By the Sea

By Jeffrey Hart | Sunday, August 5, 2007

Hence in a season of calm weather.
Though inland far we be,
Our Souls have sight of that immoral sea
Which brought us hither,
Can in a moment travel thither,
And see the children sport upon the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.
-William Wordsworth

In the summer at Ocean Grove, New Jersey black men wearing white trousers pushed the rolling chairs along the boardwalk. The chairs were made of wicker, they had red white and blue striped canopies and large wheels, and a wicker footrest. All day crowds of people walked along the boardwalk like shoals of fish. All the hotels along the beach had been built before the turn of the century. They were wooden and white, yellow or gray, had turrets, verandas, dormer windows, gingerbread woodwork and striped awnings. Most of the hotels had American flags in front, either on flagpoles standing on the front lawn or hanging from a pole sticking out from a second story veranda. In the evenings a small band would play in the bandstand on the boardwalk patriotic tunes like “America the Beautiful” and “Anchors Aweigh”; bands would also play John Philip Souza marches and hymns since Ocean Grove had been founded as a Methodist community. Presidents Grant, McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt had spoken in the town’s huge wooden auditorium, and the wounded President Garfield had died in his house a couple of miles up the beach.
From the beach when you were six or seven years old, you looked out over the sea where the sun danced in triangles on the water and all day long ships crept by on the horizon, sometimes great ocean liners with three funnels, sometimes the low sleek profile of a destroyer, and always there was the boom of the sea as the waves crashed and spread in ruffles up the sand.

My grandmother, Bertha Reith, had an apartment for the summer at the “Ocean View,” one of the hotels along the beach. Though she and my grandfather weren’t Methodists they liked the quiet of Methodist Ocean Grove, which was dry, and sometimes my mother and I stayed at the “Ocean View” too, taking the train down from New York. Weekends my grandfather Albert came down from Brooklyn, driving his blue Hupmobile with its white-walled tires and spare tire in a chrome case on the running board, always driving slowly, no more than thirty miles an hour down the New Jersey two-lane blacktop roads. “Step it up, Al,” my father would say when he was in the car with him. Albert liked to sit in a rocking chair on the hotel veranda smoking a cigar, or on a boardwalk bench in his Panama hat watching us on the beach, as my grandmother Bertha often swimming back and forth, back and forth, quite far out with her sidestroke, sometimes for half an hour.
Albert’s pale skin kept him out of the sun, but Bertha turned a nut-brown. I always think of Albert as careful and seeming old, though earlier in the century when he was young he had been an indoor bike racer, proud of his aluminum bike that weighed only a few ounces, and spinning around a banked wooden track at high speed.

Those days all women wore one-piece bathing suits, some dark wool and itchy, but my mother, Gladys Marie, wore the new white Jantzen one-piece sharkskin suit, in which she was aware that she attracted attention. She had been in some of the big Broadway shows back in the 1920s: Jerome Kern’s “Showboat,” “Poppy,” and the “Music Box Review.” She had known W.C. Fields, and said he was only funny if he had a drink or two. She also knew Irving Berlin and others from the theater world of the Twenties; during the 1930s, Irving Berlin, a sallow and quiet man in a blue suit, sometimes stopped in at our suburban apartment for a cup of tea, and as a child I had little notion of his importance. Looking back I can see that the late 1920s when my mother married my father Clifford, who was a young architect. That must have been the happiest time of their lives. I still have some 1920s theater programs from those days.

When my father came down to the Jersey shore for a weekend he would join us on the beach, and I remember especially the white belt he wore on his blue woolen trunks, the belt-buckle with two metal interlocking snakes. He was an architect, with degrees from Dartmouth and Columbia, but during those Depression years there wasn’t much building or, consequently, much architectural work. Both my mother and father were expert swimmers, but for non-swimmers there were bathing ropes fastened to wooden piles and these stretched out into the surf. Women hung in a row on the ropes and screamed.

A half-mile walk up the boardwalk from Ocean Grove you came to Asbury Park, named for the great Methodist preacher Francis Asbury, a follower of the Wesley brothers themselves; though now Asbury Park was mostly a large amusement park. The whole family went up there every night.

Asbury was separated from Ocean Grove by Wesley Lake, on which you could pedal a wooden boat that looked like a swan lazily on the water, The largest Ferris wheel in the northeast loomed over the amusement park, and when you rode in its cages, from the top you could see the lights all up the shore. There was a carousel with wooden horses and organ music, bumper cars, and a scary tunnel where you rode through in a car as things suddenly jumped out at you in the dark; there were also auctions along the boardwalk—the adults liked these—art, rugs, jewelry, and games in which people threw baseballs at targets to win watches or dolls, and on the boardwalk men with scales guessed your weight and were almost always right, missing now and then to keep the customers on the hook hoping to win a doll or some other prize. We sometimes played miniature golf, popular during the Thirties but forgotten now.

One night in 1937 you could see from Ocean Grove a strange false sunset to the west when the zeppelin Hindenburg blew up over in Lakehurst, the glow lighting up the sky as the hydrogen fire reached a heat so intense that it melted the metal mooring tower as flaming passengers leaped to their deaths. The United States had a monopoly on helium, which would not have burned, but Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes had denied helium to the Nazi government. The cause of the disaster was never discovered. A spark could have caused it. Everyone aboard wore rubber-soled shoes. But anti-Nazi sabotage was widely suspected. My father thought a tracer bullet fired at long range would have been enough to touch off the hydrogen. Everyone remembered the Hindenburg’s enormous red tailfins with their black swastika in a white circle as the airship arrived from Germany and circled the Empire State Building before heading south to Lakehurst. The Hindenburg always arrived over Manhattan exactly on time being German. Its almost idling engines gave off a strange pfff pfff pfff whirring sound you could hear below on the street. The great zeppelin symbolized German technology and suggested power, and when it circled the Empire State building this could have been taken as a salute or a menace.

A few years earlier, in 1934, there had been another disaster one night, politics also suspected, when the cruise ship Morro Castle burned off the New Jersey shore. People on the hotel verandas could see the blaze on the darkening horizon.

Bodies washed up on the beach and the Morro Castle itself, still smoking, also washed ashore too, up the beach at Asbury Park near the new Convention Center. The Morro Castle had sailed the New York to Havana route. In Cuba there had been a Communist uprising. At the time it was thought that the ship might have been smuggling arms. A demented crew member, however, in fact set the fire, but that might not be the whole story. An investigative reporter has written to me claiming that some important documents are not being released by the FBI. Years later I found at an antique show an old photograph about eighteen inches long of the Morro Castle beached near the Asbury Park Convention Center. It is framed and hangs on the wall of my office at our home in New Hampshire, and it shows a crowd on the boardwalk walking past the burned-out hulk while others stand at the railing and stare at it across the sand. Children with their parents walk on the boardwalk too, little boys in white shirts and shorts, and I could have been one of them, the figures are too small to tell.

By the Sea

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