Cape May Diaries
5- The stop sign on the highway
My wife and I were not the first members of our family to make the long trek to Cape May’s shores. My grandfather had accomplished the feat for his honeymoon in 1926, even leaving his bride on the shore to rush out into the waves to swim with the dolphins.
My grandfather -- a would-be architect who made his living as a contractor in the north -- came to the shore community above Atlantic City to make his fortune after the war, helping to construct many of the bungalows that served the post war resort industry as families began to take more frequent vacations to the shore. Our family often accompanied my grandfather during his summer trips, spending their time bivouacked in a bungalow as my grandfather worked to transform the bleak landscape into a small community, the bayside suddenly springing to life with rows of small cottages.
These were primitive structures, providing only the basic needs for visitors intending to spend little more than a week at a time here with porch, bedrooms, and kitchens. The earliest models had no indoor plumbing, people needed to exit the house to use the toilet or take a shower. Since these cottages saw no use during the winter months, few had heat, and my grandfather -- following the same ritual as every other cottage owner -- traveled south to "open up" the cottage just before Memorial Day in late spring and "close it down" after Labor Day with the approach of fall. Water had to be turned on or off, pipes had to be drained, windows sealed against weather and intrusion.
Yet even as early as the late 1940s, people looked to the seaside as a permanent residence. My great aunt and her family moved south in 1947 and opened a luncheonette in Bayville to which we flocked each summer to fish, crab or swim. I remember during a visit in the late 1950s standing on the small pier that looked out into Barnegat Bay and thinking how much I wanted to live there, too.
Apparently the same thought struck other members of my family because they became part of the later, more substantial migration, settling into Toms River in 1977 by which time they found the place so settled with people from northern New Jersey that many of the streets were named after northern towns such as Clifton and Garfield.
Perhaps my grandfather’s trips to Cape May gave him his exaggerated fondness for the Victorian Age. Born in 1901, my grandfather lived with the ending of the Victorian culture, always interpreting success with the features most associated with how the wealthy people lived when he was a boy.
So when the post war boom brought the family into money, my grandfather purchased a Victorian era house in Clifton, filling it with all the regalia he remembered from houses of its kind when he was young. Not only did he fill China closets with the best of dishes and silverware, but set rules of behavior in our house already 50 years out of fashion -- the significance of which I did not realize until we actually arrived in Cape May and wandered through the relics there, listening to lectures on how life was in 1900.
Later I learned how in many ways, my grandfather and the town fathers of Cape May tried to do the same thing, not merely to preserve the images of the Victorian area, but to maintain that era as a way of life. For different reasons neither totally succeeded, each managing in a way to pay tribute to a sense of class missing from later eras. My grandfather drew on a vague memory of what he saw as a child. His death ended his effort because his sons' memories did not reach back that far in time. While his widow's did, my grandmother was too weary from raising seven kids to bother building a museum.
She was never as fanatical as my grandfather in seeking to maintain the old standards. She was also cognizant of burden a Victorian house posed on a family that did not have servants to help maintain it. For nearly thirty years, she cleaned the fifteen rooms in that old house as well as cooked our meals, washed our laundry and treated the bumps and bruises boys routinely suffer.
In 1990, my grandmother had begun to fade, dullness setting in suggesting she did not have long to live -- though on that warn October night she greeted our arrival with nearly as much clarity as I remembered from when she was younger, so pleased at my finally settling down and binding myself to a wife and way of life.
In stopping in Toms River we had hoped my grandmother could supply me with some news about Cape May. Unfortunately, my grandmother had only vague memories. My aunt and uncle, however, had much more to say on the matter since both had wandered into those regions from time to time. My aunt gave us one small word of warning: “When you get on the Parkway during that last stretch, watch out for the stop sign.”
"Stop sign? On the Parkway?" I said, unable to envision such a circumstance.
"That's what's so tricky and dangerous about it," my aunt said. "No expects it."
The stop sign became a marker, defining dramatic changes in our lives and in the life of Cape May we did not yet envision. For us at that moment in 1990, the idea of a stop sign on a highway constructed without even a traffic light for several hundred miles seem bizarre at best, yet gave hints of the kind of world in which we were about to plunge.
For us, the report shrouded the still distant Cape May in a deeper mist of mystery. Over the next decade that stop sign would come to symbolize a sense of innocence for me, and its eventual disappearance (replaced by a traffic light) marked a significant psychological change in Cape May as the general public rediscovered that lost treasure.
While the magic of the place would remain in some degree for years, the innocence that stop sign signified for me could no more be recaptured after the stop light replaced it than the era my grandfather attempted to preserve, one more living memory waiting to fade away.