⏰ The happiest of hours | Down the Shore

What are the happiest hours you’ve spent down the Shore? So many of your memories touch on similar themes: being a kid, being a kid with a sense of freedom, being a kid who is growing up, not being a kid anymore but still feeling like a kid inside? The memories tend to be very specific. For me, I always flash on the cut-up cantaloupe my mother packed for a day at the beach, and how, not much of a swimmer, she still would float out beyond the waves in the calm ocean, carrying me with her.

Is the Shore the place where so many of you found a sense of ... possibility? A place you could live by different rules? A place where you spent whole days, even a week, with family, and it was ... good? A place to do the same things over and over again, and yet never get tired of them? Is that its secret? The same, yet never the same?

Sometimes the moments of true joy sneak up on you down here, like a last-minute decision to take the dog to the beach at dusk, the water still warm, the pink sky just melting around you both, the hopped-up joy of the dog at the ocean’s edge, the memories of all the dogs, going back in time. Just follow their lead.

The off-season can feel joyful, not gonna lie, the relief of the busyness behind us, the pleasures all still there, the water still warm into October, like extra time in a soccer game, stretching on past regulation.

Then, too, there are the actual happy hours. The ones I can actually be able to get a seat at post-Labor Day. But why keep them to myself? Here, I’ve written a round-up of some favorite happy hours in Atlantic City.

Programming note: This is my final newsletter of the summer. My colleague Jason Nark, a true bard of the Shore, will play everyone off the stage next week as you return to your regular lives. But keep an eye out. You never know when we might pop up in your inbox in the off-season.

📮 Did you enjoy the Down the Shore newsletter? Let us know what you liked by replying to this email. Have suggestions or critiques? Too many emojis? Let us know (gently) by replying to this email.

😥 Miss any DTS newsletters this summer? They’re all collected here.

🌊 Ocean water temps have been just lovely, into the 80s in Atlantic City, which, as my colleague Tony Wood reports, sets a record.

— Amy S. Rosenberg (🐦 Tweet me at @amysrosenberg. 📷 Follow me on Insta at @amyrosenberg. 📧 Email me at downtheshore@inquirer.com)

🏖️ How much sand has been brought in to battle erosion on New Jersey beaches in the last 100 years? Enough to fill 62,000 Olympic swimming pools, report Tony Wood and Sam Morris in a very cool visual look at “the battle of the beaches through the sands of time.”

🛏️ Beach ... essentials? Everything from air mattresses to grills to espresso. As Tommy Rowan wrote: “For many beachgoers, that bar used be lower: a good book, a sturdy chair, maybe a Disney-themed towel.” These days, youse beachgoers want it all.

💰Early reports seem to indicate that, for many business owners, this summer will be as much as 20 percent off last summer’s Shore blockbuster.

🌬️ Atlantic Shores, a New Jersey offshore wind company, paid $23 million for a full city block along the A.C. Boardwalk, but won’t yet say what it’s for.

🚨Brigantine police reported anti-Semitic flyers left around town.

👀 Celebrity sightings: Chef Robert Irvine was at Robert’s Place in Margate, and Kevin Jonas was at Black Turtle Coffee in Brigantine.

💔 Wildwood heartbreak: The long-awaited hometowns episode of ABC’s The Bachelorette aired on Monday featuring Wildwood boardwalk mini-hoops game operator Tyler Norris bringing pilot Rachel Recchia to his beloved but chilly Shore town (it was filmed in late April). Things seemed fine until Recchia, wrapping herself tightly in her un-Wildwood like trench coat, sat the boyish Norris down on a bench near the Tea Cup ride. From there, things unraveled like an undercooked funnel cake.

🍝 Eat artisanal New Jersey state-shaped pasta.

🛩️ Missed the Air Show? Eat lunch at the Ocean City airport’s new food truck, On the Way Cafe.

🏓 Play pickleball with the pros (or watch how it’s done). Yes, I know that’s a ping-pong racquet emoji. Sept. 19 to 24 at the Atlantic City Pickleball Open.

🌊 Visit the U.S. Life Saving Station 30, an authentically preserved station, 801 Atlantic, Ocean City. Open Monday through Saturday through Labor Day, then Friday through Sunday through Sept. 30.

🍼 Visit this adorable baby bison born at the Cape May County Zoo.

🎣 Fish for a cause at this Shore fishing tournament to raise money for Gold Star families.

👋 Go to Brigantine on Sept. 6 to celebrate Shoobie Tuesday.

Stravalon (proper noun) \stra-və-ˌlän \ A portmanteau of Strathmere and Avalon, to indicate the changes that have come to Strathmere, a little sliver of beach town near Sea Isle that oddly belongs to Upper Township.

I turn the floor over to Strathmerian Ed Tettemer, who alerted me to this fine new Shore word, and who does a fine archeological dig through the layers of vehicles driving through his town to document the changes.

Some of the more cynical of we Strathmerians now refer to our transformed beloved beach hamlet as Stravalon. Over the years the Nash Rambler was replaced by the Country Squire, which gave heed to the Subaru, which in turn made way for the Volvo XC90, which now is looking over its shoulder at that guy’s two Bentleys, the Maseratis, the Porsche EVs and the ubiquitous road-worthy golf carts. (Our walkable town is almost too small for bikes. Who on earth needs a golf cart to go two blocks from the beach to Twisties?) And the property tax bills are now higher than the construction cost of the original bungalows.

Chris Ford!

Everyone seemed to know the answer to that question about the Atlantic City native who went on to play and coach in the NBA; congrats to Cliff Miles for being first. But how many of you actually had the pleasure, as I did, of sitting in the stands with Coach Ford at Lady Viking games, where his son was also Coach Ford, and watching how just a pure love of basketball led him to cheer on the A.C. High girls like they were the Boston Celtics? And, also, let’s face it, do his share of coaching from the stands? It really drove home how great a love the love of basketball is, at all levels. As my daughter once said, when she was maybe 8, “If basketball were a person, I’d marry it.” Me, too.

(I surely did not expect this newsletter to become so much about basketball, but the Shore and the game do seem to attract a similar devotion.)

This week’s question:

This Shore town’s original Black community was the subject of a documentary: Miracle on 81st Street (and a story of mine last summer). What town was it?

📮 If you think you know the answer, email us here.

John Loeper is an innkeeper and historian in Ocean City and, as friends say, “chief cook and bottle washer,” at the U.S. Life Saving Station 30, a preserved station at 4th and Atlantic, designed by James Lake Parkinson in a Carpenter Gothic style. It is one of 42 built along the Jersey Shore.

It’s open to the public 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Saturday through Labor Day, then Friday through Sunday through Sept. 30. Earlier this summer, I spoke with Loeper.

It took a lot to preserve this history. We needed a 501c3 to take it forward. You can’t save it with cookie sales. You needed good money to do this.

It’s a museum but doesn’t look like one. It’s set up as living history. No barriers, no signage. It’s all just the way it was in 1885.

Inside people will find the boat room, living quarters, dining room, a beach apparatus cart, and a replica of a lifesaving boat. We’ve been able to restore this to the point where we have over $600,000 worth of artifacts. It’s a piece of history nobody knows anything about. .

Bill Morgan really gets at the heart of things with this LBI memory.

My parents went to LBI starting in 1950. We had no money, so they were pretty limited as to what we could afford. My father’s opinion was “all you do is sleep there, so what” ... so we had some pretty “spare” duplexes in Surf City. Didn’t matter. If the weather was nice ... we literally were on the beach all day from 10 or so til 6 or 6:30 with a break for lunch. Which was the point.

📮 Send us your Shore memory for one more chance, at last this season, to be featured here.

👋 Cheers to youse guys. It’s been memorable!