No Room for All the Kids

The McLoskey brothers of Irvington bought the Parker House from Natalie Lindgren and renamed the restaurant the Riviera to appeal to older patrons. The bar areas had been taken over by young adults.

Frank Palmieri wanted to transfer the burned-down Stockton’s liquor license to his new hotel. At the time, it was just blueprints for a u-shaped brick and stucco mid-century modern hotel. Borough Council denied him, and they also dragged their feet in approving the building permits. Months later, the ABC overturned their decision, and Frank was assured that when he finished the building, he could serve alcohol.

The borough insisted the December 1965 plans needed detailed architectural review. It took until August 66, and after threats of contempt of court for the delay, long four years after he first applied and nine years since he purchased the property, the Borough issued Frank his building permits to replace the Stockton. By this time, Frank Palmieri had lost his financing. The Stockton property sat as an empty lot at the beachfront, while he scrambled to find the now $3.3 million needed to complete the project.

The Beatles played a packed Shea Stadium to 55,600 screaming fans. It was the first stadium rock concert and the height of Beatlemania. The kids were growing up. The Flintsones cartoon was in its last year in primetime. The top TV shows appealed to older kids and included Mission Impossible, Get Smart, Batman, the Green Hornet, Gilligan’s Island, Star Trek, and Family Affair.

Comic books were in their Silver Age, with a slew of new superheroes. The growing population of young people were its largest market.

Sea Girt had its own comic hero, King Features Syndicated cartoonist Robert Dunn of Short Hills had a home in Sea Girt at 8 New York Blvd. The comic strips, “They’ll do it Everytime” and “Little Iodine” were inherited from his mentor and partner Jimmy Halto, who developed the strips in the late 1920s.

Bob Dunn was a fixture in the “funny papers”

Bob’s comics appeared in over 300 newspapers. He drew on two TV shows in the 1950s. He was also President of the National Cartoonist Society and won the National Cartoonist award for 1967-1968-1969 & 1979. He generously appeared at schools to discuss careers for artists and cartoonists and organized visits of Cartoonists to US troops in Vietnam.

Bob note he got inspiration living close to beach patrons

Typical of the community, Nelda (Murray) Ragan was born in 1922 in Newark and summered in Sea Girt as a girl. Her father, Walter Murray, purchased 221 Chicago Blvd. in 1950. While attending Rosemont College and studying art, Nelda Murray met and married WWII veteran Frank X. Ragan Jr. in 1948. In the early 1950, the couple moved to her family’s Sea Girt home. Together, they had nine children. In 1966, there seemed to be children everywhere, and educating them all became a problem.

In 1937 a kindergarten with 12 students began on the second floor of Borough Hall, and 90 older kids attended other schools.

When the baby boom came to Sea Girt thirty years later, there were now 300 elementary-age children. They mostly attended Manasquan and Spring Lake elementary schools in a 60%-40% split. It was a cooperative agreement, formalized in a ten-year send/receive contract in 1959.

By 1966, Mrs. Ragan and a dozen other active parents in the community felt the town needed to educate its own children. Her kids went to St. Catherine’s, along with 75 of the 300. But she thought it important for the town to have a school and for kids to avoid the bus.

Nelda and several other neighbors began a campaign to build a school. Many taxpayers, particularly those with summer homes and older residents, were vehemently opposed. The Borough Council understood both sides, as did the School Board, and action stalled.

Manasquan was also growing and needed an expansion. The taxpayers there questioned why they needed to teach the students of Sea Girt.

The new Broad Street Elementary School was not big enough to close the old Talyor Ave. School. The town was also renting space in the Presbyterian Church. A Civic Association organized to oppose the referendum to add six, and then twelve, classrooms to Broad Street.

Spring Lake indicated they were no longer extending the agreement at Mountz, past the 1968 school year. Sea Girt officials initially convinced Manasquan to take all the children. But the Civic Association in Squan beat the expansion. Most of the registered voters came out to express their opinion.

Sea Girt hired their own first-grade teacher in 1966, and rented space from Manasquan as a band-aid. Manasquan and Spring Lake gave Sea Girt until 1968 to solve their problem.