elcome back to LBI. This issue of Echoes of LBI Magazine marks a major milestone for our unique publication, this is our 15th Anniversary Edition. I started Echoes of LBI Magazine fifteen years ago out of my love of the Island and my passion for its history. Looking back on that exciting time, it is difficult to remember all the details and decisions necessary to get the initial issue into print. Of the things that do come to mind is one of the first decisions I had to make; a name for the magazine. Several ideas were bantered about. A few warranted serious discussion. None met the mark. But when the title Echoes of LBI was mentioned, I immediately knew that was it. Webster offers a definition of the word echoes as reminiscent of, or a reverberation. That was and remains my vision, a magazine dedicated to the arts that documents the history of the Island and its people and exalts its present day. A magazine filled with all original content contributed by people who know and love Long Beach Island.
And so, it is. Every edition of Echoes tells the story of the Island’s remarkable people and events throughout the years. Complimenting those stories of the past is a focus on art, photography, writing and more from contemporary residents and visitors alike. Echoes is a lifestyle magazine that celebrates the joys of LBI.
I have been very lucky with the caliber of people who have joined me in collaborating on Echoes. It is my dedicated staff and generous volunteers that breathe life into every edition. I could not do it without them. Maggie O’Neill was one of my first writers. Marjorie Amon was my first photographer. Over the past fifteen years many other writers and photographers have contributed, including Jim O’Connor. If you have an Island connection, great photographs, or camera with a long lens, I may ask you to contribute.
Over the past fifteen years, Echoes has published stories contributed by people from far and wide. Locals and visitors that have spent days, weeks, summers, or a lifetime here; people whose hearts are still on LBI. I have always believed that everyone has a story. And each story is part of the collective history of the Island. Telling those stories, documenting the history of LBI one person, one story, one family at a time; this is what Echoes is about.
I was raised in Harvey Cedars, the middle child of a family of six children, four of whom are still living on LBI. My father was also raised in Harvey Cedars and attended school in the one room schoolhouse, as did my sister, Gay, and brother, Bobby. I started LBI Grade School the first year it opened, 1951. My sister, Merry, joined me there the next year. Our younger siblings, Jon, and Susan soon followed.
I loved school so much. Even the bus ride was fun. I loved the teachers, gym, sports and recess the most. And though I was small for my age, I was one of the fastest runners and challenged all the boys. Of my racing successes my best win was against Toddy Nicholson. Toddy was the fastest boy in fourth grade. I was an undersized girl in third. He was fast. But I was faster.
Major storms that impacted LBI in the past have in many ways literally washed some of its history out to sea. As time passes, that history will be lost unless it is documented before its forgotten. This makes LBI’s post Sandy history even more precious and important to document. Contact me to have it documented in Echoes
This special edition includes some of our most beloved photos, updated favorite stories, and other events from 2009 as well as current articles. If you have old photos of LBI schools, class pictures, or photos of Barnegat Light’s old one-room school that you would like to share, please contact me at echoesoflbi@gmail.com.
As always LBI has many events scheduled for this summer and fall. Don’t miss the annual LBI Sea Glass and Arts Festival at Things A Drift in Ship Bottom, September 30th & October 1st, 2023.
Make some history this summer.
Enjoy more sunsets.
Cheryl Kirby Publisher, Echoes of LBI Magazine
Echoes of LBI Magazine • Cheryl Kirby, Owner & Publisher • (609) 361-1668 • 406 Long Beach Blvd. • Ship Bottom, NJ • echoesoflbi.com
If you have an LBI story, photography, poetry, nostalgia, beach find or art you would like to share, tell us at echoesoflbi@gmail.com.
Advertisers: Readers collect Echoes of LBI – your ad has the unique potential to produce results for many years beyond the issue date.
Magazine Designer – Sara Caruso • Copy Editor – Susan Spicer-McGarry • Pre-press – Vickie VanDoren
Photographers – Marjorie Amon, Irene Bausmith, Cara Bowers, Carole Bradshaw, Sara Caruso, Wendy Cikot, Laura Einhorn, Caroline Foley, Joe Guastella, Henry Hegeman, Michael Kalagassey, Diane Keeler, Denis Kirby, Nicole McGann, Jeannette Michelson, Manny Morone, Maria Morone-Zotto, Barbara Moody, Jim O'Connor, Maggie O'Neill, Scott Palmeri, Anthony Pitale, Jeff Rapp, Nancy Rokos, Greta Schagen, Robert Schlichting, Reilly Platten Sharp, Merry Simmons, Susan Spicer-McGarry, Kathleen Stockman, Diane Stulga, Vic Stulga, Steven Wagner, and Michal Moffa Wilson
Contributors – Ashley Anderson, Bella Helena Ayers, Irene Bausmith, Bob Campbell, Sara Caruso, Karen Ann Cicmansky, Ben Centra, Shelli Centra, Nancy Edwards, Carol Freas, Caitlin Furio, Joan Garris, Dory Gasorek, Joe Guastella, Paul Hartelius, Mary Ann Himmelsbach, Nancy Kelly Kunz, Kelly McElroy, Jeannine Mianowski, Nicole Musillami, Maureen Newman, Maggie O'Neill, Fran Pelham, Ann Marie Quigley, Gillian Rozicer, Randy Rush, Robert Sakson, Martin Schuyler, Reilly Platten Sharp, Elaine Sisko, Susan Spicer-McGarry, Diane Stulga, and Vickie VanDoren
Content photo – Anthony Pitale • Cover photo – Sara Caruso, story on page 93
Yet more plastic trash, Flotsam and jetsam debris. Our ocean cries...HELP!
—Artwork and poetry by Carol Freas
The Garden Club of Long Beach Island’s Art in Bloom was held on Thursday, May 18 at the Long Beach Island Foundation of the Arts and Sciences in Loveladies, New Jersey. Admission was free and open to the public with over 200 people attending the afternoon event. Eighteen Garden Club members created flower arrangements inspired by art seen in the Long Beach Island Foundation’s juried show Works on Paper.
The concept of arranging flowers to interpret art began at the Boston Museum in the late 19th century. The Garden Club of LBI has created and presented this event since 2003. There are no design rules. The flowers, containers, greenery, and props were personal choices of the Garden Club participants. No artificial flowers are ever used. —Gillian Rozicer • Photography by Jeannette Michelson
Opposite page, top left: Artist – McKenzie Eldridge, Life (multiblock linocut print); Designer – Carol Freas.
Top right: Artist – Mary Place, Lewes Lighthouse (digital drawing); Designer –Madeline Foley.
Bottom right: Artist –Gail Postal, Crystal (Stars) (graphite, colored pencil, and acrylics); Designer – Rachel Halford.
This page, left: Artist –Vessilina Traptcheva, Gaze II (egg tempera); Designer –Michele Farias.
Below: Artist – Philippe Halaburda, Surface of Breresniitz 5 (acrylics and tape); Designer – Rachael Teutul.
Sitting at an easel on one of the many docks of Viking Village in Barnegat Light, New Jersey, an artist is surrounded by natural daylight, the aroma of salt air, the sites, and sounds of birds, boats, and the operation of this working fishing village founded in the 1920s. It is a painters’ dream location, everything providing inspiration for the artist to transcribe onto canvas.
For artists, en plein air painting is about leaving the four walls of their studio behind and painting outdoors on location. This allows the artist’s senses to be one with nature, experiencing not only the sights they are painting, but hearing the sounds, touching the textures, feeling, and smelling the gentle sea breeze around them. And lastly, for those painting plein air at Viking Village, imagining the taste of fresh seafood on the tip of their tongue. This style of painting, for artists, is a more personal experience, usually resulting in better work.
The history of plein air painting can be traced back for centuries. It was truly made into an art form by the French Impressionists. Monet, Pissarro, and Renoir were major advocates of this art form with much of their work being done outdoors. As the painting experience proceeds, a plein
air artist must keep in mind how the light and shadows change as time passes. Often a plein air painter may start a painting on site and then utilize photographs to capture specific details to complete the painting back in the comfort of their studio.
Most artists work alone in their studios. Though, it is not uncommon for artists to gather at a location and paint together allowing them to not only learn from each other through critiques, but to share in the comradery. Recently, a group of artists from Pine Shores Art Association in Tuckerton painted en plein air at Viking Village.
“There are lots of varied reflections on the water; boats of every shape and size; interesting docks and waterfront buildings; and lots of marine-related activities on and adjacent to the fleet,” says artist Paul Hartelius of Manahawkin. Watercolor painting is his favorite medium, but he also enjoys oil and acrylic painting, pastels, drawing in charcoal or pencil, and photography. Hartelius is the 2023 recipient of the Ocean County Cultural and Heritage Commission Special Award for Advancement of the Arts.
LBI native, Carol Freas, paints in watercolors and has a passion for combining art and
poetry. “I’ve been an active member of Pine Shore Art Association since 1987 and an instructor there and at the LBI Foundation of Arts and Sciences in Love Ladies,” says Freas. She enjoys painting shore birds and familiar scenes that capture the lure of LBI: people enjoying the beach, children playing in the water, seashore gardens, and notable and historical buildings.
“Viking Village is a dynamic spot, with wildlife, marshes, the lighthouse, wandering visitors, scallop and fish sorting, and a fleet of colorful ships and mariners. It is a neverending source of inspiration,” says artist, Irene Bausmith, of Manahawkin. “Living on the bay, my appreciation of birds, wildlife, and the marshes, has soared. My artwork reflects the joy I find in painting, often plein air, the Island, its estuaries, and marinas.”
“Being one with nature is what excites me most about painting plein air,” says Barnegat artist, Nancy Edwards. A former president of Pine Shores Art Association, Edwards’ preferred medium is watercolor though she also paints in oils and acrylics. She has a passion for painting and photographing nature and animals. Edwards particularly loves to paint pet portraits. —Nancy Edwards
The Youth Group of The Garden Club of LBI met on May 17th at the Ocean County Library – Surf City Branch for a very special project at the end of the school year. Throughout the year, children in grades three through six joined the youth group to work with flowers.
Chair, Jeannette Michelson, and co-chair, Ginny Scarletelli, along with club member, Paula Cafone, lead the group in designing a floral arrangement. The youngsters were given an assortment of flowers including sunflowers, asters, daisies,
and proteus. The children were free to design an arrangement, some tall, some compact and all very unique.
Then with a nod to The Garden Club's Art in Bloom event taking place the next day, the children were given art supplies to create a painting of their flower arrangement. Gillian Rozicer, the club's publicity chair and a retired art teacher, guided the group through the intricacies of watercolors including brushwork, blending colors and other tricks of the trade. The results were impressive. And everyone enjoyed the experience. —Gillian Rozicer • Photography by
Jeannette Michelson
Opposite page, top row, left to right: John with little brother, Thomas; Joey & Isabel; Alyssa. Middle row, left to right: Kameron & Wesley; Cecelia; Angel Boy. Bottom row, left to right: Marissa; Tessa; Johnny.
This page, top row, left to right: Elisabeth, John & Michelle; Noel, Megan, Reid, & Jake; Jackson & Emmett with little sister, Sienna. Bottom row, left to right: Two week old Jordan; Eva, Ava & Erin; Alina & Emmie.
A walk on the beach cleanses your mind and heart, Blessings for a new day and a brand new fresh start, Cherish every second on the beach that you ever had, Let the waves wash away what is too hurtful or sad.
Never lose faith and take time to be thankful each day, Focus on the power of prayer each night as you pray, Remember that in each other we’ll always have a friend. The beach will give us strength on that we can depend.
Breathe in the fresh salty air as you walk along the beach, Here strength and energy for your soul is well within reach, For the beach will comfort you...Who could ask for more? Finding your inner peace walking right here along the shore.
—Diane StulgaWhere do seagulls go to die?
The graying gull seemed to be waiting looking out on the bay. Instinctively concerned about eating, trying to call other gulls to her aid. Feathers backward into the wind disheveled and out of sorts What a strange sight on such a beautiful day
Days gone by when she would fly high in the sky Days when her stomach was full, begging for leftovers from the departing beach crowd Checking out the shallows for blue crabs and clams Diving for the unfortunate ones and screaming for others to let her fly by
In the night sky circling above looking to rest on the piling below Shouting aloud for all to hear get off of my post its mine so stay clear Watching and waiting for sunrise to come Turning around and around going back and forth ever so slow
Days pass so fast and summer is gone Time has no meaning in life anymore She’s restless and anxious to go where she may Fighting to stay alive until dawn
The gray gull has tail to the wind looking out to the sky Sadly responding to time and the day She knows full well her time has come Still the question remains, where do gulls go to die
-Poetry by Bob Campbell Photography by Steven Wagner
M ESSAGE IN A B OTTLE
Gazing out on the horizon
As far as the eye can see,
It must be miles and miles
Before the sky appears to touch the sea,
A message in a bottle is tossed by my hand Hoping it will reach a new and distant land,
Riding the crest of waves to and fro
Like a pod of dolphins on the go,
Weathering storms with gale force winds
Staying intact while it spins,
At last it reaches it's destination
Waiting to be discovered without hesitation!
Th E S EEKERS
Some beach dreamers search daily for treasure that will hold court in their collection of memories found on world-traveled shorelines. Others know the littoral respite they walk each morning, as the sun’s promise breaks through gray, is where the tenacious find their reward. Deposited not on wet sand or in tidal flow, but in their souls as they work toward and pray for peace.
—Maureen Newman —Poetry by Nancy Kelly Kunz Photography by Sara CarusoWhen the winds came off the water
From across the bay
Flags on the small island
Saluted their strength and majesty
White caps leaped skyward
Their wake slammed boats into docks
Again and again and again
Thumping with the down-beat rhythm
Of a passionate percussionist
They came before the rains streaked the sky
Before the streets flooded hubcap high
Before pine tree boughs surrendered
Before houses went dark
And the sky became electrified
The winds came without restraint
Announced the impending havoc
Their warning resonated, but they Did not pause to see who was listening
—Poetry by Nancy Kelly Kunz
Photography by Cheryl Kirby
Listen to the living sea
Utter, in flailing tongues of foam and froth, The first syllable
From which springs all thought all word.
Om her ceaseless chant Rattles in my very bones.
The ever driving din Of wind and surf
Rolls over the morning. Within it discernible
A song most eloquent In tones barely perceived. Searching, with ear and eye
Legs working walking
Closer, louder the songGreetings from a grain Of sanderlings!
They dance as well
In unison; front line facing Tracing the edge of wave. A blur of black spinning legs Rolls along sloping damp sand. Leaving nary a trace
They peck and probe Playing surviving; While up down back forth Rocks the relentless tide.
Atop a round hump
Head on against the wind
They gather;
Mimicking primping cuddling Out of reach of unsettling surf. Some seem asleepBalls of brown balanced
On a single thin twig of leg Head curled comfortably into feathered back.
Silent alarm sounds — Wave! Time to Beat Fast Feet! No second leg drops down From those same some?
Nevertheless
They hop-a-long, Trailing the mob's rush Chasing waves back into the sea.
Welcome is distraction from the grave Winter scene; a reminder
That life flows ever on Over the edge of the world…
Now in the gunpowder gray Light of day
The flint has been struck! A spark ignites.
Shards of shrapnel thought
Explode in the chamber
Of my muzzle loaded soul
Hurling waves of words
Into the vast barrel of sea and sky
Answering the Om.
An ever lasting love
Care and commitment
Hearts beating as one
Never skipping a beat
Sharing compassion and friendship
Bringing happiness
A feeling so powerful and pleasant
Intense and uplifting
Making life complete
—Poetry by Karen Ann Cicmansky Artwork by Nancy Edwards
Feathers in the sky
Feathers in the sky
A full moon on the rise
A lonely seagull cries
So slowly on the move
Across the heavens clear and blue Feathers in the sky
Feathers in the sky
Feathers in the sky
The storm blown out to sea
Now just a memory
With cirrus clouds in place
Like delicate Burano lace Feathers in the sky
Just yesterday the zephyr blew
Thunder clapping all around Rain fell in a deluge
With lightning bolts that scorched the ground
But now there are feathers in the sky
Feathers in the sky
See your furry, feathery, or scaly friends in BEACH PAWS! Submit a high resolution image with the names of your pets, the owner & photographer to echoesoflbi@gmail.com
It's important for your hermit crabs to get extra enrichment outside of their enclosure. This will make them more tame and calm around you and give you a chance to clean their crabitat. Hermits are curious animals that love to explore and play. Setting up a playpen for them is a great way to keep your hermits' minds and bodies active.
Place toys and climbable objects in the playpen. You can also build houses for them out of LEGOs. Just make sure whatever they climb on is stable and low to the ground so there's no risk of falling. Hermit crabs even enjoy things you bring home from the beach. Before allowing your crabs to interact with a beach find, make sure to sanitize it. Boiling the beach find in water and let it dry and cool thoroughly. Do not use soap or chemicals. Hermit crab love to chew on driftwood, but avoid pine and cedar because those are toxic to crabs. As always, all should be done under close supervision.
Despite appearances, hermit crabs are inquisitive and intelligent, and will love their new activity center for years to come!
-Sara Caruso
On this solstice, when night is long, I look to the sky and find the new born sun. When the world turns to winter and my soul seeks a rest, my heart is warmed by the knowledge that each day will be a bit brighter.
Wrapped in the eternal circle of the universe, I sleep in peace as does the earth. The voice of the season speaks in whispers; faint stirrings beneath the frost.
I dream and listen to the unknown.
I breathe deep and slow, in sync with the cold world around me. I look inward, as does nature and seek reflection that renews my spirit and heals my soul. It is in the stillness of winter that I clearly hear my ancestors song. They sing softly and speak to me in the hush of snow and glitter of the stars and the beauty of white ice.
As I listen to their voices, I take comfort in knowing that pain and loneliness will always ease and become lighter, for my spirit mimics the journey of the universe. My darkness will grow brighter and my inner sun will continue to grow stronger from my yuletide rest. Rejoice in the season.
Sleep in peace.
Rest in the dark winter nights and know that renewal is a promise and eternal. Blessed be the gifts of Yule. Blessed be our winter rest.
—Poetry and photography by Maggie O’Neill
Good cheer abounds at The Garden Club of LBI’s Holiday House Tour, now in its fifty-sixth year. More than one thousand visitors streamed through five amazing private homes. Happy homeowners from Barnegat Light to Beach Haven gladly turned over their bit of paradise into the clever hands of Garden Club members who transformed each into breathtaking holiday beauties.
All the handmade decorations were natural, many from members’ own gardens, the colors of the flowers and greenery blending into the hues of the houses. The seashells and pinecones saying, “Yes, it is our much-loved LBI.” Creative surprises included gurgling snowmen melting in the shower, Santa Claus preparing his suit for the sleigh ride, and solid silver antique ornaments dancing on a tree. It is no wonder the Holiday House Tour ticket is one of the most sought-after tickets of the year.
Members of The Garden Club — now numbering 174 — come together each year to prepare for this festive event. Whether it is baking aromatic cookies for the gigantic cookie sale or twisting a wee bit of holly onto a wreath, all of the members join in to spread the excitement.
A delectable gourmet box lunch served at the elegant Brant Beach
Yacht Club was included with this year’s ticket. The Surf City Fire House turned over their wide-open spaces for the handfashioned greenery sale, the luscious cookie sale, and a holiday gift shop featuring many local vendors and artists.
Proceeds from the Holiday House Tour allow the Garden Club of LBI to continue supporting local environmental initiatives, awarding college scholarships, and providing free services for the Island’s children and seniors.
SAVE THE DATE: 56th Annual Holiday House Tour, Thursday, December 7, 2023. Preparations are underway and The Garden Club of LBI is extremely excited to present the Holiday House Tour once again. Mark your calendar for an exquisite day of visiting five outstanding LBI homes showcased in their holiday finest. Tickets go on sale in the fall.
—Gillian Rozicer • Photography by Jeannette Michelson
To most people on LBI, December 9 through 11, 2022 was a typical quiet off-season weekend. For us, it was the best three days of the year: Dia de New Friendsgivingmasnukkalloween, the sixth edition of our quirky annual party celebrating at least five fall and winter holidays over thirty-six hours.
The mouthful of a tradition began in December 2017. Due to differing family requirements, my partner of three years and I had never celebrated the holidays together. We wanted to throw a party to bask in the cheer with each other and friends but struggled to choose the holiday. Friendsgiving is classic, but we both love Christmas. We thought, Why not both? From there, it was natural to include Chanukkah for our Jewish friends, and why not New Year’s Eve too? Just like that, New Friendsgivingmasnukkah was born.
Since then, we have gathered every December in my partner’s family’s Surf City house for a Friday to Sunday extravaganza of multi-holiday spirit. We co-create the party with all the guests, and everyone brings their most dearly held family traditions. Each holiday is organized by those who grew up celebrating it, so the event schedule and name changes depending on who attends.
Sometimes, the changes are small. This year a guest brought their family tradition of a Christmas raffle and throughout the day we drew tickets for stocking-stuffers. In year three, a guest added the tradition of a midday Scream Run on the beach. We line up, count down, and take off running and screaming for as far as we can in one breath. Last year, we added a late-night polar plunge in the ocean for the most daring guests.
At other times, we add entire holidays. One year a friend from Sri Lanka added Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights, and we made colorful mandala sand art called rangoli. This year, a friend from Mexico set up a Dia de los Muertos ofrenda, an altar to loved ones who have passed. In 2021, thanks to the persistent request of a devoted guest, Halloween was permanently added to the holiday lineup.
Each year, we continue to refine the schedule to make our marathon event as smooth and sustainable as possible. This year, we celebrated Halloween in costume on Friday night. The next day, we awoke
to Christmas morning, complete with a meticulously curated Christmas playlist and a competitive round of White Elephant gift exchange.
The next few hours were open time. Some people began cooking Friendsgiving dinner; others did the Scream Run or napped. In the evening we shared what we were thankful for over a Friendsgiving feast of old family recipes and holiday classics. While digesting, we turned our attention to the Dia de los Muertos ofrenda, where we placed photos of departed loved ones and welcomed them to the party with offerings of the food and drink they loved in life. Next was the Eight Half-Hours of Chanukkah, during which we lit a new candle on the menorah every thirty minutes. We played dreidel, ate fried latkes, and, per tradition, piled onto the sofa to watch The Rugrats Chanukkah episode.
Finally, it was time to shake off our food comas and dance the year away. We transformed the unfinished basement into a carpeted dance floor with colorful lights and a disco ball. With bubbly in hand, we counted down to midnight and wished each other Happy New Year to the tune of Auld Lang Syne. Last, but certainly not least, the bravest made our way to the beach for a quick New Year dip in the freezing ocean before collapsing into bed.
The party is, suffice to say, a feat of endurance. Surviving is an exercise in drinking water, caring for each other, and strategic napping. By the weekend’s end, there is a feeling of camaraderie and collective achievement for having made it through. Even still, I worry. The invitation is an ever-growing novella of information and instructions on what to bring and how to prepare. Each year as I press send, I think, This is the year where I ask too much, and my friends will not be willing to play along.
Yet that has never happened. Somehow, each year, a crew shows up more invested than ever, with uglier holiday sweaters, more elaborate Halloween costumes, tastier food, and better gifts. Regular attendees have confided that New Friendsgivingmasnukkah is now their most anticipated annual holiday tradition. Though I cherish the time spent with my family during the actual holidays, I understand what they mean. I used to feel some disappointment after every Christmas, having failed again to find holiday joy under giftwrap. Now, by the time the actual new year comes around, I have so thoroughly celebrated the season I could not possibly be disappointed.
And LBI in the winter is the perfect backdrop for such an outrageous event. The quiet of the Island makes the approach to the party feel like a long trek down an empty, blustery, wintery road to a little house at the end of the world. A warm, welcoming house, full to bursting with string lights, pine-scented candles, sweaters, family recipes, jack-o-lanterns, latkes, eggnog, and love. A house where you are about to experience thirty-six hours of pure joy.
FurioTraditions are valuable in more ways than one, Reflecting on past memories is always fun, Like our Christmas Parade held one day a year, Leading up to letting everyone know Santa is near.
A time to keep everyone connected and proud, A place where cheering and laughter is allowed, Holiday spirit felt and seen throughout the salty air, For two hours the true meaning of Christmas is here.
From the floats, bands and carolers music is playing, As the crowds line the street cheering and swaying, Adults and children wait for this one day to celebrate, Hope future parade announcements will have a rain date!
The Year Without a Christmas Parade was sad for all, Having a rain date next year has to be the right call, So we can share the pride of our wonderful community, Filled with holiday cheer, love, joy, and unity.
—Poetry and photography by Diane Stulga
LBI FLY features giant kites, including a full size whale, fairytale creatures, flying scuba divers, sports, and so much more! Events throughout the weekend include a Mayor’s Cup Kite Battle with all six LBI mayors, a night fly at Barnegat Lighthouse, a kite garden installation by local school children, indoor kite flying demonstrations, children’s kite making, buggy kite rides, and a special candy drop. This event is free to the public. LBI Shuttles will be running throughout the weekend. For more information visit lbifly.com
From sunbathing on the beach to surfing in the ocean to lounging poolside — summertime living on Long Beach Island has so much to offer. Perhaps the most rewarding pursuit is the simple gathering of friends and family to recap the day, catch up on family gossip or debate the results of the latest sporting event. There is no better place to engage in such banter than relaxing in an outdoor kitchen preparing for the latest summer meal. According to Luke Reynolds of Reynolds Landscaping, “An outdoor kitchen quickly becomes the hub of coastal living, the place where all gatherings eventually gravitate to at the end of the day.”
Once considered a utilitarian feature for flipping burgers and grilling steaks, outdoor kitchens have become multi-functional, equipped with all the cooking features and accoutrements of their indoor counterpart. From pizza ovens to side burners for boiling lobsters and corn to multi-burner grills with searing and warming capabilities, out-
door kitchens, especially those with seating, are the perfect hang-out space and heart of outdoor entertaining.
“When designing an outdoor kitchen, “says Reynolds, “the location, shape, and size of the structure must be finalized early in the planning process along with its orientation to other features in the landscape.”
Whether U-shaped, L-shaped or a straight run of cabinetry and appliances, the design of an outdoor kitchen should complement existing accessory features and promote easy circulation through the property. An outdoor kitchen can be oriented outward to capture a stunning bayfront view or inward toward a wall-mounted Tv to encourage group interaction.
Kitchen appliances should be heavy-duty, durable, and rated for outdoor usage to ensure long-term performance that withstands the harsh coastal conditions of LBI. Keep in mind the old adage, “you get what you pay for,” when purchasing all motorized equipment. Highly rated appliances from a well-reviewed company can reduce the need for repairs and frequent equipment replacement. A well-designed kitchen should also be equipped with basic accessories to facilitate food prep and cleanup like a trash/recycle bin and sink. If a sports bar atmosphere is envisioned, consider incorporating a kegerator or wine refrigerator into the kitchen layout.
From prefabricated, all-weather composite to custom-built hardwood to natural stone applications, the materials used in the construction of an outdoor kitchen and storage cabinetry are diverse — accommodating a vast array of styles and taste preferences. Construction materials can be selected to complement existing hardscaping, architectural elements of the home or a specific color palette. Granite is highly recommended as countertop surface for its durability and aesthetic and offers many color options from which to choose.
According to Reynolds, if space is a limiting factor when designing an outdoor kitchen, consider expanding inward to create an al fresco room within the garage space to increase exterior living and entertaining possibilities. Most township zoning ordinances restrict fire features such as grills and side burners to an outdoor setting. However, these requirements can be met if a vent hood is mounted over the grill station and a non-combustible facade, such as marble or travertine, is installed behind the outdoor kitchen wall.
Both functional and aesthetic, an outdoor kitchen and sitting counter bridging the gap between indoor and outdoor living is a must have to create the perfect venue for al fresco congregating and entertaining during the summer season on LBI.
Elaine Sisko, Reynolds Staff Writer
For more information or to view our vast portfolio of custom outdoor kitchens, we invite you to peruse the website of Reynolds Landscaping, www.reynoldslandscaping.com. To schedule an appointment to discuss design possibilities for your upcoming outdoor kitchen project, please contact Reynolds Landscaping via phone at 609-597-6099.
As a retired New Jersey educator, I wanted a way for my grandchildren to learn about our lovely coastline and the life that washes ashore. Collecting shells and other beach treasures is such fun for children, so my grandchildren and I wanted a way to show off our finds, but also make it educational and fun.
While visiting my Ship Bottom beach house each summer, my grandchildren, Eliza and Connor, always put beachcombing at the top of their list of activities. We search for treasures along the shore, and visit a local shell shop to add to their collection. The children then hurry home to set up their special finds in the E & C Seashell Museum.” Using their art and imaginations, they design the showcases for their finds, set up a pretend gift shop, and food café with a creative menu. Eliza and Connor go even further to design admission tickets to the museum. Once all that is set up, they plan an opening day event, and even make advertisements to entice family visitors. Then they act as tour guides, pointing out their newest finds, as well as old favorites.
Opening the E & C Seashell Museum is always an enjoyable family tradition for the grandchildren. Each year we can't wait to see what we'll find on LBI's shoreline and add to the museum collection. For our grandchildren, and our family, it's a great educational experience as much as it is fun.
—Joan Garris, retired New Jersey educator • Photography by James Emolo
To say that Shelli Centra has her hands full would be an understatement, because they are. Her hands are full and overflowing with treasure.
“Growing up, the beach was not a thing for us,” recalls Shelli. “My family went on other types of vacations.” That changed when she met her future husband. “Ronnie introduced me to the beach and Long Beach Island. His aunt, Julia Elmowsky, owned a house on 18th Street in Ship Bottom. His family rented houses on that block.” Eventually, Shelli, Ronnie and their sons, Ben and Jake would come to 17th Street, spending two weeks every summer in Ship Bottom.
“From the time our children were very small we spent a lot of time together on the beach,” says Shelli. “Our annual summer vacations on LBI are our best memories, and sea glassing was always an integral part.”
Walking along the water’s edge Shelli and her boys would search for sea glass treasures in the sand. But the treasures they gathered were more than frosted shards of glass, they were the joy of time
spent together and memories made. Halcyon memories of beach tousled hair and laughter on the ocean breeze, sun kissed noses, and small sandy fingers entwined with hers that she placed in her heart for safe keeping.
A few years ago, Shelli’s son, Ben, wrote Sea Glass Song as a birthday gift for Shelli. “I am not an overly emotional person... but I guess you could see how much it meant to me—it brings me to tears whenever I listen to the lyrics. It reflects the essence of my relationship with my boys. The words came from my son’s heart to mine, and it is so special to me. I am touched that he remembers those moments.”
This summer the family’s treasures will increase ten-fold as Ben and his wife, Lauren are expecting their first child. “And now that Ben is about to welcome his own son into the world,” beams Shelli, “I can hardly wait to introduce my grandson to the beaches of LBI, and the joy of sea glass hunting!”
Life is made up of moments spent and memories made. Each a precious treasure to be placed in a pocket for safe keeping against the rising tide.
—Susan Spicer-McGarry • Photographycourtesy of the Centra
familyLast summer, Shelli’s sea glass treasures grew exponentially. One of the highlights of the annual Sea Glass and Arts Festival in Ship Bottom is the opportunity to win a very large jar filled to the brim with genuine sea glass by guessing how many pieces it contains. Shelli was the co-winner, sharing the bounty of sea glass treasure with Rena DiNeno of Cedar Bonnet Island.
“It was a unique sea glass experience I will never forget,” said Shelli. “I couldn’t help but sort through all the sea glass and look over each piece. I was up until 12:30 am — way past my bedtime.”
Compassion Café 2023 — Celebrating our third season on LBI! Come visit us for a great cup of coffee and more, May 16 through September 14 at The Sea Shell Resort in Beach Haven Monday through Thursday 7 am to 11 am.
Actually, our organization is not only a paid part-time summer employment opportunity for special needs young adults — a lot happens during the off-season.
We have been busy with:
• Baking and donating our very own homemade dog treats to the Ocean County Animal Shelter. BTW: These awesome treats are always for sale at the Café.
• Cupid's Challenge valentine's Day 5K Run.
• Peer-to-peer volunteer training at Ss. Nicholas, Constantine & Helen Greek Orthodox Church in Roseland, New Jersey.
• Indoor pool party at St. Francis of Assisi R.C. Church in Brant Beach.
• Hiring and training events at First United Methodist Church in Beach Haven Terrace.
• Lunch at one of our favorite restaurants.
• Arcade Day
The gang was busy this spring rehearsing for our own stage version of High School Musical which we performed at The Stafford Township Arts Center Manahawkin on May 3.
We’ve Got Talent! So, if you enjoy song, dance, poetry, trivia, gabbing, and smiling, keep an eye out for our gang’s weekly talent offerings at Compassion Café during our hours of operation at The Sea Shell Resort.
The above events and so much more are made possible by the tireless efforts of our volunteers and generous donors. Many thanks to them all!
Compassion Café Fun Fact: The age range of our present staff is between seventeen and forty-four years old.
Compassion Café seeks the integration of teens and adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities through paid part-time summer employment in a small coffee shop environment with free hands-on training and ongoing support in an atmosphere of joy, community, love, and unconditional acceptance. By providing meaningful employment our employees gain independence, selfconfidence, and work skills for future success. Compassion Café is a 501(c)(3) partnering with local businesses in a true, non-profit model.
The late William A. Koch, the patriarch of our LBI family, first came to LBI from his home in Philadelphia as a child to escape severe allergies. He often stayed well into September with his grandparents who rented in the Beach Haven area. During his teen years, he worked on the Island and brought his childhood sweetheart, Gloria G. Koch, née Godshall, for visits. She fell in love with Bill and with Long Beach Island.
In 1957, Bill bought an oceanside plot in North Beach and the house on pilings was built in 1958. They named the house KOKO; KO for Koch and KO for Kodak where Bill worked for forty years.
Our family calls shore time “camp” as they enjoy the beach, miniature golfing, surf lessons, and craft stores. We are blessed to be a growing family with four generations loving LBI. —Ashley Anderson
Brian Wilson sang about a world where he could go and tell his secrets to in the song In My Room. For many of us on LBI that world is a green bench that sits atop the dune at the end of each street in Ship Bottom.
The bench is there for us when sadness fills our world. To sit overlooking the beach at daybreak and watch the sun rise up over the water is profound solace to an aching heart. Worry, grief or fear all seem to lessen a bit when sitting on the bench. Even everyday thoughts feel more like prayers atop a dune. Perhaps it’s the vastness of the sea that comforts us. Maybe it’s the rhythmic sound of the waves that soothes our spirit. Whatever it is, the bench never fails to wrap its green around our hurt and help it heal.
Likewise, it sits waiting for us like a friend the times we go there to rejoice. It provides the perfect spot to bask in exuberance. On those special days the sand feels warmer, and the water looks more blue. Life feels good.
Sitting on the bench is like sharing your soul with a friend. It’s a friend to turn to when you need to cry. It’s a friend who warms you when your heart is cold. It’s a friend who laughs with you when the day is filled with joy. It’s a friend who whispers to you as you sit atop the dune and contemplate the mysteries of this strange journey, we call life.
The green bench. It would make a great song. —Maggie O’Neill
Photography by Jim O'Connor
In the 1950s the salt marshes of the Manahawkin waterfront were transformed into Beach Haven West when the Shapiro brothers, Herbert, and Jerome, purchased and developed the land into vacation homes. The first phase of the development of lagoon homes opened in 1957.
Today, Beach Haven West has grown to be a warm, friendly, close-knit community. Boating, kayaking, swimming, cookouts, crabbing, fishing, clamming, walking, and biking are some of the many outdoor activities enjoyed by the residents of BHW. With nearby beautiful beaches, wonderful dining, great shopping, modern medical facilities, theatres, recreation, parks, trails and more, life in Beach Haven West has so much to offer.
My husband, vic, and I dreamed of living in BHW for almost as long as we can remember. As teenagers we both came to LBI with our friends and families. Eventually, we got engaged at Barnegat Lighthouse in 1986. And although we lived in northern New
Jersey, our hearts were always on LBI. We brought our own family to LBI annually for vacation. Throughout the year we took day trips to the Island even in winter when the lagoons were frozen, and snow covered. Over those years, as we drove to LBI we always felt drawn to BHW. To me with the homes lit up on the lagoons at night, it looked like a little fishing village. BHW always had a special place in our hearts and still does even more so today.
In July of 2007, we bought a house in Beach Haven West. Since then, vic and I have been truly blessed to call this place our home. It is a special place where we make wonderful memories with our children and their families.
Our neighbors share our passion about BHW. Each of us has a story about what makes it so special to us. Jeff and Barb Moody bought their house here fifteen years ago. According to Jeff and Barb, “BHW is the perfect location for us. From our awesome neighbors to the breathtaking views, we can’t imagine living anywhere else.”
Jim and Lynne Griffin feel the same way. The Griffins moved to BHW forty-two years ago. Back then, they were the youngest family in the neighborhood. Now, they are the oldest. Over the years they clammed, fished, crabbed, and had many family parties. They made new friends and lost old friends along the way. Jim and Lynne say, “Beach Haven West is a beautiful little town by the sea.”
“I love everything there is to love about Beach Haven West living,” says Laurene Lally, who has lived in BHW for thirty years. And though her husband Tom is no longer with her, Laurene feels close to him living in BHW, a place they both loved so much.
After owning a home in BHW for twenty-six years, John and Joni Barbarula became full-time residents here in May of 2022. According to John and Joni, “Living in BHW is the ultimate stress reliever.”
BHW is a community minded place with a down-home feel. It is a unique place with local traditions carried from one generation to the next and family-oriented events.
Every June there’s the Founders’ Day Parade. After the parade folks
gather at Doc Cramer Baseball Fields for a daylong event of family fun, music, food trucks, contests, vendors, and so much more. Fireworks are the perfect end to a perfect day.
Another great Beach Haven West event that originally started as a block party on a lagoon became Lagoon Lights. Now the last Saturday in August is celebrated with a decorated boat parade. Locals, friends, neighbors, and anyone who wants to participate decorate their boat with lights and more to cruise up and down the lagoons of BHW to the delight of everyone. It is a great evening filled with beautifully decorated boats, music, singing, food, drinks, and fun.
In Beach Haven West there is always something to do. Or you can choose to do nothing — sit back, relax, and enjoy the beauty of the sunbeams dancing off the lagoon, the tranquility of magnificent sunrises and breathtaking sunsets, and the warmth of family and friends.
Living on the water in Beach Haven West is as good as it gets. From sunrise to sunset and each precious hour in between — here is to life in BHW. —Written and photographed by Diane Stulga
There seems to be a sense of purpose in life at the edge of the sea. The movement of the tides, the sun, the moon, the seasons, is simple, predictable. There is a structure to the cycle of days that is comforting.
On a grey morning of moving clouds and east wind, I found myself seated on the sand, facing the ocean engulfed in the simplicity of nature, my back turned to the civilized world. The incoming tide brought a hint of the power of the elemental forces to which I was a witness. I was drawn toward a different sense of awareness, yet one that I could not attain; where the power of the sun, the pull of the moon by which those tides are created might become more familiar.
But more immediate and tangible to my eyes was the sight of the vague horizon; a place of welcome where sea and sky converge in the fog that imagination loves so well; the ether where ideas form, where they can run fast and free. It is a feast for the mind where dreams sit at the table with history and folklore. There are stories rooted in science, in mythology, in ancient writings passed down, reaching our eyes and ears today. They mingle with clues salted away in our consciousness, a part of the very makeup of our
blood, connecting us to the first life forms that came from the sea.
In the cloud-dappled sky above the dunes, a drift of beach plum blossoms takes form in the blue. Where might it take us? …Across the thousands of miles to the east, beyond the bounds of the mighty Atlantic where lies the cradle of civilization on the continent of Africa. From there, ages ago, our collective ancestors traveled both west and east, stopping in fertile river valleys — always near water — to live and flourish, crossing rivers and oceans to faraway lands.
All these places were transformed. They became lands of hunters,
farmers, poets and playwrights, mathematicians, thinkers and builders, craftsmen, storytellers, saints and druids, explorers, dreamers, fairies, and mythical creatures of the land, sea, sky, and night. One can live for a good while within those stories, sailing on toward our own horizons of hope. These ancient ancestors brought our collective past across the seas to reach us here, seated on the edge of the world. There is a rhythm to the waves as familiar as the rhythm of one's own breath; or the regular, recurring pound of the surf as it echoes the promise and beat of one's own heart. So, join for a while, nurture your sense of wonder, become part of the sea — the source of all life on Earth. —Written and photographed by Joe Guastella
Oysters have been enjoyed for thousands of years. Indigenous people that summered along the New Jersey shores left behind huge piles of discarded oyster shells known as middens or hummocks that can still be seen today scattered throughout the salt marshes. For European settlers oysters were a nutritious staple that later became an important industry.
The oyster is a keystone species, disproportionally supporting an entire ecosystem.
• Oysters improve water quality in the bay. A single market-sized oyster can filter 50 gallons of water a day.
• Cleaner water supports aquatic vegetation such as eelgrass.
• Empty oyster shells are used as foundation for reefs providing valuable habitat for fish and other sea life.
Today oysters are still a seafood favorite, enjoyed raw, grilled, steamed, stewed, fried, and many other delicious ways. —Written, photographed, and recipe by Mary Ann Himmelsbach
Savory, smoky, and delicious, Chargrilled Oysters are the perfect appetizer or entrée. This recipe is quick and easy. So, fire up the grill and grab your shucking knife.
Ingredients:
12 Oysters
1/2 Cup unsalted butter
1/4 Cup onion, finely chopped
3 Cloves garlic, finely chopped
1 Tablespoons liquid aminos or soy sauce
1 Tablespoons Cajun seasoning
A dash of hot sauce
Zest of 1 lemon
Juice of 1/2 lemon
3 Strips of bacon, cooked and crumbled into small pieces
1/2 Cup grated Parmesan cheese
Making the Topping Sauce: This recipe comes together quickly. So, assemble the sauce first. In a small saucepan, melt the butter over medium heat. Add the onion and garlic to the melted butter and sauté until fragrant. Add liquid aminos, Cajun seasoning and hot sauce. Turn off
heat, add lemon zest and lemon juice. Stir and set aside.
Shuck the Oysters:
Preheat grill to 400 degrees. Place oysters on the hot grill with the flat side of the shell up. Close the grill cover and cook for 4 to 6 minutes, until the oysters begin to open. Carefully remove the hot oysters from the grill. Using a mitt, shuck the hot oysters. Keep each oyster in its deeper bottom shell.
Grilling the Oysters:
With oysters resting in half shells, spoon butter mixture over each oyster. Top with crumbled bacon and Parmesan cheese. Return oysters in half shells to the 400-degree grill balancing them so they lay flat without losing the oyster or the liquid. Cook with the lid open just until the cheese melts and edges of the oyster begin to curl. Transfer the oysters from the grill to a platter. Garnish and serve hot with your favorite cold beverage.
With eyes trained for rare colors, many sea glass hunters often overlook what is right under their noses. Amid the weathered pebbles and timeworn shells of low tide there may be a hidden gem that is as rare as it is old.
In bottle collecting, the term black glass is used to refer to any glass that appears solid black until you hold it up to a light source, allowing the true color to be revealed. Most black glass found along our beaches originated from liquor bottles from the mid to late 1800s. The color of the glass was intentionally made dark to protect the contents from the destructive UV rays
of sunlight. These black glass bottles are usually a deep olive green or very dark amber. The colors were the result of high amounts of iron oxides in the sand, as well as carbon and sulfur from the coal used to heat the glass furnaces. In addition to liquor bottles, other glass items such as inkwells, buttons, and insulators, along with chemical and medicine bottles were manufactured in these ultra dark shades. There are, however, even rarer colors hiding in black sea glass.
Black amber glass was commonly used for liquor and chemical bottles, and laboratory glassware. Certain chemicals, such as
hydrogen peroxide, need to be protected from light or it becomes less effective. Deep black blues also had a similar purpose, being used for poisons and medicines, but also wines and perfumes. One of the most sought-after types of black glass is deep purple, which some collectors consider rarer than red sea glass.
Deep purple, sometimes called black amethyst glass was made by adding a large amount of manganese dioxide during the glass manufacturing process to create a dark color. Many sea glass collectors may have this color of black glass in the form of a light bulb vitrite.
These are insulators located on the bottom of standard incandescent light bulbs. Decorative glassware and inkwells were also intentionally made in a deep amethyst color. Deep purple black glass can also be found in beads and Victorian mourning buttons. These would have been part of a lady's funeral attire and often featured elegant patterns such as flowers.
Another source of black glass is Vitrolite, a high strength structural glass that was introduced around 1900 as a nonporous, sanitary, and economical substitute for marble. Manufactured as glass slabs, Vitrolite was used on building facades, kitchen and bathroom walls, business signage, and areas requiring a hygienic surface. Pieces of Vitrolite will often be very dark amber, green, purple, or teal with thin ribs along one side. The origins of sea glass never cease to amaze.
A common misconception among those new to the sea glass community is that all black glass is pirate glass. The black glass found on beaches today generally dates from 1850 to 1920, long after traditional pirates were sailing the high seas. Unless a piece of glass or bottle came from a known wreck, there is no way to know for certain that it was from pirates. There are, however, ways to make an estimated guess as to what era the sea glass originated.
If you were a sailor, merchant — or yes, a
pirate — on the seven seas, keeping scurvy at bay was a big priority. Deep green onion or mallet bottles so named for their shape were kept onboard most ships in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. The bottles contained lime juice for scurvy prevention, gin, rum, or grog, a watered-down alcohol and lime juice mixture. Water was either a luxury or too contaminated to drink, so these bottles of liquid were an important part of a ship’s inventory. One way to tell if you found a piece from these bottles is the glass will be very thin and often have a rough surface with an abundance of bubbles, as these were hand blown. Some may have a rainbow-like patina on the surface of the glass, known as Benicia iridescence and patina. This multicolored sheen is caused by a chemical reaction between the glass and the elements it was exposed to over an extended period of time. However, the majority of rum, gin, whiskey, and medicine bottle pieces found on our shores were never on a ship or part of a shipwreck.
Many of the squeaky-clean beaches we admire today are a far cry from those of 150 years ago. Visitors did not think about the impact their trash had on the ocean. Tossing bottles into the water or leaving them on the beach was commonplace. Storms also played a role in scooping up refuse into the waves. By the late 1800s, going to the beach in the summer became a big part of coastal economies. As a result,
beaches where hotels, city centers, and shipyards were located, and bay beaches are hot spots for finding older sea glass.
Remember, black sea glass frequently goes unnoticed, especially on beaches with a lot of pebbles because it can look like a black stone, so it is important to check with your phone's flashlight or by holding it up to the sun. You never know what secret color it may be hiding.
Seeing a piece of black sea glass reveal its true color as you hold it up to the sun is a thrill like no other. Perhaps the next piece you find will reveal a color you have never seen before. It is this thrill that keeps the sea glass collector looking for more.
Like the sea, black sea glass will only reveal its true self if you search for it. —Written and photographed by Sara Caruso
Clockwise from the top left: People's Choice winner John Novak and his uranium sea glass piece found in Curacao, pictured to the right; Saturday Best Overall winner Gina Olkowski and her yellow sunburst piece found in Puerto Rico, picture below her; People's Choice winner Doreen Rhoads-White and her red taillight piece, pictured above her; Best Overall winner Sharlene Roberts and her Czech blue glass dog, pictured above her; Guess the Sea Glass Jar winners Shelli Centra and Rena DiNeno who both guessed the exact total of 1275; Best Overall Fossil & Artifacts winner Kristin Jakob and her fossilized crab found in Holgate, pictured below her.
Driving along a sunny road on a family vacation to Florida, Cara Bowers’ father decided to pull over to the side of the road for a brief stretch. Cara, the last to exit the car, saw her mother and sister, Amy, staring down at a white chunk of coral on the side of the road. Curious, she joined them and viewed a picture of nature that remains with her to this day. Peering into the coral, she saw a band of small, colorful fish swirl around the hollowed-out coral. That was the day Cara got hooked on the sea and all its wonders.
Years later, she and her sister, Amy, travelled to Bonaire Underwater National Park in the Caribbean for their first snorkeling trip. Here, Cara experienced a stream of serenity in the clear, turquoise waters, and sensed a growing fascination with shells. “I am filled with wonder and awe as I explore the world beneath the sea. It is like opening a treasure chest! I spied my first beautiful, shell on the sandy bottom.” She took a deep breath of air, dove down, and scooped up the empty shell. A picture of that first shell find still sits on Cara’s mantle today. “It reminds me of the first snorkeling trip that led me to become a collector.”
An avid shell collector and true steward of the sea, Cara always checks first to see if there is a living organism inside. “I never remove a living shell or coral from the sea: You can find plenty of shells with no living organism inside and dead coral washes up on the shoreline.”
Throughout the following years, Cara and Amy, the adventurous sister-snorkeling pair, have taken boat trips to the Coral Triangle, The Philippines, and in the sea off the coast of Indonesia. Closer to home, Cara’s favorite shell-hunting expeditions are on the beaches of Sanibel Island, Florida.
Whether she is far away or walking the beaches of Long Beach Island, shells are an omnipresent and important part of her life. Her framed collections line the walls of her home. Cara found her creative expression inspired by her many journeys. Moved by the splendor of beach seascapes she was led to collect a palette of shells from around the world. A favorite was given to her by her sister, Amy, a beautiful replica of a shell found in the Lascaux Cave, France.
“People often ask me if I have ever gotten bitten when snorkeling.” Cara laughs “Once I was snorkeling in shallow water. Suddenly I felt something pinch my ankle. I stood up quickly to search beneath the wave and there at my feet a small dog was leaping about in the water looking for his owner.”
Cara does not want or need a studio. “I want my shells all around me, a part of my daily life. The entire house is my studio where I work and where my collections hang.”
“Before arranging my shells or making a gift from them, I hold the shell in my hand and reflect on its meaning and how it inspires me,” says Cara. One of her creations from gathering shells is called a Sailor’s Valentine. The tradition dates to long ago when lonely sailors aboard ships made gifts for their loved ones back home, from shells they had collected on shore. “I made one for my husband,” she says, proudly
pointing to her beautiful, artful work hanging on the wall.
As an experienced collector, Cara offers timely tips and advice to those new to shell collecting:
“Of course, never take a live shell. Go seeking when the tide drops; clean shells in soap and water; store shells away from light, as they can lose their color; do not walk along the shell scrim — you may crunch the treasures. Lastly, look online for help in identifying a shell, then look for a Wikipedia entry to learn about the shell and its former occupant. When I prowl the beach, look for three things: the unusual, the perfect and the tiny, uniform shells.
“Most important of all,” Cara advises, “learn from nature because humans and all of nature are connected in many and mysterious ways.” —Fran Pelham • Portrait of Cara Bowers by Fran Pelham, all other photography by Cara Bowers
When asked, most avid sea glass collectors respond that red or orange are the rarest colors of sea glass. However, there is another color, unknown to most sea glass and bottle collectors. That color and its many shades is puce.
Originating from the French word for flea as a reference to the color of blood-stained bed linens left from their droppings, puce, pronounced pyōōs, is a range of colors named as early as the 14th century. In bottle collecting, it describes a wide variety of shades from cranberry or burgundy to peach pink or even an extremely deep purplish or reddish brown. Puce stands out from red glass with a more earthy pink tone. Considered to be the holy grail, puce colored bottles are highly sought-after with only a handful of examples found.
The majority of puce bottles were manufactured between 1840 and 1880. Most are pictorial flasks, inkwells, bitters, and medicine bottles. Some have argued that puce may not have been an intentional color and the bottle had different tones in the glass batch while being made. Unlike true red, which was created by adding gold oxide during the manufacturing process, this group of colors resulted from the use of nickel, manganese oxides, or selenium. Manganese dioxide was added as a decolorizer to offset iron impurities found in the sand used to manufacture glass. As
many sea glassers know, with exposure to sunlight, glass made with manganese dioxide will turn lavender over time. Intentionally higher concentrations of manganese dioxide during glass production would have resulted in varying shades of purple glass. Many things contributed to the wide variety of shades that exist under the umbrella of puce.
To further the confusion, the antique world is full of unusual ways to describe puce. Clearly, it is not one single color, but a family of colors with many shades. When describing puce, I prefer to reference the widely familiar colors of fruits and foods. Cranberry, apricot, raspberry, deep peach, plum, wine, and prune juice could all be considered as names for different shades of puce. Interestingly, many sea glass collectors may have shades of puce in their collection and not realize it.
As if finding the rarest colors of sea glass was not challenging enough, now there is a new, or rather an incredibly old, and even rarer color to seek. Puce is a mystery and the chance of finding a piece of sea glass in this super rare color is even more slim than finding orange or red. But it is possible. And in the end, it is another exciting reason to get out there and search because you never know what you may find. —Written and photographed by Sara Caruso
As avid beachcombers, we would like to think we have seen everything and can identify it all. But some finds baffle even the best of us and so we turn to the internet for assistance. Among the plethora of misinformation out there, we hope to find the right answer. But sometimes even the most hardened researcher comes up empty handed. And nothing seems to confound the coastal collector more than concretions. These strange looking ancient stones may indeed hide a treasure, but they are not handcrafted stone age artifacts or rare delicate fulgurites, glass created by lightning striking the ground. Instead, concretions are a fantastic glimpse into the past.
Many concretions contain fossils and other pieces of the past. These ancient time capsules formed several million years ago in sedimentary rock when minerals from ground water settled around a nucleus, such as a stone, shell, or fossil. The precipitating minerals act like cement encasing the debris with layers of rock.
The term concretion comes from the Middle Eastern word concret, derived from the Latin concrescere, meaning to grow together or harden. Concretions are important to the ecosystem as the soft stone can provide a holdfast for seaweed or corals, and homes to burrowing bivalves in the Pholadidae family such as the angel wing clam (Cyrtopleura costata).
Concretions vary in size and shape. They can be small or gigantic, random shaped or well-defined form. Many are rounded, even spherical or egg shaped. Some are weirdly symmetrical, almost statuesque, which in the past gave them the nickname “fairy stones” as people believed they were made by fairies. Here, on Long Beach Island, New Jersey we find long stretched-out twisted concretions. Understandably, many people are fooled by their wide variety of unusual shapes. Few people are familiar with concretions. Which leads to confusion and misidentification. Thus, it can be difficult to find help with proper identification.
Many believe the concretion they found is a rare stone age artifact. Instead, what they have found is a geofact, a stone worn and carved by nature that looks like an ancient artifact made by human hands.
Because they are unaware, others are quick to identify concretions as fulgurites. True fulgurite, which forms when lightning strikes sand fusing it into glass, is fragile and rather rare. Because most beach sand is very fine, the delicate glass structure of a true fulgurite would quickly be crushed by the rolling waves. This misidentification happens so frequently that I have termed concretions, especially those in shapes resembling a lightning bolt as fulguwrongs.
Identifying concretions can be very tricky. Looks can be very deceiving, and many times lead to misidentification. Asking for help on social media is a good way to learn. But it is important to confirm the crowd-sourced identification with further research.
The best time to find beach concretions is after a storm or during a blowout tide. On LBI, they can be found all along the shore, especially at either point in Holgate or Barnegat Light. The shapes of concretions can be deceiving and confusing, but they are worth investigating; these primordial rocks hold bits and pieces of history from our ancient world. —Written and photographed by Sara Caruso
If you ask people what their favorite number is, the most common answer worldwide is seven. The exact reason for this is unclear, but humans are not the only ones to have favorite numbers — nature has them as well. The person who introduced nature’s favorite numbers to Europe more than eight hundred years ago was Italian mathematician, Leonardo Fibonacci. We are indebted to Fibonacci for popularizing the use of Hindu-Arabic numerals that we use today in place of the complex Roman numeral system. But his most famous contribution to mathematics was the Fibonacci series. A mathematical series is simply a string of numbers arranged according to a rule. In the Fibonacci series, the first two numbers are one. Each successive number is simply the sum of the two preceding numbers. The series goes on forever, but the first ten numbers are 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55.
So, as you can see, three is a Fibonacci number and four is not — which brings us to the clovers. Although four-leaf clovers do exist, they are exceptionally rare, occurring in just one in 10,000 cases. Nature greatly prefers to produce three-leaf clovers. You do not have to look far to find other examples of Fibonacci numbers in nature. Pick up any pinecone and count the number of left-leaning
or right-leaning spirals as you go around the cone. The number will vary depending on the pinecone, but it will always be a Fibonacci number. Now, look at any flower and count the number of petals or count the number of sections on a sand dollar. Once again, it is usually a Fibonacci number.
Fibonacci numbers also show up in unexpected places. Take any number from the series and divide it by the previous number. As you go up in the series, that ratio quickly approaches 1.618, the golden ratio of the ancient Greeks. The Greeks felt that a rectangle with this ratio between the long and short sides was the most aesthetically pleasing of any rectangle and are believed to have used the golden ratio in their architecture. Today, the Fibonacci series is still finding real-world applications in fields such as computer science and finance.
—Martin SchuylerFibonacci Fun
For a game with friends or family, go outdoors, set a timer for thirty minutes and see who can find the most examples of Fibonacci numbers.
Each spring, between the Delaware Bay and the Atlantic Ocean the sandy coastline of New Jersey hosts two of the most amazing annual events in nature — the migration of the Red Knot and the spawning of the Atlantic Horseshoe crab.
Red Knots ( Calidris canutus rufafly ) fly more than 18,000 miles in their annual migration between wintering areas in South America to breeding grounds in the Canadian arctic. Red Knots are one of the longest-distance migratory birds seen in North America.
As the Red Knots drop by, on the last stop of their migratory journey north to their breeding grounds, they are just in time for a feast. Hordes of Atlantic horseshoe crabs ( Limulus polyphemus ) are scrambling up onto the beaches to spawn, laying millions of eggs. For the hungry birds, it is a food fest. These energy packed eggs are unlike any other food source and allow the birds to essentially double their body weight in a short three-to-four-week period. This weight gain will enable them to make the remaining 4,000 miles of their journey northward.
New Jersey shores host the largest concentration of spawning Atlantic horseshoe crabs in the world. As part of the arachnid family, more closely related to spiders and scorpions rather than to crabs, horseshoe crabs have roamed the ocean floors for more than 450 million years. Their body design protects every vital organ beneath an armor-like shell with a horseshoe shaped front. Like armor, the shell flexes in two places, allowing the animal to swim or turn itself over if toppled upside down.
Peak spawning season for the Atlantic horseshoe crab in New Jersey is from May to June. Around the full and new moon, the crabs come ashore during high tide at sunset and into the night to spawn. After laying their eggs, they return to the sea for an entire year until the next spawning season. During rough weather, up to 10% of the crabs are flipped over onto their backs by waves and become stranded. Horseshoe crabs can use their tails to flip themselves back over, but they are not always successful. Those that are unsuccessful die and become food for other birds.
Horseshoe crabs can live up to twenty-five years and may molt seventeen times discarding their smaller shell as they grow to reach maturity. In the last two decades, for numerous reasons there has been a significant decline in the horseshoe crab population which has also impacted those migrating shorebirds who depend on crab eggs for fuel to complete
their migrations to breeding grounds. The Red Knot has been placed on New Jersey’s Endangered Species list.
Red Knot migration and fly thru dining can be seen May to June at the outgoing tide at beaches in New Jersey where horseshoe crabs are spawning.
The best time to see horseshoe crab migration in New Jersey:
• May through June
• Calm nights, low wind, and surf
• Nighttime high tides around the new and full moons
Horseshoe crabs are a valuable part of the ecosystem. Helping a horseshoe crab helps migratory birds. Horseshoe crabs do not bite or sting.
Things you can do to help horseshoe crabs:
• Just flip it over: If you see a horseshoe crab upside down on the beach, just flip it over by using the edge of its shell and release it back into the water. Do not use its tail, as it is very delicate and can be damaged. And although its tail looks scary, it is not a weapon.
• Report a Horseshoe Crab Spawning Beach: Report spawning activity by accessing the form entitled "Identification of Horseshoe Crab Spawning Habitat in the Inlets and Bays of New Jersey," or by calling the toll free phone number 1-866-NJ-CATCH (1-866-6522824) or dep.nj.gov/njfw/fishing/marine/horseshoecrab-id/
• Join the Horseshoe Crab Count at delawarebayhscsurvey.org/join
• Check out The Wetlands Institute to participate in various activities: Adopt a Horseshoe Crab/ Attend a Shorebird and Horseshoe Crab Celebration Day/Donate. Your donation will be used to fund horseshoe crab conservation activities at The Wetlands Institute, such as spawning surveys, reTURN the Favor program activities, aquaculture maintenance, and outreach and conservation initiatives and materials. For more information, head to wetlandsinstitute. org/conservation/horseshoe-crab-conservation/ and wetlandsinstitute.org/adopt/ Artwork and story by Nancy Edwards
Iremember the first time I saw a cameo, beautiful, delicate, and translucent. It was love at first sight. My first cameo was a gift from my grandmother. It was a beautiful blue and white given to her by her best friend, Mrs. Tracey. Unfortunately, it was stolen from me when I was in Paris.
Cameos have been loved, worn, and collected throughout history. A few famous people who have shared my love of cameos were Napoleon Bonaparte, Queen Victoria of England, Pope Paul 11, Queen Elizabeth II and the Swedish royal family. Napoleon loved them so much that he founded a cameo carving school in Paris.
One of my friends in the military who knew of my fondness for cameos sent me one from the far east. When I saw the whole shell cameos, I had to have one, then another, then a third. To me they are the most beautiful art pieces. —Ann Marie Quigley
The earliest cameo known was carved by an ancient human ancestor in Indonesia more than half a million years ago into the shell of a now extinct palm-sized freshwater mussel Pseudodon vondembuschianus trinilensis. The ancient carvings, concluded by researchers to have been made with a shark tooth, go deep into the calcium carbonate shell. Though whitened by time, when fresh the shell had a leathery dark brown outer layer which when incised revealed its light substratum creating a simple multidimensional design of contrasting colors. And though the tools would change — over many millennia the same technique of carving away one layer to reveal another would be perfected by cameo artists to create the beloved and enduring cameo.
Shell cameos are carved bas-relief by hand into the surface of the shell of a species of large sea snail, Cassis rufa (Cypraecassis rufa) a marine gastropod mollusk commonly
known as the cameo shell or bullmouth shell.
In the hands of a skilled cameo artist a shell with two to four color layers can become a cameo with intricate features of contrasting colors. These detailed reliefs were sometimes carved into the surface of an intact shell to create a whole shell cameo. More often cameos were carved from segments of shell and used to adorn pieces of jewelry.
Profile cameos generally depict a woman facing right, some face left, even fewer are full-face. Highly detailed, hand-carved cameos featuring women with elaborate hair styles, jewelry, hats, or intricate clothing, or tableaux, mythological or historical figures, men, children, mother and child, multiple figures, portraits of identifiable individuals, animals or birds are uncommon and highly prized by collectors.
Shell cameos became popular during the
Renaissance with the height of their popularity occurring during the Victorian era when men wore cameos as stickpins, watch fobs, cuff links, and rings. Cameo pendants, earrings, necklaces, brooches, bracelets, and rings were worn by women.
Victorian cameos, circa 1837-1901 most frequently depict an idealized woman in profile with intricately styled hair and Grecian clothing. Cameos rendered of women wearing gold and diamond jewelry, such as a bracelet, earrings, tiara, or necklace are known as habillé — French for dressed — became popular in the 1840s.
Over the years cameos have maintained an abiding presence among collectors and as treasured family heirlooms. Today, with the recent resurgence in Victorian and Edwardian fashions inspired by popular television series and movies, cameo jewelry is on trend.
—Susan Spicer-McGarry
History records that storied Barnegat Lighthouse is the second tallest in New Jersey after Absecon. And depending on the source, it ranks as the 10th tallest lighthouse in the United States. But therein lies a documentary inconsistency. The tower at Barnegat Inlet is listed by various organizations, groups, societies, books, documents, and websites spanning its 164-year history as 150, 157, 163, 164, 169, 172, 178 and 189 feet tall. As well, some explain that these figures are the height of the “tower” while others claim it is the height “above sea level.” Even so, which one is which and of them all which is accurate? That a well-documented and photographed historic landmark dating back before the Civil War could have such a basic fact about it so unclear is a testament to the way life, history, and the proprietary language of engineering can cause history to drift into the fog of oversimplification and myth.
The questions remain, though — why has the height been so varied for so long and how tall is Barnegat Lighthouse anyway?
Plans for “Old Barney” began as early as 1852 while the Bureau of Lighthouses was bombarded with cries of righteous indignation from international boat captains frequenting Barnegat Inlet and its far-reaching outer sand bars as they guided their cargoes and passengers into the gateway to the New World at New York harbor. Such cries forced the hand of the government nearly twenty years earlier to establish a network of navigational aids to stem the tide of wrecked vessels on the most dangerous shoals and at the mouths of the narrowest inlets and rivers along every coast of the growing United States. If America was to grow as an international trading power and generations of men, women, and children from across the globe were
going to populate the vast North American continent after being borne across the vast oceans aboard ships, then wrecking upon the shores so close to the promises offered by the land of opportunity had to be minimized as much as possible. Engineers could not stop the hand of God from rendering ships asunder in apocalyptic hurricanes or violent nor’easters, but they could make it so that a dark, rainy night was not all it took to condemn dreams and souls to watery graves at the very doorstep of the Western world. So it was that a lighthouse was operational on Barnegat Inlet starting in late 1834. But the first tower’s criminally inferior construction and the lack of forethought to integrating the vast coastal network together combined to make the constellation of lights meant to guard American shores little more than fireflies attempting to glow during a rainy pitchblack night. The first Barnegat lighthouse
was so weakly powered that scores of mariners over the years alleged it was the tower itself that drew them off course like a siren’s song, reportedly mistaking its low dim beacon for that of a pilot boat meeting it at the outer reaches of New York harbor for escort into port.
When a replacement light at Barnegat Inlet was at long last authorized, after a series of scandalous wrecks around it in the years preceding the 1857 start of construction, Army Corps of Engineers Lt. George Meade was put in charge of not just Barnegat but numerous of the giants by the sea marking the approaches to New York. Meade requested of Congress in 1855 that a tower “to be 150 feet high” should be erected at Barnegat and use the revolutionary French Fresnel lenses that were proven so effective in European lighthouses by that time. Indeed, it was the lenses that formed a basis for new categorization and measurements by which American lighthouses would be graded.
Unlike most buildings and structures, lighthouses are unique because their purpose also determines how they are measured and designed. A lighthouse is simply a tower, of stone, brick, steel and even wood in some cases, which holds up a lighted navigational aid of some kind, whether a simple fire in ancient times or an electrified LED beacon still active in many around the world today.
When Lt. Gen. Meade was outlining his plans to Congress for Barnegat’s new light, he spoke in engineering terms to break down the components of it. In writing that he would order construction of a tower “150 feet high” if granted the funding, in lighthouse terms that meant the pedestal of material upon which the light itself would be held up.
In this case the brick tower at Barnegat would stand 150 feet above the ground, atop which would be the most powerful navigational aid in the world of the 1850s — a two-ton first-order Fresnel lens standing over 10 feet tall and comprised of 1,008 custom hand-cut glass prisms.
But the engineering specifications for the lighthouse do not end with “tower height.” The craftsmanship and scientific marvels that are Fresnel lenses work thanks to carefully calculated placement. Tower height is
not something that can be set merely based on material availability or budgetary concerns. In order to do its job to protect marine traffic, the intensity of the lens’s power, from the giant first-order to the small but still effective sixth-order, must be made-to-order based on how far its light must reach and how brightly it must shine. When that is figured out, the tower height becomes critical in establishing the single most important measurement for any Fresnel-powered lighthouse — the focal plane.
The focal plane, or height of a lighthouse is the distance from sea level — not the ground at the base of the tower — to the focal point of the lens, otherwise known as its bull’s-eye where the light is the brightest and creates the beam that strikes far out to sea to be visible to mariners if they come within its reach.
At Barnegat Lighthouse, the immense and powerful first-order Fresnel lens had twentyfour vertical panels with thick circular bull’seye prisms at the middle. This precise design and the choice of twenty-four panels was carefully arranged to make Barnegat unique among all other American lighthouses. Along with a type of fuel to cause a certain color flame and the lens’s placement in a rotating clockwork mechanism and the speed at which the rotation was set, no other lighthouse would shine like “Old Barney” would for sixty-eight years. A bright white flash every ten seconds nearly twenty miles out to sea alerted every mariner that they were passing Barnegat Inlet, and only Barnegat Inlet, and the storied shoals that marked her mouth which had claimed so many vessels and lives across 400 years of seafaring history.
Figures vary for the Barnegat Lighthouse focal plane, along with the other measures given for the tower’s various parts. What are the accurate numbers, though? To find out, State Park officials, construction personnel overseeing the 2022 – 23 restoration work on the lighthouse, the Friends of Barnegat Lighthouse and this writer worked together to find those answers. And the results were surprising.
Thanks to brave folks who could conquer their fear of heights if they had it, the traditional measure of any structure was pre-
cisely documented to be 168 feet. That is the height from the ground to the very top of the roof, including any caps, vents, or antennae.
With that figure, Meade’s original plan for a 150foot tower could be reasonably confirmed as the height from the ground to the top of the brickwork at the base of the metal and glass
enclosure where the lens was mounted for so many years of service, otherwise known as a lantern room harkening back to the days when it was lit with flame and fueled by lighthouse keepers during long, stormy nights without respite.
That establishes the overall height and the tower height. But what about the focal plane? For that, USGIS topographical surveys were turned to. Barnegat Lighthouse stands sixteen feet above the water below its rocky base and beside its deep stone and brick foundations that were so threatened the tower was in danger of toppling several times during its day. So “Old Barney” is 184 feet above sea level, with a corresponding tower height of 166 feet. With a 10-foot lens atop the tower in the lantern room from floor to ceiling, which puts the bull’s-eye at five feet for a focal plane of 171 feet.
What is surprising but perhaps fitting is
with the exception of the 150-foot tower height projected by Meade, neither the now-measured 168-foot overall height nor the adjusted 184 feet overall, 166-foot tower and 171-foot focal heights above sea level were among those frequently cited for heights of Barnegat Lighthouse. It is a credit, however, to 19th century engineering that the Army Corps had it right and French artisans were able to hand-craft high-tech lighting thousands of miles away to protect captains, crew and thousands upon thousands of passengers encountering one treacherous New Jersey inlet. So it is that Meade’s tower stands tall 164 years on, now known to be 168 feet tall. All of these discoveries, however, raise new questions. Absecon is celebrated as the tallest lighthouse in New Jersey. But is it really? How was it measured? How have the scores of other lighthouses been quantified? And who will find that out? —Reilly Platten Sharp
More than fifty years ago, a small group of committed Long Beach Island residents who shared a dream to build a community hospital rallied together to see it through. For twenty years, that same group fundraised tirelessly to ensure their fellow local residents had access to quality health care within their community. Their shared dream became a reality when Hackensack Meridian Southern Ocean Medical Center — formerly known as Southern Ocean County Hospital — opened its doors in 1972. Today, philanthropy remains a crucial part of Southern Ocean Medical Center’s makeup, so much so that Hackensack Meridian Southern Ocean Medical Center Foundation is hosting its annual Signature Social to raise critical funds to build upon that dream — a robust
surgical expansion to meet the growing health care needs of the community.
Southern Ocean Medical Center Foundation, the philanthropic entity of the hospital, will be hosting its annual Signature Social at Bonnet Island Estate in Manahawkin on Friday, August 4. Proceeds from the event will support the surgical expansion project, which is slated to cost about $25 million, and will transform the hospital’s entire surgical suite. Included in the project, which will span thirty months, is the expansion of six state-of-the-art operating rooms to 600+ square feet, enabling them to accommodate local and minor procedures, and the extension of the sterile processing department — critical to any surgical suite.
The project will greatly reduce patients’ wait times and comes during a time when there is great growth taking place —
community and business-wide — all throughout Southern Ocean County. The hospital has increased its services over the last decade to accommodate the exponential growth of Ocean County’s population due to an influx of new full-time residents, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Southern Ocean Medical Center has not had any major enhancements or renovations in the last twenty years, making this an exciting endeavor for the community, which is once again banding together and relying on the power of philanthropy to build upon the dream of its founders.
To purchase tickets or sponsorships, visit GiveHMH.org/ SOMCSocial. To learn more about how you can support Southern Ocean Medical Center’s surgical expansion, contact James Young, executive director of Southern Ocean Medical Center, at james.young@hmhn.org or (609) 978-3040.
Iwas eight years old in mid-September of 1951. Shy, quiet, and scared, I waited with my two brothers on the corner of eleventh street in Surf City for the big yellow school bus. Our previous summers, for as long as I could remember, were spent in a two-story carriage house with an outdoor privy that our family had owned since the 1920s. Dad had just built two rooms on at the back of the house, a real bathroom and kitchen; we would all live there full-time now.
The bus arrived and soon delivered us to a sprawling building on 19th Street in Ship Bottom, the new Long Beach Island Grade School, where I joined forty other wide-eyed third graders, all just as fearful as I. I do not recall what transpired over the next few days until one morning that I was part of a group greeted by a
beautiful young woman. She was introduced as our new teacher, Miss Nadler. Her enthusiastic love of teaching eased me into this new life on LBI and ignited my love of school.
In 1987, I returned to LBI with my own family, gradually meeting with past school friends and finally reconnecting with Joan Nadler, now Mrs. Edmund Lange. Her forty years of teaching at Long Beach Island Grade School is an exceptional story of dedication, and I was thrilled to learn details of her past.
In 1951, as a nineteen-year-old sophomore at West Chester College in Pennsylvania, Joan worked weekends at her family luncheonette on the northeast corner of 13th Street in Ship Bottom. One eventful day that fall, she heard the new school
desperately needed another third-grade teacher, so she quickly arranged an interview and was hired on the spot. Over the next seven years she continued to study for her degree, taking classes at Rutgers on Wednesday nights and Saturdays. It was a threehour drive before the Parkway was built. She dated some until meeting Ed Lange, owner of a masonry business in Ship Bottom whose family emigrated to Philadelphia from Germany in the early 1940s. They married in June of 1961, at Holy Trinity Lutheran church in Brant Beach. She took a break from teaching to nurture their own three children, Randy, Jeff, and Cindy and afterward returned to teaching until retiring at age sixty-five.
Joan initiated the first computer classes at both Island elementary schools, established programs for gifted children and all-day kindergarten in addition to welcoming hundreds of young children to the thrill of learning. I remember being enthralled during rest time after lunch as she read chapters from books by Louisa May Alcott. I wonder how many other children also fell in love with Mrs. Lange over these many years.
As I continue to learn more Island history each time I visit Joan, it is easy to fall in love again with this gregarious, kind woman, and ardent Phillies fan, who became my teacher in 1951. Her calico cat, Mimsy, agrees with me and cuddles under her chin to listen. —Carol Freas • Photography courtesy of Nadler Family
There once was a little girl with black hair whose first steps were in Long Beach Island sand. But Margaret Thomas's footprints are the kind that do not blow or wash away. She has become an inseparable part of Harvey Cedars and the Island in her time, a soul, touching generations into the past.
Her great-grandfather, John Warner Kinsey, first brought her father’s family to the Island as manager of the oldest hotels. Her great uncle, Mayor Josiah “Bo” Kinsey, oversaw much of the town
building and growth. Her father, Reynold Thomas, followed in his uncle’s footsteps as mayor and local fixture for most of his life. Her mother, Josephine, was the epitome of a trailblazer who left her mark around the world before leaving hers in Harvey Cedars.
So, it was fated, it seems, that the lady of Bay Terrace who was given nicknames as varied and beautiful as beach sunsets would live her life to the fullest in the best tradition of Harvey Cedars. The “Poochy” who so many have been fortunate to call a friend
and a part of the very soul of the Island has lived fully, loved fully, endured fully, and laughed fully, all while never ceasing to cherish the ordinary that is so extraordinary around her for ninety years. Margaret the basketball player. Margaret the cheerleader. Margaret the beach comber. Margaret the writer. Margaret the historian. Margaret the mother. Margaret the great-grandmother. Margaret, the daughter of Reynold and Jo. These are just a few of the many sides to an ordinary lady who is extraordinary because she has been true to herself, her family, and her Island, never forgetting where she came from, where she has been and where she has yet to go.
Those hundreds whose lives were touched by Poochy and could attend, with countless more around the world and smiling down were present in spirit, gathered on the occasion of her birthday on April 15 to ensure she knew what she meant to them and the Island community. From her first steps in Harvey Cedars sand to the ones she made yesterday, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow must have had Margaret Thomas in mind when he wrote:
Lives of great [people] all remind us We can make our lives sublime, And, departing, leave behind us Footprints on the sands of time;
Footprints, that perhaps another, Sailing o’er life’s solemn main, A forlorn and shipwrecked brother, Seeing, shall take heart again.
—Writtenand photographed by Reilly Platten
Sharp
The Barnegat Light Yacht Club, BLYC, was founded in 1928 by twenty-four people who gathered in their homes near Harvey Cedars Cove. Dr. E. Howell Smith, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Dentistry and resident of 78th Street, called the club’s first meeting. Originally named the High Point Yacht Club after the High Point neighborhood in the borough where it is located, the club changed its name in 1932 after discovering another club already used that name. The new name, Barnegat Light Yacht Club, was derived from the prominent landmark in the area, the Barnegat Lighthouse. Although it may appear that the club was named after a more northerly town on Long Beach Island, at that time the town of Barnegat Light was named Barnegat City. The city’s name change to Barnegat Light took place almost twenty years later.
In 1930, BLYC members bought land on Barnegat Bay at 76th Street in Harvey Cedars for $2000 and constructed a clubhouse
for $6000, which is still standing today. The clubhouse was built to accommodate forty families. Annual dues of $25 were payable in monthly installments during the Depression. Initially, the club was primarily a social organization, hosting weekly dinner parties with food prepared by members. Tickets were $2 for adults and $1 for children. BLYC was open from July 4 until Labor Day. Most weekends, member Frank Smith entertained guests with piano music and sing-along. A band was hired for the bigger end-ofseason event. Saturday handicapped sailboat races occurred during the season and were open to both members and non-members. It would be many years before there were enough sailboats of one type to run a specific class race.
During the Depression, BLYC membership numbers were low, hovering around thirty. Despite the lower-than-expected level of membership, the club was successful. To help pay off the mortgage
and dock, a barroom was added with individual member lockers for liquor, and three slot machines were installed. Alcoholic refreshments were limited to three bottles of whiskey, three bottles of gin and a jug each of Manhattans and martinis per week at the dinners. Once the limited allotment was consumed, members used libations from their private liquor lockers, a practice that continued for another thirty years.
World War II was a challenging time for the club, with most of the men away serving in the military and no club activities taking place. Dues were eliminated and replaced with voluntary contributions to help pay off debts and expenses. After the war, younger second-generation members began to join, and dues were reinstated at $25 annually, with membership hovering at around twenty. A bulkhead was built with a davit and hoist system to lower boats into the water, replacing the method of sliding them into the bay. At that time, there were only two other yacht clubs on the Island, but additional clubs were established in the area beginning in the late 1940s, and active adult racing competitions between the clubs began, especially in Comets and Moths. Other boats, like Dusters, Cats, and Stars, were also sailed locally around Sandy Island off Harvey Cedars on Saturday afternoons with prizes, such as a crab net, a paddle, or an anchor for first place.
During the 1950s and 1960s as BLYC membership grew, the clubhouse underwent renovations, and a T-pier was installed. A standing invitation to participate in sailing races was extended to non-members, a practice that continues to this day, and the club saw an influx of sailing competitors each weekend. By the 1960s, adult sailing had expanded to include Lightning sailboats, which remain a key boat for the club.
Throughout the 1970s, membership increased to seventy. Name badges were established, the porch was enclosed, bulkheads were expanded, and new hoists were purchased. Lightnings and Sunfish were actively sailed.
In the early 1980s, a group of concerned past commodores from five local yacht clubs, including BLYC member William S. Clarke, came together to address the decline of sailing and racing on the Island. This group gathered support from their respective clubs, which led to the formation of the Long Beach Island Yacht Racing Association in 1983. LBIYRA encourages both youth and adult racing among the Island clubs and participation in other regattas. The first Youth Interclub Regatta was held that summer, and every summer since. Young sailors from the Island have raced against each other in Optimist Prams, Sunfish, Laser, and Club 420 boats. Adults also race across multiple classes of boats during Race Week in mid-summer.
In 1986, Maryann Toedtman became Commodore, marking the beginning of women taking on leadership roles within BLYC. Two years later the dock was expanded to include additional boat slips. A large deck was added shortly thereafter. Commodore Allan Wahlberg’s wife, Barbara, initiated a formal ladies’ organization which published a cookbook, organized weekly activities, including the first ladies golf outing, and operated a boutique. By the 1990s, membership had grown to
over eighty-five with several third-generation members. Additional sailboats and power boats were purchased for the youth program as it remained strong with over one hundred children participating.
Over the past twenty years BLYC has continued to support local sailing and social events, hosting the Central Atlantic District and New Jersey State Lightning Championships periodically and maintaining other adult fleets of Sandpiper and Sanderling Cat Boats and Sunfish. As an all-volunteer club, BLYC’s members take active roles across many functions based upon their background, talent, profession, and interest. Weekly socials are held from June to September, with committees planning the evening’s food and entertainment as varied as hosting local bands to themed dinner parties, even game shows. BLYC supports our community, holding fundraisers for the Island library, Southern Ocean County Hospital, the High Point Volunteer Fire Company, ReClam the Bay, and the St. Francis Food Bank. Our youth program as well as weekend adult racing, are open to non-members, and BLYC is the only yacht club on the Island that welcomes community children to participate in our program offerings. As BLYC celebrates its 95th anniversary this year, our members continue to be grateful to be able to enjoy the beauty of Long Beach Island and the camaraderie of others committed to fun, competitiveness, community, and friendship.
THE YOUTH PROGRAM:
The Barnegat Light Yacht Club has been a hub for sailing and swimming activities for community children since the 1950s. Organized sailing races for teenagers on Long Beach Island began during that time. Junior members raced El Toros, Sailfish, and Sunfish over the next two decades. In the early 1960s, BLYC established a formal summer youth sailing program for teenagers on Sunfish and Lightnings. The program also included swimming instruction and was expanded to younger children in subsequent years. In 1985, the club
purchased two Optimist Prams as an alternative to the Sunfish in the youth program. Within seven years this boat became the craft of choice for learning on Long Beach Island and around the world. Lasers and Club 420s were added over time. Many BLYC sailors have successfully competed in these boat classes across the Island, at the state level, and even internationally. The key theme of BLYC’s youth program is to develop a love of sailing in young people that will last a lifetime, and the club takes pride in achieving that goal.
Today, the youth program has three parts:
traditional swimming, sailing, and a new Sandpiper class. Daily swim classes are available for children ages four to sixteen. Additionally, the club has a swim team that competes against other clubs on the Island throughout the summer season. Sailing begins at age seven in Optimist Prams and continues with Lasers and Club 420s in the teenage years. The club supports racing teams at each age level. For students who do not wish to race competitively, BLYC offers an Adventure sailing program, which features the use of a variety of boats to learn and enjoy sailing in a relaxed format. This summer a new class for six- to seven-yearolds will be offered to introduce children to BLYC’s waterfront program. Through outdoor activities and games, children will learn about the Island, the bay, local wildlife, ocean safety, and more. —Dory Gasorek • Photography courtesy of the BLYC
Visit barnegatlightyachtclub.com for more information. If you are interested in membership, please reach out to Membership Chair Susan Lewis at blycmembership@gmail.com
Safety scissors. A crayon. A hairbrush. An eraser. A journal. A toy car.
Artifacts like these are memories you can hold in your hand. In the grasp of those who once put them to use, they have the power to transport you back to times and places when life was different, simpler, and new. In a fourth-grade class at the Long Beach Island Grade School at Ship Bottom a lifetime ago, one little boy read a new issue of National Geographic. When his social studies teacher told the class he wanted to do something special, something that would carry into the future a reminder of who they were and what they were about, Mike Smith put his magazine inside the time capsule that would preserve this snapshot of student life from 1972 within the very walls of the school for fifty years until the time was right to hear the echoes from their past selves. And on an ordinary October day in the fall of 2022, that time had come, and the children of George Cafarelli’s class returned to their old room and the school auditorium to step into the past and for a moment remember the child within. As Smith put it when the moment came, it was not just a step, it was a “blast from the past.” For the students and the school officials, it was a moment to reflect
on where they had come from, especially at a time when the controversial end of an era has been looming over a school facing closure at the end of a long, storied but, like its predecessors, now antiquated life.
In the wake of World War II, the Island, like the nation, saw an explosion of development and growth and the arrival of the nuclear family seeking a home with a yard and picket fence. The filling in of the Island’s bayside and the spread of the familiar cape cottages meant the summers would be more crowded in the years and decades to come, but also increased the permanent population who did not retreat from the cold winters and waters to suburban neighborhoods and big cities. And that meant more children. There were years during the first half of the 20th century when the old one-room schoolhouse at Barnegat Light, the equally rustic Barnegat Elementary, and the large but modest Beach Haven Grammar School had classes with a dozen or fewer local children in them. By the 1940s, though, that was no longer the case and classes began to swell to capacity, and over capacity, testing the creativity of principals and teachers to fit classes in and maintain an effective educational standard for all. At the end of the decade this “good problem to have” for the Island community was acute and needed a solution.
In 1948 discussions and referendums first attempted to merge the Beach Haven and Barnegat Light schools to address the overcrowding problems, with a new school an eventual goal. The vote failed in spite of conditions at Beach Haven, the largest of the three schools whose residents also voted down joining the consolidated district, forcing three classes to be held in the basement. On the north end of the Island at the Barnegat Light School, teacher Freida Cranmer was struggling more and more to handle over thirty students spanning multiple grades in the one-room classroom. And more were going to be attending in the coming years from new and growing neighborhoods in Long Beach Township, Ship Bottom, Surf City, Harvey Cedars, and Loveladies. The school district recognized the problem and plans got underway in 1950 for a new, modern school to be built in Ship Bottom that would address the overcrowding. A referendum was successful, and construction began soon after.
The cornerstone for the new school was laid on July 4, 1951, and the school opened in September, just in time to hold a 180-day school year. At a cost of $350,000, or $4.1 million to today’s dollars, the school featured 10 classrooms designed for 275 students. A few years
later an auditorium capable of holding 1000 children was added for special events. In spite of the school’s addition and the upgraded facilities, the problem was not solved. Attendance was at capacity already in the new school’s first year. In 1952, it was already over capacity with 305 students. Modern programs requiring class space, such as home economics and arts classes, were now a part of school offerings. But as the 1950s wore on at the LBI School, those classes sometimes had to be cut to make room for core curriculums. The problem received a band-aid in 1958 when Southern Regional High School was built, and the former high school building became available. The district relocated Barnegat Elementary to the new larger accommodations and tore down the old schoolhouse. Even so, the problem remained until another elementary school was approved for construction on the Island in 1967. A year later, the fourteen room 6.7 million dollar Ethel Jacobsen Elementary School opened in Surf City for kindergarten through second grade children.
With the three schools from the Island over to Barnegat now working in sizable tandem, the overcrowded classrooms were thinned out and specialty classes were able to be offered again. The children of Cafarelli’s fourth grade social studies class at the LBI School of 1972 were one of the first to come up in the expanded district and its new facilities. They were the first of generations to come who would experience far less upheaval and
change than their older siblings or parents. Last October, memories of those experiences flooded back into the minds of those former students.
Smiles, laughter, furrowed brows, and a few watery eyes. The former students, in some cases now grandparents, were touched with emotion as they gazed into the time capsule they prepared when they were just beginning their journeys on life’s path.
Wayne Henderson and Tom Logue pressed themselves into child-sized desks in their old fourth grade classroom. Tim Brindley stared up at the framed note on the wall near the ceiling marking the space where the time capsule was hidden. Brenda Snow laughed as she read from the journals she and her classmates made documenting their school day. James Guld studied a cream-colored plastic device as all tried to remember who put it in the capsule and what exactly it was. Sam Wieczorek plopped himself on the edge of the auditorium stage and poured over an old magazine, his feet dangling free above the floor like a care-free kid again.
The attending children of LBI School along with school officials filled the auditorium, the sun beaming in through the windows as alumni joined the children to become curious students once again.
Mike Smith joined the group later, remarking with amazement that they put that capsule together and here it was once again, containing these relics from their former selves. Some forgot what item they had placed in the time capsule. Others rediscovered long-forgotten details of their days and pictures of themselves that brought them back to a simpler time.
The one person missing from the happy, surreal day was their teacher, George Cafarelli. Living in retirement in Manahawkin, he passed in 2008 while his wife, Jane, also one of the group’s teachers, passed a few years later. But he was there that day in spirit. The first item out of the capsule, the cream-colored device everyone struggled to explain, was after discussion confirmed to be Cafarelli’s contribution. He enjoyed studying the weather, they recalled, and this was a radiosonde that could transmit weather data when launched with a high-altitude balloon. From there, the former students took turns going through the box, sharing stories with
the children who stayed after the ceremony to hold an object as ordinary and similar as any they still use today but a small reminder that big things have small beginnings. Lives sprawl and meander through joy and tragedy, success and failure, childhood and grandparentage. But each life begins with the little things like a crayon, scissors, a classroom, or a dream of what you will be when you grow up on an island you call home. Carfarelli’s students knew that for certain last October, and maybe the children following in their footsteps got a small sense of it, too. —Written and photographed by Reilly Platten Sharp
Before Long Beach Island became the bustling destination that it is today, it was a quiet place with few houses and acres of open sand. Back then, with not much to do for entertainment, the children of a few families found each other and made their own fun, dubbing themselves the Loveladies Kids. They did not know then how deep their bond would run, or that they would still be making their own fun seventy years later each time they reunited to reminisce on the summers of their past.
Bud Wigmore’s family moved to Panorama Drive in Loveladies Harbor when he was just twelve years old. “There were only a few houses on our street,” recalls Wigmore. “From our kitchen you could see
straight across the lagoon to the houses on the other side.” One day while in the kitchen, Wigmore’s mother mentioned that a family with children was moving in. At her suggestion, Bud and his brother John got into their boat and went to meet the new neighbors. “It turned out they were from the same township that we were, and they were in the same school district,” said Wigmore.
These across-the-bay neighbors were the Falcones: Tony, Dick, and Carol. Next door to the Wigmores were the Barbers: Spencer, Helen, and Anne. Across the lagoon was the Leute family: Tracy, Jerry, and Jeff, and next door to them were John, Cathy, and Ruth Bent. The kids be-
came fast friends and organized themselves into groups: the older kids, the big kids, and the little kids.
They spent their days fishing, clamming, and chasing the ice cream truck. “In a day we could get over a thousand clams,”
said Wigmore. “We would sell them for a penny a piece to local merchants down on the causeway.” They spent most of their time on boats, using them as the main form of transportation between their houses. “We used to have rowboat races. We made our own fun because we did not have a lot.”
The group expanded as the years went on, and the kids later met Karin and Ramsey Ives from a few streets over, and Tom Hafkenschiel from Barnegat Light. Their adventures expanded as well, leading them to nights of dancing at Kubel’s and beach bonfires. Maisie Hodes, who lived down the road from the Wigmores and Barbers, led hootenannies at the LBI Foundation of Arts and Sciences, providing another outlet for fun.
As the kids got older, they continued spending time together at their various summer jobs. Some worked on fishing boats, some at restaurants. Many worked at Andy’s at the Light, cooking and serving food. It was there that Anne Barber and Jim Peavy’s LBI love story began.
“Anne was a waitress, and I was a cook,” recalled Jim Peavy. “She was four bells, so if I wanted to see her, I just rang four bells, whether there was an order or not.”
Today, Anne and Jim Peavy have been married for fiftythree years. Their children and grandchildren enjoy the Island almost as much as the two of them always have.
“Now our children know each other,” Anne Peavy said of the families of the other Loveladies Kids. “They played in the same lagoons where we swam. For some of us, this was the fourth generation falling in love with LBI. Now, we see our grandchildren feeling the magic, too.”
“Our little grandson, who is five, says this is his favorite place,” said Anne. “Our house is tiny, and it does not have any fancy things in it, but he loves the way the morning sun comes in. He says it makes you so happy because it’s such bright sun.”
Though all the Loveladies Kids are older now with families of their own, they still find ways
to hold onto their youth and honor their memories and remember loved ones who have passed. About fifteen years ago when John Wigmore passed away, the others reunited in Barnegat Light for the funeral.
“Afterward, some of us put on our bathing suits and went to the beach, held hands, and ran into the water together like we used to. Then we got popsicles from the ice cream man. It was just all for John,” Anne Peavy said. “Our childhood never left us.”
Despite the years that have passed since their days growing up on LBI, their connections to the Island still remain.
Spencer Barber, Anne Peavy’s brother, described the feeling of returning to the Island. “As soon as we would get here, I could feel relaxed. Even when I drove up here from Atlanta this week, coming across the Causeway, it was the same feeling. The weight of the world was lifted a little bit, and I knew I would see a number of people
that I had been friends with for ages.”
For Barber, the bonds he built with his Island friends are unlike any others in his life. “Bud Wigmore is probably the oldest friend I have,” he said. “We have known each other for sixty-five years.”
When they were younger, the gang would get together once a year in the off-season for a New Years Eve party, because they just could not go the whole year without seeing each other. Now, their yearly reunions serve as that opportunity, and they relish every second.
“We just come here to be with each other,” Barber said. “We have a big get together and everyone is glad to see each other. For all of us it was a unique life. It brings us back to the way we were.”
When spending time together, they cannot help but dwell on their love for the Island and the memories and relationships it gave them.
Anne and Jim Peavy recalled a road trip they took off the Island a few years ago where they visited other spots along the Jersey Shore. When they got off the Parkway and drove back
onto the Island, they looked at each other and said, “There’s no place like this.”
The group is well aware of how unique their childhoods were. Instead of bikes, they boated or swam to each other’s houses. They walked straight into each other’s homes without so much as a knock. They spent much of their time at the beach, day, and night. And they were able to make the sort of friendships that transcend distance and time.
Watching them reminisce, it is easy to see not only the love they have for each other, but for the Island that brought them together.
“It has been nearly seventy years of friendship. We have taken different paths and embraced different lifestyles but growing up together on a patch of undeveloped sand, we are a pack,” Anne Peavy said. “When we are together, I think we each make a silent toast to our parents: Thank you for giving us Long Beach Island. I know they would be proud of this legacy.”
—Kelly McElroy • Photography courtesy of the Loveladies Kids
A million stars reflected on the sea of a million dreams, a world of wishing and woe, wonder and Atlantic awe: A place no person could ever entangle from their heart. The water sings of your name as it rhapsodizes along the rocks and shells of perfect surfing swells at the feet of a glorious, gushing moon. Another gnarly night.
Anchored beneath a current of diamond lights as the sky flows from dusk to dawn, the waves penetrate every fear I’ve ever known as if nothing matters. Nothing but this. Nothing but my home of sweet celestial melodies that hum of another starlit seashore midnight in my sand-spangled skin. A gift of heaven and earth at the kiss of our enchanted oasis. An oasis for the mind and heart.
—Poetry by Bella Helena AyresPhotography by Nancy Rokos
In 2009, several initiatives were launched on LBI that contributed unique and creative endeavors to Island life. Fifteen years ago, Echoes of LBI Magazine published its first issue in May, followed by the premier of the Lighthouse International Film Festival in early June. That month also saw Into The Mystic Legends and Ghost Tours of Beach Haven manifest for its initial season. And not to be left behind, the Southern Ocean County Wedding Roadshow debuted as well.
Cheryl Kirby’s creative aspirations were realized within the pages of Echoes of LBI. The publication was a high-quality arts and lifestyle magazine that delivered all original content comprised of Island history, photography, poetry, art, and a slice of Island life under its signature black cover with embossed seashells. Bringing together many of LBI’s creative locals to fill its pages, Echoes reverberated across the Island, becoming a coffee table must have for LBI homes. Its visual beauty highlights articles on various aspects of beach living, from long ago to now. Achieving the perfect balance between the nostalgia of yesterday and the Island of today, Echoes has become the voice of LBI. Shells and sea glass are recurring themes for the magazine and provide the perfect link for the annual LBI Sea Glass and Art Festival held each October at Things a Drift.
But Echoes was not the only launch Cheryl was involved with in 2009. A conversation between her and Charlie Prince, a film attorney from New York and Beach Haven, would have important ramifications for the arts on LBI. Charlie wanted to start a film festival on the Island. Cheryl called on Maggie O’Neill, her co-worker with the Ship Bottom Merchants Association and avid movie fan, to help. A planning meeting was held around
Cheryl’s kitchen table. Not long after, Charlie launched LIFF, the Lighthouse International Film Festival. Numerous volunteers worked around the clock for weeks to set up viewing venues all over the Island. Directors, producers, actors, and writers from around the world came together for the event. From a kitchen table discussion to being named as one of the world’s top twenty-five coolest film festivals by Movie Magazine, LIFF has grown by leaps and bounds under the tireless dedication of its Executive Director, Christine Rooney, another LBI local. It continues to deliver a remarkable line up of independent films that keeps us entertained, makes us think and moves our community ever forward.
But 2009 was not done with its magic and another first was conjured that summer. Maggie O’Neill started Into The Mystic Ghosts and Legends Walking Tours in Beach Haven. Unique things for families to do is important for LBI tourism and Maggie realized the Island could use a good ghost tour. She ran an ad in The Sandpaper looking for stories of paranormal experiences. After researching legends and talking to locals for a year, Into The Mystic followed Echoes and LIFF as one of the new “have you heard about” LBI happenings. The tour is a walk
through Beach Haven, stopping at different points to explore ghostly and unexplained tales of the Queen City. From pirate stories to ghost dogs to little girls in white, the legends and ghosts of Beach Haven provide a fun night for everyone.
The Southern Ocean County Chamber of Commerce also debuted a startup that year when The Wedding Road Show was launched. The Chamber said, “I do,” and collaborated with wedding industry media, professionals, and venues with a plan to bring destination weddings to the LBI Region. The wedding show hit the roads of LBI. Brides-to-be tour different restaurants, bars, and venues up and down the Island for one weekend in April. There are giveaways, promotions, food, and more. Putting businesses together with brides looking for, well, all of those businesses, was a marriage made in heaven for couples who dream of having an LBI wedding. Destination LBI’s wheels started turning and they never looked back.
Four start-ups all in the same year. Four creative additions to the magic of LBI. Four new ventures that are still going strong. Happy 15th Anniversary to all four prodigies of 2009. What a year it was! —Maggie
O’Neill
The saga of Nat Ewer II and the Lucy Evelyn is as American as apple pie. It is a tale of setbacks and new beginnings, the chance to start again. When Nat and his wife, Betty, sat in a New Bedford, Massachusetts auction house in 1948 to bid on the ship, it was destiny that brought them together and would bind them for the rest of their lives. The Ewer’s son, Nat III, remembers how it was for his parents, his brothers, and sisters, and for himself with Lucy in their lives. The ship and the entire development that was centered on it was not just a business. It was family. “My father was very sentimental about the ship,” recalled Nat III. “[The day of the 1972 fire] It was hard to call him and tell him. That was his lifetime achievement.” A lifetime, indeed, was what it took to come to the radical idea of making a business out of a large ship pulled onto dry land. But it made simple and well-learned sense — Nat II needed a ship for those times when water flooded Long Beach Island, and the Lucy Evelyn needed land to stay away from the water that almost wrecked her several times over.
The three-masted schooner was built in Harrington, Maine in 1917 for Capt. Everett Lindsey of Machias for what would be 1.5 million dollars today. He chose the name to honor both of his little girls, Lucy, and Evelyn. And almost immediately she seemed to be a damned ship. The day of her maiden voyage, loaded and manned, was delayed for months at the last minute because of a sudden freeze that would trap her in the harbor for the entire winter. Things progressed in what became an all-too-familiar pattern of success and failure for her.
Her pearly white paint job gave her a glow in the Caribbean and Atlantic sun as she crisscrossed the ocean over the years, at times setting records for fastest crossings. But tribulation was never far from her horizon.
She nearly sank off Cape Cod and kept afloat in part because of her cargo of lumber. She grounded and lost her rudder another time. Later, a tug could not hold her on course, and she grounded yet again. Horrid weather supposedly blew her nearly to Africa just trying to round Cape Cod bound for New York from Maine. When she suffered the latest financially disastrous trip in early 1948, Capt. Lindsey had had enough. The Lucy Evelyn was tied up at port and he put her on the auction block in hopes of recouping his losses and making the crew of the last voyage whole. Nat Ewer II waited that day until her lot came up and made his move.
As Nat III remembers it, his father’s own professional trials and tribulations began about 1938 when he ran a little gift shop, he called the Sea Chest on the old Beach Haven boardwalk. When the Great Atlantic Hurricane of 1944 roared by, devastating the Island, it also wiped out the last remnants of the once-lengthy boardwalk dating back to the 1890s and the heyday of the two grand old hotels, the Engleside and Baldwin. The Ewer’s Sea Chest was among those casualties marking the end of an era. “Everybody had good pickings on the beach,” Nat III recounted. “All the stuff that was in the gift shop was strewn 10 miles either side of it on the beach.”
Nat and Betty Ewer were faced with starting over. Although its best days were behind it, the Baldwin Hotel still functioned as a local institution, including storefronts that once included a pharmacy. Nat II grabbed a now vacant space on the ground floor and made his store anew. Like his equally unlucky future business partner, Lucy Evelyn, Nat II also suffered a series of Jobsian setbacks. The Baldwin suffered a fire that destroyed part of one whole wing in 1947 and suffered flooding another year that damaged the shop. Once again, Nat II rolled up his sleeves and rebuilt, relocating to a small building on the Boulevard.
“But it flooded,” Nat III ruefully said. “It flooded two seasons...so we learned to live with that. And dad said, ‘darn it, the next time we hit a problem [the shop] is gonna float.’”
At the auction in New Bedford in 1948, Nat II was amazed at the price being asked for this white schooner that was one of several possibilities he was determined to bring back to Beach Haven to finally solve his war on flood damage. In the end after some lastminute bidding drama, Nat and Betty were the new owners of a $1,550 cat-infested, old refrigerator-filled, paint-peeling derelict being sold to satisfy the final meager debts of a frustrated and defeated old Maine captain. For the poor ship and her plagued new owner, this was another chance at redemption for both to chart a new course toward a future together. It was a match made in heaven. But it would take a little longer to be realized.
They say history is cyclical. Eventually it will repeat. Lucy’s false start at her beginning before she could live her life on the sea was decided by fate to be the same way she would be reborn for her new life as a land-locked ship sailing the ocean of dreams brought on board by all her guests as she was packed, summer after summer, for years to come by excited families. After careful planning, the Lucy Evelyn was towed down from New England up through Little Egg Harbor Bay and anchored off Beach Haven the summer of 1948. It was then that everyone discovered her draft was deeper than they thought and the water near spots where Nat II thought she could be berthed was far too shallow. So, she sat just offshore, within sight of her future home, for months until channel dredging by Harvey Cedars’s own Reynold Thomas and the right high tide could bring her home where she would stand tall for twenty-four years.
Nat III leaned into a back door of the Lucy Evelyn that terrible Tuesday morning, February 8, 1972. What he saw was a vision out of hell. “It looked just like the inside of a barbeque, bright red coals everywhere I looked — as far as you could see.” The ship caught fire late the night before and burned, not as a great towering inferno, but like a roast slowly cooking. The fire had started when the old heater just got too hot on a bitter cold night of a gale and kept trying to do its job to keep the place from freezing. The driedout timbers above it, though, could not take the sustained blasts of fiery air and eventually turned to embers that spread around the ship. According to Nat III, the fire spread like a stalking predator between the inner and outer hull ship-wide, the spaces functioning like chimneys sending flames licking upwards toward the deck, making it very difficult for fire hoses from down on the street to reach. The Lucy Evelyn endured three days of what amounted to an Island-appropriate Viking funeral.
The words of the chief of the Beach Haven fire department still ring in Nat III’s ears today. “We might as well let it burn.”
The fire chief did not want to put his men in danger since there was no one on board and no one nearby in danger when the fire started. But he was worried the tallest mast would fall into the marina and take out some of the docked boats there. That was when Nat III sprang into action.
“I just went and tapped all the [mast] pins which are all now free and pulled the mast over with my little Ford Bronco.” For him, that was the moment the night hit home. “That was a heart breaker for me,” he somberly recalled nearly fifty years later. “That’s when I knew the Lucy Evelyn was lost.”
While sifting through the ashes and ruins that the Ewers debated how to deal with — cut it all down to what was stable and sell their wares on the now open-air lower deck, buy another boat somewhere, rebuild to code a concrete-form shaped like a boat — it was discovered that the timbers at and below ground level were badly deteriorated and soft. At some point the weight of everything above would have caused a catastrophic structural failure that could have led to injury or loss of life if it happened during a busy summer day when the ship was crowded. With that knowledge, looking back the family agrees it was possibly for the best that things happened the way they did, as painful as it was to lose the centerpiece of the family business and an old friend.
Nat and Betty had to begin again after so many years of good luck. But they were not starting from scratch like all the times before.
They lost what they called “the World’s Most Unusual Gift Shop and Marine Museum,” a place selling everything sea-related and covered in pictures and relics washed up. A specialty were detailed hand-drawn maps telling the history of the Island sold on large hanging canvases hand-colored by Nat’s daughter-in-law Carol. But even without the original shop, by then they had added eight buildings on the sprawling bay-to-Boulevard property that offered a variety of fun items, from Christmas decorations and clothing to homemade candies and various sea flotsam in addition to what was sold at the Sea Chest. After the fire, Nat II did what he always did and put his efforts to the grindstone with his now older family, and together they grew what was called Schooner’s Wharf into something that could survive even without the storied landmark ship. And they did, with nearly a dozen shops lining the shopping strip ten years after the fire until Nat II finally reached the point where he had done all he set out to do and passed on what had become a legacy borne out of floods and dogged determination. In 1982 he told the Atlantic City Press that “at the age of 70, I decided it was time I slowed down a bit and let someone else take over.” He sold the entire enterprise for four million in current dollars to local partners who promised to carry forward what he had started. Like Nat II, they started over in order to move ahead by tearing the lots down to the sand and constructing a new expanded shopping center designed to emulate the classic seashore architectural styles, complete with a scale replica schooner ship at its center in honor of the Lucy Evelyn
But nothing would ever replace the old ship that endured so much
hardship to end up with the family that would give her peace. And she meant as much to the Ewers as she did to the Island and the swell of summer guests. “Barnegat Lighthouse and the Lucy Evelyn,” Nat II boiled it down in one interview with the Atlantic City Press after the 1982 sale, “they were the only two attractions on Long Beach Island then.” If not for being chronically flooded, Nat and Betty might never have been at that auction in New Bedford. Between that and a twenty-four-seven work ethic, “thousands and thousands of people did enjoy the Lucy Evelyn thanks to mother and dad,” according to Nat III.
Although she never set sail again, Nat and Betty were there to see the Lucy Evelyn float one last time and fulfill Nat’s prophecy that his last store would be inside something that floats, just in case. That day came during the five devastating high tides of the Ash Wednesday storm of 1962. On March 8 during the peak of the storm, the Asbury Park Press reported that they had heard from Betty who told them that “the red water line of the Lucy Evelyn is a good three feet above the broken sidewalk” that lay below the surface of flooded Beach Haven.
Nat II and the Lucy Evelyn were there for each other when they both needed it the most. A more unique business and personal relationship between one man’s determination and, of all things, a land-locked ship could not be conjured up. It is simply the stuff of dreams possible in Long Beach Island sand. —Reilly Platten Sharp
My obsession with antique bottles began in my early teens. My main focus is quackery and medicine bottles manufactured in the 1800s through the early 1900s. My fascination with the history of weird remedies, medicine, and medical treatments is something I grew up with. My mother, Maria, was a nurse and these were topics we enjoyed and discussed frequently. My first job was at Rite Aid Pharmacy where, among other things, I helped in the pharmacy and learned about modern medications. I usually acquired my bottles by digging, antique fairs, thrift stores, and yard sales. Researching and collecting local bottles became one of my passions.
In 2017, I was contacted by a friend to see if I was interested in some old bottles she had. At the time, she was the owner of a small consignment shop, and sometimes received bottles from commercial fisherman who would occasionally bring them up with their catch in trawling nets. When I arrived, she showed me some of their finds: 1880s blob top soda bottles, milk bottles, glass bottle stoppers, and other interest-
ing trinkets. Then, she showed me a small clear glass medicine bottle; I almost fainted. There, embossed on this small antique glass bottle were the words "Durand" and "BEACH HAVEN, NJ." Realizing the rarity of what I was holding, my hands began to tremble. Knowing that I am an avid collector of old bottles and that I might be able to find out more about this rare treasure, my friend was willing to part with it. I immediately began researching. Similar bottles with the same name had been found in Moorestown, New Jersey. The Moorestown Historical Society states that Durand was a medical product manufacturing company, but from my years of bottle collecting experience, I knew the name on the bottle had to be the pharmacist not the bottle maker.
After years of searching with few to no leads, an antique postcard I found at auction brought a ray of hope. The postcard featured the side of the Hotel Baldwin and on the ground floor I could see a drug store. There it was — Durand’s Pharmacy!
After further research I concluded the
pharmacy would have been located on the corner of Beach Avenue and Pearl Street in Beach Haven and was part of the west end of the famous and long-gone Hotel Baldwin. Unfortunately, there was no date associated with the postcard, so, I turned my research back to the origins of the bottle.
Most pharmacy bottles of a similar time period were made by a handful of glass manufacturers. Generally, the name of the pharmacist/proprietor was embossed on the bottle in script above the city where the pharmacy was located. The curved front of the bottle was left blank to allow for a paper label with the patient's name and doctor's instructions to be affixed to the surface.
My Durand’s bottle is a standard size clear glass prescription vile, usually intended for syrups/liquid medicines. It is embossed with only the name of the pharmacy. I could tell by the shape of the neck that the bottle was made sometime between 1890 and 1920, as after that the use of corks and stoppers were generally discontinued, and manufacturers switched almost exclusively
to twist-off caps. The bottom of the bottle gave another clue, the letter B above a U.S.A. mark. I knew this was one of the trademarks used by the Whitall Tatum Glass Company.
Whitall Tatum was a glass company founded in 1806 in Millville, New Jersey. They manufactured many prescription and laboratory bottles for druggists along the east coast and held several different patent designs for medicine bottles. After researching further, I was able to pinpoint the year my bottle had been manufactured: 1912. This would later coincide with more information about the druggist himself, Arthur J. Durand.
A.J. Durand, as he was known around Beach Haven, was a popular man. Originally from Pennsylvania, he eventually settled in Tuckerton, New Jersey. Along with Beach Haven, Durand
would go on to open pharmacies in Tuckerton, and Moorestown, New Jersey. Durand’s pharmacy in Beach Haven was part of the Hotel Baldwin and was in direct competition with the original Engleside Hotel's pharmacy, Paxson's, run by L.C. Paxson. As time went on Durand’s pharmacy grew and could be seen in advertisements promoting Beach Haven to Island visitors. Along with prescriptions, customers could purchase ice cream, soda, and other seasonal items in his beachside pharmacy.
A. J. Durand enjoyed Island life. An avid sailor, he joined the newly formed Little Egg Harbor Yacht Club in 1912 and was
eventually elected as their first fleet surgeon. Durand was close friends with the original Buckalews and served as best man at their daughter's wedding in 1906. He also joined them on rabbit and quail hunts. Along with hunting, Durand enjoyed fishing, and often reported on the fish he saw in the waters around Beach Haven. Though no date is available for when Durand stopped operating his businesses, it is known that he eventually retired to a life of fishing and frolicking, leaving his pharmacies to new owners.
In retrospect, it is amazing that a small glass bottle scooped up by chance in trawling nets far from the shores of LBI became the thread that led to the rediscovery of the location of Durand’s Pharmacy in Beach Haven. If the nets had missed this one small bottle this history would remain beneath the waves.
As a collector and researcher, I still have one unanswered question: how did this prescription bottle from Durand’s Pharmacy in Beach Haven get so far out to sea? Perhaps, it was the prescription of a wayward sailor who downed the last swig of cough syrup and cast the empty bottle overboard. These types of secrets remain with the mermaids. And mermaids never tell. —Sara Caruso, with research by Reilly Platten Sharp
American Russian sculptor, Boris Blai, left an indelible mark on the world of art, education, and the lives of countless individuals. Born in Russia in 1893, Blai was a master sculptor, visionary, and innovative educator whose philosophy was to provide individual attention to the needs of each student for personal growth through art as the basis of successful teaching.
Photographs of Blai offer a glimpse of a man in the full of life, distinguished, robustly fashioned, seemingly as indestructible as his bronzes, alight from within. Those who knew him, and other writings describe him as larger than life, augustly warm, magnetic, and dynamic with the physical presence of a championship wrestler; an artistic force of nature with powerful restless hands who strode through life with might and main — leaving change in his wake.
As a child, Blai exhibited artistic prowess and by age thirteen he was admitted to Russia’s Imperial Academy of Fine Arts. Upon graduation Blai continued his education in Germany and Ecole des Beaux Arts, Paris, where he apprenticed to French sculptor, Auguste Rodin. A close friend to Nicholas Romanoff, the last tzar of Russia, Blai fled his native country before the revolution and served in the French army during World War I. After the war, he came to the United States in 1918, settled in Philadelphia and became a United States citizen in 1931.
Through his friendship with sculptor R. Tait McKenzie, and his prominence in the art world, Blai became acquainted with Phila-
delphia’s wealthiest families. Through these contacts he taught private lessons in his home studio and later became the director of the Oak Lane Country Day School where he was inspired to found the Tyler School of Art at Temple University in 1935. Believing that art should be an integrated part of the total experience, as dean, Blai created an innovative curriculum combining sculpture, art, dance, music, and drama — emphasizing a student’s mastery of technique within the framework of a liberal arts curriculum.
“My relationship with Dr. Boris Blai, started some seventy years ago,” says artist and educator Marvin Levitt. “It is a relationship that literally changed my life and set me on the course I believe I was truly destined to follow.” Levitt, under Blai’s auspices as head of the art department, briefly attended the Oak Lane Country Day School. “I will be forever grateful for the opportunity he gave me to realize my dreams.” In the course of his career, Levitt taught at his alma maters, the Oak Lane Country Day School and the Tyler School of Fine Arts where Blai had been his mentor and inspiration. Levitt believes the relationship was meant to be, as he taught at the LBI Foundation of the Arts for well over fifty years.
Drawn by his love of the ocean, Blai found his way to a narrow strip of sand along the New Jersey coast — Long Beach Island. There
he left a far-reaching legacy that continues to touch lives and fan the embers in the souls of creatives; the LBI Foundation for the Arts and Sciences in Loveladies. During his decades on LBI, as an educator, artist and friend, Blai touched the lives of many Islanders and inspired countless students.
Joe Willy Oliphant, an LBI builder translated Blai’s vision of the Art Foundation’s building in Loveladies into brick, wood, and steel. Blai memorialized the ensuing relationship in bronze — a bust of his friend. Blai’s friendship with Joe Willy Oliphant was multi-generational. Oliphant’s grandson, Larry, recalls a visit to Blai’s studio in his Menlo Park, Pennsylvania home. “He showed me his chair which is now at Things A Drift, calling it his Pondering Chair. Blai explained that while sculpting he sat in the chair to ponder his next move.”
ven, had the rare privilege of sitting for Blai in 1963. Her parents, Jack and Virginia Lamping, and Blai were long-time friends. Blai offered to sculpt her as a gift to his friends. Watching Blai at work was a unique opportunity which became an event for the Lamping family. “…I thought of Boris as a family friend,” recalled Joy. “He was a person we enjoyed... who was always giving me a sculpting knife and hunk of clay when we visited.”
Sculptor, Stuart Mark Feldman of Philadelphia, taught for many years at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and was an apprentice to Blai. “Boris
always had important wisdom to impart that wasn’t always comprehensible to a budding sculptor, such as, ‘Put the clay in the right place and you have a work of art!’ He never quite defined what the right place was but over time I realized that, with experience, you learn where that is. Which, on reflection, makes sense since his other frequent wise saying was, ‘Time and repetition is your best teacher!’ Now, forty-seven years later, I am finally able to find the right place to put my clay.”
Boris Blai's influence on art education is profound and enduring. His innovative teaching methods continue to inspire art educators, encouraging them to foster creativity and interdisciplinary approaches. Blai's own sculptural works, celebrated for their emotional depth and technical prowess, are exhibited in galleries and museums globally, serving as a testament to his talent and contribution to the art world.
Blai’s vision and dedication transformed the landscape of art education and Long Beach Island and has left an indelible mark on future generations of artists and Islanders. —Susan Spicer-McGarry
The sun is setting
Your eyes are heavy and sore
In your sterile room
You ask me to draw the shade once more
You were there for me
When others not A bright shining sun
In my darkest night
I watched for you to turn the corner
After school, by the windowsill, Fearing on day you wouldn't So cold is that fear still
Chasing the gull that stole your cigarettes Where the wind breathes heavy
Up to the end of West Avenue
There lies so many memories
Your warmth was so welcome
As I watched it fade away
The weight on my chest growing
As your final wish was to stay
Hearts are broken
Now you rest with the changing tide
Upon a gull's wings
May you forever ride
Goodnight mother, Please travel well
But before you get to heaven, I'll love you more than I got to tell.
—Sara Caruso
Robert Engle was a farmer from the outskirts of Camden, New Jersey who saw the overnight success of two-year-old Beach Haven and its first hotel, the Parry House, thanks to his role as manager there in its first years and sprang into action.
In 1876 Engle bought an entire block one street south of the Parry and built his own hotel that he called the Engleside. Featuring an open-air porch and four stories of rooms for over 300 guests, Engle’s hotel was a formidable foe for his former employer but another feather in the cap for Beach Haven’s developers. That competition would escalate a few years later after an 1881 fire reduced the Parry House to ruins but saw its owner
rebuild two blocks south of Engle and erect the giant Baldwin Hotel, leading to years of bitter battles over street rights and rail cart rights of way. Engle kept up with the Baldwin locomotive money and grandeur by upgrading his hotel, too. In the 1890s, a distinctive towering spiral turret was added to the east end. After Engle’s death in 1901, his son, Robert Fry Engle, took over and increased the hotel’s popularity even more with the addition of motorized transportation and extensive advertising thanks to his affinity for photography, an example of which is shown here. Thus, began decades of gaiety and profitability before the future arrived and the old hotels disappeared one by one. —Reilly
Platten SharpWhen you live on the bay at the Jersey shore…
Summer company arrive by car almost every weekend, if the sun shines, and leave when it rains.
Winter visitors are overwhelming. They fly in from all over the world with no off-season reservations.
First the Swan bring their teenagers, like “trick-or-treaters,” begging at our door.
The Loon visit, but don’t socialize, diving, diving, busy, busy not a glance in our direction.
The Buffleheads are next. A mob, with white headbands, they ignore our welcoming chirps.
The Redheads, with glistening complexions, come to rest and have leisurely meals.
The honeymooning Harlequins, eyes only for each other, snuggle on the ice
The Merganser, with “rock band” hairdos, twist their heads like “Ringo” drummers.
Many of their visits overlap, creating a tapestry on the water of brown, white, grey, and green.
By late spring, migration guests depart. The bay is left to us, the seagulls, and visitors arriving by car.
—Poetry and photography by Irene
Bausmith
Updated from the 2012 Spring into Summer Edition
Can you think of a better way to ring in the New Year than to take a refreshing dip in the ocean? Well, that is exactly what we did this year. On January 1, 2012, we took the plunge and began what we hope will be a tradition to be carried many years into the future: the Annual New Year’s Day Ship Bottom Polar Plunge!
The idea behind our new glacial rite took flight after I casually remarked to my husband, Fred, on New Year’s Eve, “Hey, it’s almost warm enough to go swimming in the ocean.” The suggestion really was not a serious one, as Fred is not one to go into the ocean much, even during summer. It never occurred to me that he would consider my remark a challenge.
Later that day, though, as we were sitting around chatting with friends on that rather balmy New Year’s Eve, my earlier remark came up in conversation. After a series of surprising expressions of support and interest, lo and behold, the group, including my husband unanimously decided that we would start a tradition of plunging into the Atlantic on New Year’s Day. As we began to fine-tune the details of our dip, one of our friends, Cheryl Kirby, even suggested we dress up for the event. The group immediately warmed to the idea and began digging through costumes and old clothes in hopes of finding the perfect sartorial compliment for the alter ego they would be adopting for the following day’s festive, but frigid, plunge. In no time, we had gotten the particulars of our gelid gambol down cold.
In the few hours that remained before we broke the ice on our inaugural dive, we invited everyone we came in contact with on LBI to join us at the 4th Street beach in Ship Bottom at noon to either participate in or witness the First Annual New Year’s Day Ship Bottom Polar Plunge.
On New Year’s Day the weather cooperated fully, with air temperatures in the low 50s and the water temperature only slightly cooler. Several friends and neighbors showed up and to our surprise as everyone was assembling, we picked up a last-minute convert. A young man who had walked over the dunes to see what was happening decided to join the madness, stripped down to his boxers, dashed toward the water and took the plunge with us.
Our Polar Plunge was an exhilarating and refreshing way to start 2012, and we cannot wait to do it again! It is a terrific way to start the year off with a feeling of empowerment, not to mention a great way to beat a hangover. So, mark your calendars. Next year’s event will take place January 1st at noon on Ship Bottom’s 4th Street beach. Come in costume and help us keep the new tradition going.
—Vickie VanDorenUpDATE: Like so many other New Year’s resolutions, despite our best intentions, sworn oaths, personal promises, and pinkie swears, this one too slipped away — not to be repeated. However, we are still game if you are. Contact echoesoflbi@gmail.com to join us for the Second Annual New Year’s Day Ship Bottom polar plunge for 2024.
