The Sun! The Sand! The Surf!… Get your towel, sunscreen, beach chair...
and just one more thing: The price of admission — your beach badge.

In the first ever book about New Jersey’s beach badges, Long Beach Island takes center stage with 55 Years of Long Beach Island Beach Badges 1967-2022. This colorful hardcover is a fascinating pictorial look at more than half a century of beach badges on LBI— starting with the very first badges ever issued.

The book presents every seasonal badge ever issued on LBI — plus a comprehensive sampling of daily, weekly, senior, holiday, and specialty badges. Presented within each of the Island’s towns chronologically — along with history, fun facts, rules, and price history for comparison (it’s all here!) — this is a rich gallery of summer icons familiar to generations of LBI beachgoers.

It’s a visual journey through beach time and summertime, exploring the history and evolution of beach badges on this eighteen-mile strip of sand. The Island’s six towns adopted beach fees in the late 1960s and '70s (along with much of the Jersey Shore) to fund lifeguards and beach maintenance. Today, beach badges are so accepted that most objections have vanished, and badges have become hot souvenirs.

This is a must-have book for anyone who has spent summers on LBI. 55 Years of Long Beach Island Beach Badges 1967-2022 is a celebration of the rich memories that beach badges represent. They’ve marked the passage of time — a child’s birth year, family vacations, summer jobs, and even relationships that have lasted a lifetime. Readers can stroll down the endless summer’s memory lane and reminisce. Who knew there was so much meaning and emotion in these little plastic tags of various colors and shapes!

BOB KUGEL, who has a long history on Long Beach Island, grew up in Edison, NJ. His family's first one-week LBI vacation was in Beach Haven Gardens in 1970 when he was 13. He was hooked on the Island. Fast forward a decade, and in 1980 he owned one of the classic Holgate trailers. Four years later he bought a house in Ship Bottom. He became a full-time borough resident in 2005.

A veteran of New Jersey's telecommunications industry, Kugel retired in 2005 and took advantage of the beach life — surf, sand, and fishing. He also worked from 2005 to 2022 at Southern Ocean Medical Center. When he's not making surf art, you can find him on Facebook on his favorite LBI beach badge group, or giving online weather reports all summer long.