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:
“There is a history in all men’s lives,
Figuring the natures of the times deceased,
The which observed, a man may prophesy,
With a near aim, of the main chance of things
As yet not come to life.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“History does nothing; it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this.... It is not “history” which uses men as a means of achieving—as if it were an individual person—its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present. History is a hill or high point of vantage, from which alone men see the town in which they live or the age in which they are living.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)