Memories of the PAL House on the Sea Isle City Boardwalk

Reminiscences of the PAL House on the Sea Isle City Boardwalk

The first Jersey Shore resort I remember is Sea Isle City in the Fifties and early Sixties when my family took week long vacations to the PAL House on the Sea Isle City boardwalk.

Of course there is no Sea Isle City boardwalk anymore – and no PAL House for that matter, as both were destroyed in the storm of 1964, though I remember my father saying that they moved the PAL House around the corner to a side-street and it may still stand today. The boardwalk however, was replaced with a concrete and blacktop promenade that also acts as a protective barrier against storms.

The Camden Police Athletic League (PAL) house was huge, though I was small at the time and it may have just seemed very large to a small boy.

You came in the front door off the boardwalk over a smaller boardwalk, and entered a large community room. While there were rooms upstairs, we stayed in a small room with two or three beds that was off to the side of the community room on the first floor. In the back of the large general area were a few large tables and a kitchen where there was always something cooking.

Above the front door there was a spy glass – similar to the ones pirates and ship captains used at sea that extended out and folded up.

Among the things that I remember doing include hanging out under the boardwalk with Charlie Kocher, a friend from Camden whose father, like mine was a policeman, and Charles himself later became a policeman. His dad was in the Navy during the war so we wore Navy hats he had given us.

One day my dad bought a kite and I remember running along the beach trying to get it flying, and once we had it going it really went well. We cut little holes in the bottom of plastic cups and sent them up the kite string and tied the string to the boardwalk railing in front of the PAL House.

Just down the boardwalk was an amusement hall with a carousel that had rings you reached out for and grabbed and then threw at the open mouth of a large clown against a wall. I kept many of the rings, but was required to return them before leaving town.

One year there was a baby parade, and I guess I must have been five or six years old, old enough to remember them putting me in a little red wagon and surrounding me with boxes of cookies and candy and being pulled down the boardwalk by one of the young girls who was my babysitter. There’s a photo and a 8mm movie of this parade somewhere.

Things got a little chaotic when it rained because everybody hung out in the community room where I remember playing pickup sticks for the first time on the table back by the kitchen. They also had a handy supply of Lincoln Logs, Lagos, puzzles and card games that kept us kids occupied.

I can also recall getting dressed up to go to Church, just around the corner and down the street, an old wood clapboard church across the street from Raffa’s Deli.

Then there was the Storm of ’64. I don’t think it was a hurricane that had a name, but rather it was a 3 day ‘nor’easter and pretty much destroyed the Jersey Shore.

A day or two after it was over my dad let me come along when he drove down to check out the damage and it was pretty severe. I remember houses in the middle of the street.

If they moved the PAL House to another lot, they didn’t keep using it as they had built a small two bedroom rancher down town, near the ACME, where there were acres of clear ground that turtles over ran on their migratory egg laying expeditions. There were no houses from the main drag to the bay, which you could see from half mile away. Now it is all built up.

Since I was a little older I remember a little more, and specifically going into town – now twenty or more blocks away – to get fudge – Copper Kettle – and see a movie, which was located right next to the boardwalk just down from Braca’s Café. The movie theater itself might have been called the Braca. And I can date all of this now because that was the summer we saw the John Wayne African safari African safari movie Hatari.

Years later I sent one winter in Sea Isle – a winter rental in the same neighborhood as the second PAL house, and got to know it a little better.