4th of July, Asbury Park

by Daniel Wolff

  Meanwhile, the reelected mayor quickly rehired his old police chief. By the Fourth of July, 1935, bookie Walter Hurley was back in operation on Main Street, as was Detective Crook's son, James. It was business as usual. Though Asbury, like most shore towns, couldn't afford fireworks displays that year, the Steeplechase building off the boardwalk was still headlining a minstrel show. The Rialto Theater hosted the Hot Harlem All Colored Revue, and July 5 through 7, Paul Whiteman's big band played Convention Hall. Whiteman was the new, white "King of Jazz" in the tradition of Sousa and Pryor. When he failed to draw much of a crowd, he blamed the atmosphere in Convention Hall: a remnant of the old beach censor days. "Young people," Whiteman explained, "they're the ones who dance. And what do they like? . . . Low lights, dim corners, a romantic background."

  Mayor Hetrick celebrated that Independence Day by ejecting the owner of the refreshment stand on First and Boardwalk for owing the city back rent. Others in the same position— the operators of the Casino restaurant and of the rolling-chair concession— he treated more lightly: they had supported the Hetrick ticket in the last election. The mayor also replaced the head of bathhouse concessions with his own man, meanwhile reducing the lease from $85,000 to $40,000. According to a contemporary, outside study by the National Municipal League, the fees that the city charged for its rental properties depended on who was leasing. They varied from sixty-five cents a square foot to $ 11.11: a factor of nearly twenty. "We have no proof of improper influences . . . " the League concluded, "but inequalities so glaring as these are indefensible, even if graft or political favoritism had nothing to do with it." The study called beachfront leases, in particular, the "traditional footballs of politics in Asbury Park."

  But by this time, talk of reform had just about faded. FDR's Works Project Administration had created some local jobs, including a $160,000 project on the beachfront, but unemployment just kept growing. In the decade between the mid-twenties and mid-thirties, for example, Asbury's electrical workers union went from a hundred members to eighteen. Down in Trenton, unemployed members of the socialist Workers Alliance, furious at the inaction of their elected representatives, took over the legislative building. Calling themselves the Army of Unoccupation, they began passing mock bills to show up what one leader called "the bunch of miserable buffoons that you usually witness in this building." Their protest legislation included a system of unemployment insurance, a thirty-hour workweek, and heavy corporate taxes. One of their leaders described New Jersey's legislators as "cynically, brutally indifferent representatives of finance capital."

  He could have been talking about Asbury Park's reelected mayor. As the city's finances continued to flounder, the Hetrick government, as one opponent put it, "bled its people white." In 1938, the city foreclosed on 313 properties for failure to pay taxes. Many of them were middle-class houses in prime residential neighborhoods, now little more than "empty shells." When the city took possession of these properties and resold them, Mayor Hetrick's friends managed to prosper. For example, clients of Tumen and Tumen bought twenty-four properties, putting down only $14,000. One estimate said the real estate was worth a good $60,000 more than that. Tumen and Tumen picked up another foreclosed property for $1,500 and quickly sold it for $4,500. Why couldn't the city find buyers willing to pay these prices? Why were the Tumens prospering from the city's decline?

  In Asbury, anyway, the New Deal did little to save capitalism and even less to reform it. The Depression continued, and what money there was continued to flow through the underground economy, ending up in familiar hands. When, in 1941, the tide began to turn, it was the prospect of war that changed things. A huge influx of military personnel and dollars poured into the area. The U.S. army, for example, foreclosed on the old KKK headquarters outside Long Branch and added it to Fort Monmouth as a top-secret radar lab.

  Asbury Park wanted its share. But as the editors of the Asbury Evening Press pointed out, Hetrick's machine was doing next to nothing to attract military dollars. "And the reason for the indifference, of course, is the fact that defense measures cannot easily be adapted to serve the political machine." Asbury's reform parties regrouped. For the city elections of 1941, an updated version of the 1933 alliance, now calling itself the United Citizens League, ran a five-man ticket including a veteran police captain. Joe Mattice, still heading the city's Democratic Party, chaired the League. The owner of a string of movie theaters, Walter Reade, campaigned on an independent liberal ticket. And Hetrick ran as a Republican with his usual slate.

  The challengers hammered away at the mayor's machine, citing the "vicious and notorious land grabs" and publicizing the enormous debt that the city had built up under "Boss rule." "This town is broke," Reade declared, "and it's going to stay broke." Most recently, Hetrick had installed parking meters in Asbury, allegedly to lower the high tax rate. The opposition argued that the meters only inconvenienced shoppers— and the income never made it to the city treasury.

  The mayor paid his critics little attention. As he had in most elections, Hetrick barely went out in public. When he did address a rally at the Berkeley-Carteret Hotel, he urged voters "not to be bothered by the past," but to consider a future that would include "10-story apartment houses and more federal funds for housing projects." Hetrick cited statistics: with less than 10 percent of Monmouth's population, Asbury accounted for nearly a quarter of the county's retail business. In an unintentionally amusing phrase (given the Hetrick machine's tradition of secret side deals), the mayor guaranteed, "This town will take so many forward steps in the next few years that you won't know it." What steps had it taken so far? Hetrick's special attorney declared that among the mayor's major accomplishments were the 250,000 tulips that the city had planted. "Did you ever try to eat tulip soup?" candidate Reade countered. The Asbury Evening Press ran an editorial: "Tulips for the Homeless."

  "A vote for Hetrick," the Citizens League warned, "is a vote for Tumen. They are inseparable." The Hetrick campaign countered by reminding voters of 1933's failed reform government: "Don't Change Experience for Another Experiment." The key to the election was still the West Side, but its demographics were shifting. The 1930 census had found that other ethnic groups had moved out, leaving the Springwood Avenue area almost totally Negro. Ninety-nine percent of Asbury's thirty-five hundred Negroes lived in the First Ward, one third of them officially unemployed. Forty percent of West Side housing was deemed "sub-standard," and the city Housing Authority had designated the area "definitely blighted." To woo these voters, the reformers enlisted local Negro leader George Fleming. "I don't blame Hetrick," Fleming told a West Side rally. "I blame the Negro who has kept him in power for 24 years. We have been beaten, kicked, and downtrodden, and . . . never let out a word of protest till now." Hetrick, meanwhile, courted the West Side vote by pushing through the city's first Negro housing project, the long overdue Asbury Park Village, with 126 low-income units.

  Joe Mattice warned that the mayor had ways of winning the West Side. Mattice said he'd overheard a "Mr. Nick" boasting he could "deliver the colored vote." And according to George Fleming, Asbury's police officers were forcing Springwood Avenue to support the mayor— bringing in its "women of the street" and telling them they'd better "get together with the old board" or else "they wouldn't be able to work." Hetrick's city magistrate, following directions from the Boss, started "a little cleanup" of various "joints." He called in Minnie Lopez, who ran one of Springwood's biggest nightclubs, and allegedly told her, "You've been doing a lot of ballyhooing for the new ticket, and if you don't shut up, I'll close Cuba's."

  On election day, one of the Citizens League's colored workers and two of Walter Reade's supporters were arrested. Hetrick's city magistrate denied the mayor had ordered the arrests, denied they'd been held all night without bail, and denied he'd said to their attorney, "I have no idea what the charges are but we'll find something good."

  In one of its pre-election ads, the Citizens League had contended that Asbury would save $220
,000 ("over $600 a day") if it could defeat Hetrick and "take the political hacks off the pay roll." Maybe that purely fiscal argument worked. Or maybe Hetrick was just getting old. Though he and one of his colleagues won reelection, the sub-headline on page one of the Asbury Evening Press read MACHINE LOSES CONTROL OF CITY.

  Which is how three reform candidates wound up waving from the lead car of the rain-delayed July Fourth parade of 1941. By then, they'd already fired nine employees of the city's publicity bureau, abolished the jobs of public safety director and engineering clerk, and gotten rid of the two men hired to maintain parking meters. The new government had also suspended the city magistrate and was investigating the Hetrick machine's last-minute "emergency" spending spree of $28,000.

  The Independence Day crowds cheered. But it's understandable if they had their doubts about the triumph of democracy. Or, for that matter, about the reform of capitalism. The flow of military dollars into town was still a trickle. And Clarence Hetrick was still a councilman. Then on October 13, 1941, the lead sentence in the lead article of the Asbury Evening Press read "The hand that held an iron grip on Asbury Park's municipal affairs for more than a quarter century was stilled in death today." Hetrick, sixty-eight years old, had died of thrombosis and diabetes. The Evening Press went on to say that his "once strong organization" had been "virtually dissipated" in the last election. Then, the paper admitted that no one had ever quite understood the workings of that organization: "Up to the last, Mr. Hetrick had remained a political enigma to friends and foes alike."

  The enigma may have been dead; his organization was not. In the special election to fill Hetrick's seat, the reform coalition fell apart. The new mayor endorsed the independent, Reade. And at the last minute, Joe Mattice bolted, throwing his support to the Hetrick man— who ended up winning by 123 votes. In dismay, George Fleming took out an ad on behalf of Asbury Park's Negro population. "The gang which has been smashed must remain smashed," Fleming wrote. "I say to my people we will not betray, we will not sell out, we do not want a return of the old clique." But the Evening Press conceded that Mattice had joined "the remains" of Hetrick's machine to sweep the West Side. "The bitter contest," it concluded, was liable to "leave wounds that may be long in healing."

  Post-election, with winter coming and the tourists returned to the cities, the citizens of Asbury Park could stroll the empty boardwalk and consider the future. By December, war would break out, Convention Hall would be requisitioned for an officer- training center, and the year-round population— especially among Negroes on the West Side— would dramatically increase as local factories geared up and enlisted men poured into Forts Monmouth, Hancock, and Dix.

  But that fall, it was still quiet. And if there was bitterness from all this political infighting— if there was a sense that no matter how you voted, the crooks stayed in office— well, those that walked along the boardwalk had the perfect sound track. "This Love of Mine" was the hit song that fall of 1941. It was part of the new, immensely popular sound being forged by the skinny kid from New Jersey, Frank Sinatra. Sinatra's bandleader, Tommy Dorsey, called its understated approach their "Sentamentalist" sound: just a rhythm section, some backup singers, and Frank. It wasn't a big band at all but something smaller, more intimate. Within the year, Sinatra would leave Dorsey's band altogether and go out as a solo act.

  That fall of 1941, all up and down the boardwalk, from the jukeboxes and the radios, you could hear Sinatra's drawn-out notes, his yearning cries, what he called his bel canto styling. In Asbury, after decades of being looked on as little better than the colored, Italian-Americans were making their way out of the West Side ghetto and into the halls of power. To them, Sinatra's styling had a brash, familiar confidence. "This love of mine goes on and on."

  Yet, even as he proclaims himself, there's something so fragile in his voice— and sad— that it threatens to leave the singer himself speechless. "This Love of Mine" is one of the rare examples of a song where Sinatra wrote his own lyrics, and he doesn't so much describe feeling as allude to it, betting that his listeners will understand. So, after he's explained that he's lonesome during the day, all he has to add is "and, oh, the night." He knows his audience will know what he means: they share a background of despair. When he admits that his heart is bound to break, his voice drops to a hush. "Nothing matters," he sings, and pauses. His voice gets even quieter, a whisper in your ear. "So, let it break."

  It was more intimate, more openly revealing, than any popular music Asbury's boardwalk had heard. Sinatra would claim that he'd learned some of this technique from Billie Holiday, the soft way she phrased pain. But Billie Holiday, of course, wasn't likely to be heard on Asbury's boardwalk. If this was the background music to the promised land on the eve of war, it was a long way from Arthur Pryor's martial band. In fact, toward the end of "This Love of Mine," the resignation— the sense that things go wrong, that they corrupt, that they conspire to screw the little man— is so complete, it's hard to believe the song can continue.

  But Sinatra asks one last question. He asks it of the sun, the moon, and the stars, and when he sings the word stars, his voice rises to an almost frightening intensity. At the end of the day, at the end of 1941, on the almost empty Asbury Park boardwalk that had been subject to decades of greed and deception, you could hear the young Sinatra ask the stars, "What's to become of it, this love of mine?"

  And the sound— extraordinarily— is the sound of hope.

  FOURTH OF JULY, 1956

  ON THE FOURTH of July, 1956, Asbury Park was recovering from an unexpected and seemingly inexplicable fistfight that had broken out on the boardwalk just days before. The papers were calling it the Convention Hall Riot. Hundreds of people had gone on a rampage, starting at the beachfront and continuing on into the business district. The police had arrested dozens, scores had been injured, and with the assistance of out-of-town cops and soldiers, six blocks had been put on lockdown. City officials seemed confused about what the trouble was all about. But they knew what had gotten it started: this new teenage music, this stuff they called rock & roll. It threatened the very values Asbury Park had been built on— threatened the city's central strategy of containment— and it had to be stopped.

  Some had escaped the West Side with the cool style of Sinatra. Some had fought their way out through the political system: men like Joe Mattice who made their deals with the old Methodist power structure. Some had taken the merchant's route, establish ing little clothing and food stores on Springwood Avenue, leveraging their profits to buy a house on the north side and maybe even a shop on Cookman Avenue. And some had never left.

  Through the war years of the 1940s, the "colored" population around Springwood Avenue had skyrocketed. Negroes assigned to Fort Montgomery's signal corps lab, Point Pleasant's Coast Guard station, and the local Naval Ammunition Depot didn't have much choice about where they'd live. One scientist remembers taking a room at a boardinghouse for maids and chauffeurs: the only place in Monmouth County that would rent to him. And you couldn't buy in most areas because banks wouldn't okay mortgages. By 1944, unofficial studies found that Asbury's Negro population had risen to more than a quarter of the city's twenty-six thousand residents. The West Side was brutally overcrowded, and it wasn't just from military families. Wartime labor shortages had forced businesses to hire minorities. In Red Bank, the all-white workforce of the Sigmund Eisner company became thirty-five to forty percent black. The same thing happened at Asbury's Atlantic Sports Wear Company and at Thomas A. Edison, Inc. in West Orange.

  With jobs, the wartime economy also brought promise. "During the war years," as one contemporary put it, "the general attitude of the Blacks in Monmouth County was characterized by faith in the American way of life— a faith in things hoped for, but not yet seen." The city decided that the best way to contain the population boom was to have the colored patrol themselves, and West Sider Thomas Smith became one of Asbury Park's first Negro policemen. It was less a concession than an accommodation, bu
t the result for men like Smith was a good salary and the chance for advancement.

  By June of 1944, the last remaining councilman from Hetrick's machine had passed away. For the first time in Asbury's history, Democrats controlled the city council. Yet, instead of picking a Democratic mayor, the council opted for George Smock II: a Republican whose family could be traced back to pre-Revolutionary War Dutch settlers. As a partner in Buchannon & Smock Lumber Co. ("since 1873"), Mayor Smock believed firmly in the Merchants' Vision. Some observers thought the Democrats had appointed him mayor because the party leader, Joe Mattice, had said so. In return, Smock reappointed Mattice judge of the First Judicial Court. "There was no sleight of hand," Mayor Smock had to declare, "and no deals."

  If you gauged democracy by how it worked in Asbury Park, you'd have to conclude it was a basically conservative system. Once you got into office, you stayed. Between founder Bradley and Mayor Hetrick there had been a brief interregnum. Now, with Hetrick gone, Smock's ticket won the May 1945 election and would remain in power for more than decade— from the Nazi surrender well into the Cold War. The administration's goal was simple: to maintain the status quo. Smock ran what one councilman lauded as "a conservative economic government," slowly repaying the city debt left over from Hetrick's days and carefully fending off change. In his official capacity, he followed the Asbury Park resort calendar. Each Fourth of July he declared the crowd a record-breaker; in August he presided over the annual baby parade; through the winter he boosted the Merchants' Vision; and each spring he renewed the beachfront leases.