Surfing the Inner N8

You never know when you’ll run into someone really interesting.

This afternoon I was in the hallway where parents and grandparents were waiting to pick up their kids (and grandkids) from preschool.  I was talking with one of the grandfathers, who is turning 76 next week.  He told me about listening to a Washington Redskins game on the radio with his dad in December 1941, when the game was interrupted with the news that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor.  That in itself was scary enough, but what made it worse was that they didn’t know where Pearl Harbor was!  He then told me about how he lived in Baltimore during the war and used to watch the American ships that had been torpedoed as they were dragged into the harbor there in Baltimore.

We got to talking about local history and he told me about visiting Ocean City for the first time in 1947.  This was before the construction of the bridge spanning the Chesapeake Bay, so you either had to drive up into Delaware and go around it or take a ferry across the bay–a ferry that didn’t hold many cars and didn’t run very often.  Even when the bridge was built in the 1950s, he said that it was only one lane each way–and each lane had two lanes of traffic feeding into it.  Talk about a bottleneck!  Ocean City, he said, was just sand from 16th Street up to Delaware.  Things sure have changed!

Everyone over 70 should write a book.

Here’s a link to an article about the history of the bridge.