Irene Peterson's Blog

Yesterday Herb took me to Long Beach Island to see the house we intend to rent at the end of the summer.

It's a little close to the other houses and you have to climb up stairs to get to the kitchen and living room and porch and bedrooms, but in two months I hope to be able to scamper up those stairs and thoroughly enjoy myself.

I need it.

The oncologist prescribed it.

Therefore, we must go.  I can hardly wait.

Maybe I'll write, maybe I'll walk on the beach (can't do that now because I can hardly walk on solid ground or floors, the sand would pull me down and I'd never get up on my own), maybe I'll work on the cancer book, maybe I'll sit and think.

Maybe I'll be finished with Loey by that time.

I was going to write for her today, but we have a party to go to for Joey, the last nephew to graduate high school.  He's a sweetie and he loves my two measly books.  The kids have decided he looks sort of like a terrorist, but this kid is one excellent citizen.  He belongs to the fire department and has probably saved lives and houses in his town.  I see good things in his future, even if he has already rolled a car.  Live and learn.  He wants to be a lawyer.  Good.  I will probably need one.

Best to have it in the family.

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As an afterthought, for those of you reading this who think everybody in New Jersey is in the mafia or wants to be, let me get this straight:

1. Not all people in Jersey are in the mob.

2. Not all people with Italian sounding last names are in the mafia.

3. Not all women in New Jersey dress like those women on the television show.

4. Not all women in Jersey WANT to be like those women on that tv show.

5. Nobody really acts like that but those four women and their families.

6. Nor is there this strong desire to throw away money on gambling, glittery clothes that make one look like an expenive street-walker,  huge houses that need help to keep clean, and schools for kids who want to grow up to be just like their mommies in every woman in New Jersey.  It is fiction, it is fantasy, it is totally unrealistic and they're doing it for the money, you'd better believe it.

7.  I stress again, not everyone in New Jersey is connected to the mafia or the mob and not everyone in New Jersey wishes they were.  The Sopranos and the Real Housewives may have counterparts in real life, but I do not know any of these types and I fully intend to keep it that way.
 

If you think any of this is real, you need a reality adjustment. Come to New Jersey. It's a beautiful state to visit.  We're already too crowded for you to stay, but you can visit.

One third of New Jersey lies below the Mason-Dixon line.
I think that's where I am now, but that's okay. I've been in the south many times and survived to tell about it.

But on my journey along the Jersey shore, I have come to the place least visited in my youth.
We're heading toward Atlantic City where the population definitely thins out. We are also back on the mainland and the ocean touches the towns. Personally, I don't know anybody who has ever stayed in Brigantine except my mother's neighbors. It's small, curled around Atlantic City and has a lighthouse. No big deal. But there is ocean and it isn't too crowded and besides, AC is nearby. If the hotels and gambling and buffets lure you, you're all set.
Atlantic City used to be incredible. When I was young, I got to see the diving horse on the Steel Pier and a movie about Helen of Troy and a dancing water show on the pier. I didn't feel unsafe or wobbly, which is good. There were three big piers of amusements. In a candy store, I saw the blackened remains of what appeared to be a baby mermaid in a glass case. It was freaky. Of course it wasn't a mermaid, but it was one ugly fish-type thing with a flat human face. Maybe a baby manatee or dugong. That freaked me out. There was plenty of salt water taffy (invented in AC) and a huge, wide boardwalk with trams or pedal cars that you had to pay to get some old guy to push you around the boardwalk in. Of course, we never got one of them, we were young and could walk the miles and miles of boards.
We used to go to AC to visit friends of my father's parents. They owned a small hotel and treated my grandparents lavishly, considering. I remember hanging out on the front porch not wanting to hang with people who didn't speak English to us, ignored us in fact, while serving up copious amounts of food to the entire family plus grandparents. All I wanted to do was go up on the boardwalk, but that seldom happened. These people must have died or sold the hotel when AC started cleaning up its act, getting ready for the gambling. It's gone now, along with these folks. In its place is probably some huge casino/hotel. It was right near the boardwalk, so my guess is it went the way of all the small hotels that were torn down to make way for the big stuff.
AC is fine up by the boardwalk. Anywhere else, it's is still pretty much a hole. As I said before, if you like to gamble and go to buffets and see shows, stay near the ocean. If you want to see how the other half lives, cross over the main street and end up in another world.

Further south you come to Ventnor and Margate. In Margate you can still visit Lucy the elephant...some historical evidence of the shore's past glory. It is a wooden elephant that used to be a hotel and a home and is now a museum thanks to those who fought to preserve it. Originally, it was built as an attraction to get people to buy property in this area. Come see the wooden elephant and buy a house or have one built by the seaside. Lucy is huge. She's painted elephant color and bears a howdah on her back. That's the little covered chair the maharajahs used to sit in whilst coasting among their people for show. There are small portholes in Lucy's side so you can see sunlight. I don't know how big the rooms could have been when she was used as a hotel, but people stay in cabins on ships that are minute, so I guess staying inside an elephant is novel enough not to make one claustrophobic.
Few people know that Lucy once had a sister elephant further down the coast. She got blown away in a storm.
That's why it is important to have Lucy still there. She's old but she represents a time when people could still be knocked out by the thought of a huge wooden elephant.
Those times, regrettably, are long gone.
Between AC and Wildwood used to be a nice stretch of free open beach that you could see from the main road. Blue-green water with white sandy beach. It was empty when I was young. My father actually stopped there and let us explore the beach and dig for giant clams there one time. It was deserted and we probably shouldn't have gotten onto the beach, but he took a chance and let us roam around. One of the few spontaneous things I remember my father doing. Last time we were down that way, Herb drove along that stretch of road (there's a toll both in the middle of the road...weirdest thing ever)and I looked for that lonesome beach but could not find it. I sincerely doubt there are any beaches in New Jersey that aren't under the jurisdiction of either a town or the state itself.
But, back then, it was cool being on that lonely beach, having it all to ourselves.

It is probably covered with million dollar McMansions now.

Ah, but Ocean City is next. Ocean City does not allow liquor to be sold in the town. It does not rent houses to fraternity guys. It is the ideal place for kids. There are amusements there and a long, nice boardwalk. One should not confuse this with Ocean City, MD.
This is a family town full of cookie cutter condos and summer houses, an excellent place for people with young kids to go for vacation. To each his own. The grown-ups can leave the kids with the au pair and toddle over to AC for excitement while the kids go to sleep. Very convenient.

I have never been to Avalon or Stone Harbor or Sea Isle City. They're all supposed to be very nice places to stay, but I can't write about them as I've never seen them.

But I have been to the Wildwoods and can write about them.
The Wildwoods exist because they have a beach that goes on forever. All the sand that the ocean sucks out of the northern beaches ends up piling up here and you have a huge walk to get from the exciting boardwalk to the actual shorefront. Scouts camp out on the beach without fear of being washed away off season. Wildwood is also known for it's collection of early 50s motels and the way it was back in the 60s when it was THE place for the people from Philadelphia to go. The top Philly acts all apprenticed and appeared in the clubs there.
The boardwalk was and still is famous for the activities and amusements and variety of nifty stuff to do there. But that beach. Wow. Maybe the widest beach in the world, the safest place to swim in the Atlantic Ocean. Three giant piers of amusements owned by one family, the Moreys. If you only have one chance to visit the Jersey Shore, make it the Wildwoods.

But there's one more place to visit on our trip to the shore.
Cape May.
Cape May is one of the loveliest spots along the Atlantic coast. The architecture is Victorian gingerbread and the pace is gentle and gentile. There are nice beaches and plenty of hotels and bed and breakfasts. It is open all year, too. At Christmas, there are town-wide events and the whole town becomes a Christmas card full of lights and enchantment. It has quite a reputation for being a great place to visit all year round. You can birdwatch at the sanctuary at the very tip of the land...out by the lighthouse. It is on the flyway and migrating birds stop there on there way to Canada and South America, depending on the season.
What I thought was coolest was that you can actually stand on the furthest part south of the state...sort of like Land's End in Cornwall.

One last treat. There's a place called Sunset Beach a little ways round the bottom of the state. There are the remains of a fortification there from WWII and also the remains of a concrete ship if it hasn't washed out to sea yet. Now, the most fantastic part of Sunset Beach is that is where you can find Cape May diamonds. They're quartz crystals that are amazingly clear and can be polished and cut into gems fit for jewelry. They wash down the Delaware River and end up along the shore. I think that makes a perfect end to my travelogue.

From Cape May, one can take the Cape May ferry to Lewes, Delaware. That's worth the ride, any time.

Leaving Seaside's boardwalk and meandering down Seaside Park's nice clean beaches, the last thing on the peninsula is Island Beach State Park. Someone in our government wisely set this great spit of land aside to remain a sanctuary for birds and what have you, and loads of beaches for day trippers to enjoy. You can't rent a house in the park, but who would want to? It's there to be enjoyed, not lived in. Oh, there is a house or two. Back in my misspent youth, Sandy and I used to take her father's 4x4 onto the beach and drive in the sand. Yes, one could do that way back when. And if we wanted to go swimming, we'd even get in for free because Kevin Kelly (Sandy's perennial beau)knew one of the governor's kids and all we had to do was say we were visiting him (never met him)and the park police let us in without paying. I'm gonna have to look up which governor had all the kids as I have forgotten now. We used that excuse all the time. Never had to pay. It was nominal back then, but nominal was expensive to us.

Now, you have to go back to the mainland and take Route 9 or the Parkway to get to the causeway that leads to Long Beach Island. That's a real island and where there are no boardwalks or worthwhile amusements, but the beaches are less crowded and there are fewer people crowding everything, except on Saturdays when you are trying to get there or go back home with a great tan.
Across the causeway from Manahawking on Route 72 lies Jersey's wonderland. When I was a kid, hardly anybody went to Long Beach Island because there wasn't a boardwalk or easy, convenient place to meet members of the opposite sex. The beaches were nice and relatively empty compared to those at Seaside or Asbury Park or Point Pleasant and back then, there weren't that many houses. It's different now.
Starting at the northernmost end of the island, you find Barnegat Lighthouse. This is open for tourists and still guards the entryway into the bay. If you stand at the tip of the island, you can easily see the bottom of Island Beach State Park! Traveling south on the one main road that dominates the island, you go through lots of towns with huge houses lining the beach and bay with very little beach access for tourists. The owners of these houses probably thinkthey bought the rights to the beach, but anybody can walk anywhere that the tide reaches without being hassled. Riparian rights, or so they claim. But I wouldn't want to put down my beach blanket and sit a spell without a tide chart. And glares from the people who think they own the sand all the way to the water. It just isn't done. But further down the island in Harvey Cedars there is plenty of beach access. Just no real good place to park your car.
There is a town with a great name along the way--Loveladies. Doesn't that sound like a nice place to stay? There used to be lots of old Victorian houses along this part of the island, but a great storm in 1962 or 4 washed over the land and actually separated the island into two parts, rather inconveniently as there is only the causeway to get onto the island and that was on the lower half. The people on the upper half were stuck there for awhile. There are about two Victorian houses remaining up there, both shabby and weathered, but remnants of a more glorious past.
Surf City and Ship Bottom are typical shore towns. There are beaches and small rental houses and stores and churches and motels and hotels. Good destination. It's clean and friendly there, but the first towns you come to after crossing the causeway. A little lively, a little noisy, a little great place to be.
The bottom of the island contains the queen of the beach...Beach Haven. Beach Haven has just about everything you could possibly want. Movie theaters. Churches. Victorian houses and a museum. An ice cream shop where the waiters sing to you and get you to sing. A playhouse with live shows. Lots of rental houses and motels and hotels and beach access. There is a small amusement park on the side of the main road (Long Beach Boulevard) and plenty of activities in the summer. It is a year-round town, too, but it more or less empties out after September. There are schools here. Small schools for the few residents who live on the island full time. Let's face it, it isn't Florida or Sun Belt except in the summer season. When I came down here in the winter around 1967, this was a ghost town with few cars on the road and even fewer people on the streets.
Different story in the summer.
There's more of the shore, to be continued!

Let me tell you a little about the infamous Jersey Shore.
It starts somewhere up near Keyport which is really on the Raritan Bay, which empties into the Atlantic Ocean. There are waves there, but there are waves on big lakes. The water is brackish at times. Sandy Hook, which is this cape-like arm that reaches out toward NYC in the north, protects this part of the shore region. It is part of Gateway National Seashore, too, protecting NYC harbor with what used to be a military installation. There's remnants of artilary stations and officers' houses and barracks. Maybe the Coast Guard has a station there. It would be smart to, but due to cutbacks in national security during Reagan or Bush I, there's nothing much but seashore. It does protect Raritan Bay from storms, I guess, and there is the defunct Twin Lights lighthouse high above the spit of land. That's not used, but it is a nifty park. There are great seafood restaurants inside the hook area and a rumbling bridge connecting the hook to the mainland, over the inland waterway. Going south along the highway directly by the ocean is a huge stone wall that protects Sea Bright from ocean waves.

It is about 12 feet high and meant to keep water from Sea Bright when there is a storm. It doesn't really work at all. But it does keep you from seeing the beach from the road. It also keeps out undesirables from the beach that the people from Sea Bright apparently think they own.

There are small towns as you go further down the two lane highway along the coast. You travel south, you go through some really nifty towns that people can commute to NYC from via ferry. It used to be really popular in the late 1800s and people spent the summers there by the sea while the father traveled by ferry or steamer into the city during the week. In these coastal towns like Monmouth Beach and Long Branch there were horse racing and gambling of all sorts, with prostitution and other lovely things on the side that men of means could enjoy. All this is pretty much gone now as the area fell from favor, fires burnt down the boardwalks and the wealthy found the Hamptons to build their palaces in.

Next going south you come to the Asbury Park area. North of this you pass through Spring Lake and Deal, towns with still some Victorian splendor, but rather private. At least for me, anyway. I did a book signing in Spring Lake in a Victorian hotel. Very nice. Rather old-fashioned, definitely not where teenagers would want to hang and check out guys (or girls.)
Highly recommended for the older patrons with money to spare, not pensioners.

Asbury Park, nearly destroyed during the race riots of 1967, used to be an incredible resort, THE place to go for the wealthy and people who wanted to be seen. Warren G. Harding's mistress gave birth to his illegitimate child in a house that still stands on a side street in the Victorian section of the city. The main street sports Art Deco buildings and some of the boardwalk has them too, but most have washed away. Or been burnt. The Stone Pony, home of some of rock and roll's most famous and gifted Jerseyans, still stands and some of the rockers still make their way there on occasion. Madame Marie, the fortune teller made famous by Bruce Springseen and the Sopranos, has a little brick building on the beach/boardwalk area, but her granddaughter or niece works it. Marie has retired, I think, or only shows up on occasion. Fame does that to fortune tellers, I guess.

Now, right next to Asbury Park is Ocean Grove. Ocean Grove used to shut down on Sundays because it was originally set up as a Methodist camp meeting by the sea place for devout Methodists to congregate and listen to traveling preachers scare them into being devout of a Sunday. The town is small but sports some of the most magnificent Victorian gingerbread houses in the state, not to exclude the round auditorium which still stands and has all sorts of concerts and preachers and speakers visiting throughout the summer months. It used to be that only certain people could buy the houses or tent shacks that families owned and passed on to their heirs. Now, if you have the money and can afford to buy one of the little gems, I guess you have to pass some kind of approval to purchase a house there. That's what used to happen, I'm not sure any more. It's lovely and has blue laws still, only there are no parking spaces for visitors, so it's rather exclusive in its own way. Nice to drive through, though.

Oh, and Asbury Park, its neighbor to the north, has certain undesirable people living there, so there used to be chains across walkways to keep them out of OG. That, luckily enough, has changed, even if the attitudes among some of the inhabitants has not. All things change with enough time. The chains are gone, though, and Asbury Park is trying to dig itself out of the terrible reputation it had because of the riots so long ago. It's trying very hard to rebuild, even if it is taking over 40 years.

There's Belmar and Lake Como as you drift south. Nice places with boardwalks but no amusements. You want amusements, you have to get to Point Pleasant beyond the Manasquan Inlet. Point Pleasant is a lovely seaside town with a boardwalk full of surprises. Rides, food, Kohr's custard stands and excellent Jersey Pizza can be enjoyed on the boards along with a day in the sun and waves. I spent plenty of time in Point Pleasant in my youth with Sandy, my best buddy in the world. Oh, Lord, don't get me sidetracked!

Continuing down the seaside highway you come to pleasant towns like Mantaloking where the beaches are not readily accessible to non-residents. More private houses line the dunes further south until you come to the Ocean Beaches and Ortley Beach and Lavallette and eventually land in Seaside Heights. There are no heights there, it's all really flat, but oh, well. This is the amusement center of my youth. (This is where Sandy and I played 52 pick up evenings on end.) The boardwalk is full of games of chance, rides, loud blaring music from the Himalaya ride, pretzels, pizza, Kohr's custard (the absolute best) and anything else you could possible want. It is also where you would find that other boardwalk/Jersey shore speciality, sausage and pepper sandwiches. Good anywhere you go, any stand that sells 'em.
Attached to Seaside Heights and its boardwalk is Seaside Park with its own share of rides and great food, including Maruca's Pizza, definitely the greatest treat on the boards. Arcades and a new carousel, too. Seaside Heights has an old carousel that has been poorly restored by volunteers, this new one in the Park is shiny and plastic-looking. Take your pick.

I'm only halfway down the shore but this isn't my computer, so I'll continue some other time.
The best is yet to come. Less crowded, sandy beaches, no boardwalks, more exclusive than Seasides, better for being alone to write. Stay tuned.

We're going down the shore.
Herb decided we needed a vacation.
So he went online and found this cute little Cape Cod style house down in Holgate (which is way south of Beach Haven on Long Beach Island) and it was available and we talked it over and we're going. It's rented now. Shows that it is taken on the website.

Amazing. You go online and find a house to rent over a hundred miles away and you make a phone call and wham, you have a vacation.

The house is air conditioned.
I may never leave it.
I'll bring the laptop and I'll work on my stuff and I won't answer the phone unless it is Sandy or the kids. There are four bedrooms and everybody can have their own bed.

We asked my mother to come with us (I know you're reading this, Mom) but she's getting wishy-washy about it. Dunno why. She ALWAYS GETS WISHY WASHY. I expect it. And then she realizes it will be cool and she goes along with it. Hell, if somebody invited me to go with them down the shore, I'd go. In a second. A millisecond.

This might be worth a book. For sure. If it is, I can deduct.

Mercenary vacation. Yes!

Originally, he wanted to drive up to Nova Scotia. Now, I have nothing against Canada, nothing at all, but the drive alone would cost a small fortune. The Jersey Shore is better. Even if it rains. The Jersey Shore is much better.

It's in my blood.