Close to Shore - Michael Capuzzo [74]
Never had this aged yarn been borne so far so fast or been so thoroughly reinvented as new, by the Times of Adolph Ochs, William Randolph Hearst's Journal, Joseph Pulitzer and Frank Cobb's World, and by the “great octopus” that was “the most tremendous engine for Power which ever existed in this world,” the Associated Press. The titans of the yellow press knew the shortcuts to the frightened heart. Cobb hired young college men conversant with the Ajax of Sophocles; Hearst went for the “gee-whiz” effect; Ochs knew the thrill of murder and shark attack like any man, but while “the yellows see such stories only as opportunities for sensationalism,” he said, “when the Times gives a great amount of space to such stories it turns out authentic sociological documents.” However the story was told, people already knew it by heart and knew without asking what the end was. On the eastern seaboard, men took hold of the fear and anger and made it their own.
In New York Bay, on Saturday, July 8, seven days after Vansant's death, two days after Bruder's death, the very day Ben Everingham clubbed an attacking shark at Asbury Park, a score of boys and girls were bathing near the Robbins Reef Yacht Club, in Bayonne, New Jersey, when several of the children saw a shark, a big one, some eight feet long, appear off the float that extended out from the clubhouse. The children saw something black approaching them and, becoming frightened, started for shore. Somebody yelled, “It's a shark!” and the children ran, screaming, for the bathhouses.
In the yard adjoining the bathhouses, Dennis Colohan, a police lieutenant, was working with Amos Harker, superintendent of the city water department, and two other policemen to place an engine in a motorboat owned by Harker, when they heard the screams. Looking out on the water, the men saw a shark lift its head only a short distance from where the children had been bathing.
Lieutenant Colohan had his revolver with him and, followed by the other men, ran to the end of the float. The shark was still coming, headed toward shore. Colohan waited until the big fish was twenty feet away. He saw that the fin alone was three feet high out of the water and he squeezed the trigger. Some of the shots lodged in the shark's head, and yet the shark kept coming and Colohan kept shooting, emptying the revolver. The shark “seemed stunned for a moment, and then, lashing its tail, it turned quickly about, headed toward the Robbins Reef Lighthouse and disappeared,” Colohan said.
Word spread on the beach rapidly and “many bathers along the shore decided to quit,” reported the New York World. The police issued a warning to all bathers not to venture far out in the bay. According to an old bay fisherman, “The shark was the first seen in New York Bay in many years and the first ever so close to shore.” Lieutenant Colohan stood on the shore with the other men for half an hour after the shark disappeared by the lighthouse, waiting for it to return. The next day he was a hero, elevated by the World to the same pedestal as Everingham: “Two More Sharks Sighted and Sent to Sea A-grieving.”
More than two hundred miles south, along the coasts of Maryland and Virginia, swimmers and boaters spied the ocean and the waters of Chesapeake Bay as something menacing and foreign. The Washington Star urged swimmers to beware of whatever had killed two men in New Jersey. Hundreds of thousands of people on the Atlantic coast were now afraid to go in the water, the Star noted, for good reason.
A warning came from silent film star and world-renowned beauty Annette Kellerman, who in 1914 starred in Neptune's Daughter and was then appearing as a mermaid in A Daughter of the Gods. “Whether . . . Bruder was killed by the dreaded shark or by some other species of large fish,” Kellerman was moved to write in a major article in the Washington Post, “something in the water . . . attacked him and tore his limbs from the body, that we do know.”
Kellerman's voice was an important