Cape May Diaries
11- Breakfast at George’s
A turn of the century photo of Beach Street showed George's restaurant as a candy store.
What attracted us to the place our first morning in Cape May more than a decade and half ago (and every morning since) was the small sign in the window that said: "Breakfast."
This was no posh seaside place painting in exorbitant Victorian colors, but the kind of simple establishment we made a point of finding in our travels. The word breakfast seemed to say it all, even though the menu also provided some lunch items. The shop closed at 3 p.m.
With about a dozen booths and a few stools at the counter, George's seemed a testament to the more legitimate past, and gave us a glimpse to the more subtle changes that occurred during our yearly visits, beginning with reaction to the war in the Persian Gulf and continuing through the attack on the World Trade Center slightly over a decade later. Locals -- who apparently frequented the place -- made no secret of their conservative leanings, and talk rose from each booth concerning every issue. In our escape from reality, George's became our daily news report.
As well as providing us with a glimpse of the real world, George's also acted as barometer for the year round population, a glimpse at the 5,000 full time residents that endured and profited from the onslaught of three million and growing yearly tourists. Each year we witnessed George and his family slowly changing. We watched his family grow older, and George's face more wrinkled.
Then, one year, George was not around, and his son-in-law seemed to have taken his place behind the cash register, and we assumed we had witnessed the demise of the only Cape May resident with whom were had any continued familiarity.
But glimpses can be deceiving. For two years running, we did not see George and presumed the worst. We also lacked courage to bring the matter up with his wife, and before we could, George reappeared looking perfectly healthy. After this he remained a continued fixture until our visit in 2002 when he and his wife announced in a necessarily-repeated performance that they were retiring as of the end of the year and that his son-in-law would take over operations.
George, however, told us he had no plans to retire to some place else, which meant he would continue to live in the apartment above the store. This also meant that he would be unable to resist poking his nose into the store from time to time, despite his announced retirement or his wife's protests.
Rumors of George's wealth were grossly exaggerated. Because he had been here so long even locals believed he had invested deeply in Cape May's real estate, and thus compiled a small fortune over the years as land values exploded. Many assumed he owned the whole line of stores between Pearl and Jackson's streets, a rumor he dispelled with a sad shake of his head.
"We own this building and the building next door," he told us, describing the breakfast establishment and a beachwear store with their associated second floor apartments. "But we don't need much more than that."
As well as we thought we knew them, their recognition of us came slowly, and during the first few years, they frowned at us, as if struggling to make out where they had seen our faces before. During those first few years, they recognized us only during a week long stay than forgot us. I showed up twice in the morning, once stopping there for coffee after my jog, only to return a while later with my wife for breakfast.
We felt no great concern. The tourist always has the better memory in this regard, fixing that particular time and place in his or her mind as something special like a mental photograph. For George and his family, we were but a passing face in the crowd, one that might seem familiar, but never memorable.
Our persistence, however, paid off, after about a decade when George's wife actually smiled on the first morning of our yearly trip. Then in the subsequent years, she continued to acknowledge us, as if she understood our ritual, and we became for her like the flocks of geese making their way south each year, a sign of the end of season.
George, his wife, his son-in-law along with the variety of waiters and waitresses that we encountered during our visits, had an amazing practicality that spoke of a New Jersey that rapidly vanished along the Turnpike and Garden State Parkway. New Yorkers settling along the shore route and Philadelphians, along the inland route, altered more than the landscape with their invasion. They brought a change of values as well. These successful invaders carried with them a new arrogance similar to that which Cape May and Atlantic City must have known during the Victorian Era, but had faded away during the lean years of the Great Depression and its aftermath, when people had to scratch out a living from farms and sea side stores such as George's.
George's became fixture of the real past to which I needed to attach myself, regardless of the differing political position the other regulars had. Each year’s national political issues seemed to swirl around us over breakfast as people mumbled and grumbled about the headlines they read. Not shy about my own political leanings, I often drew frowns from a more conservative crowd, though never to the extent that we felt unwelcome. George’s was a sanctuary for all who chose to break bread there, and we were greeted with the same respect as any regular. We eventually came to that understanding after more than a decade-long association, how wealthy in spirit these people were who broke fast with us each morning. We both watched the world we loved vanishing, and the landscape being inherited by a new, younger population, and we were both helpless as to what we could do to halt its progression and maintain those values like "hard work," "honesty" and "simplicity."
And hearing of George's retirement seemed like one more sign of my own demise -- especially in a year which had seen my mother's passing up north. But then, in subsequent visits, we got to meet George’s grandchild and knew there was hope in the world after all.