Saturday, April 14, 2007
Nuns on the beach
During my middle & high school years, I always spent Easter week with my grandmother in Atlantic City, taking the bus down Monday. It was an enjoyable if generally dull week of wandering the beach & boardwalk, playing pinball, watching Philadelphia TV stations, & eating Nana's cooking. A week to be spoiled. The boardwalk was just waking up from the winter season when the warm weather businesses & piers were shuttered & most of everything else was semi-comatose like a blue claw crab on ice. The boardwalk "Easter Parade" brought the first sizable crowd of the year into town for a day. Probably some fading Bandstand fav from Philly played a holiday show on the Steel Pier, a Bobby Rydell. The candy emporiums propped their doors open & let the fragrances drift out.
It was also the week Atlantic City hosted the annual Convocation of Northeast Catholic Educators, "Spring Break" for several thousand priests, brothers, & nuns. Back when the majority of teachers in Catholic schools were of religious orders. Those were the years of Vatican Two, nuns were still wearing traditional habits or the new, less confining modifications. So the boardwalk was a sea of black & brown with starched white edges. They spent money, too. Not as much as the Shriners or UAW, & I doubt if the illegal gambling rooms & ladies of the evening did very well ( certainly they did some business). Hotel restaurants & bars made out alright, it wasn't an expensive city. It was off-season & the boisterous summer surf 'n' turf customers weren't waiting in line. The Catholic Educators rode rolling chairs on the boardwalk & horses on the beach, sunned themselves on the patio in front of the Dennis Hotel, loitered in the somewhat seedy but still impressive lobby of the Traymore. Priests loading golf clubs into taxis was a common enough sight. Sisters sat together on benches comparing bags of freebies from the convention vendor displays. Although there were meetings, seminars & panel discussions, nobody looked like they were rushing from one to another of them.
It was also the week Atlantic City hosted the annual Convocation of Northeast Catholic Educators, "Spring Break" for several thousand priests, brothers, & nuns. Back when the majority of teachers in Catholic schools were of religious orders. Those were the years of Vatican Two, nuns were still wearing traditional habits or the new, less confining modifications. So the boardwalk was a sea of black & brown with starched white edges. They spent money, too. Not as much as the Shriners or UAW, & I doubt if the illegal gambling rooms & ladies of the evening did very well ( certainly they did some business). Hotel restaurants & bars made out alright, it wasn't an expensive city. It was off-season & the boisterous summer surf 'n' turf customers weren't waiting in line. The Catholic Educators rode rolling chairs on the boardwalk & horses on the beach, sunned themselves on the patio in front of the Dennis Hotel, loitered in the somewhat seedy but still impressive lobby of the Traymore. Priests loading golf clubs into taxis was a common enough sight. Sisters sat together on benches comparing bags of freebies from the convention vendor displays. Although there were meetings, seminars & panel discussions, nobody looked like they were rushing from one to another of them.
Labels: Atlantic City, boardwalks, growing up, jersey shore, religion
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"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson
I didn't know they did an NJEA like convention for nuns at AC. With AC being the way it is now it seems like it would be good vs. evil at work.:)
It's unfortunate I didn't carry my cheap Kodak around AC. I was there during the 1964 Dem Convention, too. I loved the old hotels, the arcades, the overall strangeness of a place that had so many visual contrasts. Definitely would have taken plenty of snapshots. But I would've had to spend my meager allowance on photo processing. An army of nuns against the backdrop of the old Steel Pier? That'd be a precious document now.
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