Island Album: Photographs & Memories of Long Beach Island - Hardcover

Margaret Thomas Buchholz

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1593220219 ISBN 13: 9781593220211

Publisher: Down The Shore Publishing, 2006

Synopsis

Like a great family photo album for Long Beach Island, Island Album is a delightful oversize hardcover that will be poured over and shared by the ''family'' of this New Jersey barrier island resort. Here is Long Beach Island in the days of pound fishing and great hotels, but here, too, are individual fishermen showing off their catches and a gaggle of summer waitresses posing for a group picture in their brief spare time. Children of every decade personify summer as they romp on beaches and mess about in boats. Teenagers are teenagers, recognizable at work and play. Houses evolve from simple shanties into Victorian ''cottages'' and finally modern structures with walls of glass. But all are home to the families gathered for the camera on porch and dock. The text, drawn from a series of remarkable interviews taped over a ten-year period, combines descriptions of life on the Island with what the Island represents to those who have known it well. This fragile strip of land between bay and ocean captures the imagination today as much as ever, and this loving evocation of its past will delight those who know, and those who have just discovered, this place apart.

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

Islands are mythic places. Crossing water to reach them, it is easy to feel that we are leaving the complexities of everyday life for an elemental world governed by the natural rhythms of sun and wind and tide. Albums, in contrast, root us in our past, preserving the everyday life of childhood, of animals, people and places we have loved.Island Album presents us with both the idea and the reality of one New Jersey barrier island. Here is Long Beach Island in the days of pound fishing and great hotels, but here, too, are individual fishermen showing off their catches and a gaggle of summer waitresses posing for a group picture in their brief spare time. Children of every decade personify summer as they romp on beaches and mess about in boats. Teenagers are teenagers, recognizable at work and play, from the 1920s through the 1960s. Houses evolve from simple shanties into Victorian “cottages” and finally modern structures with walls of glass. But all are home to the families gathered for the camera on porch and dock.The text, drawn from interviews taped over a ten-year period, combines descriptions of life on the Island with what the Island represents to those who have known it well. Here are stories of sailing and fishing, of treks by car, train and foot, of beach camping, lifeguarding and coastal rescue, of violent storms and the endless struggle to resist a hungry sea. There is, of course, some regret for the loss of wilderness and the slower pace of much of the last century. Yet something quintessential about Long Beach Island remains. This fragile strip of land between bay and ocean captures the imagination today as much as ever, and this loving evocation of its past can only enhance its present.

About the Author:

Historian and writer Margaret Thomas Buchholz is the author of New Jersey Shipwrecks: 350 Years in the Graveyard of the Atlantic, co-author of Great Storms of the Jersey Shore, and editor of Shore Chronicles: Diaries and Travelers' Tales from the Jersey Shore 1764-1955. Her essays about the New Jersey Shore have been included in anthologies and collections. Buchholz was publisher of the Long Beach Island, New Jersey Shore, newspaper The Beachcomber from 1955 to 1987, and is still an editor. She grew up in Harvey Cedars, where her family has been coming since 1833, and currently lives year-round in her childhood home on the Island.

About this edition

• Publisher: Down The Shore Publishing
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 1593220219
• ISBN 13: 9781593220211
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 207
• Editor: Margaret Thomas Buchholz