Tuesday, September 22, 2009

My Summer of 1971


During the summer of 1971 I worked at The Christian Admiral, a three hundred and thirty-three room hotel in Cape May, New Jersey. The owner and operator was the Reverend Dr. McIntyre, an old school anti-communist fire breather and a fundamentalist minister. He was considered by some to be the “Dean of the Radio Ministers,” a kind of politically bent Presbyterian Oral Roberts minus the faith healing rigmarole.

Of course all of this meant nothing to me. I was nineteen at the time and more interested in escaping home than right wing politics. By nature, I am conservative. I was brought up thinking that people should work for a living and equated welfare with failure. I was a child of the middle class and a holder and defender of the middle values of Middle America. The world seemed pretty much black and white

In other words, I was clueless. If the Reverend Dr. McIntyre was an anti-communist, well, that sounded pretty good to me.

The hotel closely resembled Rev. McIntyre’s anti-communist movement. Both had seen better days. Built at the turn of the century, The Christian Admiral was originally called the Hotel Cape May. It incorporated many of the architectural features that were used on the Titanic: winding staircases, Victorian facades, and skylights. And where the Titanic sank on it’s maiden voyage, the Hotel Cape May’s best day was the first day it opened. After that it was all bankruptcies and sheriff sales until finally the whole complex landed in McIntyre’s lap some six decades later like over-ripe fruit.

I worked that summer in the kitchen as a dishwasher. My job was to run glasses, plates and silverware through an antiquated dishwasher. I never really understood the inner workings of the contraption. There was a conveyor belt of some sort, a valve that controlled the steam, and a pressure gauge whose needle seemed to be perpetually in the red zone. Lacking any mechanical skill, I left the management of the equipment to my fellow worker, John.

John was from Brazil and only knew one word in English: his own name. Whenever he needed help, you would hear him shout “JOHN!” and there he would be, waving and gesticulating trying to make himself understood. I rarely knew what the hell he wanted, but it didn’t seem to matter much. The problem generally resolved itself. And if it didn’t no one seemed to care.

We worked all shifts, scraping, cleaning, stacking and occasionally breaking all manner of dishes, saucers, bowls and cups spending most of our workdays totally drenched. At the end of the day I stank like a concoction that was two parts ketchup and one part body odor.

The interesting thing about working in a hotel was that you could see everything from the inside out. There were connecting hallways to all points of the complex, hidden closets that stored all manner of goods, and elevators with access to floors that were not available to the “guests.”

Though technically the Admiral had seven floors, the kitchen help had rooms on the 8th floor. We each had our own room with a sink, but the bathroom and showers were communal.

My room looked like something out of a George Orwell novel. The mattress on the bed was lumpy, the sink facet dripped, paint peeled off the wall. The only personal fixture in my room was a Peter Max poster I taped above the bed. But from my window I could see the Atlantic Ocean, the boardwalk, and the summer cottages eight stories below. In the morning I would breathe in the salt air from the sea and feel as if I had a million dollars.

I had nothing except a few books and some clothes.
But in some ways, I had everything.

As a worker at the Christian Admiral I was required to attend at least one Bible meeting each week. There was always a vast array of speakers at these sessions. Strom Thurmond, I’m certain, spoke there. Most of the speeches and sermons were a combination of old time gospel along with a generous dose of patriotic nationalism. (There was never a loss of topics to expound on. After all, Nixon was president and Vietnam was raging. The world, as always, was a mess.)

Today I probably wouldn’t mind sitting through a good right-wing diatribe. If you are in the right state of mind, they can be fun in their own way. But in 1971 I was still a teenager. My nerves hadn’t settled yet and I needed to be on the move. I would walk in the front door, sign in, and then sneak out the backdoor.

The boardwalk awaited me.

It really wasn’t much of a boardwalk at all. It had a few places to buy hotdogs and pop and a gallery of pinball machines. Usually somebody had a radio playing the Beach Boys. Most evenings I ended up sitting on a bench, looking at the ocean and enjoying the evening sea breeze.

It was unlike anything I had ever experienced.
It was magic.

Then, sometime in the middle of August, Hurricane Doria began her destructive march up the east coast.

Next:
Hurricane Doria

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