[Download] "Penny Arcadia: Coming of Age at the Jersey Shore (Essay)" by Thomas C. Carlson " Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Penny Arcadia: Coming of Age at the Jersey Shore (Essay)
- Author : Thomas C. Carlson
- Release Date : January 22, 2010
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 58 KB
Description
Sixty miles to the north of Manasquan, New Jersey, was New York City, which to me in the 1950s, simply meant Ebbets Field, the Duke, Pee Wee, Gil Hodges and the Knothole Gang. Sixty miles to the south was Atlantic City, Casino-less of course, but where the horse still dove from the platform on weekends at the Steel Pier. Halfway between the Brooklyn Bums to the north and a blind horse to the south, loveable losers both, I slouched towards my majority in Manasquan, whose winter population of a few thousand more than quadrupled in the summer, and that didn't even count the "day bennies" who came in the morning-fathers fish-belly white with sheer black socks and splayed wingtips, fat kids and tremendous-titted wives in chenille bathrobes, carrying coolers and picnic baskets-and who left in the afternoons sandy, sunburned, and cranky, the men's bathing suits hanging by their netting from the antennas of their bulbous cars, which clogged the parkway all the way to the Lincoln Tunnel. Manasquan's mile of sand and sea was considered the place for middle class families. Flanking us just to the north were snooty Sea Girt and Spring Lake, anchored by their huge old high- colonnaded beachfront hotels, the Stockton and the Monmouth, the Warren, the Essex and Sussex, each with its arcade porches punctuated by forest green rockers and Adirondack chairs facing the sea. Even on cool summer nights in the 1950s, you could drive between these great white elephants and the sea, and see and hear the dances going on inside and spilling out onto lantern-strung verandas. Years later I would sit on the boardwalk benches and gaze across at the now boarded-up hotels (killed by the '60s, the war, air travel, some inexorable cultural sclerosis, their own weight, me and my counterculture friends-who knows?) and think of those Fitzgerald-like scenes I glimpsed from the shadows across the wide beach boulevard at the still center of the Eisenhower years. And probably because of some recent college reading, I would think of Fitzgerald's description of the dances at The Breakers in Palm Beach, upon whose veranda "two hundred women stepped right, stepped left, wheeled, and slid in that then celebrated calisthenic known as the double-shuffle, while in half- time to the music two thousand bracelets clicked up and down on two hundred women."