A Bridge Over Troubled Waters
In the Spring of 1972, I had successfully negotiated my freshman year at Cornell. That year had been eventful in that I had transferred from the Engineering School to the College of Arts and Sciences. I had pulled that off on my own since my mother’s approach to child rearing was that you were on your own at seventeen once in college. No one challenged me on the move other than my advisor and the Administrative Dean at Arts & Sciences, and that was all overcome. I’m not sure if it was liking economics or not liking engineering that prompted the change, but so it proceeded.
As a foreign resident with a traveling mother in Rome, my summer plans were also totally up to me, but returning each holiday to Rome was not an option. I had befriended a sophomore in my fraternity who was a hotel school student. He came from a hotel family who owned three hotels in Atlantic City. He offered me a job for the summer working at the hotels. In those days, internships did not exist, and summer work was about earning money for the school year.
In 1972 Atlantic City was still just a honky-tonk boardwalk town since gambling and casinos did not come to Atlantic City until 1978. It’s claim to fame was still a Steel Pier diving horse. It was where high school kids came to play skee-ball, eat corn dogs and go under the boardwalk to get what they could get from their sexual partners. If you remember your Monopoly Board, the most expensive property next to Boardwalk and Park Place is North Carolina Avenue, a prestigious “green” property. North Carolina Avenue was the location of the Chalfont and Haddon Hall Hotels, the hotels that eventually became the first hotel/casinos in Atlantic City, and the first casinos in the U.S. outside of Nevada. The three hotels owned by my fraternity brothers’ family were directly adjacent to the Chalfont and Haddon Hall on North Carolina Avenue.
They are long gone now but were then three four-story motel-style motor courts with a shared pool in the middle of the parking lot. The Catalina, the Barbizon and The Tides. There were probably two-hundred rooms between the three. I was to be the house-boy for all three hotels. The staff consisted of chambermaids, front desk staff, a lifeguard (a fellow fraternity brother) and me. Anything not done by the maids or desk people was assigned to me. This included counting and sorting linen for the laundry service, keeping the outside property looking good, making sure the hallways were always clean and presentable and the always-interesting all-other that included ousting unruly guests or doing absolutely anything that needed to be done day or night.
My lifeguard pal and I joined forces to rent a room at a flop house hotel on New York Avenue. You may recall that on the Monopoly Board, New York Avenue is a modest “orange” property that falls right before Free Parking. That should tell you all you need to know about the quality of our lodgings that summer. I lost the coin flip and got the fold-away cot to sleep on. The only saving grace was that we got one of the few rooms with a private bath, and I do mean bath as in a claw-foot tub as opposed to shower. It was a less than ideal situation with no air conditioning. The best part of the place was that a crew of 100 young Irish working girls (mostly set for chambermaid jobs) moved into the building next door, which immediately upgraded the window view.
My summer in Atlantic City was all about working 12-16 hours per day with no days off. Crawling up the laundry chute to unclog it and suffering the indignity of finding the surprises in and amongst the sheets from these honky-tonk hotel rooms was a treat. Being sent to break-up high school parties or throw out the Gypsies who had snuck twenty people into one room, were also special tasks. It was particularly hard to work that hard while my roommate was chilling beside the pool, working on his tan. In fairness, I knew what I was getting into when I took the job, though the exact nature of the work was somewhat of a surprise.
After 69 days straight of work, I snapped and quit. My friend’s father was very sympathetic and seemed to genuinely feel bad when he heard my reasons. He suggested that I could take a day off if that would help. I think he missed the point, so I thanked him and headed for the bus station (I had driven down with my friend, the owner’s son). He was cool and told me he was surprised that I had lasted so long. My roommate asked if I would continue to pay half the rent for the rest of the summer which confirmed my suspicion that he was oblivious to anything that was not about him and his tan. I was sore in more ways than I can recount, but I just left quietly, wondering about the meaning of fraternal friendships.
When leaving Atlantic City over the bridge to the mainland (the Margate Bridge) I noted the expensive toll on this quaint little bridge. For some reason, it stood out and has stayed with me all these years. The bus ride to Port Authority and then to Ithaca could not have been more pleasant, another testament to the harshness of my last 69 days. Atlantic City began to fade into the backwaters of my memory.
When I got to Ithaca, my first task was to unearth my motorcycle from the fraternity house basement allowing me to become mobile again. I spent the rest of that summer tarring asphalt driveways. I found the hot sticky work tough, but not as tough as climbing the laundry chute. Also, I was running my own business in my uncle’s neighborhood in Ithaca, and the money was much better than hotel work. I also got to sleep in a real bed, which helped greatly with my return to the world of the living, most notably away from Atlantic City.
A few years ago, a new couple joined our motorcycle group. They have now joined on our trips to Croatia, Greece and Sicily. They will be going with us in four weeks to Turkey. They have even decided to fly in for Kim’s cabaret show later this month. We’ve become good friends over the last few years. Kim and I very much enjoy their company, so we are looking forward to seeing them. Here’s the thing, they live in Atlantic City and own several local properties due to their family construction business heritage. One of the things they own is the Margate Bridge. Yes, one and the same bridge I had noted forty-seven years ago as I left Atlantic City. It all brought back lots of old memories.
What are the odds that in this big wide world, my two interactions with Atlantic City would intersect in this way, years apart? We recently had dinner with my old friend from the Atlantic City hotel business. While we dined with him and his wife, I mentioned the bridge connection. They knew our motorcycle friends and knew they owned the bridge. There was even some old connection among them involving coaching cheerleading back in the day. It really is a small world.
Somehow, this connection allowed me to build my own bridge over that summer of questionable memories, memories that had been long-ago submerged troubled waters for me. Now it is just another story of a minor coincidence, which seems to be the basis of most of my memories and stories.