There are times when I have to look back and laugh at how much I did not want to move to New Jersey. I had conjured up mental pictures of what it would look like and after the three day house hunting trip I found them all to be true with the addition of an Archie Bunker living on every corner. Then of course there was the 1300 mile crying jag on the trip there.
Perhaps I tried a little too hard in the beginning to hate every breath I took in that state, did not even try to understand what they were saying
and was just being stubborn and hard headed. Although I am not one of those women content to stay home and bake bread I really am a "nester" and resent packing up and moving around. At some point in time the magic of the silly state rubbed off on me and I began to see that I made a big mistake in my characterization of the state and it's residents.
Yankees are not cold and unfriendly as they are purported to be. I found they are just a little slow to warm up to new folks, especially ones from the southern half of the country. In the south people tend to smile and say hello when you see them on the street but that is about the extent of it. In Yankee country they spend weeks to months glaring at you and then suddenly anything you need from them is yours. They just need the time to check you out, make sure you are staying and from there you have a friend for life. Of course being from Oklahoma was a great curiosity as they all had to ask if everyone still rode their horses to town on Saturday to shop. They had seen pictures so they were sure that was the case.
Must say that the fact that New Jersey is called the Garden State was a laugh before my arrival. Truthfully my mental picture of the entire state had been one of dirty, overcrowded, smog filled Newark. That is except for Atlantic City where all the Miss America contestants strolled around in evening gowns and bathing suits. If you cut the state in half by drawing a line from Trenton to the shore the southern half of the state is very similar to the Midwest.
Driving on any road from the west to the east or north to south takes you by hundreds of small farms. During the spring and the summer there are stand after stand selling fruit and vegetables grown right there. While we were there we picked strawberries and blueberries. There were tomatoes almost too big to hold in one hand along with asparagus, corn, watermelons, cantaloupes, apples and almost anything else you might want. Closer to the coast there are miles of cranberry bogs and the forty foot tall pine trees. So much for the smog filled cities I thought would be the face of New Jersey.
I have to admit that I had never seen the ocean before the move to New Jersey. There are 141 miles of coast from New York to Cape May all dotted with communities. Most of the beaches are groomed everyday and there is a small fee for a beach tag for a day, a week or the entire summer. I really liked the groomed beaches as they were always clean and smooth.
Atlantic City was a straight forty-five mile run from Riverton and although it was not my favorite place it was very interesting. Legal gambling was passed for New Jersey in the late seventies so when we arrived the huge hotel and casinos were popping up all along the old boardwalk. Your point of view made the change in Atlantic City either a good or a bad one. The sad part was that Atlantic City land values went up and since all the business was along the Boardwalk with the casinos the town itself slowly began to look like Berlin after the war. Buildings were torn down to make way for the hundreds of buses that rolled into the city everyday and the residents could no longer live there. Instead of creating jobs for them the casinos actually drove them out of town.
Atlantic City back in the day was accessible by a short train ride from Philadelphia for a day on the beach, amusements along the boardwalk, carnival rides on the huge piers and great places to eat. After five o'clock in the evening dresses and sport coats were mandatory for strolling the boardwalk or dining in the restaurants. As life got more casual so did the clothing rules for the boardwalk become more casual.
With the advent of the casinos came the change in the character of the Boardwalk itself. All the old "shore" type of businesses like the Mr. Peanut stand with the huge iconic Mr. Peanut Man himself, the Saltwater Taffy and the arcades begin to disappear. The saddest part was the fire, questionable fire, that destroyed the Million Dollar Pier to be replaced with a shopping center.
I have to admit that it was fun to take visitors to Atlantic City to see the sights and lose my allotted twenty dollars. I had never seen Playboy Bunnies or even been to Las Vegas so it was something different. I did however get a little less enthralled when I took a friend one day and parked my new red five speed Capri in a parking garage and it took twenty minutes for it to come down from where ever. I actually was beginning to think I would never see it again as that was a great place to lose your car. It was said the parking attendants had a list of cars the bad guys would like to have and they seem to get many. Driving the backroads along the shore you could find many empty shells of what were once nice vehicles. They were reduced to nothing and left along side of the road. I can not remember if car insurance was high there or not but it must have been.
One of the other things about both Philadelphia and New Jersey was the food. Texas may be famous for steaks and Kansas City for BBQ but that place was the best for pasta and pizza. There were little shops that sold fresh pasta. You could get plain, lemon pepper, tomato basil and ten other kinds of dough and have it cut into anything from angel hair to lasagna. There were a dozen kinds of homemade sauce and you had a great quick dinner. Sal's Pizza Shop was a couple of blocks from our house and I fell in love with his deep dish pizza. Sal himself was a character as he loved every woman who came into the shop and it was difficult to pay him for the pizza without getting your hand held and many compliments. Too bad Sal was only about five feet tall, not a handsome Italian and had a wife about six feet tall all dressed in black that looked like she might break you in two at any moment. The kids loved to tease me about little Sal. Can't forget the Bosch's Deli and their meatball subs. I think I became part Italian while living there.
After our big mistake the first Christmas in Riverton of putting up a fake tree at Thanksgiving and the horrible lights on the house I was not going to make the same mistake again. A few miles north of Riverton was a little farm along side of the road. In the summer you could go to his gate at seven in the morning and buy a bag of fresh cut corn. At Christmas he had a limited number of Christmas trees he would cut. So I went up and picked out a live tree, put it up on Christmas Eve, put single candles (electric) in all the windows and a fresh wreath on the front door. Now everyone knew I was finally acclimated to their town.
Things got interesting after Christmas. I got offered a JOB. I hated to tell them I was incapable of working at a regular job where I had to be someplace at a certain time and stay there until a certain time. It was a job I knew nothing about and not one I ever thought about. It had hours and responsibilities. They all thought I would be perfect and I did not have the heart to tell them I would be awful at it. But....it paid money and my decorating budget was at that time a big zero and I had put the house on the Christmas house tour for the following December.
Compliments and money sort of forced me to say yes.
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