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By Root 326 0

in Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise, he viewed college as a place to “go in for everything” to “see what he was made of.” What Van was made of was not just the French Club and German dramatic society, the humor magazine, literary journal, and yearbook, but also golf and cricket, baseball, soccer, and crew. He mourned a classmate who died on the Titanic, shared the outrage over a plan to make the university coed—“desecrate not the sanctity of bachelor hall!”—and drank his way through the senior class banquet with the rest of them, carousing through a revelry of ragtime and vaudeville and feasting, a night memorialized in a ditty he fondly recalled: “Bouillon of clam, filet of sole, a brew made by Anheuser/We see them coming home next day—A little pale Budweiser.” He wasn't the best at anything, except the Wireless Club, of which he was made president senior year, but the young man who disembarked at Beach Haven was a grown man, not just clever but capable and athletic, a fine swimmer, a son a father could be proud of.

If Dr. Vansant felt a wave of foreboding, he could have been forgiven, for the entrance to Long Beach Island recalled his memories of the island as a tragic place in the Age of Ships. Walt Whitman, the bard of Camden, New Jersey, and a frequent visitor to the island, wrote of mountainous waves concealing “unshovelled ever-ready graves.” The doctor knew the shoals off the Barnegat Inlet as the graveyard of the Atlantic in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, the watery tomb of four hundred to five hundred ships and men beyond counting. The schooner Powhatan breached by a wave that swept to their deaths all twenty-nine crew and three hundred and eleven passengers, German immigrants bound for New York; a passenger ship from Liverpool, grounded on the bar in a winter gale, thirty souls perishing from the cold; the New Orleans packet Auburn, loaded with cotton and hemp, lost with nineteen of her crew; the schooner Surprise, of Baltimore, down with another thirty men. By the bay was a mass grave of fifty souls who had washed onto the beach from the Powhatan, including a mother and baby who were still said to haunt the island.

Miles Carey, the Engleside's porter, signaled the official start of vacation as he cried, “Engle-siiiiide!” ushering the final stragglers aboard the autobus. Woody, his rival from the New Baldwin Hotel, boomed “New Baaldwin!” It was a beloved annual ritual to the Philadelphia summer colony that ended up in the local newspaper and letters home and memories long after other events faded. Adding to the majesty of the scene was a new feeling of importance for the summer colony at Beach Haven. The four-times-a-day Pullman from Philadelphia to Beach Haven was truly extraordinary. The newspapers boasted of the future of Beach Haven as a great coastal city now that the mighty Pennsylvania Railroad had reaffirmed its importance. Beach Haven was six miles at sea, advertised as farther from land than any New Jersey resort, free of “land breezes” and pollen. The American Medical Association had endorsed it as one of the finest resorts for sufferers of hay fever on the East Coast. Promoted by Quakers for its rustic and healthful appeal, it billed itself as “the only practical resort in America.”

Soon the Vansants were motoring down Beach Haven's main street, Beach Avenue, a baking promenade of sand and crushed shells lined with kerosene lamps and bayberry bushes. Mosquitoes hovered everywhere despite the fortune spent on drainage ditches west of town. To the surprise of Dr. Vansant, who often recommended the island as an escape from allergies, ragweed sprouted on every corner, and goldenrod surfaced in the middle of the street. The railroad had unknowingly imported the seeds with carloads of gravel for the first paved roads. Domestics slowly moved in and out of small shops in the heat, buying fresh meats and groceries for their masters in the hotels and cottages, for there was no refrigeration, and iceboxes were inadequate. The servants called the street Mosquito Alley.

In a few blocks