Frank's Place: Down the Shore, on the porch, with the paper
All along the Jersey Shore, summer cottages and those big Victorian rooming houses with wide porches and castle-like turrets have disappeared.
All along the Jersey Shore, summer cottages and those big Victorian rooming houses with wide porches and castle-like turrets have disappeared.
They've been replaced by more practical but much less distinctive duplexes and multi-unit condominiums like the one at 17th and Central in North Wildwood.
That spot on the intersection's northeast corner used to be occupied by a drugstore, which, until life no longer afforded such luxuries, was my summer SportsCenter.
In 2016, it's difficult to explain how isolated the Shore was during the 1950s and 1960s. At the little house my family rented, there was no TV or telephone. Radio reception was spotty. You had to work at staying informed.
Newspapers were a lifeline. And in that beach town pharmacy I daily devoured the Philly and New York sports sections, from bylines to box scores.
Each morning, I'd stand at the magazine rack and for hours read - but seldom buy. I'd pluck out the sports pages and discard the rest of the papers. Until the bittersweet summer of 1966, when darker concerns penetrated my sports cocoon, other news didn't interest me.
I was 16 that summer and drifting between Philadelphia and North Wildwood as I also drifted, very slowly, toward maturity.
When the Phillies were home, I sold programs and Cokes at Connie Mack Stadium. Whenever they were away - and sometimes even when they weren't - I headed down the Shore.
Something was going on inside my head, but, like Bob Dylan's "Mr. Jones," I wasn't sure what. Long-standing routines fell away. Instead of accompanying family and friends to the beach or boardwalk, for example, I preferred being alone.
When not breakfasting on statistics at the drugstore, I was on the front porch reading, thinking, and, on nights when a cool bay breeze was the only relief from heat, listening to baseball on the radio.
The summer of 1966 was particularly hot and, for Philadelphia sports, particularly newsy.
Gene Mauch's Phillies hung in the race deep into the schedule, and every day, it seemed, the Dick Allen myth expanded: home runs that cleared the seating pavilion in left-center; an inside-the-parker that won an extra-inning game; unexplained absences; his "Dick not Richie" plea.
Joe Kuharich's Eagles opened their exhibition season with a narrow victory at Atlanta, the first-ever game for the expansion Falcons.
The 76ers, under new coach Alex Hannum, were at camp, preparing for the greatest season in franchise history.
And one morning that July, I read "Philadelphia Flyers" for the first time. A two-paragraph story deep inside the Daily News revealed that a city-wide contest had yielded that name for the new franchise the NHL had awarded Philadelphia five months earlier.
But as fresh as those memories remain, they're shrouded by two indelible summer tragedies that, perhaps because the victims were so close in age, haunt me still.
On July 15, a screaming eight-column headline stretched across Page 1 of the Inquirer like funeral bunting:
"8 Young Nurses Massacred in Chicago"
The details were both horrifying and compelling. Someone had entered their apartment and, one by one, raped, tortured and killed them. A ninth nurse saved herself by hiding beneath a bed.
For days, I forgot about sports. In the six or seven papers the drugstore carried I followed the investigation and the subsequent arrest of the hollow-eyed killer, Richard Speck.
If the Kennedy assassination three years earlier had left the door to my closed little world ajar, it now was wide open.
For the first time, I began to scan the news before sports. Seeing my interest in the Chicago murders, someone suggested I read In Cold Blood, the new nonfiction novel that in graphic detail chronicled another multiple murder in the Midwest. My penchant for baseball biographies instantly ended.
That book by Truman Capote terrified me. But the brilliance of the writing moved and delighted me. If I lost my innocence that summer, I gained an ambition.
Back on the porch weeks later, I listened as Allen's inside-the-park homer in the 10th inning ended the season for Houston centerfielder Jim Wynn, who broke his arm on the play, and won the game. Twisting the transistor's dial that same night, I also heard some of the Eagles' 9-3 exhibition victory in Atlanta.
I never got to read about either. At the drugstore the next morning, the Aug. 2 Inquirer blared more shocking Page 1 news:
"Sniper Kills 13 on Texas Campus
"Wounds 33 Before Being Slain"
An ex-Marine, Charles Whitman, had snapped. Heavily armed in his killing aerie, the campus below became his shooting gallery.
There was no turning back. Sports was no longer a singular focus. It would, forever more, be an escape.
A few days after the Texas shootings, I returned to Philly for good. My grandfather, who often silently shared that North Wildwood porch with me, died a few days later.
College came the next summer. Full-time summer jobs and increased responsibilities ended my sessions at the drugstore, which, like so many of the papers I read there, closed decades ago.
I've returned to North Wildwood almost every summer since. There on vacation last month, cable TV, a cellphone, and laptop brought me the news.
One morning, relaxing on the porch, my grandson brought me an Inquirer that had been misdelivered to a condo below.
I glanced at its Page 1 headlines. Two policemen in Louisiana had been assassinated. Quickly tossing the front section aside, I reached instead for the sports pages and nestled down into my chair.
The breeze was cool again. I had plenty of time. And it felt so damned good.
@philafitz