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By Root 327 0

one in educating America about the terrors of sharks. The world's most famous female swimmer, later portrayed by Esther Williams in the 1952 movie Million Dollar Mermaid, Kellerman was arrested in 1907 for wearing a one-piece bathing suit, which pointed the suffragette movement toward androgynous bathing styles and freed women from the gloves, hats, stockings, and pumps that made it impossible to swim. Kellerman was an early prophet of swimming as a safe, democratic, and wholesome sport. Now, in July 1916, she urged Americans to accept a hidden danger inherent in swimming: to fear sharks and to raise their children to fear them, especially the white shark. Well known to Australians, the white was “the nearest to what we term man-eater,” for it “will attack with terrific ferocity, and nothing will stop him from attaining his end . . . whatever his eyes see he will go for, and at one gulp swallow a man . . .” In Australia, “from the time a child is able to understand things the fear of the shark is forcibly impressed upon the mind. The shark to an Australian child occupies the same position as the bogey man does to American children.”

She closed her essay with a prescient warning: “That shark that killed Bruder will hover about the spot and perhaps others will join him. Then we will be subjected to a reign of terror that will cause the public to shun the beaches and bring ruin to the bathing-house owners. Let a word in time suffice. We must have no more shocking cases on the order of the Spring Lake beach affair.”

That same morning in Spring Lake, the soul of Charles Bruder was committed to eternal life at a funeral service at St. Andrew's Methodist Church, as employees of the Essex and Sussex, the New Monmouth, and other hotels filled the pews. Outside the windows, patrol boats buzzed along the coast through a steaming summer morning, and rowboats, packed with armed men, moored near the north and south bathing pavilions. Despite the heat, the beaches were almost empty, particularly at the South End pavilion, where Bruder was attacked, “indicating the fear felt by members of the cottage colony,” a local newspaper reported. Only a few ventured into the ocean and seemed to have no fear.

The fear had spread to nearby Manasquan, too. E. E. Sweeting, proprietor of Sweeting's bathing pavilion, tried to persuade bathers they had nothing to worry about. Sweeting had assigned Captain Charles Bentz of his surfmen to patrol the beach in a boat, “armed with a marlin spike, axe and other hardware that a shark might resent if he ventured too near.” But bathers were reluctant, and attendance was sparse.

After the church service, the funeral procession wended to Atlantic View Cemetery in Manasquan to bury the bell captain, in a grave near the sea, with a brief ceremony to bring closure and peace. Yet it was as if burial confirmed the strangeness of Bruder's death, as if opening the ground for a man killed by a shark released feelings of alienness and threat. Shortly after interment, five miles almost directly off the coast, John Anderson, a respected Manasquan fisherman, had a frightening experience he would later tell everyone on the docks. He was cruising in his small boat, when he saw “a school of sharks and porpoises disporting in the briny” with “other sea denizens which might have been whales.” Anderson had seen many sharks in his years at sea and worked among them, but now, fearful, he turned his boat toward shore, “loath to stay near the sea monsters.”

Disporting in a Perfect Surf

The next morning, Sunday, July 9th, Asbury Park's summer people in the hotels and cottages sat by eastern windows, as the newspapers instructed, to catch the healthful light from the sea. Hotel guests had breakfast and headed to church, where they heard soloists sing “Eye Hath Not Seen.” Afterward, gentlemen in straw hats and matrons in silk dresses strolled down the boulevards to the sea. Trolley car 32 was swollen with passengers bound for the beaches, for “visitors and hotel guests had fully regained their confidence,” the Asbury Park Press