cover perches, how to hand-feed a parakeet without getting pecked, and (less alluring) the weekly cage cleaning requirement.

But what really excited me was that you could supposedly teach your parakeet to talk. Forget about canaries; I wanted my bird to converse with me, not serenade me. Unfortunately, either Archie wasn’t the brightest budgie in the flock, or more likely we weren't systematic enough to train him properly. For whatever reason, we never succeeded in turning Archie into much of a raconteur.

He did, however, have one notable verbal accomplishment. In those days when you wanted to make a telephone call, you picked up the receiver and the operator (a real human, and always a woman) said “Number, please.” Almost all our numbers began with “Asbury Park two,” the local exchange, followed by four additional digits that uniquely specified the recipient. Archie’s cage hung right over the telephone, and Archie became quite adept at saying the three little words he heard most often, “Asbury Park two.”

Sadly, Archie came to a bad end at the claws of one of our mama cats. I was devastated and insisted on wearing a black armband to school.

* * * * *

The invention of kitty litter in 1947 by a man named Edward Lowe changed cat ownership forever, in ways that went far beyond which side of the door the cat spent the night on. Before kitty litter, cats were workers who earned their keep by keeping rodents at bay; since kitty litter they have become fur babies who, if we’re lucky, curl up with us at night.

In my childhood home and I'm sure in many other homes of the late 1940s and early 1950s, however, this new invention hadn't quite caught on yet. I also don’t remember the practice of routinely neutering male cats, though females were generally spayed. Consequently, there was no such thing then as what we would now call an indoor cat, and life with a tom involved a lot of patching up.

So it was with John Timothy McGoldrick, son of one of the many Orrie's and a wondrous beast with totally contrasting outdoor and indoor personalities. Outdoors, birds feared him, and rightly so. Indoors, he drooled like a baby and happily let Archie perch on his head, purring all the while.

He did, however, have a disconcerting habit of disappearing for days at a time, and as he grew older his absences grew longer. The day my parents finally left the house on Pinewood Drive to move to Long Island, Goldie was nowhere to be found. All the neighbors were asked to watch for Goldie and notify us immediately if he turned up, but he never did.

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A HOLIDAY GIFT FROM SEARS

12/20/2017

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Excitement reigns among nostalgia buffs: As of the 2017 holiday season, the iconic Sears Wish Book is back! Well, sort of. It’s mainly accessible online, but the retailers (subsumed by Kmart in 2005) assure us that “Sears’s best customers will also get a limited edition copy in the mail.” Mine hasn’t arrived yet - guess it would take more than a couple of stops at the Sears watch repair counter to qualify for "best customer" status.

* * * * *

Richard Warren Sears sent out the first flyer for his mail order watch and jewelry business in 1888. He soon branched out into other merchandise, and by 1894 his modest mailer had evolved into a catalog. In 1896 the catalog grew even larger and started coming out twice a year. In 1897 a color section was added. An American tradition was born.

The Sears catalog proceeded to do for mail-order shopping what amazon.com later did for online shopping. In our house, as in many others, the arrival of the Big Book was truly an event. Twice a year, an enormous tome, 2-3” thick, was stuffed into our mailbox, in plenty of time for us to order our back-to-school wardrobe, our Easter finery, and our summertime shorts and halters. My sisters and I pored over its offerings, hoping they would make us look like the models in the pictures. Our choices bookmarked, we measured our chests, waists, and hips (which in fact were all about the same circumference in those days) and traced the outlines of our feet, all in a quest for the perfect fit. Our mom meticulously filled out the order form, which often spilled over onto two or three pages, carried it out to our mailbox, and raised the red flag to alert the carrier to the presence of outgoing mail. Then, biting our nails, we awaited the arrival of our precious cargo.

My all-time favorite was a dress that had also been purchased by the beauteous Ruth Ann, a classmate with an enviable put-together look - not a strand of hair would dare try to escape from her hip-length flaxen braids. The dress featured a quilted blue vest layered over a puffy-sleeved blouse adorned with red polkadots; an enormous red bow at the neck completed the look. It was actually singularly unflattering and made me look like Howdy Doody's twin sister (nothing was ever unflattering to Ruth Ann); but I was proud to share my sartorial taste with this etherial creature and always experienced a frisson of pleasure whenever the two of us showed up wearing "our" dress on the same day.

Although the clothing and toy sections were Sears's little-girl magnets, the catalog also featured sewing machines, sporting goods, musical instruments, saddles, firearms, buggies, bicycles, baby carriages, and oh, so much more. My parents swore by Sears products. As a young adult just starting out on my own, I inherited an ancient Kenmore vacuum cleaner from my parents when they upgraded to a newer model Kenmore. Mine looked like a torpedo, and old as it was, amazingly you could still buy any replacement part you needed. My husband and I used it till we decided we could afford something with more features - disposable bags and a shape better suited to navigating stairs were the big selling points, as I recall. It may have been a mistake; we never had a more reliable vacuum cleaner.

The vacuum cleaner is long gone, but I still have my mother’s Franklin Deluxe Rotary Model sewing machine in its original red-stained wooden cabinet, along with a box full of lethal-looking attachments with names like the Multiple Slot Binder, the Five Stitch Ruffler, the Underbraider, the Edgestitcher, and the Gathering Foot. Alone in an even bigger box is the Adjusting "Famous" Buttonhole Worker. The machine itself is an early electric model with a thigh-operated lever instead of a treadle. I learned to sew on it. Again, I replaced it not because it was broken but because I wanted some fancier and more user-friendly features. I haven’t plugged it in for half-a-century - I now use it to hold my inbox - but for all I know it still works.

They just don’t make ‘em like that anymore.

* * * * *

Sometime during the fall the Christmas catalog would arrive - the unofficial start of the holiday season, the stuff dreams were made of. This special edition concentrated in one place all the holiday-related merchandise from the Big Book - wax candles for trees, cards, ornaments, stockings, and artificial trees - along with additional items deemed to have an extra measure of gift-appeal. The first edition, in 1933, included the “Miss Pigtails” doll, a battery-powered toy automobile, a Mickey Mouse watch, fruitcakes, Lionel electric trains, a five pound box of chocolates, and real live singing canaries. Yes, it of course included many toys, but even more pages were devoted to gifts for adults. In 1968, in deference to a sobriquet already in wide public use, the book was rechristened the Wish Book.

The Sears folks were well aware that their catalogs were a potential treasure trove for anthropologists. In 1943, the year I was born, the Sears News Graphic referred to it as “a mirror of our times, recording for future historians today’s desires, habits, customs, and mode of living." Producers of Broadway shows and Hollywood movies still turn to the old Sears catalogs for help with retro styles and furnishings.

The Big Book was discontinued in 1993, but Sears was slow (too slow) to introduce online shopping and its fortunes dipped. Wishbook.com was launched in 1998, but the beloved print version wasn’t retired until 2011 - only to be revived this year by popular demand. Whether it will be reissued next year remains to be seen.

* * * * *

Sears's mail order business long preceded the Sears chain of retail stores, which didn’t start opening until 1925 (oddly presaging amazon’s current expansion to brick-and-mortar retailing; been in Whole Foods lately?). There was a Sears store in Asbury Park, memorable to me because my father once “lost” me while shopping in the hardware section. I wasn’t really very lost, of course, but I was frightened enough that a kindly clerk took it upon himself to reunite me with my dad a few aisles away. (My mother never, ever lost track of her children in a store!)

I can't remember why we didn't shop in the store more. I mean, why did we order our clothes from the catalog if we could go and try them on in the store? Perhaps there was no children's clothing department? Or only a limited selection of styles and sizes? All I know is that it never occurred to us not to catalog-shop. Perhaps it's the 20th century equivalent of ordering something on amazon.com that I could easily pick up in the drugstore.

* * * * *

In 1908 Sears outdid itself and started selling prefab houses, to be put together on site by the owner - a process that clearly took "assembly required" to a whole new level. About the only precondition was that the buyer live near enough to a railroad line so that the lumber, asphalt shingles, plaster and lath (later drywall), windows, flooring, hardware, and everything else needed for the project - around 30,000 pieces in all, including 750 pounds of nails and 27 gallons of paint, enough for 3 coats on the exterior - could be delivered in boxcars. Each part was numbered and had to be matched up with the extensive instructions and blueprints that came with the kit. Sears even provided financing; heating, plumbing, and electrical systems were extra. Decorating advice was available on request.

Sears was not the only purveyor of prefab houses nor even the first, but it was the largest and most diversified. Several editions of the 1908 Modern Homes catalog were issued, ending up with a selection of more than 40 house designs, with prices ranging from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars. By the time Modern Homes came to an end there were 447 models in all, according to the Sears Archives, in different sizes and architectural styles, stratified into three lines to accommodate different budgets. Some were only offered once; other more popular models were evergreens that reappeared year after year.

After absorbing many foreclosures during the Depression (to avoid giving the impression they were abandoning their customers!), Sears discontinued financing in 1934. In 1940 the last of the Modern Homes catalogs was published, but kits continued to be sold through 1942, including designs from the 1940 issue as well as new designs that had never appeared in the catalog. By then an estimated 100,000 had been built, many of which are now listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Before my recent visit to Shark River Hills, I emailed my childhood friend Bill to ask if he had any "then" photos to pair with the "now" photos I was planning to take. He responded with two photos of his family's home on South Riverside Drive, taken in 1949. His father later dug out the crawl space beneath the porch to extend the basement and enclosed the porch itself to provide more living space, so the house looks quite different today. But those changes were made after the Stodolas left Shark River Hills; these photos show the house as I remember it. Thanks, Bill!

In his narrative about the house's history, Bill also mentioned - much to my surprise - that it was one of several summer homes built in the 1930's by a developer from Sears kits shipped by rail to Belmar and then transported to Shark River Hills for assembly. Unlike his family's comfortable two-story home, said Bill, most of these houses were smaller, single-story affairs.

"That's the story I heard anyway," he added.

Unfortunately, it is not always easy to identify Sears homes. A few years after Sears stopped selling kits, all sales records were jettisoned. Some homeowners did not want it known that they lived in kit homes and destroyed the evidence. Sears offered reverse floor plans and encouraged buyers to customize - to swap out the siding material, to add a dormer - resulting in a certain lack of uniformity. Competing kit home manufacturers often copied design elements from one another, which can also contribute to confusion.

Still, there are a few markers - stamps on the lumber used for framing on houses built after 1916, shipping labels, a small circled "SR" cast into the lower corner of the bathtub in houses built during the 1930s, etc. - that can help to support or rule out a house's pedigree. Paperwork found in the home and legal documents can also provide clues, as can comparison with published house plans. And of course, unless the house was built between 1908 and 1942, it cannot be a Sears home. (See Rosemary Thornton's fascinating books on Sears houses for more help in verifying authenticity.)

Although New Jersey boasts many kit houses, I have yet to uncover any more information about the would-be Sears homes of Shark River Hills. Wouldn't it be cool to develop a Shark River Hills equivalent of this list of kit homes in my current hometown of Ann Arbor, Michigan, posted by Rosemary Thornton on her blog? On the other hand, it is well to bear in mind that many family legends are simply that, legends, and more people think they own Sears houses than actually do.

Perhaps a loyal reader will step forward to elaborate on the history provided by Bill and to identify additional Sears homes that might, just might, be hidden in plain sight in Shark River Hills.

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SHARK RIVER HILLS: A MOMENT IN TIME

11/21/2017

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Although people have been living in what is now Shark River Hills since Precolumbian times, its modern era dates back to July 8, 1923, the day that property in this shiny new resort area went on sale. The Shark River Hills Company had actually purchased and platted the 728 acre tract several years earlier, but initial attempts at development had faltered. Now the Company had placed its renewed hopes in the capable hands of Morrisey & Walker, Realtors. The realtors quickly proceeded to live up to their reputation for aggressive marketing, splashing a large ad in the Asbury Park Press on July 7 that proclaimed Shark River Hills to be nothing less than “the LAST HIGH-GRADE DEVELOPMENT NEAR ASBURY.” Parcels could be had for as little as $95, or $10 down and $10/month.

Asbury Park Press, July 7, 1923

Promotional fan, featuring the "Shark River Hills girl"

The pitch was primarily aimed at the summer crowd, who were lured by a vision of a vacation paradise and assured that building “YOUR bungalow on YOUR lot” was a better investment than a series of summer rentals. But those who wished to make Shark River Hills their “permanent house” were welcome as well, so long as their money was green.

* * * * *

"Uppie" Updegraff (Neptune Historical Museum)

A driving force behind this sales campaign was Alice “Uppie” Updegraff, the doyenne of Jersey Shore realtors. For years she commuted from her home in Matawan to her job at Morrisey & Walker in Asbury Park, but in 1924 she decided to set an example for her potential customers by buying - not just any house, but the oldest home in Shark River Hills, built in around 1913, a charming bungalow on Riverside Drive to which a garage was later added. The house appeared in many ads for Shark River Hills property. (Later still, the house was moved to its current location on Glenmere Avenue.)

I knew Uppie from practically the day I was born and have several pictures from a photoshoot on her lawn when I was 4 1/2 months old - me with my parents, me with Uppie's cat - all with her famous house looming in the background, blurred but visible. I suspect Uppie counted my mom and dad as being among a few hundred of her closest friends. More than once I heard the story of her comment when she first saw me as a baby: “Lots of head above the ears - just like her father.” I don’t give her much credit for phrenology; but for finding a way to admire a baby and flatter the baby's father at the same time, she definitely deserved the Dale Carnegie award for knowing how to win friends and influence new parents.

Uppie's home at 645 S Riverside Drive, the first home built in Shark River Hills

"Lots of head above the ears?" Uppie's home can be seen in the background

I remember Uppie as a tiny, wizened old lady though at the time she was probably about the same age as I am now. Living with her in the bungalow were her willowy daughter Virginia - also a real estate agent - and Virginia’s husband, the splendidly mustachioed Alphonse Tonietti.

I always found Alphonse a bit of an enigma, but with the help of my friend Joyce, who has a better memory than I do for these details, and my cousin Alan, who is a better scholar than I am, I've pieced together most of his story. Alphonse was born in 1896 in Basrah (then part of the Ottoman Empire), attended the American College in Beirut, Lebanon, and arrived in the US in 1921, where he graduated from the Columbia University School of Journalism. He went on to have what seems to have been a fairly distinguished career, working as editor of the Literary Digest Magazine and serving on the staffs of the New York World-Telegram and the New York Sun.

Then, in the mid-1930s, Alphonse achieved a measure of possibly unwanted fame when he was fired by the Italian language newspaper Il Progresso, followed by a lawsuit that was widely reported in the Communist and liberal press. Amazingly, he won his case and was reinstated with seven weeks' back pay, the Court finding that he had been discharged not because (as Il Progresso claimed) he didn't write in Italian - that had never been a requirement of his position as editor of the American page - but because of his activities as Chair of Il Progresso's chapter of the New York Newspaper Guild.

By the time I knew him, he had moved on to become the owner and operator of the Holy Land Art Company in New York City, a manufacturer of religious artifacts and fabrics. He died in his office on Murray Street in June of 1958, at the age of 61. Virginia Tonietti lived on for another thirty years; she never remarried.

Two details of more than passing interest are missing here - why Alphonse abandoned his journalism career in favor of selling religious objects; and even more intriguing, how on earth he managed to meet an all-American girl from the tiny hamlet of Shark River Hills, New Jersey and persuade her, in October of 1931, to become his bride.

* * * * *

When my parents decided to give up their rental unit on Clinton Place to buy a home of their own in 1947 or 1948, Uppie and Virginia were close at hand to shepherd them through the process. The house they chose was a modest bungalow on Pinewood Drive at the corner of Hampton Court. It seemed baronial to me at the time although it is currently listed on Zillow as being 1879 square ft, a number that includes two large porches that have now been enclosed and a substantial addition. So - a not-so-big house back then. According to Zillow it was built in 1908.

But wait! Wasn’t Uppie’s house, built in around 1913, supposed to be the oldest house in Shark River Hills? Surely Zillow had gotten the date of the Stodola home wrong.

When I visited Shark River Hills this past August, I had a chance to chat with the current owner of the house, who confirmed that yes, indeed, the house was built in 1908 - that's the date shown on the deed. When I observed that the date seemed too early by several years, he told me that the daughter of the previous owner, the one who had bought the home from my parents, had informed him that the house was originally built not as a residence but as a retreat for Roman Catholic priests, on land purchased by the sister of one of the priests. In fact, he said, the house featured two small prayer rooms, one in the basement, the other a second floor enclosure barely larger than a closet that my father had used as his ham shack!

So far my efforts to track down the previous owner’s daughter or to find any corroboration of the house’s supposed history as a Catholic retreat have failed. If anyone reading this blog can provide me with information about the history of my childhood home I would be very grateful.

Pinewood Drive and Hampton Court - summertime

Pinewood Drive and Hampton Court - winter scene

* * * * *

Although Uppie and others made it their full time home, Shark River Hills remained largely a resort community for quite awhile. Relics of this history were all around when I was a child; across the street from us on Hampton Court was a log cabin (still there!) that was shuttered most of the year, and our closest neighbor was a tiny cottage only occupied during the summer months. Shark River Hills even had its own boardwalk, running from the Club House to the Tucker's Point Bridge, which had doubled the number of routes between Neptune City and Shark River Hills when it was completed in 1923.

The Shark River Hills boardwalk (Neptune Historical Museum)

Crowds gathered on the boardwalk to watch a sporting event (Neptune Historical Museum)

But the little subdivision was on the verge of a sea change. As our friend and neighbor Mary Jane Evers put it, Shark River Hills in the early 1940s was “a summer development, [with] homes not equipped for year-round living, and about three macadamed roads which the Army had done to get to their own properties in the Hills and to allow the personnel to get to work.” My parents' circle of friends were recent arrivals, just as we were, and they were all full timers.

As usual, Mary Jane had it just right, even if there’s no precise demographic term for an old-timey summer resort proceeding peaceably along its journey toward year-round development when it suddenly finds itself host to an Army base and under pressure to make itself user-friendly for a large infusion of military and associated civilian personnel. My father was part of that Camp Evans infusion, and so it happened that this oddly unique moment in the history of Shark River Hills formed the backdrop for my childhood.

The “great hurricane of 1944” demolished the old boardwalk, and no one bothered to rebuild it. The era of Shark River Hills as a summer resort had come to an end.

* * * * *

To all my loyal readers: A very happy Thanksgiving from my family to yours.

Front row: my dad, Aunt June and Uncle Syd (Dad's brother); Back row: my mom holding my sister Sherry, my sister Leslie, me, my grandparents Edwin and Beatrice Stodola

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WORLD WAR II: THE AMERICAN FRONT

7/12/2017

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Suppose they gave a war and nobody knew?

In the minds of most Americans then and now, World War II was “Over There.” The home front was regarded not as a war zone, but rather as a base of operations for providing supplies and support. America was where Rosie the Riveter kept wartime production going so that our boys could go overseas where they were so badly needed. America was where homemakers like my mom, along with her friends Mary Jane Evers and Ruth Mofenson and all the other Camp Evans wives, got by on a ration of 4 gallons of gas per week so the War effort in Europe could be fueled.

And yet just days after Pearl Harbor, Hitler ordered an attack on America. He had been anticipating the entry of the US into the War, which would likely infuse American industrial might into the Allied effort, and believed that preventing the US from supplying Britain with fuel and arms would be key to a Nazi victory. The Nazis had been fighting what Winston Churchill dubbed the “Battle of the Atlantic" since 1939, including the use of Unterseeboote (U-boats) to attack Allied merchant shipping in an effort to counteract the naval blockade of Germany. The German Kriegsmarine was thus well-poised to add the US to its list of targets. Operation Paukenschlag (Drumbeat), a barrage of submarine attacks on American shipping, was launched in January of 1942, and soon Nazi U-boats were swarming up and down the East Coast, preying on American warships, tankers, tenders, and supply ships.

U-Boat crew watches the sinking of a torpedoed tanker.

The German fleet was ready; the American military was not. The first few months of 1942 were basically a romp for the Germans, who referred to it as the “Second Happy Time” (the first being an earlier naval operation in which little resistance was offered). The British, who had been the victims of the first “Happy Time,” recommended that ships avoid obvious standard routes, that navigational aids such as lighthouses be shuttered, and that a strict coastal blackout be enforced. Whether because of doubts about the soundness of the advice or because it was decided to allocate resources elsewhere, the suggestions of the British were by and large ignored. Although small shoreline communities were politely asked to “consider” calling for dim-outs, fear of negative effects on tourism and business shielded larger cities from such requests. All the U-boats had to do was watch for ships silhouetted against city lights at night.

After a few months the Americans knuckled down and adopted more stringent measures. Blackouts were ordered and enforced, and my husband remembers being scolded, as a young child in Maine, for peeking under a cover draped over a radio to hide the light while the family listened to the news. Peacetime shipping lanes were abandoned and shipping was restricted to daytime in convoys, escorted by British corvettes specially designed for anti-submarine warfare. Unpredictably-timed daily patrols were implemented, and gradually the German “wolfpacks” retired to happier hunting grounds elsewhere in the Atlantic. Eventually German codes directing sub maneuvers were broken by the Allies, and Operation Drumbeat officially ended in July of 1943 - although periodic submarine attacks on American ships continued until just a few days before Germany surrendered in 1945.

Still, although the Allies technically won the Battle of the Atlantic by virtue of winning the War, the overall picture for America did not exactly smell like victory. Indeed, one historian claims that Operation Drumbeat “constituted a greater strategic setback for the Allied war effort than did the defeat at Pearl Harbor." More ships and more lives were lost in the former than in the latter, giving lie to the popular notion that Pearl Harbor and Nine-Eleven were the only two successful strikes against the American homeland. Yet in all, only a handful of U-boats were destroyed.

* * * * * * * * *
So where was everybody while all this was happening?

A few people, of course, were of necessity informed about what was going on in their back yard. My father, in our oral history interview in 1975, told me with perhaps less than complete candor, “There was no attack on the East Coast, at least not at that time [of Pearl Harbor] - although there was some later.” (A better interviewer than I would have pressed him on this issue.) His brother Sid, who was in the Coast Guard stationed in Boston, surely knew. The “need to know” list, however, was apparently astonishingly small - reflecting the succinctly-stated policy of Ernest J. King, Chief of Naval Operations: “Don’t tell them anything. When it’s over, tell them who won.” (This is the same Admiral King whose daughter once remarked that her father was very even-tempered: "He's always in a rage.")

Nonetheless, many individuals were uncomfortably aware that something was afoot, especially after blackouts were systematically mandated and enforced. A number of ships were torpedoed by U-boats within sight of New York and Boston. Other residents near the shore reported seeing eerie lights and other unnatural phenomena that were difficult to explain. Further news about the German presence trickled out when a couple of unsuccessful attempts to land German spies on American shores via U-boat were foiled.

American World War II poster by Seymour R. Goff. (The original "might" quickly dropped out.)

On the whole, however, popular alarm was subdued by nondisclosure (with the rationale that news of sinkings so close to our shores might aid the enemy or undermine morale) and misdirection. No patriotic newsreels about these shoreline attacks were shown at American matinees (whereas German moviegoers regularly saw such footage). Citizens who had actually witnessed a U-boat attack, or the destruction of a U-boat, were asked not to reveal what they had seen. The famous slogan “Loose lips sink ships” was in fact coined to justify this veil of secrecy. The American people were never given a full account of the genuine danger they faced.

Partial knowledge and half-truths, of course, bred speculation and rumor - something that can be more dangerous than the truth. On Saturday August 7, my grandmother noted in the journal she kept in the summer of 1943 during her annual stay on Cape Cod, “Gradually the news comes in with the story of the Busy Blimps. We hear a large convoy was going by and was attacked by a German submarine; that it has been sunk somewhere off our shore. We hear distant guns but never know whether they are real, or target practice somewhere." She drew pictures of her neighbor’s clothesline on successive days, hoping to discern patterns in the size and spacing of the hanging towels that might, just might, be coded messages. Less amusingly, she also identified a potential German spy among the customers at a local bakery. “The authorities think someone is acting as a German agent along our shore. I think so too, but probably have my eye on the wrong person.” Fortunately she was wise enough not to gossip about her suspicions; loose lips may sink ships, but false accusations can do their own kind of damage.

* * * * * * * * *
How close did Operation Drumbeat come to the Jersey Shore?

Very close indeed.

Here as elsewhere along the Eastern Seaboard, residents periodically reported seeing Allied convoys being attacked by the U-boats and being awakened at night by the sound of explosions at sea. But the most shocking evidence came to light in 1991, when a fisherman’s net caught on a massive object sixty miles off Point Pleasant, New Jersey. When a group of recreational divers made the 230-foot descent, they found an intact U-boat, along with its torpedoes and the remains of its crew. No records of attacks in the area or unaccounted-for U-boats could be found to identify the wreck.

Over the next six years, a team of professional divers led by John Chatterton and his partner Rich Kohler made it their mission to determine the identity of the wreck - dubbed “U-Who” because of the uncertainty. Their efforts were hampered by diving conditions so treacherous that they claimed the lives of three divers during the course of the exploration. (See Bernie Chowdhury's The Last Dive: A Father and Son's Fatal Descent into the Ocean's Depths (Harper Collins, 2000) for a heart-rending account of the deaths of Chris and Chrissy Rouse, an experienced father-and-son scuba diving duo.)

Chatterton and Kohler's first clue was the discovery of a knife inscribed “Horenburg,” the name of a Radio Operator assigned to U-869, a Type IXC/40 U-boat. Their initial elation, however, was dampened by the news that U-869 had been sent to Africa and sunk off Casablanca on February 28, 1945 by an American destroyer and a French sub chaser. Reluctantly, the “Horenburg knife” was discounted. In 1997, however, serial numbers and other conclusive evidence were recovered confirming the identity of the wreck as U-869. Evidently the commander, Hellmut Neuerburg, had never received the orders diverting the sub to Gibraltar and instead perished off the Jersey Shore just a few miles from where I lived in Shark River Hills; I was two years old at the time.

Crew of the ill-fated U-869.

U-Who continues to hold its secrets close - though not for want of ink spilled on the topic. Chatterton and Kohler, as documented in Robert Kurson’s bestseller Shadow Divers: The True Adventure of Two Americans Who Risked Everything to Solve One of the Last Mysteries of World War II (Random House, 2005), concluded that the sub was probably sunk by one of its own acoustic torpedoes. Gary Gentile, another experienced wreck diver, hotly disputed this theory in his book Shadow Divers Exposed: The Real Saga of the U-869 (Bellerophon Bookworks, 2006), citing logs from two destroyer escorts suggesting that they had sunk the sub and also arguing that the damage was more consistent with the destroyer attacks. The United States Coast Guard’s official report, after a lengthy investigation, supported Gentile’s conclusion, but Chatterton and his colleagues continue to believe that the two destroyers attacked the sub after it had been struck by its own torpedo. The truth may never be known.

Yet another piece of the U-Who puzzle was added when a German named Herbert Guschewski, after watching a preliminary version of a 2004 PBS NOVA episode about the wreck entitled “Hitler’s Lost Sub,” approached the producers of the documentary. Guschewski had been the Second Radio Officer assigned to U-869 (and a close colleague of Martin Horenburg, whose knife had given the first hint about the sub's identity) but was hospitalized with pneumonia and pleurisy just before the boat departed and had thus been unable to accompany his crew-mates on their first and only voyage. An interview covering his recollections of life on a U-boat and his feelings about being the sub’s lone survivor is included in the final version of the NOVA program. It is worth watching.

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TONI's DOUBLE LIFE

3/12/2017

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Of all my childhood toys, only two remain with me today: my Hazel-Atlas “modern tone” tea set (supplemented by eBay purchases to replace pieces that went missing somewhere along the way) and my beloved Toni doll.

My Toni is a model P90 - that is, 14” tall (the smallest Toni; the dolls also came in several larger sizes.) She has blue sleep-eyes lined with a fringe of upper lashes and painted lower lashes, a slightly pouty red mouth, a jointed body, and a platinum wig glued to her skull. Sadly, one of her hard plastic pinkies has broken off, but she is otherwise in pretty good shape. She was manufactured by the Ideal Toy Company sometime between 1949 and 1953, so I couldn’t have been more than ten when she and I began our long journey together, and more likely closer to six. I suppose I should display her on a stand and try to protect her from further damage, but my granddaughter loves to play with her and I love watching my granddaughter at play, so Toni’s fate is to lead the rough-and-tumble life of a child’s toy and not the pampered retirement of a collectible gathering dust on a shelf.

In addition to Toni herself, I have a whole wardrobe of clothes made by my mother using patterns from Butterick or McCall’s and material left over from clothes she made for us on her trusty old Kenmore electric home sewing machine (which I also still have, along with a set of bobbins and a box of lethal-looking attachments for ruffling, zigzagging, buttonholing, etc.). In fact, for a long time I had two of each outfit, one for Toni and one for her red-haired sister Nancy Lee, a slightly larger Arranbee doll with which I foolishly parted with when her arms and legs came off, not knowing at the time how easy it would have been for any “doll doctor” to reattach them. I no longer have Toni's original outfit, detracting from any value she might retain as a collectible, but the ones my mother made for me are far more precious.

Toni looking jaunty in a jumpsuit made by my mom.

As gifts to my sisters, I repurposed a couple of duplicate doll dresses into cushions.

Although to the untutored eye she resembles many dolls of her era, including my poor dismembered and discarded Nancy Lee, my Toni doll has a dirty little secret: In addition to being a charming toy with lots of little-girl appeal, she was also a promotional gimmick for Toni Home Permanents. Designed by the renowned German immigrant doll sculptor Bernard Lipfert, she came packaged with her own home permanent kit that included a sugar-water permanent solution, end papers, curlers, and a comb. Yes, you could actually perm Toni's nylon wig - though if you did it too often her hair could turn into an irrecoverably sticky mess.

In the past women had styled their hair with curling irons and, well, just plain irons, which all too often left their homes reeking of scorched hair. So the development of the permanent wave in the early twentieth century was embraced by many women, especially after the less elaborate cold wave was invented in 1938. But even though the alarming Rube Goldberg machines and strong heat of the old-style perms were no longer needed, the cold wave process still involved serious chemical changes to the protein structure of the hair and required six to eight hours in a salon.

The home permanent, pioneered by the Toni Home Permanent Company of Forest Lake, Minnesota, was thus a breakthrough product, offering a cheaper alternative to the salon perm and bringing hair styling back home again. It also made beauty a social occasion, with Toni parties becoming popular among both teenagers and adults.

In 1948, the Toni Company was acquired by Gillette, an early step towards diversification for Gillette and also the start of more aggressive marketing of Toni products. The best-known ad campaign featured photographs of wavy-haired identical twins and famously asked, "Which Twin has the Toni?" The twins themselves sometimes appeared in touring shows that invited audience participation in making the correct identification.

Less attention has been paid by historians of advertising to the innovative process by which the Toni doll's creators sought to engage the consumer by appealing to her children. I was blissfully unaware not only of being targeted by the advertising industry but also of the delicious irony of having wheedled my mother into paying for this privilege.

Long hair and heavy machinery don't mix, and the employment of women in factories during World War II led to a call for shorter hairstyles. (The sultry actress Veronica Lake cut off her "peekaboo" locks to help promote workplace safety, and although her career suffered as a result, her sacrifice led to a measurable decline in industrial accidents.) The home perm was well adapted to these new styles and helped prolong a preference for soft waves or curls, often swept away from the face or paired with bangs.

Sleeker straighter hairstyles did not become fashionable till the 1960s, popularized by activists like Joan Baez, and my poor sister, who had the most adorable straight hair and bangs, was subjected in the name of beauty to a series of Tonettes, a Toni home perm intended especially for little girls. My own hair, on the other hand, was too curly. I desperately wanted to let it grow long, but my soft-hearted mother couldn’t bear the anguished tears produced by combing out my sausage curls and repeatedly dragged me off to a beauty parlor for a cringe-worthy do called the “cap cut.”

My little sister with her Tonette curls.

The dreaded "cap cut."

I'm not sure when creme rinse - a thin white liquid that magically softened and detangled thick curly hair - became readily available, but when it did it changed my life. (It now seems to have morphed into much thicker “conditioners” that moisturize, volumize, and decrease frizz. Sorry, folks, it's not the same stuff.) Once I discovered creme rinse, I let my hair grow out and didn’t trim it back to shoulder-length until I turned forty.

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JEEPS AND STOCKINGS: TWO ADDENDA

12/31/2016

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In the spirit of tidying up 2016’s loose ends in time for the New Year, I have a couple of follow-ups to earlier posts based on reader responses. Rather than updating old entries and expecting my long-suffering readers to go back and dredge them up, I decided to do a free-standing post elaborating on a couple of interesting bits of mid-20th century Americana.

* * * * * * * * * *

First, in the essay entitled “Out and About on the Jersey Shore,” dated May 3, 2016, I stated “Our friends the Evers had [a car with a rumble seat, a padded bench where the trunk should have been], and we all vied to be one of the two lucky ducks (three, if we wheedled persuasively enough) who got to ride there…. (The Evers family also had a Willy’s Jeep. They had all the good cars!)”

(Courtesy of the Evers family)

When I recently asked Helen and Bill Evers for some photos of their mother for my essay on Pearl Harbor, Helen sent several of their childhood family, including a couple of pictures of the cars I had mentioned in the May 3 post. This one is almost certainly the car with the rumble seat, though that particular feature is hidden by the Evers paterfamilias, Jim.

The other car photo she sent was of the Willy's jeep! Just seeing that iconic car and those two adorable little kids brought a smile to my face.

Bill and Barbara Evers, shown with their family's Willy's Jeep in 1949. (Courtesy of the Evers family)

We Americans loved our Willy’s Jeeps. Brainchild of the industrial designer Brooks Stevens, the Willy’s Jeep Station Wagon first rolled off the assembly line in 1946, just in time to join American families in their wholesale move to the suburbs. I was pleased to confirm my childhood memory: Despite its appearance, it was actually a faux woody made of painted steel, a design that was both safer and better-suited to mass-production than contemporary wood-bodied passenger wagons. Production continued in the US until 1965, when the Jeep Wagoneer supplanted it in our fickle affections. Production continued in Brazil and Argentina for several more years.

Thanks, Helen and Bill, for your generosity in sharing these wonderful old family photos. (I always have a hard time using the term "vintage" about photos of my own contemporaries!)

* * * * * * * * * *

Second, my daughter Julie, upon reading my most recent entry, “A Jersey Shore Christmas,” dated December 25, 2016, asked me if my mother’s legs were really bare in the home movie clip of her sledding down the driveway with me. “Those weren't white wool stockings?” The same comment could equally well be applied to the women’s legs in the photo of the riverside bonfire.

A little clarification is in order. No, I don't remember my mother's ever owning or wearing white wool stockings. But I probably shouldn’t have used the term “bare-legged” (even though to my way of thinking it’s a distinction without a difference) because she was almost certainly wearing nylon stockings - and therein lies a story.

Nylon was developed in the 1930s in the lab of Wallace Carothers, a polymer scientist with Dupont, and patented in 1938. Although Dupont’s vision for their invention - the world’s first fully synthetic fiber - extended far beyond hosiery, they cannily decided to start by offering women an affordable and less delicate alternative to silk stockings. The new product was introduced with much hoopla at the New York World’s Fair in 1939 and went on sale to the general public in May of 1940. Four million pairs were sold on the first day alone. Nylon became a household word and “nylons” a synonym for stockings. They were more than just an article of women’s underwear, they offered hope that modern technology would lift a Depression-weary nation into prosperity once again.

Barely had nylons become one of life’s necessities for the American woman when they were snatched away. In December of 1941 the US entered World War II, and all nylon was diverted to the War effort, used for everything from parachutes to rope to aircraft fuel tanks. The only stockings to be had were bought either before the War or on the black market. To give the illusion they were wearing proper nylons, women painted “seams” down the backs of their legs (probably straighter than it was ever possible to get the real thing!). When stockings were reintroduced after the War, consumer demand outstripped supply, leading to mile-long queues and even “nylon riots,” with women getting into fist fights with one another in the heat of competition. Fortunately Dupont soon rose to the occasion and ramped up production of the coveted garment.

Late in the 1940s seamless nylons became available, but surprisingly they never entirely caught on. (For some, apparently the seams were part of the mystique.) Nylons, with or without seams, along with the garter belts that held them up, remained women’s wardrobe mainstays until the introduction of pantyhose in 1959 - ushering in a trend towards higher hemlines and ultimately the micro-miniskirts that shocked us all a few years later. But that is another story.

I should add that little girls did not wear nylons until they reached their teens or at least their tween years. In the firehouse Christmas party photo, the girls truly were bare-legged, though we usually wore leggings when we went outside during the winter. By leggings I don’t mean either the modified tights that are now called leggings or the leg-warmers worn by dancers and dancer wannabes, I’m talking about thick wooly pants held up with suspenders that were companion garments to winter coats. These leggings were only worn outside, so we put them on and took them off again multiple times per day - going to and from school, for recess, at lunchtime, etc. Synthetics had not yet revolutionized cold-weather gear, at least not for civilians, and we spent much of our outdoor recreation time looking and feeling like the Pillsbury Doughboy - unlike our moms, who simply had to grin and bear it.

Thanks, Julie, for asking a good question and for caring about how cold your grandmother must have been!

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A JERSEY SHORE CHRISTMAS

12/24/2016

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When I thought of writing about “A Jersey Shore Christmas,” I realized I’d actually done it several years ago, when my grandson, then age 8, was collecting family history narratives from all his grandparents for his Cub Scout Bear Trail badge. One of the questions was, “What did you do as a child during the holidays?”

My response started out, “Christmas was the biggie.” The rest of this post is adapted from the essay I wrote for him then.

Our Christmas actually started with Thanksgiving - and anyone who denies that it began so early back in the "old days" or blames Hallmark for rushing the season is mistaken. We usually went to my father’s parents' home in Oakland NJ, a couple of hours' drive from Neptune, along with my uncles Quentin and Sid (my father's brothers), their wives, and Quentin’s three children, who were about our age. Of course we had turkey, stuffing, and all the fixings. My mother made apple and mincemeat pies and to let the steam out, she took a sharp knife and made dotted lines in the crusts that read TA ['tis apple] and TM ['tis mince].

Once we recovered from the soporific effects of the feast, my grandfather, a concert pianist whose skills had sadly grown rusty from arthritis and disuse, reluctantly succumbed to my grandmother's pleas and sat down at the piano, his ever-present cigar dangling from his lips, and we all sang Christmas carols. Then my sisters and I, having raided our grandmother’s wonderful costume trunk full of scarves and bolts of exotic material, belted out all five verses of "We Three Kings.” I always claimed the role of Balthazar because I loved the dark melodrama of his lines: "Myrrh is mine, its bitter perfume, breathes a life of gathering gloom; sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying, sealed in a stone-cold tomb." (Gian Carlo Menotti's opera Amahl and the Night Visitors, also about the gifts of the Magi, was written and first shown on TV in the early 1950's. My sisters and I took to it instantly, probably because we were already devoted fans of the three wise men and felt we had a special connection with them. We spent many happy hours reenacting the songs from Amahl - and thus a new holiday tradition was born.)

As soon as Thanksgiving was over, the Christmas season began in earnest. My mother made two fruitcakes, one dark and one light - the locus classicus for my own compulsion to bake fruitcake every year whether anyone likes it or not - which she doused liberally with brandy once a week until Christmas. Around the same time, my father scheduled the family Christmas card photoshoot, a ritual he truly adored. He set up lots of spotlights, and some years he also draped the room with sheets to provide a neutral backdrop. Elaborate scenarios were developed (clutching our pets; reading to the younger children; my sister at an easel pretending to paint), and a primitive version of Photoshop was applied to the results. His children didn’t always share his enthusiasm (as unfortunately can be seen from our glum expressions in some of the photos - re-do's weren't as easy as with an iPhone!). We had to sit very still, with our pasted-on smiles, and the spotlights made the room hot as an oven. Today, of course, I am inordinately grateful not only for the memories my father made for all of us by staging this event but also for the photographic record of how we all grew and changed and added to our number over the years. Wish I could tell him so now.

The cards began in 1943, when I was 10 months old. There was no card for 1944. After that the series remained unbroken; some years there were actually two different versions. The only year my parents appeared was 1950. Note the extra-special gift we received in 1953! Our last Christmas in Neptune was 1955; the cards continued for a few more years at our new home on Long Island.

A couple of weeks before The Day, we decorated the house. My mother had a creche that we set up on the mantle, and even though we weren't particularly religious, I loved the baby Jesus and the whole family tableau. (I still do.) Right below them hung the stockings awaiting Santa's attention - an interesting juxtaposition of Christian and pagan symbolism, though not one we thought much about at the time. We also had a little cardboard village with colored cellophane windows and holes for Christmas lights, which she arranged on the piano. A wreath went up on the door.

My father set up the tree in a semi-finished "game room" in the basement, near the pingpong table. The beloved box of ornaments came down from the attic, and we competed to be allowed to hang our favorites. Another predictable squabble was sparked by the silver foil icicles: I liked to hang them slowly and painstakingly so they would look like real icicles, while my sister preferred taking clumps of the stuff and flinging them at the tree. These mini-crises resolved, we artfully arranged our gifts under the tree - all but the ones from Santa, who didn't visit till Christmas Eve after all of us (including, we supposed, our parents) were sound asleep. (I'll never forget how proud I was when I was deemed old enough to be dropped off at Woolworth’s in Asbury Park to shop on my own, using the money I saved from my allowance by depositing fifty cents per week in a "Christmas Club.")

My parents always hosted an Open House for all the neighbors (children and adults alike) on Christmas Eve. During the preceding week, we made dozens and dozens of cookies - including sugar cookies, which we decorated with red and green sugar, and Tollhouse cookies, made by following the recipe on the back of the Nestle’s package, which magically and consistently produced the Best. Ever. Chocolate. Chip. Cookies. Out came the two fruitcakes, dark and light, for one last splash of brandy. Just before the party my mother prepared two batches of eggnog, nonalcoholic for the kids and most definitely alcoholic for the adults. We donned our Christmas finery and were allowed to stay up late. Years later, one of the neighborhood girls told me she was so inspired by these parties that as an adult she has always given a Christmas Eve Open House of her own.

After all the guests had gone home, we put on our foot pajamas and snuggled up to listen to "The night before Christmas"; then it was off to bed with us so we wouldn't be too tired the next morning. Not a problem for me; I was almost always the first one up. But we still had to wait for our parents to get up before we were allowed to go down to the basement and start opening our gifts - which seemed like forever but was probably more like half an hour. We had made our Christmas lists and I usually got exactly what I'd requested, plus lots of other stuff. One year I asked for a Nancy Lee doll but stipulated that I wanted her wrapped so I could be surprised when I opened the package. This turned out to be a bad call because she didn’t come in a box, and her gorgeous red hair ended up with a bad case of "wrapping paper head" that never quite went away no matter what I did.

When I was around five, my father bought us an electric train. After we went to bed on Christmas Eve, he stayed up long into the night laying the track so that the train would disappear down a hallway and a couple of minutes later reappear through the dining room. That year he, not I, was the first one out of bed on Christmas day. The train was a big hit with all of us but no one was more excited than my dad. If you want to make an engineer happy, just give him a model train and a whole day with nothing else to do but play with it.

No portrayal of Christmas in Shark River Hills, or any other holiday for that matter, would be complete without mentioning the firehouse on Brighton Avenue. The firehouse was more than just headquarters for the volunteer fire department, it was the beating heart of the community, serving as a meeting place for scout groups and other organizations and an event center for community parties and celebrations. My mother was a member of the Ladies’ Auxiliary, even though my father was not a firefighter. Here is a photo of the Christmas party in 1953, at which 73 children were in attendance, including both my sisters (#27 and #57), my BFF Joyce (#36), and practically everyone else I knew (plus a few I didn’t). Where was I? I guess I must have been ill that evening; surely I didn’t have anywhere else to go! (For awhile, identifying the 73 children became a Facebook obsession among the SRH crowd, including a circulating excel file that ended up with about 3/4 of the names filled in.)

By around Christmas there was usually plenty of snow on the ground, which meant the long, winding Riverside Drive hill would be cordoned off and sledding allowed. Wish I had a photo of that! Instead, I’m including a little home movie, taken by my dad, of my mom sledding down the driveway with me. Notice how my mother was dressed.

The end of the Christmas season was marked by an enormous bonfire at the edge of the Shark River, fueled by dozens of spent, dried-up Christmas trees. Both my sisters are in this photo, taken in 1951. (Where was I, I wonder?) On the right, in the background, you can see the mothers - again, barelegged, in skirts. Thanks to my sister Sherry for reminding me about this event.

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THE DAY EVERYTHING CHANGED: PEARL HARBOR AND ITS AFTERMATH IN THE CAMP EVANS COMMUNITY

12/7/2016

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Today marks a grim milestone in American history - the 75th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941, “a day which will live in infamy,” as FDR famously referred to it in his call for a declaration of war. Early that morning, a Sunday, the Japanese launched a surprise attack on the US naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, sinking or damaging 18 ships and destroying 188 aircraft. In all, 2,403 were killed - mostly service personnel but also including 68 civilians - and 1,178 wounded. Since the US was not at war, all the victims were noncombatants.

Congress quickly heeded Roosevelt’s call for a declaration of war. Four days later, unhappy about Japan’s unilateral, unannounced initiation of hostilities but realizing American participation in World War II was now inevitable, Germany and Italy declared war on the US, which immediately reciprocated.

Although the US had kept a wary eye on developments in Europe (Asia not so much), until now it had maintained a staunch neutrality, its populace deeply divided on whether America should be involved in the war effort in any way. All that changed with Pearl Harbor. Within hours America was on a wartime footing. Soon films about military life and lovers separated by war would crowd out Citizen Caine and Dumbo in the movie theaters. Soon “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” and “I’ll be Home for Christmas” would dominate the airwaves, along with revivals of World War I hits like “Over There.” Soon deprivation and shortages of building materials and consumer goods would become the norm. Soon admonitions like “Remember Pearl Harbor!” and “Loose lips sink ships” would become part of our daily conversation.

Much has been made of the parallels between Pearl Harbor and 9/11. Both were unexpected attacks on iconic homeland targets, both inflicted a shocking amount of damage, both resulted in thousands of casualties, and both brought a sudden reveille to those who thought the world outside our borders could simply be ignored. Both drew the US into many years of armed combat. Whether the long-term ramifications of 9/11 can possibly match the political, economic, sociological, and cultural dislocations that followed World War II - the decades-long dominance of the US on the world stage, the Cold War, the increasing pressure for gender and racial equality - remains to be seen. But the analogy is useful in giving those too young to remember Pearl Harbor at least a hint of its transformative effect on life in America.

* * * * * * * * * *
For both the men and women of the Camp Evans community, the impact of Pearl Harbor was, if anything, magnified by the circumstances in which they found themselves - that is, in a new, ad hoc community, with nothing in the way of roots or shared traditions; and with all the men suddenly on high alert, aware that if the Axis powers knew what was going on at Camp Evans it too could become a prime target.

My father’s story was perhaps typical. His first job after graduating from the Cooper Union in 1936 with a shiny new degree in electrical engineering was as a “student engineer” for Pan American Airways, where his chief duty was painting antenna poles. After a series of “starter” jobs with gradually increasing responsibilities, he eventually landed in Washington DC in a Civil Service position in the Signal Corps, in which he advanced from Junior Engineer at $2,000/year to Assistant Engineer at $2,600/year. As the new decade dawned, my father, finding his job too long on administrative duties and too short on research (in a word, he was bored), sought a more stimulating position, one that would draw more extensively on his hard-won electronics skills. He was just on the verge of accepting a job at the Bureau of Standards in Washington in early 1941 when the Signal Corps countered by offering a promotion to Associate Radio Engineer at their radar laboratories at Fort Monmouth in NJ. He jumped at the chance.

Much of what I know about this era of my father’s life was gleaned from an oral history interview I conducted with him in 1979. He told me his initial assignment was at Fort Hancock, “an isolated peninsula up near New York City; but we were eventually transferred to the old Marconi Radio Building down at Belmar [which the Army had only recently acquired].” To minimize his commute and allow him to ride his bike to work sometimes (they only had one car), my parents moved at around the same time from Long Branch, their first NJ home, to Shark River Hills.

If my dad was looking for excitement, he almost certainly found more than he’d bargained for. My parents and their friends were of course keenly aware of the war in Europe - how could they not be, given my father’s line of work? - but it was someone else’s war, not theirs. Preoccupied with unpacking their boxes, adapting to their new life, thinking about having children (a question of when, not if), they were as oblivious as most other Americans were to the fact that war was about to lap up to our own shores, and even more surprisingly, at the hands not of Hitler but of the Japanese: “Pearl Harbor...was a tremendous shock to us. I guess if we really stopped to think of it, we would have realized that something like this was inevitable, because Hitler's intentions were very clear - dominate the world! - and he would form whatever alliances and whatever he needed to do it. But when the shoe dropped, as it were, it was a great shock. It was a Sunday morning, and we were madly telephoning - how can we get out and man those radar sets and do something about it? - a panic, pretty much of a panic.”

My father added, “[It turned out] there was no attack on the East Coast, at least not at that time - although there was some later.” I didn’t pursue this almost offhand observation at the time and neither did he. It now appears that U-boat attacks on shipping along the East Coast were more extensive than was ever officially revealed, and I can’t help wondering if my father knew more than he was letting on.

Several workplace changes resulted almost immediately from the attack on Pearl Harbor. Security, already tight, was strengthened even further. My father's work took on a laser-like focus on the military applications of radar: “I eventually wound up heading what was called the Special Developments section with about 15 or 20 people in it and we did some very interesting work in radar [including the Army’s first moving target search radar].... I think some of it was very original.” Another dramatic change was in their work schedules: “Overtime became the rule rather than the exception - in fact, we worked pretty much a six-day week.”

* * * * * * * * * *
When the Camp Evans wives were parachuted into the unfamiliar Jersey Shore culture, they found themselves quite isolated, their social circle largely defined by their husbands’ work ties. After the sky fell on December 7, 1941 and their husbands started spending more and more time at work, they clung to each other all the more tightly for solace and companionship.

My mother’s closest friend from that era was Mary Jane Evers, an outgoing woman with a wry sense of humor. (Decades later I named my black cat after her black cat, “Rasputin.”) Mary Jane had a way with words and for many years wrote an amusing column in the Asbury Park Press called “We Took to the Hills” that went well beyond the demands of the genre (which tended to focus on who had tea with whom or presided at the ladies’ auxiliary meeting). In 1996, when I asked her to contribute to a “collective memoir” on my mother, she responded with a charming, breezy essay, scrawled in longhand, portraying both the impact of Pearl Harbor and her evolving friendship with my mother.

Although she was still living in West Long Branch at the time of Pearl Harbor, she was obviously already very tuned into life in “the Hills” and the Evans Lab community: “You must remember we were all ‘strangers in a strange land,’ so to speak. Our husbands had been assembled from all over to nurse the infant Radar labs and then the electronics labs. None of us had family nearby; shortly after we met, the attack on Pearl Harbor [occurred]; we each had 4 gallons of gas a week for the family car, and meat and sugar rationing. We lived in a summer development, in homes not equipped for year-round living, and about 3 macadamed roads which the Army had done to get to their own properties in the Hills and to allow the personnel to get to work.”

My mom and Mary Jane didn’t formally meet until sometime in 1944, when each of them had a toddler daughter and Mary Jane was pregnant with her second child. By late fall, Mary Jane was going through a very rough patch. Her new baby had recently died at the age of three months, and her husband Jim, who like my father had joined the Radar Division at Evans shortly before Pearl Harbor in 1941, was away on “travel duty.” Impulsively, my mother phoned and invited her to join them for Thanksgiving dinner. Their friendship was cemented with that gesture.

Mary Jane with Sally (Courtesy of the Evers family)

Elsa with Cindy

Mary Jane was keenly aware of how unlikely, in many ways, their friendship was: “We were very different people and from different backgrounds, but I believe that being thrown together in need, we grew to respect each others’ views and to treat our children a bit differently [than we might otherwise have done]. She was very loving (almost doting with you!); I saw children as little beings who would grow, hopefully, into individuals I would like. I have certainly achieved that!” (To be honest, I have no idea what those differences might have been - from my child's-eye point of view, the two women were a perfectly matched pair of moms. Politics? Whatever the differences were, clearly they were apparent to Mary Jane and presumably to my mother as well.)

Aside from their children, the other perennial conversation topic was money, or more accurately, the lack of it. According to Mary Jane, the pay was not generous even by wartime standards: “Civil Service personnel were not among those getting raises in Congress. The general public, from what I have learned, figured they had had money all thru the Depression when everyone else was broke, so they could just wait.”

“Budget problems were ever on our minds," she went on to say. "Your [parents] would have some ‘interesting’ discussions when the bills came in. My daughter Barbara vividly remembers hearing Elsa say, “There’s always too much month at the end of the money!” The women raided their kids’ piggy banks (we all had piggy banks, which were supposed to teach us to save our money), and as my mother commented to Mary Jane, “By the time I pay the children back, I’m broke again!” Elsa and Mary Jane bartered babysitting time by deliberately joining organizations with different meeting schedules: “She was in the AAUW and I was in the League of Women Voters; she was a member of the local Fire Auxiliary and I was a member of the Hospital Auxiliary.“

At the end of this litany, Mary Jane worried she might have left me with the impression that the lives of the Evans wives were all about “money-grubbing.” Of course, none of us was suffering from malnutrition or doing without the basics of food, clothing, and shelter. The point was that money was needed not only to provide the necessities of life but, in a world filled with bad news and uncertainty, to allow for the comfort of a few extras - “a spot left over for simple parties, cheap beer and soda and birthday cakes.” Making things come out right, making ends meet, making it possible to have birthday cakes as well as Spam - that was a job that fell to the women. It was part of their contribution to the war effort, and they took it seriously.

* * * * * * * * * *
How did the children of the Camp Evans community fare during Pearl Harbor and its aftermath? I was born just over a year after Pearl Harbor and have only fleeting memories - if indeed they are authentic memories at all - of the War years. Many of the facts of wartime life were part of the air we breathed. Yes, we ate Spam for dinner. Yes, we observed blackouts and dim-outs to avoid bringing unwanted attention from the German U-boats to American supply ships. Yes, we shared in the American love affair with the radio and tracked the terrifying narratives it brought into our homes. Yes, a chronic state of low-level deprivation was a part of our daily existence.

But in some important respects we were sheltered. The men - whether they were in the military or, like my father, civilians employed by the military - were doing work deemed critical to the War effort and therefore spent the War years on the homefront. They may have left for work early in the morning and arrived home late at night, but at least they were there, not thousands of miles away like my father-in-law, who spent four years on the Italian front as an Army surgeon. Our uncles and cousins may have been in uniform overseas, but not our fathers.

Jim with Sally (Courtesy of the Evers family)

King with Cindy

And perhaps partly for that reason, our moms were stay-at-home moms, quite unlike my stepmother Rose, a real life "Rosie the Riveter" who worked as a welder in a Grumman Aircraft plant on Long Island. Although to say the Camp Evans wives bore the brunt of child-rearing responsibilities would be an understatement - and without benefit of Dr. Benjamin Spock, whose revolutionary book on child care wasn’t published until 1946 - at least “Just you wait till your father gets home” was not an empty threat. (Not that my own mother said that, ever, but I certainly knew children whose mothers did.)

So in a way we Camp Evans kids got the jump on the Fifties. At a time when other families were struggling to adjust and create a new normal, we were already there. The Baby Boom was already in progress. Sally, the oldest Evers child, was born on September 11, 1942 - 39 weeks to the day after Pearl Harbor. My mother suffered a miscarriage before I was born; otherwise my parents too would have had a “Pearl Harbor baby.” Perhaps that’s why, whatever arbitrary cutpoints the demographers adopt, I’ve always known in my heart of hearts that I’m a “Boomer.”

Our mothers also didn’t have to be hounded out of their jobs and back to domesticity, they’d been there all along. I’m not sure to what extent, if any, the resurgence of feminism rooted in the wartime increase of women in the workplace ever touched my mother. Much later she took a few education courses in the hopes of translating her college English major into a marketable skill, but by that time her health was starting to fail and her retooling scheme never got off the ground. Her ambition for her three daughters was that we should marry well, so that we too could have the privilege of staying home to care for our children. We all remember her saying, only half-jokingly, “It’s just as easy to love a rich man as a poor man.” Fortunately for us, in light of subsequent economic shifts that made the one-income family a luxury, as well as our own ambitions, we got quite a different message from our father, who presented his women colleagues as role models and urged us to take all the math and science we could cram into our schedules.

* * * * * * * * * *
My parents and their friends were part of what Tom Brokaw called the “Greatest Generation” - men and women born between 1901 and 1924, who came of age during the Depression and World War II, who shared a common core of values including honor, service, love of country and family, and personal responsibility, and who more than rose to the occasion when duty called. For better and for worse (don't forget the internment camps for American citizens of Japanese descent, or the abuse my pacifist uncle suffered as a Conscientious Objector during World War II), they shaped America as we know it today.

As Brokaw observed, it was sometimes difficult to coax their stories from them because of their conviction that they weren’t doing anything special, just honoring their commitments and doing what they were supposed to do. In this context, I feel fortunate to have obtained, without really planning to do so, the two eyewitness accounts on which the above narrative largely rests. And a big shout out to Bill and Helen Evers for sharing their childhood family photos with me. For more about the Evers's and their friendship with the Stodolas, read my post dated February 27, 2016 and elsewhere in passing.

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GROWING UP IN AN AMUSEMENT PARK

10/18/2016

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Let’s start with the boardwalk.

The world’s first boardwalk opened in Atlantic City on June 26, 1870. The Jersey shore boasts more boardwalks than anywhere else in the US, with nearly every coastal town having one, some extending from one town to the next. If you grew up on the Jersey Shore, the boardwalk was as much a feature of the natural world as a mountain or a lake might be in some other place.

Who doesn’t love a boardwalk? It was a place where people could come to see and be seen, to admire each other’s finery and the incomparable view of the wild Atlantic. It was a great equalizer - free, so rich and poor alike could enjoy its blandishments. It was a place to stroll and relax, a place guaranteed to please your houseguests, be they visiting dignitaries or simply friends and relatives. This photo, which I believe dates to around 1940, shows my mother on the left entertaining her inlaws - my grandmother (center) and grandfather (right) flanking my Uncle Sid. Not sure who the man sitting next to my mother is - possibly my Uncle Quentin. My father must have been taking the photograph. No dressing down for the weekend here!

Contemporary boardwalks are bustling centers of economic activity, including upscale shopping and fine dining establishments, family and adult entertainment, water parks, beautiful antique arcades, and the like. The boardwalk I recall, however, was a slightly tawdry affair with a sort of carnival atmosphere - though it must have been fairly innocent because we were allowed to go there alone at a relatively young age. I assume the mob violence so graphically depicted on Boardwalk Empire ended with the repeal of Prohibition, but if any criminal activity persisted, it flew right over my head. I was more interested in spending my pennies on salt water taffy than on anything illicit.

What I remember most vividly are the rides (as in, “Mommy, can we please go on the rides?”), and mostly the rides for little kids (remembering that I moved away when I was thirteen). The fun house was a perennial favorite. Also high on the hit parade (in more ways than one) were the bumper cars; my father took us, which was part of what made it so special, and it would be hard to say who enjoyed it more, the children or their dad. Among the most memorable rides for me was the tilt-a-whirl, mostly because a friend and I went early in the season one year, when hardly anyone else was around, and the kid who ran it thought he was giving us a treat by letting us stay on for maybe half an hour. After that I never wanted to see another tilt-a-whirl in my life. Sixty-some years later and the thought still makes me queasy.

Best of all was the merry-go-round. When we were infants we maintained a wobbly perch on the stationary animals, held in place by our parents who rode the merry-go-round by our sides. As we grew bigger, we rode alone, and eventually we graduated to the horses and tigers that moved up and down the mounting post in a pattern that was supposed to simulate galloping. The last frontier was the gold ring. Even at twelve, I had to stretch to my limits to reach the ring dispenser. Most of the rings were steel gray, but occasionally a gold ring was dispensed; and your reward for catching the gold ring was - a free ride and a chance to try again for another gold ring. There’s a life lesson there, I’m sure.

At the time, of course, I had no idea when I hopped aboard the merry-go-round that I was tapping into a tradition that can be traced back to medieval jousting matches in which riders galloped in circles while tossing balls in the air. By the 17th century, the balls had been replaced by small rings hanging from poles that the riders were supposed to spear - presumably the antecedent of the gold ring. By the mid-19th century the modern platform carousel had been developed (in earlier versions the animals hung from chains and riders would fly out via centrifugal force as the carousel picked up speed) and was a popular feature at fairs. In the US a thriving carousel industry grew up, staffed by skilled craftsmen who created ever more elaborate and lavishly decorated animal figures. Although most of the master carvers were European immigrants, the animals on the Asbury Park merry-go-round were carved by the American craftsman Charles I.D. Loofa - though a few had to be purchased at the last moment to meet a delivery deadline.

My love affair with the merry-go-round puts me in good company. The author Stephen Crane, who grew up in Asbury Park, loved the Palace carousel and courted his girlfriend with nonstop rides in the early 1890s. Asbury Park's other "favorite son," Bruce Springsteen, was filmed riding the carousel in 1987 for the music video "Tunnel of Love" - though alas for carousel fans, that footage ended up on the cutting room floor.

Sadly, the horses have now been put out to pasture and the three (!) splendid band organs silenced. Palace Amusements closed its doors in November of 1988 and was demolished in 2004, despite being listed in the National Register of Historic Places and despite strong protests by local preservationist organizations. Interestingly, just before the demolition, urban archeologists dug up hundreds of rusted rings; the Palace was still using its ring machine until the day it closed, long after most amusement parks had discontinued the practice in the face of rising costs for rings and insurance.

The carousel was moved in 1990 to an amusement park somewhere in the South. A few years later, when that facility folded, an optimistic New Jersey real estate developer purchased the operating mechanism and returned it to New Jersey in hopes of reinstalling it in a restored Palace building. That hope fizzled when the Palace was demolished, and the remnants of the merry-go-round turned up for auction on eBay. Any attempt to restore the ride to its former glory would require replicas of the figures since most of the originals were long since sold off individually and disappeared into private collections. One more treasure on the junk heap of history....

The photo below, taken on July 6, 1955, subsequently appeared in the Asbury Park Press - truly a case of “The photographers/ will snap us/ and you’ll find that you’re/ in the rotogravure.” My friends and I were recruited to pose for this feature, and I remember much debate about what to wear for the occasion. Naively, we thought the photoshoot was all about us; in retrospect, our job was probably less to show off our Sunday best and more to show off the gorgeous old merry-go-round.

l to r: Carolee Birch, Joyce Traphagen, Susan Traub, and Cindy Stodola

Postscript: Efforts to revitalize the boardwalk culture of the Jersey Shore suffered a huge setback in 2012, with the onslaught of Hurricane Sandy. The Belmar boardwalk was completely destroyed, and others suffered extensive damage. Asbury Park fortunately escaped the worst of the storm’s fury and was able to reopen for the 2013 season - the only Jersey Shore community to do so - with its newly refurbished boardwalk now linked up to the boardwalk in Ocean Grove.

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CINDY STODOLA POMERLEAU

I was just shy of 3 years old when the US Army successfully bounced radar waves off the moon - the opening salvo in the Space Race, the birth of radioastronomy, and the first Earth-Moon-Earth (EME) communication. I was born on the Jersey coast for the same reason as Project Diana: my father, as scientific director of the Project, was intimately involved in both events. Like Project Diana, I was named for the goddess of the moon (in my case Cynthia, the Greeks' nickname for Artemis - their version of Diana - who was born on Mt Cynthos). Project Diana is baked into my DNA.

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TO THE MOON AND BACK
(ARCHIVED BLoG)

DR HELEN JONES

OUR PETS

A HOLIDAY GIFT FROM SEARS

SHARK RIVER HILLS: A MOMENT IN TIME

WORLD WAR II: THE AMERICAN FRONT

TONI's DOUBLE LIFE

JEEPS AND STOCKINGS: TWO ADDENDA

A JERSEY SHORE CHRISTMAS

THE DAY EVERYTHING CHANGED: PEARL HARBOR AND ITS AFTERMATH IN THE CAMP EVANS COMMUNITY

GROWING UP IN AN AMUSEMENT PARK

CINDY STODOLA POMERLEAU

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TO THE MOON AND BACK ​(ARCHIVED BLoG)

CINDY STODOLA POMERLEAU

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TO THE MOON AND BACK
(ARCHIVED BLoG)