I have more than 220 photos from a recent, two-hour work event that I have no desire to remember fondly, if at all. And yet I have almost no photos from my eight most memorable summers at the South Jersey Shore — 1991 to 1998, when I was 14 to 22 in high school and college.
Those summers were magical. And not just because hindsight tends to become a highlights reel that minimizes the negative. Even back then, I appreciated the rarity of what I had. I still do and always will.
The recent search for photos from that era demonstrated the analog existence we lived. Lived, loved, treasured.
My mom didn’t know my location and couldn’t track me. She knew where I said I’d be. But that was accurate maybe 60% of the time. Often, we’d start one place and end up at another. Other times I lied. But my mom’s no dummy. She picked her battles. And she knew we lived on a skinny, 6-mile-long barrier island with no bars. For most of high school, we were always on bikes or foot. And we all worked full-time jobs on the boardwalk from the year we turned 14, some day shifts and some nights until 10 or 11 p.m. My first job was at Shriver’s, an iconic salt water taffy and fudge shop on the boardwalk, for $3.80/hour. After work, we’d head home for dinner and showers, then meet back up on the boardwalk to wander among other groups of young teens. It was the Shore’s version of Midwest teens’ habit of cruising in cars at night. We’d grab slices of pizza, visit friends working in the surf shops and always run the last few blocks to make it home by a 10 or 11 p.m. curfew that got extended by an hour each summer.
Back then, college kids could still afford to rent a collective Shore house for the summer. Those houses became our nighttime headquarters. Days off were spent at the beach, with a chair, a towel and a book.
While memories of those summers are endless, photos are few. Cameras required film that had to be developed — no zoom, filters, preview screens or editing tools. So any decent shot of sunburned friends at the beach or playing Quarters around a late-night table was a huge win.
The fortuitous timing of my 1976 birth has allowed me to live in two worlds — analog and digital. We used pay phones, landlines and answering machines. Text messages didn’t exist.
We left handwritten phone messages on a designated notepad in a designated spot on the kitchen counter. We memorized dozens of phone numbers and celebrated call waiting’s defeat of the busy signal’s maddening blare.
No GPS voice guided us to every destination. Written directions had to be reversed to get us home and folded paper road maps lived in glove compartments.
I think back on the time we always managed to fill — without looking at a screen. Spontaneous moments weren’t scripted, posed and curated for social media content. They were enjoyed and remembered because they meant something to those involved, not because they would impress strangers online.
The “good old days” of my youth may sound impossibly primitive to today’s teens — but at least my parents didn’t always know where I was.
