Daniel Rubin: Whole new world to fathom

Afterward, as he shivered in the salt air and begged to go back in, John Gregory described his epic battle this way:

"Freezing. And when a big wave came, everybody fell down and the mud all went in our mouths."

You mean

sand

, a friend corrected.

"Yeah," said John, age 7, no longer a boy from Camden who had never been to the ocean. It was

sand

that had gotten in his mouth as he braved the elements and conquered the surf and relished a day to remember.

The sky over Ocean City, N.J., on Wednesday was cold and gray. The forecast called for thunder. The sea was a sole-numbing 59 degrees.

None of this mattered to John, a stocky, wiggly rising third grader in a Sgt. Slugger T-shirt and black surfer jams.

He had vacuumed at his grandmother's house so he'd have some spending money for his day at "the pool," which was what he kept calling the place an hour from his home.

"He's never been nowhere," said his mother, who goes by the name Diggity Di at Camden's Bonsall rec center, as she scraped sand off four dollar bills that John had left in his pocket when he exploded into the water.

A blue-lipped boy. A soggy wad of bills. This is the beauty part for Vince and Jeanie Hubach.

They run a nonprofit that welcomes inner-city kids to the beach. It's called Angels on the Atlantic.

That was the name of the pink-and-green burger joint the Drexel Hill couple bought back in 2004 on Beach Road in Ocean City.

The Hubachs have retained the name, and are playing the role of angels themselves. This summer, the organization's third, 3,000 kids from Philadelphia and Camden summer schools and rec programs will spend a day swimming, digging, shrieking and exploring nature's simple pleasure.

What makes a couple pay $750,000 for two oceanfront lots, open a restaurant good enough to be named "Best Breakfast at the Shore" by Philadelphia Magazine, then turn it into a refuge for the landlocked?

Go back a few years, to the early '90s, when Vince Hubach was installing refrigerators and shelves in corner stores and bodegas from Philly to Newark, N.J., and some smart aleck would holler:

"Yo, mister, get me a soda."

Hubach would yell back something like, "Why don't you go to the beach?" And the reply would often be a startling, "What's a beach?"

Vince, 40, had been going to the Shore since he was a boy from Glenside and his family split an Ocean City cottage for a week. Jeanie, 42, spent summers in Longport and Avalon.

The couple did well in their careers, he in restaurant equipment, she as a personal assistant. They had no children. They felt a responsibility, as he put it, to share because they could.

Typically the children come for most of the day, but Wednesday's excursion was particularly short. The 88 Camden kids had an hour for swimming and running around before Vince hosed them down at lunchtime. He was the balding, tanned, smiling guy in the T-shirt that read:

"The cure for anything is saltwater: sweat, tears or the sea."

They feasted on free hamburgers and hot dogs grilled by Angels' cooks. That left little time for the Science by the Sea program.

Vince's sister, Michele Thomas, had brought some microscopes from GlaxoSmithKline, where she works as a strategist. She dispatched a few kids to fill specimen jars with blades of grass, shells, or whatever else they could find.

Dasani Bethea, 7, scooped up some sand and took it to Thomas, who applauded her find and then transferred it onto a glass slide for inspection.

The girl bent over the eyepiece, then gasped. "They look like diamonds!"

On a gray day when the pool turned out to be the ocean, a few grains of sand could be diamonds indeed.