For six miles along one of the finest bathing beaches on the
Atlantic seaboard extends the world-famed board walk, sixty feet
wide, topped with planking and built upon a steel and concrete
foundation, where promenade health and recreation seekers from
all parts of America and foreign climes. There are four great
piers varying in length from one thousand to three thousand
feet, with auditoriums and all kinds of amusements which are as
varied as the visitors are versatile. The shops of the board
walk are one of its most attractive features.
One's motto at Atlantic City as well as the world over should be
that of a certain medicine man who gave this advice to his
customers: "Let your eyes be your judge, your pocketbook your
guide, and your money the last thing you part with." But, alas!
how few heeded the free advice he gave them, but persisted in
buying his patent nostrums until their pocketbooks could
scarcely raise an audible jingle!
Money may befriend one at Atlantic City but it will never admit
him into real society where the passwords are wit, wisdom and
beauty of character; which, united, forma truly royal life.
There are people who care not whether their clothes come from
Paris or Mexico just so they are comfortable, serviceable and
becoming. Society of this type is not exclusive but admits alike
all worthy people.
"What space bath virgin's beauty to disclose
Her sweets, and triumph o'er the blooming rose.
Not even an hour!"
What a motley crowd of human beings throng the board walk! How
like the vast interminable deep is this thronging, surging mass
of humanity, where they, like restless waves, pause awhile on
the margin of the boundless sea until the ebb tide moves out in
the vast sea of life. "Here the fury of fashion ebbs and flows,
a constant stream, representing all the states of the Union."
Here are men with silk plug hats and petite mustachios who seem
"straight from Paris!" Others whose ruddy faces and commanding
air proclaim them genial sons of the Emerald Isle, while still
others are the possessors of so many and varied characteristics
one might be justified in calling them mongrels. One would think
the lovely Pleiades themselves came every night on a long
journey to look at the board walk with an interrogation mark in
every twinkle. Here come youth and beauty seeking pleasure.
Here, too, you will see old age trying to recall their youthful
days "when the serious looking canes they so carefully carry
gave place to the foppish switches they so artfully carried in
their younger days." Here the gilded doors of idleness and
pleasure are ever ajar but they never lead to the halls of noble
aims and the palaces of worthy ambition. Here the entrances are
always crowded with that class of people whose motto is, "Things
are good enough as they are," or "Eat, drink and be merry," or
"We are weary of well doing."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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