From the Introduction:
The tales of a town emerge from many places. On a windy night, they whisper through the trees. From sepia-toned photographs, the eyes of ancestors seem to speak. From some prescient person in another century who saw that the words were worth something, another picture develops of their place in time. And when today's living legends turn the key to the treasure chest of their memories, yesterday tumbles out.

Milton Cranmer: As a boy, following his father, Milton learned the outdoors. He rode atop bales of salt hay piled on a scow as it made its way from the meadows down to the train siding at "Hilliards" where the railroad bridge ran across the bay. He speared eels with an old man named Johnny Johnson and hauled them to the rail yard by hundred-pound sacks. He stayed with his uncle, Frank Thompson, the lighthouse keeper in Barnegat Light. In the wintertime, the migratory birds flying south would be blinded by the lighthouse beacon. "They'd fly right into the lighthouse. You could go down there and pick yourself up a mess of ducks."

Ed Hazelton: His is a Manahawkin of the past, a Manahawkin where little Ned stepped carefully into the imprints left by his father in the snow while the two hunted fox, a Manahawkin where everyone gathered to watch the Stafford Orioles or, in later years, the Stafford Bears play, a Manahawkin where busy sawmills turned out boards of the long-grained, nonsplintering cedar shipped out by train, but it is a past that becomes alive and vibrant again with Ed Hazelton's remembrances.