Close to Shore - Michael Capuzzo [57]
Putting down the field glasses, Mrs. Childs rushed for the telephone and called the hotel office. F. T. Keating, assistant manager of the hotel, picked up. Keating, alarmed, went straight to the hotel manager, David B. Plumer, who—without time to consider the uniqueness of the situation—put into motion the first coastwide shark alarm in the history of the United States. Plumer instructed Keating to call every physician booked in the hotel, or anywhere in Spring Lake. Moving urgently to the E & S switchboard, he ordered the operators to notify every “central” operator on the north and central coast. The first central switchboard operators had been men, but they fought constantly and were unruly with customers, so they were replaced by women. So it was women who sounded the alert that the shore was in chaos. Within minutes, the E & S operators reached every major hotel on New Jersey's Gold Coast, from Atlantic Highlands, sixteen miles north, to Point Pleasant, six miles south.
For the first time in memory along the East Coast of the United States, a tranquil beach day was interrupted by surfmen running to the edge of the sea to frantically wave swimmers out of the water; by bathers thrashing and stumbling madly to shore for reasons that were urgent if not clear. Within half an hour, thousands of bathers fled more than thirty miles of beaches in a shark panic without precedent.
Perhaps it is not surprising that the first appearance of the great white shark as twentieth-century man-eater harkened back to apocryphal stories such as St. George and the dragon and foretold all appearances, in fact and fiction, of the great white to come. Men and women fled the water for sound and practical reasons, and they also fled their nightmares, long quiescent, of a creature buried so long in myth and rumor and repressed fear that when released expanded beyond any known and reasonable bounds. A simple act of nature in a few square feet of ocean sent a cloud of fear along vast stretches of coastal water and far inland. The crowds fled a sea monster, with its weight of evil, threat, and retribution.
Moments after dialing the assistant hotel manager, Mrs. Childs ordered her servants to bring around her automobile. She had tried to ring her niece on the telephone, but there was no answer. Within minutes, Mrs. Childs was speeding to Deal Beach, seven miles to the north, to personally stop her niece from entering the water for her afternoon swim.
Just one block south of the New Essex and Sussex on the Spring Lake oceanfront, the switchboard jangled urgently at the New Monmouth Hotel. The enormous New Monmouth boasted a central Palladian dome flanked by polygonal towers from which unfolded vast wings that embraced the sea. Within minutes, the sumptuous ritual of afternoon tea at the New Monmouth was sundered as Drs. William W. Trout and A. Cornell, the house physicians, sprinted through the lobby, carrying their heavy black bags.
Rushing south on Ocean Drive and down to the beach, the doctors pressed through the small crowd that had gathered around the body in the wet sand. “A morbid crowd had gathered, intent on seeing the remains,” the Asbury Park Evening Press reported. The bell captain, or what was left of him, lay on his back in a welter of blood that was already crusting and drying on his bathing costume and diffusing on the sand. Trout and Cornell, the first physicians to reach Bruder, summoned their full professional composure, but jellyfish stings, crab pinches, and sunburn were the usual toll of the beach. In their combined years, the physicians had not seen such wounds from an animal attack. Bruder's left leg was bitten off clear above the knee; his right leg, just below the knee, was gone. A huge gouge was ripped from his torso, the wound edged with large teeth marks. The bell captain was already dead from massive blood loss. There was nothing to do but arrange for the body to be taken to autopsy and to calm the crowd.
Eyes full of questions turned to Trout and Cornell as