Two Centuries of History on Long Beach Island

''Not just a treasure of trivia; it's a living history and not only of the Island but the people and Pinelands on the mainland…. The book is full of photos still so vivid you almost imagine being there yourself. Dip into this book anywhere and find yourself absorbed.'' — The SandPaper

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''Fascinating stories and nearly 200 photos from all of Long Beach Island'' — Beach Haven Times

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More Than a Treasure of Trivia, Lloyd’s Book Is a ‘Living History’


(published in The Beachcomber)

Every time people pass the shack on the Causeway, they wonder who owns it, who built it, what was it for. John Bailey Lloyd knew. Whenever people go to the north end of the Island, they wonder how Old Barney got its name. John Bailey Lloyd knew. And what was the Mansion of Health all about, and was there really a swamp where Surf City now sits, and when was beer ten cents a glass?

John Bailey Lloyd knew, and in two marvelously entertaining books, told us. Six Miles at Sea: A Pictorial History of Long Beach Island and Eighteen Miles of History have been perennial best sellers here, but each time Lloyd finished one, he found out more stuff and discovered more pictures and heard more stories. He put some of these into an occasional newspaper column and was finishing work on a third volume when he died two years ago. And now his publisher, Down The Shore, has brought out Two Centuries of History on Long Beach Island, which expands our knowledge and appreciation and enjoyment of "this blessed isle" and makes us miss Lloyd all the more.
Few places can boast their own historian but JBL, as he was known in almost paired initials to LBI (he once joked that if took his English version of John – Ian – he’d be IBL), was not a fusty, archive-bound regurgitator of dim and moldy pasts, but a live-in, live on part of this place – knowledgeable, affable and eager to share. Because he kept learning, so did we.

Where his previous works tended to treat eras and auras, the new volume deals a lot with people. You’ll learn about the man who financed the Union Army during the Civil War and relaxed by shooting curlews in the bay. You’ll read how Butterfly became Madame. You’ll visit the man who grew rye on a farm in Beach Haven, and the one who grew orchids on an estate where nuns now blossom in Harvey Cedars.

You will also discover how LBI towns got their names, plus learn the names that have disappeared under the sands of time. Do you know where Bond’s, Venice Beach, Silver Sands were? How about the Frazier Tract, the Sewell Tract, the Webster Tract, Beach Arlington?

As to who Thomas Lovelady was, not even JBL could find out, but what’s a history without some mystery?

You will find out where all those Cramers and Cranmers came from, and whether they’re related; the truth about shoobies; how a woman started the beach patrol; and how acetylene lamps lit the boardwalk in Beach Haven – the boardwalk that was blown away in the 1944 hurricane, the last one to actually come ashore here. Its ferocity and destruction made it the Storm of the Century until the northeaster of 1962, but both didn’t affect LBI as much as the blizzard of 1922, which chewed off a chunk of the Island – there is no longer a First, Second, East Third or Fourth Street in Barnegat Light. In fact, there was almost no more Barnegat Lighthouse as the sea chomped away at its base. After the storm was over, the town fathers sent out a call for wrecked cars to form a kind of metal rip-rap jetty around it, later replaced by a "steel petticoat" filled with concrete, which is still doing duty today.

You can dip into this book anywhere and find yourself absorbed. Beach "cottages" in the 1920s were as large as some of the mansions going up today – "palatial dimensions and elegant interiors," said one newspaper at the time. They bore such names as Nearsea, All Breeze and Saltaire, or Idlease, Dun Rovin’ and Money Sunk, or the so-called Shakespeare cottages – Portia, Rosalind, Sylvia and Audrey – named for the Bard’s heroines. (No Juliet, Ophelia or Lady Macbeth, though, nothing grim.)

Two Centuries of History – the name sort of continues JBL’s numerical run – is not just a treasure of trivia; it’s a living history, and not only of the Island but the ports and pinelands on the mainland – "This is fairyland," gushed the Philadelphia Mirror of Tuckerton in 1875. But of the cedar bogs in the Pine Barrens, a visitor wrote, "the silence of death reigns in these dreary regions: a few interrupted rays of light shoot across the gloom; and (except) for the occasional hollow screams of the herons and the melancholy chirping of one or two species of small birds, all is silence, solitude and desolation."

The book is full of photos still so vivid you almost imagine being there yourself, with kids watching the pound boats come in or elephants parading in front of the Engleside Hotel or the Hindenberg flying over the Island, the swastika on its tail clearly visible.

Did you know the Engleside kept a dairy herd to provide fresh milk for kids? That a pond in Holgate "grew" ice during the winter for use in the summer? That there was an airport in Holgate…? I’ll stop now, but almost every page holds a surprise. Get a copy yourself and plunge into a nostalgic bath of a past we all somehow share.

And glimpses of the future, too, which is our present. "I hazard but little when I assert that this place must, at some distant day, be one of the most popular resorts for that numerous portion of our citizenship who, eschewing mere fashion and show, desire to spend their vacations in quiet leisure," prophesied one correspondent in 1875. And JBL has recorded it all.

Like every Down The Shore publication, Two Centuries of History is meticulously mounted and handsomely put together, sized for the coffee table but stuffed with fascination. (Design and layout are by Leslee Ganss, one of Down The Shore’s secret strengths.) In the preface, publisher Ray Fisk talks about how JBL "enlightened and charmed" us. So, in fact has Down The Shore, searching out new looks at life on our beaches and bays, bringing back works long out of print, and steadily advancing appreciation of the treasure that is the Jersey Shore.
(Reprinted, in its entirety, from The Beachcomber, with permission. Copyright c. 2005, Jersey Shore Newsmagazines.)

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''Lloyd's last work is a window full of astonishing views into the region's heritage.'' --Asbury Park Press

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EXCERPT from Two Centuries:
“Citizen” Bill Kane and the Mason-Dixon Line
by John Bailey Lloyd

The popular notion that the Mason‑Dixon Line crossed New Jersey is a modern one. It started in March of 1952 with a front-page cartoon in the Beach Haven Times drawn by William Kane of Beach Haven Terrace. Kane first came to Beach Haven Terrace in 1907, at two months old, when the place was all marsh and meadowland, with a wall of gigantic dunes on the oceanfront and an imposing new Coast Guard station on what was soon to become New Jersey Avenue. Bill’s father was J. J. Kane, the sales manager for the Fidelity Land Company of Philadelphia, the founders of Beach Haven Terrace that same year.

Bill Kane saw all the early history of the town and in time became, with his wife, Edna, the proprietor of the Nor’easter convenience store, post office and newsstand on the Boulevard in Beach Haven Terrace. During World War II, he commuted every day in a car pool with others on the Island to a defense job at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, which he chronicled in a delightful book of narrative and cartoons. If ever a man grew into the role of delightful old codger, it was Bill Kane. Until they got to know him, strangers waiting to make purchases in his store waited nervously as he sat behind the counter on his stool, talking in grunts and monosyllables while jotting down sums for the sale of groceries and newspapers on the backs of paper bags. He refused to use a cash register. Often outspoken in his opinions, he was known to many as “Citizen Kane” — but there was not a soul who didn’t love him for his gruff sense of humor.

Although he also painted and sketched, he was primarily a cartoonist whose work is now scattered far and wide. Fifty of his drawings depicting scenes of local history, along with some of his photographs, appeared in a little booklet published in 1957 to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Beach Haven Terrace. He was also a remarkably fine photographer who managed to be on the scene at every major event or incident in Island history — from hurricanes to plane crashes and hotel fires. His work was published all around the state.

Bill Kane loved to create attention, and the cartoon in the Beach Haven Times in 1952 was a perfect example of his occasional playfulness. He knew that the Mason‑Dixon Line never crossed New Jersey, but he decided to extend it with a ruler and see where it would come out. The resulting imaginary line runs right through Manahawkin and exits into the ocean at North First Street in Surf City just above the Ship Bottom line.

Kane enjoyed every bit of this scenario. He published and sold posters, and put up signs outside his store welcoming “y’all” to Beach Haven Terrace — “geographically located on LBI, six miles at sea, and six and a half miles below the famous Mason‑Dixon Line.”  There was, for a time, a small monument placed at North First Street in Surf City, everything north of which was, of course, Yankee land. Kane urged everyone south of the line to start drinking mint juleps. In those carefree summers of the 1950s, many acquiesced.

Now for the facts about the Mason‑Dixon Line. The original line was the east‑west boundary between Maryland and Pennsylvania, first surveyed between 1763 and 1767 by two British astronomers, Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon. The job was undertaken to settle a dispute between the Calvert and Penn families, the landholders of the two states in question. The line of the survey does not extend eastward beyond the northeast corner of Maryland. In fact, at that point, it makes a right angle abruptly south to become the border between Delaware and Maryland on the Delmarva Peninsula. There was never any need for it to cross the Delaware River, as the land then known as the East and West Jerseys was never in disputed ownership. Nor did the line extend westward any farther than thirty miles short of the Pennsylvania‑Ohio border.
(Excerpt Copyright © Down The Shore Books LLC)

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EXCERPT from Two Centuries: “Old Barney”
by John Bailey Lloyd

“Old Barney” as a nickname for the Barnegat Lighthouse has no long history, although it sounds like the sort of affectionate term that might have been bestowed upon it long ago in the age of sail. We imagine a schooner, northward bound, hugging the coast in the dark of night with her captain and crew anxiously looking for that single white flash at one-minute intervals that would indicate Barnegat Lighthouse. Suddenly there is a winking light low on the horizon. “There’s Old Barney!” exclaims the helmsman with relief, and all hands know the ship is on the right course and New York is ninety miles away.

The only thing wrong with this scenario is that the phrase “Old Barney” would be an anachronism. It wasn’t in use then. Nowhere in the newspapers, books or journals of the 19th century does the term “Old Barney” appear. Certainly there are many references to Barnegat Lighthouse written then, but not a single writer ever called it “Old Barney.” It is a completely modern nickname, and that may be why there are a few old-timers for whom it does not sit right (much like someone saying “Frisco” for San Francisco); they prefer the full name of Barnegat Lighthouse.

The nickname “Old Barney” was invented in the offices of the Long Beach Island Board of Trade during World War II, nearly twenty years after the light had been turned off forever and replaced by a lightship eight miles off the coast. Jack Lamping, who was the director then, felt that Barnegat Lighthouse, the Island’s most enduring symbol, needed some sort of friendly name to attract people to the Island in the war years when gasoline rationing required car pooling. Other lighthouses had acquired such names over the years, and so he began using the term on his weekly radio show and frequently in promotional literature about the Island.

He got a Pennsylvania poet from Downingtown, named H. Vernon Deets, to write a brief poem about the lighthouse to honor one of the keepers who, as a veteran of the Civil War, was buried at Arlington.

“As a beacon of mercy,  Old Barney stood
At the edge of the bay beyond the pine wood
Its keeper, I am told was never forward and never bold.
When he died, he was laid to rest among the nation’s honored best.”

The title used for Deet’s little bit of doggerel was “Old Barney.” At about this time a local businessman, Frank H. Klein, who was later to become a Ship Bottom councilman and two-term mayor, was starting up a milk delivery company on Long Beach Island. He chose to call it Hy Vita, and he needed a clever symbol to beat out the big Philadelphia distributors, something that would indicate to everyone that he was purely local. What could be better than a picture of Barnegat Lighthouse on every bottle? Along with it he included the slogan: “As dependable as Old Barney.”

Frank Klein’s glass milk bottles with the picture and lettering all in red were soon to be seen everywhere and did more to promote the term “Old Barney” than any of the efforts of the Board of Trade. Hy Vita went out of business in the 1960s, and collectors still eagerly seek the bottles.
(Excerpt Copyright © Down The Shore Books LLC)

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EXCERPT from Two Centuries: “Shoobie”
by John Bailey Lloyd

(“Shoobie” is a distinctively South Jersey expression, meaning a person who visits the seashore for a single day, primarily to use the beach. The term was never applied to the fishermen who were also making day trips.)

IT HAS BEEN SAID THAT "SHOOBIE" is a slang formation of “shoebox” or “shoe-boxer,” meaning someone who carries his lunch to the beach in such a container. However, the question arises as to why anyone would ever want to use a shoebox for anything other than a card file. They are certainly not airtight. The lids won’t stay on. And how many pairs of shoes would a significant percentage of day visitors have to buy in order to get enough boxes for them to become symbolic?

I was a lifeguard for six years in the late 1940s and early 1950s, first at Surf City and then at Long Beach Township. In six years, I never once saw anyone eat lunch out of a shoebox. Admittedly, our regular neighborhood beaches were not generally frequented by day-trippers, but, I did, from time to time, have to take my turn on the south end of the Island. We guards all hated the Holgate beach and referred to it as “Siberia.” It was far from the other lifeguards, and our ordinary customers, and was made up almost entirely of day-trippers. They didn’t understand the surf and took unnecessary risks. Otherwise, they were nice people who had come to the shore for the day to have fun, get badly sunburned and eat as many hot dogs as they could. Why would they bring shoeboxes to carry food? The answer is that they never did carry shoeboxes. They were the food vendor’s best customers. Still, we called them “shoobies.”

In the post World War II years, when prosperity and the automobile were bringing more and more day-trippers to the shore during the summer, I first became aware of “shoobies.” In 1948, my parents summered in North Beach, then known as the Frazier Tract, while all of my friends were in Surf City. In those years, there were fewer than twenty teenaged boys in the whole town. As for girls, they were all our younger or older sisters, and so we, 15- and 16-year-old boys, all hung out together in front of Ken Smith’s store at Eighth Street and the Boulevard near the Surf City Hotel.

The one thing we all had in common, besides a love of jokes and the latest information on new automobiles, was that we never wore shoes and neither, for that matter, did anyone else on the Island in those years. Being at work was different, but going barefoot all the rest of the time was part of being at the shore. The soles of our feet were as tough as leather and we could spot a “shoobie” from a mile away.

We used to see strangers get out of their cars in their bathing suits — where they had changed we never knew — but they would be wearing street shoes to walk the graveled side streets up to the beach. “Here come the ‘shoobies’” we would say. Their feet were too tender for the gravel and there were no sidewalks to use. At the end of the street, where the sand started, they would often remove their shoes and leave them all parked in a row under the benches. Canvas tennis shoes were unknown to “shoobies.” Women wore sandals and their kids wore ankle-high, black basketball shoes. Flip-flops were a whole generation away. Once in a while you would actually see someone on the sand, well above the water line of course, wearing a bathing suit and strolling along in brown or black leather oxfords with socks. He would be your quintessential “shoobie.”

It all has to do with wearing shoes while the inside crowd did not, by custom, wear them. Though a “b” has been added to word, it has a purpose. You can’t say “shooey” with ease and “shoosey” would be baby talk and a little too cute. “Shoobie” is the perfect formation. It also has a slight rhyme with “rube,” meaning hayseed, and even summons up that connotation.
Never for a moment did it have an ethnic or class connotation. Most “shoobies” did not even know they were “shoobies,” because they were never taunted. They were simply observed, and perhaps commented upon by summer residents and natives alike, all of whom felt a measure of superiority for having tough feet. “Shoobies” are not so easy to spot anymore, because we are living in an era when all of us wear shoes everywhere but on the beach itself.
(Excerpt Copyright © Down The Shore Books LLC)

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