ON THE BOARDWALK IN ATLANTIC CITY, THE THOUGHTS AND EMOTIONS OF A FIFTIETH HIGH SCHOOL REUNION

I recently attended my fiftieth high school reunion in Atlantic City, the casino gambling center on the New Jersey coast. It was the first high school reunion that I attended, and what a mixture of emotions, thoughts and memories it awakened. I had had many reasons for not attending a high school reunion before, and one of them was that I saw myself as too busy earning a living to take the time to go. Another reason was that I had some less than happy memories of my time as a teenager in Atlantic City, many of which had nothing to do with high school per se.

By no means were all my thoughts negative, however. In fact wherever I lived in the ensuing years following graduation, I always felt some nostalgia for Atlantic City. As a lover of the sea and as a lover of performance and show business all my life, I was proud of my Atlantic City roots and was never hesitant to tell people about it.

Steel Pier, Quite a Phenomenon

One of the Atlantic City facts of my life that I have always been very quick to tell people about was my four summers working on Steel Pier in the food services department, known then as “the refreshment stands.” Back then, Steel Pier was quite a phenomenon—a huge entertainment complex that extended a half mile out to sea. It included three large theaters, one of them a vaudeville house presenting some of the best known performers of the day, the second a vaudeville-style venue for performing kids, and the third a first run movie theater.

Near the end of the pier was a huge dance hall where the best known big bands of the day could be heard and danced to. And at the very end was the water circus. Here divers demonstrated a bevy of Olympic style maneuvers as they plunged into the ocean, and here the famous diving horse made the audience gasp as it culminated every show with a jump into a large tank of water.

Business Reversal, A Wrenching Affair

My summers on Steel Pier then couldn’t help but form the basis of many of my happiest Atlantic City memories, but the circumstances of my family’s decision to relocate from Philadelphia just as I was about to start high school had a dark side. At the start of the 1950s, my father had suffered a business reversal, a wrenching affair that involved two other families—his in-laws, that is, my maternal grandparents, and the family of my mother’s sister, that is, my aunt.

As the major investors in the failed business, my grandparents took a severe beating. In their late fifties with their retirement savings severely depleted, they now needed some way to survive financially. They decided to take their remaining funds and to invest in a business they knew well from their earlier lives raising a family in a coal mining town in central Pennsylvania. They bought a small building in Ventnor, an Atlantic City suburb, took up residence in the apartment on the second floor, and opened a dress shop on the first.

In Poor Shape Financially

It was no accident that they had found their way to the Atlantic City area. One of my grandmother’s sisters, Rose Segal, had been a long time resident of Ventnor and had raised a family there.

My father, meanwhile, was having trouble getting a new career going in Philadelphia. Financially we were in poor shape. My mother saw my grandparents’ business as a possible salvation for our family. She would help her parents run the store in return for a small salary, and my father would start some kind of business of his own in Atlantic City. At the time, he told me that he was thinking of opening a hardware store. However, the reality was that he was not happy at all about leaving Philadelphia, and he would continue to complain about our having made the move for many years to come.

Best Job of a Lifetime

We found a house in Margate, another suburb, adjoining the marsh and the then undeveloped bayside, and as I have previously written, I quickly got swept up in the life of the bay including boat building with purloined house lumber. Meanwhile my father made no serious attempt to find work in Atlantic City, not that I could see anyway. Not too long after the move took place, as luck would have it, he would land the best job he would ever have in his life—as the Philadelphia-based East Coast manufacturer’s representative for a Minnesota manufacture of appliances, of which the home freezer was to be his hottest product.

Hence in 1954 I started the ninth grade at Atlantic City High School as an Atlantic City newcomer with a mother helping to run a dress shop in Ventnor and a father living five out of seven days a week in a combination office and apartment in Philadelphia. When my parents would get together in the house in Margate on weekends, the conversation would inevitably turn to the big issue in their lives. This was always the grist for my parents’ anger mill, especially my father’s, and he had a caldron of a temper.

Mother Holds Her Ground

My father would make clear how unhappy he was that we had made the move, and not backing down one iota my mother would make clear that she could not and would not abandon her parents and the dress shop in Ventnor.

By now, both of my grandparents were ailing, especially my grandfather who suffered from diabetes and a weak heart. And, it must be quickly added, that guilt over the business failure and the substantial financial loss incurred by my grandparents was still upper most in my mother’s mind.

No Unqualified Welcome

This then was the baggage I brought with me when I started Atlantic City High School. The social situation I found there is what I have come to believe was fairly typical. No, I was not given an unqualified welcome, but if I had expected that I would have been very naïve. I hadn’t gone to junior high or elementary school with any of these kids. I was an unknown. Given that fact, it is amazing that I did as well as I did socially.

First of all I was fortunate to have been accepted as a pledge by one of the two Jewish high school fraternities. Exactly how this came about is a mystery to me now. I did know, but I’ve long since forgotten the exact circumstances. However, it must have had something to do with family connections through my Great Aunt Rose, who was always “Aunt Rosie” to me.

Rough Pledge Experience

Through the fraternity, I had access to friendships and a social life, but first I had to get through my pledge year, which proved a rough time, particularly one less than wonderful hazing experience. This hazing experience left its scars, the worst of which were the emotional ones. These scars had everything to do with my decision not to join a fraternity when I went on to college.

I am speculating, but I now think that my less than happy experience as a pledge had to do not just with my newcomer status, but with the fact that I did not live up to expectation among certain segments of the fraternity. As a very tall person, I was expected to be an accomplished athlete, and in this regard I was a disappointment. I have always loved athletics as a participant as well as a spectator, but especially with regard to the ball sports where hand-eye coordination is important I just never measured up to my own or many others’ expectations.

Reality of Cliques and In-Groups

That said, I have to quickly point out that there is probably no secondary level school in the country and probably the world that does not have its cliques and in-groups. Atlantic City High School was no worse than any other secondary school in this respect and probably not as bad as many. Also I have to say that as a shy person I did not do myself any good. A more socially aggressive person might have been able to break through more barriers more quickly than I did.

Though barriers existed, by no means did I feel overly circumscribed. I remember many happy Friday and Saturday evenings, that is, once we got our licenses, driving through town with my high school friends and singing the latest hit songs at the top of our lungs. Singing was something I always enjoyed doing and continue to enjoy to this day. These drives would often include stops at a great pizza joint in the inlet called Maria’s and later stops at a Chinese restaurant in the center of the city where we would finish out the night with a succulent appetizer like roasted, bright red Sha-shu.

Great Swimming Adventure

During summer nights, one of my friends and I found a way to work off the excess energy in our teenage bodies, energy that remained despite our seven-day-per-week day jobs. We’d go swimming from his house on a lagoon in Margate. Our most ambitious feat involved swimming to the Ocean City bridge, a distance of over a mile in each direction. Swimming remains to this day my favorite form of physical exercise--swimming and ballroom dancing, that is.

And so these are the memories that I brought with me to my fiftieth reunion, held at the huge casino resort Trump Taj Mahal, a complex right across the Boardwalk from what remains of the Steel Pier, now strictly an amusement pier and maybe a third of the size of the original. As I rubbed shoulders with my classmates over a period of two days—about half of the original class appeared to have made it, half of a class that was not small by any measure--I was at first struck with feelings of self doubt. It’s a complex of feelings that I’m sure is not unique to me, a feeling that is bound to be awakened by something as momentous as a fiftieth reunion in almost everyone.

The Awful Reunion Comparisons

How did my life compare with that of my classmates? Had I come anywhere close in 50 years to accomplishing what some of them had accomplished? Toughest thought of all, had I come anywhere close to measuring up to my own expectations for myself? Also there were the memories of the classmates who hadn’t survived, who were taken from us much too early.

Soon, thank goodness, a more positive emotion took over. That thought went something like this: “Damn it, you enjoy this thing called a reunion. Fifty years---it is an amazing milestone.” That was followed by still more good feelings: “What a great group of people. I’m only sorry now that I didn’t make more of an effort to get to know more of them back then and then to stay in touch, but at least I’m starting to make up for it now.” Let us hope all of us have many more good years ahead and many more happy reunions.

As I say, one of life’s amazing milestones—a fiftieth high school reunion.

To communicate with the author, write to Stephen.saft@gmail.com.

Copyright © 2007 by Stephen Alan Saft