Mrs. Helen Shriver Schilling & the Trashing of Old Ocean City

Now the estate of Helen Shriver Schilling, after failing to abide by her estate planning regarding her movie theaters, want to build on the beach.

Helen Shriver, originally of Rydal, Pa. was the only child of Sarah and William Shriver, Jr., the son of William Shriver, Sr. who started a candy and ice cream business on the Ocean City, NJ boardwalk at 9th street in the early 1890s. Her father rebuilt their businesses in brick after the great fire of 1929 that destroyed much of the boardwalk and surrounding neighborhood.

She attened Hood College in Maryland and graduated in 1922. She married Charles Frank Schilling, a Philadelphia builder, and they enjoyed the outdoors, hunting and fishing. Although they sold the candy business in 1958 to the Hank and Virginia Glaser Family, it retained her family name.

For decades Mr. and Mrs. Schilling ran her family's Ocean City businesses, which grew to include the Strand, Moorlyn, Village Theaters, five parking lots and boardwalk storefronts that were leased out to various businesses including the Seaside Baths, Dels grill and Mack & Manco Pizza.

After the death of Mr. Schilling in Sept. 1980, she became a trustee of the Tabernacle in 1981 and donated money to Shore Memorial Hospital in Somers Point, where a wing is now named after her family. She also renovated her properties in 1988 to ensure they would continue unhindered into the future.

One thing that didn't last was Shriver's Pier, which stretched out over the 9th Street beach from the boardwalk and provided a pleasant place for people to sit in the shade. After young people and hippies began to conjugate there it was torn down and not rebuilt, as I'm sure Mr. and Mrs. Schilling would have wanted.

I know because I knew Mr. and Mrs. Schilling from when I first started working at Mack & Manco's Pizza in the early 1970s, as they would come in and sit at the counter for lunch nearly every day. One day in the late 1990s, I was driving around and saw Mrs. Schilling outside her house on the point at the Bay in the Gardens. She invited me in for tea and we sat and talked for awhile and she clearly expressed her strong views towards preserving Old Ocean City as best she could.

When she died in December, 1998, her attorney Ronald Taht, Esq. handled her estate. Taht’s former partner Bob Bell handled the estate of her father and grandfather. The toll both that leads out of Ocean City to Longport has a plaque that notes it is officially named the Robert Bell Toll Booth.

When Mrs. Schilling died Taht was quoted as saying, “To me, it’s the end of an era. The Schillings and Shrivers were old Ocean city and we’ve lost so much of that. They were very fine people who loved this city very much.”

As anyone who knew Mrs. Schilling understood, the one thing she wanted was to keep her properties and businesses intact, especially the movie theaters, which she insisted, under no circumstances, were they to be sold to the Frank Family who owned a movie theater chain that stretched from Northfield to Cape May, as they had unfairly competed with the Shriver/Schilling theaters in Ocean City and had wanted to buy them for many years.

The Franks, who had one of the first drive in movie theaters, were also credited with creating the multi-plex theaters that included more than one screen in each theater so many movies could be shown at the same time.

Despite the distinct and pronounced desire of Mrs. Helen Shriver Schilling, her attorney Ron Taht, Esq. created a shell company that officially purchased the theaters, that were then sold to the Franks, circumventing her estate plans.

At one time the Strand Theater on the Boardwalk at 9th Street had a seating of 2,000, which was full to capacity for such hit movies as Jaws, and included a giant silk curtain of Neptune, the God of the sea.

One of the first things the Franks did once they had assumed ownership of the theaters, was to take that curtain down and trash it in the back parking lot of the theater. They literally ripped it up and threw it in the trash. I know this because I was there and witnessed a member of the Frank family doing it.

The next thing they did was to divide the 2,000 seat theater in a number of smaller theaters, which they also did to the Moorlyn and Village Theaters.

It took a while, but eventually the Franks decided they couldn't make enough money from running the movie theaters they had wrongfully and probably illegally purchased via Ron Taht, and wanted to convert them into apartments. They did this to the Moorlyn Theater, across the boardwalk from the Music Pier, where they destroyed a second story stage where W.C. Fields and other Vaudeville acts had once performed that should have been restored and maintained as a theater.

They also own the Cape May theater that they also want to destroy and convert into condos and apartments.

And now the estate of Helen Shriver Schilling wants to build homes on the beachfront property that she once owned and wanted preserved.

Well none of her other plans for her estate have been honored, her theaters sold to those she specifically requested then never be sold to, and then subsequently trashed, so why should any of her wishes be upheld by the city or the courts?

Old Ocean City, the one best remembered, is gone, and those who own it now are motivated by greed and not a sense of community or history, and as soon as they get what they want, they won't live in the New Ocean City, but they'll take the money and run.

The Neptune Curtain at the Old Strand Theater in Ocean City was trashed, as was the theater itself