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| Photo provided by Jeanette Fusco |
For Jeanette Fusco, author of Seagate House: Legacies of Long Beach Island, traveling to “the beach” in 1935 was much different than it is now. Fusco began visiting Long Beach Island with her family when she was just a mere 2 years old.
“Getting there was always an all-day affair,” Fusco remembered, rolling her eyes and giving a laugh during an interview.
Fusco’s family lived in Englewood, Bergen County in northern New Jersey. After packing up the family’s green Dodge with everything from clothes and linens to sandwiches and beach supplies, the first part of the gang – parents Ted and Jessie Kamish, and Jeanette with older sister, Adele, and younger brother, Ted – would pile into the car and make the half-hour drive to Weehawken. Weighed down by the sheer magnitude of people and things inside the car, the bumper scraped along the edge of the driveway as they pulled out.
Meanwhile, Aunt Alice, Uncle Joe and cousins Mary Elizabeth and Alice, both a few years older than Jeanette, had traveled from Brooklyn and over the Hudson River via the Weehawken Ferry. They would be waiting for Jeanette’s family to pick them up.
Uncle Joe, well over 300 pounds, always sat in the desired front seat of the car, alongside Jeanette’s parents. Aunt Alice, Mary Elizabeth and young Alice all squished into the back of the car, equipped with a small chair for an extra seat. Luckily, they always shipped their long-term luggage via train.
Hot and sweaty, with nothing to cool them down but the smoggy, northern New Jersey air blowing in through the rolled-down windows, the family turned around and headed for Long Beach Island.
When they finally came out of heavy traffic and into the greener land of South Jersey, they’d stop for a break in Lakewood, where the air was cooler and cleaner. They’d purchase eggs and chicken at the local food market and run into the woods for a pit stop before piling back into the car again, where they’d fight tooth and nail for every millimeter of personal space available.
From Lakewood, they traveled south on Route 9 all the way to Route 72. (This was 20 years before the Garden State Parkway vastly improved access to South Jersey beaches.) By the time they reached Beachwood, just south of Toms River, the children were so tickled by the vision of silky, white sand, they could barely contain themselves.
“Are we there yet? How much longer?” The children were relentless. “What about now?” Eventually, Jeanette’s father threatened to end their vacation right then and there if they asked any more questions. The kids were always quiet then.
When they reached Manahawkin, they always stopped at a grocery stand on East Bay Avenue to pick up fresh fruits and vegetables, which still smelled of the earth’s pure fragrance.
Fusco remembers calling it “the Old Man’s” stand. The owner looked like Santa Claus, with white hair and spectacles.
After loading up on groceries, everyone carrying a brown bag exploding with fruits and veggies, they’d pile into the car once more. Before the modern-day causeway bridge was built in 1958, summer motorists frequently waited in traffic stopped on the two-lane, wooden causeway while large boats took their time passing underneath the raised drawbridge.
At last, they finally landed in Ship Bottom. They headed straight for Zacharie Realty.
“When we got to the Island, we had to find a place to rent,” Fusco said. “You would never do it when you were up in North Jersey. That’s just the way it was. You couldn’t go online and see what the place looked like. When you came to the Island, you looked at what was available, and if you wanted to rent the house, you did.”
The family always vacationed in Ship Bottom for six weeks. Fusco’s father would drive back up north for work during the week, but he always came back to the Island on weekends and during the last two weeks of summer; staying for Labor Day was a must.
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| Photo provided by Jeanette Fusco |
“My mother would complain to my father of Joe Pop’s Bar on 20th Street: ‘We’ll have to rent elsewhere. The drunks are singing all night,’” Fusco reminisced with a chuckle.
Many of the houses back then had no refrigerator. Fusco recalls chasing after the “iceman,” a local college student who delivered ice to renters with iceboxes in their basements.
Watching the fishermen at the pound fishery bring their day’s catch in to the beach was also fun entertainment.
Fusco said she learned how to swim in Barnegat Bay. Her father and cousin Alice were wonderful athletes and great swimmers. They often swam off the pier near Bay Beach, where commercial garvey fishing boats came and went, and a man who commuted from Philadelphia docked his seaplane. Fusco also remembers swimming on the Boulevard after a big hurricane, when water was waist deep near Lang’s Liquor Store.
Jeanette often watched the young girls who attended Camp Dune, a sailing camp for Christian girls, trot around the beach near the water’s edge. But Jeanette didn’t have much interest in sailing. She was more of a fisher-woman. Fishing, crabbing and clamming were more her thing. Every year, she and her brother Ted bought new fishing equipment, including a crab trap from Conrad’s, the local hardware store.
They also enjoyed going out for ice cream sundaes at the local drug store, complete with an ice cream parlor that sold Dolly Madison ice cream.
“My uncle Joe used to take us there. All the drug stores had ice cream parlors back then,” Fusco said. “It had a bar across the counter, with red stools. We would get banana splits and all kinds of different stuff. It was difficult to make our minds up when we were kids because they had so many kinds and flavors. It was wonderful; we used to think it was just grand.”
Vacations on LBI weren’t always so sweet. During WWII, Navy blimps patrolled the coast for enemy submarines and no one was allowed on the beach after dark. Fusco’s family and the rest of the people residing on the Island were required to have black-out shades on the windows of their houses. Air raid wardens walked up and down the streets to ensure everyone had their windows covered. Any light that showed through could help Nazi U-boats near shore seeking potential ship targets in the dark.
“During World War II, some German subs were seen in close,” Fusco recalled. “I remember my brother and I picking up wooden crates that had held oranges. The printing was in German. My brother also picked up a German sailor’s hat on the beach. Tar was everywhere from a sunken sub, and my mother had a tar station at the door with kerosene to clean our feet.”
In 1949, four years after the war ended, Fusco’s parents bought a house in Peahala Park, which was built by Herbert Shapiro, a pioneer most notably recognized for developing Beach Haven West on the other side of the bay. Fusco’s parents paid just $8,500 for the home. It sold a few years ago for approximately $400,000.
As a teenager, vacationing on LBI was just as fun, if not more so, as it was for Jeanette as a kid. She and her friends always made a trip to Atlantic City, 34 miles away. They’d walk up and down the Boardwalk, eating custard and trotting out to the edge of the Steel Pier. Watching the diving horse show, with a female rider on a trained horse that jumped from a tower into a small pool of water, was one of the trip’s most eventful sightings.
Back on the Island, Jeanette and her siblings enjoyed climbing the 217 steps of Barnegat Lighthouse, though it wasn’t very well maintained during those days. The lock on the lighthouse was usually broken open, and the inside of the tower appeared dirty and unsafe.
When Jeanette was 17, she met a boy whose family owned a six-person cabin cruiser. One night on a whim, they took the motorboat through Barnegat Inlet out into the ocean. Inexperienced and caught in a tremendous current, the two needed the Coast Guard to tow them back to shore.
Every Sunday, the family attended Catholic Mass. But Jeanette’s father didn’t feel comfortable attending the church in Beach Haven; it was too crowded. So they began to attend Mass inside the Colony Theater in Brant Beach, where Franciscans came to worship after traveling from Philadelphia. The kids, wearing stiff, starched clothing, always complained about having to wear shoes.
“We walked around the beach barefoot most of the time, so we hated having to wear shoes,” said Fusco. “But my father would always tell us that we could give God one hour of our week.”
On other days, the family went to the Colony Theater to watch the latest movies. The theater had no air conditioning, so doors in the back were left open for the ocean breeze to waft in. Unfortunately, so did the mosquitoes. The owner of the theater came in with his flit gun to help get rid of the flies, and everyone knew to duck when he walked by.
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| Photo by Ryan Morrill |
When the “mosquito man” came around town in his car, puffing out bursts of insecticide, the children ran down the street after him.
“In the 1960s, ‘the mosquito man,’ we used to call him, had a jeep and a big drum on back, and he used to go up and down the streets,” said Fusco. “The kids would run behind him, breathing all that stuff in. The whole block would run after him. Who knew about insecticides back then?”
Things have certainly changed at the Shore, but Fusco and her extended family, including her children and grandchildren, still come to the Island to visit every summer. In her spare time, Fusco researches and writes about the changing community of Long Beach Island. Her latest fiction novel was self-published in 2010. Seagate House: Legacies of Long Beach Island can be found in Andy’s at the Light in Barnegat Light, Book Worm in Surf City, New Jersey Maritime Museum in Beach Haven and the Beach Haven Public Library. For more information, visit seagatehouse.com.
This article was published in The Beachcomber.
