4th of July, Asbury Park

by Daniel Wolff

  Other traditions continued, as well. For their first three years in office, Smock and his fellow councilmen were under investigation by a Monmouth County grand jury. Indictments charged the Asbury city government with eleven counts of illegal activity, ranging from the purchase of lumber, coal, and steel without getting competitive bids to handing out beachfront leases based on friendships and/or kickbacks. Over at Convention Hall, the owners of the Whirl-O-Ball concession sued the city when they suddenly lost their space on the boardwalk. They claimed the mayor was playing favorites, but Smock defended himself, insisting, "All of our actions were for the best interests of the city of Asbury Park." What's more, the mayor explained, the council's procedure was "similar to that of the preceding governing body for more than twenty-five years." In other words, Smock was just doing what Hetrick had always done— which was pretty much what Bradley had always done— so what was the gripe?

  But even as Mayor Smock and Asbury Park stuck to the business of business-as-usual, the world that began outside its borders was transforming itself. Between 1944 and 1954, nine million U.S. citizens moved into new single-family homes, creating vast suburbias. Housing starts jumped from fewer than 115,000 in 1945 to nearly 1.7 million in 1950. Long since developed, Asbury Park proper didn't take part in the construction boom. Bradley's basic zoning plan steadfastly remained: beachfront backed by bungalows backed by shops, then the railroad separating what were now being called the slums. But out in New Jersey, there was an explosion of split-levels, cul-de-sacs, and two-car garages. Not far from Asbury, you could buy a three-bedroom Catalina ranch for under $12,000 ("No down payment for G.I.'s"). Add a new Oldsmobile for a little more than two grand, and you were all set to make one kind of American dream come true. All you needed were the connecting highways.

  The New Jersey Turnpike opened in 1952. It linked the Northeast metropolitan corridor from the George Washington Bridge down past Philadelphia. And on Friday, July 1, 1955— just in time for the holiday weekend— the last four miles of the Garden State Parkway officially opened, tying the Jersey shore into the loop. The parkway's 165 miles of road had cost $305 million, but there was every reason to believe it would quickly pay for itself. Those first six months of 1955 were the biggest in the history of the auto industry, with Detroit turning out 4.25 million passenger cars.

  The day the Garden State opened, the Asbury Evening Press announced, "City dwellers by the thousands, spurred on by the forecasts of hot, humid weather, began pouring into the Shore area." The next day, homeowners within five blocks of the beachfront found their driveways blocked. According to the Asbury police, "every available foot of parking space along Ocean Avenue" had been taken. Photos of the beach showed it packed with white bodies. And the influx was only going to get more intense with the scheduled widening of the feeder roads that led from the Garden State into Asbury.

  Visitors found a city whose changes were mostly superficial. Convention Hall still featured old-fashioned attractions like ZooA-Rama and a mechanized miniature circus. Sure, you got a glimpse of the nuclear age: a show of radioactive automobiles from the Yucca Flats atomic bomb tests. And a changing morality allowed moviegoers to catch Marilyn Monroe in The Seven Year Itch over at Walter Reade's Mayfair. If you wanted something even racier, there was The Game of Love, which The Ocean proudly advertised as "Shocking!" But a survey conducted in 1956 concluded, "The last 10 years have by-passed the town." That seemed both accurate and intentional. There hadn't been any major beachfront improvements since the Klan had marched through Long Branch. The city had been granting its merry-go-round lease to the same operators since 1932.

  There was something reassuringly nostalgic about Asbury, but by standing still, the city had also gotten seedier. According to some, the place needed fresh blood and new ideas. The local paper began supporting a new civic group that was calling on Smock's city manager to resign. Suddenly, in February 1955, to the surprise of the city, the mayor himself stepped down. The reason given was his health, but his wife was quoted as saying he had "no specific complaint. It's just a lack of energy."

  New energy was exactly what Asbury Park wanted. More and more, the boardwalk crowds were made up of modern day-trippers, driving into town for quick thrills before heading home. The city had to decide how to adjust without becoming, as one critic put it, a "Coney Island type venue." You had to go back in history to understand that distinction. As Stephen Crane had put it long ago, Asbury's self-image was one of "singular and elementary sanity" compared to Coney Island's "profanity." Where Coney Island had been wide-open, appealing to the ethnic mix of New York City's tenement communities, Asbury saw itself as morally and racially segregated. The most popular ride in James Bradley's city had probably been the Ferris wheel: a gentle, steam-driven trip up above Lake Avenue to an observation deck. There, a proper middle-class couple could admire the view of the ocean and the line of church spires that stretched down Grand Avenue. In comparison, Coney Island's premier attraction was the Steeplechase. After racing wooden horses down a track, you had to crawl through a low "dog house" into "The Insanitarium." There, on the stage of what was known as the Blowhole Theater, you ended up face-to-face with a dwarf in outlandish costume. Before a man could react, the dwarf would shock him with an electric prod to the ass or the crotch. A woman would have her skirts whipped up over her head by a blast of air. Out of the darkness, there'd come a roar of laughter as those who had just gone through the same humiliation shouted their approval.

  From Coney Island's perspective, the national character was clear enough. "We Americans," Steeplechase proprietor George C. Tilyou declared, "want either to be thrilled or amused, and we are willing to pay well for either sensation." The symbol of all this was a caricature of Tilyou called Tillie. Painted on his fun-house walls and reproduced in his advertisements, it was the toothy face of a grinning adolescent with hair neatly parted, a high turn-of-the-century collar, and a slightly crazy stare. Tillie stood for bright lights and loud music and the sticky comingled smell of sweat and candy.

  In the past, Asbury had had its own Steeplechase and its own Tillies, but even in its wildest heydays, the city had always tried to project an image of middle-class respectability. Now, in the mid1950s, with Mayor Smock gone and the Parkway practically leading the masses to its shore, the city took another look at itself. And found there was no danger of turning into Coney Island because that had already happened.

  Yes, people still came to Asbury Park to swim and lie out in the sun. But even over the sound of surf, you could hear the dinging of the boardwalk. Like most towns on the Jersey shore, the predominant amusement at Asbury Park had become the not quite legal "games of skill." In wooden booths just off the beach and at arcades inside Convention Hall, you could drop a nickel in a "catchpenny game" and enter a dazzling atmosphere of bells and flashing lights and payoffs. There was Fascination, a kind of tic-tac-toe, where you rolled a rubber ball into a grid of holes and tried to light up five in a row. In Skee Ball, you bowled up an inclined ramp and tried to land in the ring worth the most points. One of the most popular was Skil Bingo, where your nickel bought you a bingo card. The "skill" was tossing dice or marbles to determine what numbers came up. On all of these, if you won, you got a prize, or tickets you could turn in for a prize. Up and down the boardwalk, players aimed for the bull's-eye or tossed big colored rings onto milk bottles or chased goldfish down a colored track with a metal shark.

  By 1955, the most popular game on the boardwalk was pinball. And in many ways, pinball proved to be rock 6k roll's precursor: the advance army that opened the way to the boardwalk. Pinball had begun during the Depression as just another gravity-fed maze game. By 1933, lights had been added and, a few years later, bumpers. But it was after World War II, with the invention of the flipper, that the game came into its own. Now, you could keep the thing alive, banging on it, lifting it off its legs, flipping the ball back and then rattling the entire pleasure machine. It might last just a minute, or it might go on for a
delicious half hour. When you finally lost and looked up, hot and sweaty and strangely exhausted, the world continued to ring.

  This wasn't healthy exercise. This had nothing to do with Robinson Crusoe. Almost as soon as it appeared, pinball was denounced as "a perverter of innocent children." The most popular versions— like Bingo Pinball— paid off in cash. According to a Better Homes and Gardens of 1957, "Pinball feeds on vast sums siphoned from the worn pockets of those least able to afford the sucker's games of rigged odds." It was a poor people's game, a democratic game, and word on the street was that the pinball empire was Mob operated. A lot of the little mom-and-pop stores didn't much care: the machines brought in customers. That riled their competitors, the big new department stores, and they led the campaign against Bingo Pinball, calling it a direct descendant of the slot machine.

  On the surface, Asbury Park tried to distance itself from this lower-class amusement. The city didn't allow the kind of machines that paid off with cash. But it couldn't afford a total ban. The pinball concession for Convention Hall brought in $8,000 a year (through a lease to a corporation that included the president of the school board). Fascination, Whirl-A-Ball, and Skee Ball all made obvious what had been true since the city's beginning but had been kept hidden: Asbury's "guests" were rubes. As visitors lined up on the boardwalk, banging on the flashing games, it was clear that the city had a carny economy. Even now, Asbury tried to save face by maintaining that the games weren't gambling per se. But in 1954 the state of New Jersey ruled they were. The court decided there was no real difference between slot machines and pinball games: both involved "price, chance and prize."

  Up and down the shore, concessionaires tried to ignore the law. But the next year, a judge confirmed the ruling, and in June of 1955— just at the start of the high summer season— all the Skillo-Basket games on the Jersey shore were ordered shut down. According to Police Chief Fred Lembke, Asbury Park didn't suffer because its boardwalk didn't allow this variation on the roulette wheel. But Asbury did have Fascination and Bingo, and by 1957, the state would broaden its definition: whether you played for money or a prize, relied on skill or chance, no matter how "innocuous" the game might be, if you put down your cash in the hope of winning something of value, it was gambling— and illegal.

  The Asbury Park Evening Press took the position that this was a good thing. The operation of these games, it editorialized, " disguised with a phony 'skill' element . . . has been the measure for the deterioration of many resorts." Asbury Park, the paper assured its readers, wasn't dependent on this petty gambling. It was a "successful and thriving community" with an "attractive residential center," hotels, boardinghouses, and a commercial street that was the top retail trade area in Monmouth County. In other words, it still was— or could still be— James Bradley's ideal community. The paper worried about the "long range effect upon the character of Asbury Park," if it focused on "the immediate dollar." The city had to get back to attracting "desirable" tourists who came with their families and stayed awhile. "If Asbury Park's prosperity depends upon spinning wheels in order to separate the visitor from his cash," the editors declared just before the Fourth of July celebrations of 1956, "or upon chasing goldfish up and down a tank to see which one crosses the line first, then we are indeed in a sorry way." At least one local clergyman agreed, writing that a community dependent on gambling "or any other form of evil" wasn't the sort of place where he and his family wanted to live.

  But the dependency already existed. All you had to do was ask the people who actually worked the boardwalk, who made their living there. One Toms River man had spent more than a decade running a game he described as "throwing balls at cats to win a prize." He pointed out that it wasn't just undesirables who played these five-and-dime games, but exactly those all-American families that Asbury claimed it wanted to attract. Another concessionaire took the argument a step further: "A vacation resort such as this gets a shot at an alleged sucker perhaps once a year." So they lost five bucks trying to win the stuffed animals and cheap jewelry that the boardwalk operators called plush. Afterward, they'd go and spend a lot more on "legitimate" amusements like dinner. What was so wrong with the immediate dollar? The Beach Merchants' Association got ten thousand signatures on a petition to reopen the games, while the First Methodist Church was telegramming the governor to uphold the ban.

  Next door, Ocean Grove seemed to reproach Asbury with its very presence. There, in the fall of 1955, evangelist Billy Graham delivered a sermon on the revival of religion. It drew twelve thousand people. In the other direction, Long Branch was enjoying the benefits of an amendment to the state constitution that once again allowed betting on horses. Monmouth Park had finally reopened a half century after James Bradley had helped close it. But where did that leave Asbury? "Everyone will sell hot dogs and hamburgers," one concessionaire predicted, "and all the old ladies can go to the race tracks instead of playing skee ball or Skil Bingo." In other words, the city would slowly but surely fade away.

  But besides those old ladies, there was another kind of visitor. The owner of the Palace just had to look down Kingsley to see them. Night after night they cruised the strip, modeling their cars, their clothes, their hair. They were the new discovery— or was it invention?— of the 1950s: the teenager. Like the rest of Asbury's beachfront, Palace Amusements hadn't changed much since the 1930s. Its carousel house dated back to 1888, its Ferris wheel to 1895, and its most recent addition— the Crystal Maze hall of mirrors— to 1903. But these kids didn't come roaring off the highway to ride a merry-go-round. By the Fourth of July, 1956, the owner of the Palace had completed renovations specifically designed, as he said, for "teenagers looking for a good time."

  First, he'd torn down the old Turner and Ocean Spray hotels (so much for the "desirable" long-term tourist). In the newly opened space, he built two big additions. That made room for rows of new pinball machines under the now-required sign FOR AMUSEMENT ONLY. More importantly, the Palace enlarged its Tunnel of Love by over eighty feet, giving teenagers that much longer to sneak a kiss, a touch. The Palace's other new wing— three stories high— contained what were known in the trade as "dark rides." The Ghost Ride spooked your date into your arms. The Twister carried you, screaming, in and out of whirling lights. The Oriental Express, the Whip, and Rock-O-Plane would eventually be installed. And the bumper cars gave teenagers coming off the Garden State a chance act out head-snapping collisions under mirrored sparks of electricity.

  Old Asbury objected, of course. One civic leader declared that the city mustn't allow the boardwalk to "denigrate to the level of a carnival midway." But by 1956, the writing was quite literally on the wall. The new and expanded Palace rose in garish green, its outside covered with murals of giant clowns, kids in bumper cars, and the promise of FUN FOR ALL. Dominating all this were not one but two grinning Tillies. Asbury Park might not have electric prods and upraised skirts, but the caricatures of George Tilyou promised the equivalent: wild times, slightly out-of-control thrills, dangerous fun.

  It was a new kind of promised land, and it had a sound track. Long Branch residents called it "excessive noise" and complained that it was booming out of the Ja-Da La Martinique Club at all hours of the day and (mostly) night. "[It] isn't loud," the owners explained. "It's just repetitious." More importantly, the music drew a bigger crowd than the club could hold. The beachfront was dying. And this new music had the potential, the owners declared, of making "the Long Branch-Asbury Park area into another Wildwood instead of a graveyard."

  The comparison was to Wildwood, New Jersey: a party town a hundred miles farther down the shore. There, a round-faced country-western singer named Bill Haley had helped invent " excessive noise." Playing a summer gig on the Wildwood boardwalk, Haley had become friends with the act appearing across the way. The Treniers, black twins out of Mobile, Alabama, had started off with Jimmie Lunceford's big band and now played an extroverted, beat-heavy dance music. Early in 1952, they'd released "It Rocks, It Rolls, It
Swings," and later that year, Haley produced his own version, a record called "Rock the Joint." The song became a regional hit as clubs up and down the Jersey shore competed for the new teen market. His follow-up, "Crazy Man Crazy," made it onto the national charts in 1953, and by late that summer Bill Haley and the Comets were whipping boardwalk crowds into a frenzy with something called "(We're Gonna) Rock Around the Clock."

  "Rock Around the Clock" briefly made the charts in 1954, but it only became a massive hit when it was included in the 1955 movie Blackboard Jungle. Like Marlon Brando's The Wild One and, later that summer, James Dean's Rebel Without a Cause, Blackboard Jungle lionized and capitalized on the phenomenon of the teenager. But Blackboard Jungle was the first to make an explicit connection between juvenile delinquency and rock 6k roll. All these movies showed the teenager as antisocial. Anti, that is, the kind of status quo that Asbury had struggled to maintain. By the end of Blackboard Jungle, tolerance and understanding win out. There's even racial harmony as the young Sidney Pokier leads the white kids away from gangbanging. But teenagers in the movie audience were less interested in the hap>py ending than the beginning. That's when "Rock Around the Clock" kicked off with its count-up ("one, two, three o'clock, four o'clock, rock!"), its triple-time drumming, and its crazed guitar. For teenagers, the message was crystal clear. Mayhem. Stand and dance! Which is just what they did, in the aisles of movie theaters across the country. Blackboard Jungle propelled "Rock Around the Clock" to number one. And brought Bill Haley to Asbury Park.