Close to Shore - Michael Capuzzo [47]
Taft, famously good-natured, was a well-liked ex-President. That afternoon, as he stood at the podium, magisterial in his dark suit, looking out on the sea of faces in the ballroom of the Essex and Sussex, murmurs of excitement swept the crowd. Emboldened by his enormous girth—a man so big, the pundits said, there was no room for meanness—Taft enjoyed the symbolism of rising and commanding a crowd. He had been the first President to throw out the first pitch of the baseball season—at a Washington Senators–Philadelphia Athletics game on April 14, 1910. Yet many of the summer colony, despite their wealth and position, had never heard Taft's voice. It was an extraordinary and memorable event before radio for an American to hear the President speak.
As the baritone of the ex-President's voice filled the room, however, the thrill quickly diminished. Taft spoke almost mechanically of Americanism and patriotism in the style of an earnest, careful lawyer with the soul of an honest bureaucrat, a man who began his first inaugural address: “The office of an inaugural address is to give a summary outline of the main policies of the new administration, so far as they can be anticipated.”
To polite applause, William Howard Taft concluded his speech, ending with an appeal to a shared faith in “Almighty God,” and the wealthy summer colonists spilled out of the hotel onto the boardwalk to enjoy the remnants of daylight. The sea was blue-gray and calm with a few swimmers in the water, and roadsters whined along Ocean Drive behind them. It was at that moment that a crowd on the boardwalk—no doubt still discussing Taft's speech—spotted a large, dark fin in the ocean. Then there were many fins, rolling in a school parallel to the coast.
“Sharks!” someone in the crowd cried, and near hysteria rippled through the group. Local fishermen nearby attempted to calm the crowd by pointing out that the fins were not those of sharks but belonged to porpoises, which commonly moved in schools offshore. But to many in the summer colony who had read in the Press about the young man in Beach Haven who was attacked and killed the previous Saturday by a shark, sharks were a subject of worrisome gossip and speculation for days.
Still, the excitement subsided as longtime residents assured guests that sharks never attacked bathers on the Jersey coast. Some insisted that Vansant's death had been fabricated by the newspapers, or grossly misunderstood, as the youth must have simply drowned. Shortly, their confidence restored by knowing skepticism, the summer colonists returned to the hotel to prepare for a graceful evening of music and July Fourth dinner. “The first accident of its kind recorded in the annals of the Jersey coast created considerable excitement,” the Asbury Park Evening Press reported, but “doubt as to the veracity of the dispatches from Beach Haven was frequently expressed.”
The Distance Swimmers
That morning, the ocean was calm and smooth as blue fabric, and waves came spaced at long intervals like decorative fringes of lace.
A breakfast was served early with glimmering views of the ocean at the Essex and Sussex, the morning papers unfurled above clouds of steaming French coffee. The quiet on the western front was a small breather as the British and French prepared for more fighting at the Somme; Sir