Looking back now after all these years I can pick out very few moments when I should have seen it coming. Like when I hit Ocean City and ran the yellow – the only traffic light in what was then a sleepy little burg about to wake up as a vacation resort.
For a fleeting moment, I wondered as I passed through the intersection whether it was a signal to take heed; to go slowly, cautiously. The thought flew from my mind, too anxious was I to get where I was going. At age twenty-eight my time seemed to be slipping too fast into the future. Life had suddenly seemed too short.
It was 1954.
Eisenhower was in office.
The Russians had the Bomb.
The economy was booming.
And I was wondering what to do with my life.
Six years earlier, Maryland Gov. Theodore R. McKeldin rode in his big white Cadillac converible to officially open the four-mile long Bay Bridge. It spanned the width of the Chesapeake Bay, linking the state’s Eastern Shore to the rest of the world.
The bridge was going to bring opportunity to many, including me, something I never imagined during the years it was under construction.
Times were prosperous. The United States dominated the world financially and militarily. More and more people owned cars – big cars. To accommodate all these automobiles, President Ike signed a big bill that put government in the bridge- and road-building business. Soon concrete ribbons appeared across the landscape.
Few people really understood what highways were primarily thought of, at least by the government. Evacuation routes in case of war – atomic or otherwise.
People escaped from the steamy suburbs of Washington and Baltimore in their big cars. They drove to Maryland’s short coastline, to this single stop-light town, a resort on a sandy barrier island less than a mile wide and about ten miles long.
Unlike the mega resort that it’s become today, with almost every inch of sand developed, Ocean City was only several blocks long then. An occasional hotel or lonely old clapboard house stood along the Coastal Highway, or amid the watery grasses along the bay, or between the sand dunes along the shore.
A friend, Eddie Farlow, opened a hotel and bar at the north end of Ocean City’s boardwalk to serve the well-paying beachgoers. He profited well enough by the summer crowds that he would spend autumn and winter relaxing at his hunting lodge in western Maryland. Eddie always did things smart.
I ran into Eddie the year before, shortly after Ike ended the fighting in Korea and discharged me and thousands of other happy grunts. We sat in Mulligan’s, in our old north Baltimore haunt. It was where we grew up and where I now rented a one-room flat, a block from the new municipal stadium where the Orioles played baseball.
It was a hot August afternoon. Sunlight streamed through the dark tavern’s open door. We sat in a corner booth under a whirling ceiling fan. Eddie hoisted a frosted mug then cracked a red-steamed claw he pulled from a cluster of crabs piled on the black-and-white print of the morning’s edition of the Sun. Old Bay seasoning made my mouth burn for a cold one. Eddie bought me a Pabst.
He was visiting the neighborhood, looking up mutual friends. He no longer had family around; don’t remember what happened to them. He finished a cigarette and said he’d heard I was looking for a job. “Why don’t you go back to college? Take advantage of the GI bill.”
Uncle Sam drafted me my junior year at Loyola, where I studied pre-law, which is another way of saying humanities, which is another way of saying I had a year-and-a-half left and still wasn’t sure what the hell I wanted to do with my life.
As it was, I learned more in my one year fighting the commies in Korea than in all my years at school. War teaches life is brief. I decided sitting in a lecture hall or behind a desk only made it briefer. And I didn’t want just any job. I had turned down a couple of offers already. Eddie knew this because I told him.
Eddie listened to me ramble as he drank his beer and sucked the meat from crab claws. When I finished, he offered me a job – managing the Blue Dolphin, his hotel. He needed a reliable man while he turned his sights to developing.
“I’ve acquired a number of beach-front properties, and I’m acquiring more,” he said. “Now with the bridge over the Bay there’s going to be big demand for hotels and so I need someone down there year-round, running and watching the Dolphin.”
We were close friends growing up, but grew apart when Eddie left his senior year of high school to open his own business. He invested in a Multimixer, a five-spindled milk shaker, and a grill. From a stand in downtown Baltimore, he sold to lunchtime crowds of office workers. “Quickie Burger and Shake” was a hit. He opened three more.
Eddie’s stands became so popular that at lunchtime male office workers liked to ask their female secretaries if they wanted to go for a “Quickie.” Burgers and shakes made him a small fortune before he sold them and bought the Blue Dolphin.
Growing up, Eddie always had deals going on and always let me in on them. His greatest enterprise was in junior high school. He ran the largest paper route in the city by convincing a group of paperboys to let him manage their monthly collections, promising better earnings than what the Baltimore American paid.
Eddie was actually working for a bookie and using the route to collect and make bets. Only he and I knew this because we did all the collecting. Eddie shared his cut of the take with the boys, and they never questioned.
He did well for three months before one kid’s father started asking why he didn’t see his son out collecting for the paper. No one ever found out about the bookie angle, but the American’s circulation manager, suspicious about what was really going on but having no desire to find out, told Eddie he could forget about a route of his own.
Eddie was no hood, just an ever-loving opportunist with the heart and mind of a true take-no-prisoner capitalist. He always looked out for me growing up. Here he was again offering me this job. The offer sounded interesting, though I wasn’t sure I wanted to run a hotel or live at the beach. Actually, I wasn’t sure about anything.
A smile crept across Eddie’s face as he dropped a ten-dollar bill on the table to pay the check and placed two, crisp one-hundred dollar bills before me. He looked confident, knowing money’s power of persuasion.
“That’s yours, Ned,” he said to me. “All I’m asking is that you come down and give it a chance. I think you’ll be happy that you did.”
I started to chuckle. “Come on, Eddie, you don’t need to do that.”
“You’re looking at your first week’s salary,” he said.
“Yeah, I dunno,” I said, removing a crumbled pack of Chesterfields from my shirt pocket and wedging my fingers inside for a cigarette.
“Whatta ya got to lose? Besides, do you really want to keep going to your parents for rent and food? You run my hotel you get room and board free.”
I shook my head, impressed as always with how Eddie played all the angles. This wasn’t a chance meeting. He learned, no doubt, talking to my mother, my daily habits of stopping in Mulligan’s for a beer and a smoke each afternoon. She liked to talk, and she had always been fond of Eddie. My father was always suspicious of him.
“So, you talked to my mother. She getting ready to cut me off?”
Eddie laughed. “Nah, she’s worried you’re drifting.”
She was entirely right. I felt no purpose in life other than searching the newspaper classifieds every morning and attending an Orioles game each week. Eddie was right, too – what did I have to lose? Dad’s waiting for me to finish law school and join his practice no matter how long it takes me. I’ll always have his support.
I looked at the two hundred dollars. For me, at least, it was no incentive to uproot my life in north Baltimore. But things were getting dull. Maybe opportunity waited on the beach. “Ok, I’m hired,” I said, as I scooped up the money.
Eddie smiled.
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