MEMORIES OF ASBURY PARK
When I was a boy in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s, I would spend half of my summers with my grandparents on their farm in Freehold, and every Friday, Grandpa and Nana would load the “woody” station wagon with produce, eggs, and chickens (and me in the back, sitting on a folded Army blanket) and we would make the weekly drive to deliver that stuff to white-, gray- and blue-haired ladies in Ocean Grove and Asbury Park who lived in rooming houses and apartments. At the end of the day, my reward for helping Nana carry all those baskets and boxes up all those stairs in hot New Jersey summers would be a grilled cheese sandwich at the Neptune Diner or on the Asbury boardwalk and then a round of miniature golf with Nana, while Grandpa sat on a bench, smoking his pipe, before heading back to the farm in the dark, me asleep on that same Army blanket. Later, as a teenager, I would make the drive down from Essex County and we would roam the boardwalk, hit the Penny Arcade and the shooting gallery, buy a box of salt-water taffy at Berkeley’s, and sometimes go through the Convention Hall to Ocean Grove, where there was a really good bakery, just on the other side of the Hall, that made these really great almond macaroons. On the way back through Convention Hall, I used to love to pop a penny into those machines that looked like the scales you weighed yourself on (and got your fortune told as well), but instead had metal outlines where you put your feet; the machine would vibrate your feet and make them feel rejuvenated. My second date with my wife of 43 years was spent at Asbury; we still have two of the rings from the old carousel. I never got the gold ring and isn’t it ironic that when you were finally old enough and big enough to reach the rings, it was time to get off because you had become “too old to ride on a merry-go-round.” It depresses me to see what Asbury looks like today, a shell of its former self. Madame Marie, the fortune-teller, is gone, the Palace is dead, its heart broken like the windows in Convention Hall. Sad.
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