History
Reggie Jones, 77 and the "oldest lifeguard at Jones Beach" in 2004 reflected on the beach's history and his work, "From his wooden lifeguard tower." He remembered, "when everything was closed on Sundays -- the blue laws -- and most families had one car and there were no downtown shopping malls. For 25 cents you got in the car and took the kids to the beach. This was the poor man's Riviera." He wore the "itchy" one-piece woolen lifeguard suit "instead of the Tommy Hilfiger trunks that are today's standard issue." Fashions of beachgoers also changed with "The girls are wearing dental floss" as opposed to the dresses that he remembered being worn. Jones Beach gets more visitors annually than Yellowstone and Yosemite combined with 8 million people visiting in 2003, a steep drop from the 13.3 million who visited in 1970.
Read more about this topic: Lifeguard Tower
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is. How many times must we say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople! What does Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates to these neighboring systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or succor have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, or the Kanaka in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The greatest honor history can bestow is that of peacemaker.”
—Richard M. Nixon (1913–1995)
“In the history of the human mind, these glowing and ruddy fables precede the noonday thoughts of men, as Aurora the sun’s rays. The matutine intellect of the poet, keeping in advance of the glare of philosophy, always dwells in this auroral atmosphere.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)