Leaping in the Waves

I asked Margie when she got her first swimming suit. She thinks she was four, and she got it to take with her to Uncle Herman and Aunt Mildred’s house out on Long Island, so they could take her to Jones Beach. Her uncle and aunt were a child-free couple who offered to host Margie in the summers from the time she was three till she was about nine and started going to summer camp.

Jones Beach was a sparkling new park begun the year Margie was born,1928, in an ambitious time for park-building in US history. In order to create the park, houses had to be moved, roads had to be built, sand was dredged from the ocean bottom, and thousands of workers planted grasses by hand, as a way to create dunes and hold the dredged sand in place. The full history and many photos (mostly from the 1950s) and diagrams are on this website.

By the time she was four, Jones Beach was the talk of New York, and people from every economic group wanted to experience it, though it was only accessible by car, a policy decision that cut most New Yorkers out, especially the poor, by intention. Jones Beach fronts the Atlantic, and the waves come crashing in with an energy and power that would have terrified most four-year-olds. Uncle Herman lived on Long Island above his furniture store, he had a car, and Margie wanted nothing in the world so much as to hurl her tiny body into those waves. She says she never had any fear of water. She felt as if she was born to swim. Uncle Herman and Aunt Mildred had their work cut out trying to save Margie from drowning.

“I love the water,” Margie said dreamily, her eyes closed. She opened her eyes and pointed to a black and white collage atop a cabinet. “You see that picture over there?” 

It’s a series of white paper cut-outs augmented with black lines, pasted on a piece of cardboard painted black. “My friend Joe Mornis made that for me in—what year does it say on it?” 1978. “Yes, Joe was an artist friend—not a lover, just a friend—when I was a newlywed living out on Long Island in the late forties, early fifties. He settled in Hicksville, and he made that picture about me and the waves of the ocean. When I look at it, I feel as if I’m leaping in the waves at Jones Beach again.”