Word: beaches
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...twice had the absorbing experience (once on the Pacific and once on the Atlantic) of standing on the beach and seeing that certain big black fin cut the water out where, but a few minutes before, I myself had been swimming, I'd like very much to know the preferred procedure when the third-time-that-charms comes along. I have heard all about how you subdue such tough customers as lions, alligators, rattlesnakes and such-you pull their jaws apart till they snap, or holding them by the tail, you crack them like a whip and their head...
Nobody remembers his name but oldtime vacationers at Atlantic City, N. J. ("Playground of the World") say that the resort's first sand sculptor was a young artist who showed up on the beach one day in the 1890's and molded from a mountain of wet sand a lifelike figure of a scantily-clad young woman clutching a baby. He labeled the result "Cast up by the Sea." The piece so affected passersby on the boardwalk above that they tossed coins down to the artist, who was soon followed to the beach by other itinerant modelers...
Figures carved from wet sand are vulnerable to rain, wind and tide. Long ago the sand sculptors learned to mix one part of cement with three or four parts of beach, and their creations will withstand two or three years of hail or high water. But last week another force threatened to wipe out permanently much of the itinerant artists' handiwork and a livelihood which, although sand sculpturing has remained the piece de resistance and principal attraction, has lately come from the more lucrative practice of sketching board-walkers who pause to gawp at the modeling. Last week...
...refuse to say how much rent they pay for riparian rights to their small plots of sand. To the City they pay nothing for licenses. But they readily admit that they weekly net somewhere around $50 each, after rent and assistants' fees of $25. Most famed of the beach's seven oldtime artists is a barrel-chested, cow-eyed Calabrian named Dominick ("Nick") Spagnola who has sculptured next to the Steel Pier for 17 years. Self-taught, he pioneered floodlighting, cement statues, the personal sketch. Ten years ago, against his better artistic judgment, he installed easel and paper...
Although Mayor White has not yet gone so far as to urge elimination of all the beach artists, he deplores the trend toward commercialism, would prefer a return to the oldtime "innocuous" status, intimates that he will take steps if boardwalkers are further bothered by money-chiseling sand-chiselers who persist in erecting by their studios such poems as: Kind words I like to hear To praise I'm deferential Criticisms I get now & then But the coins are the things essential...