Life’s a Beach

Joanne, we’ve heard a lot about the history of beaches, but I want to know about your personal history with beaches.

Joanne Freeman: Wow. My personal history of beaches, okay. Well, it’s kind of in two parts. The first part was the non-existent beach because I lived in Yorktown Heights, New York, in Westchester County and I don’t think we really ever went to the beach. I think I had a sense that beaches were magical places where you went and became amazingly suntanned and laid out on towels looking decadent, but we went to Sparkle Lake. That was where we went in the summer. Sparkle Lake …

Brian Balogh: I’m sorry, Joanne. That’s our next show.

Joanne Freeman: The Sparkle Lake, yes. It was just what it sounds like. It was a small lake.
Then, when I was, I don’t know, 14, 15, we moved to Los Angeles. Then, all of a sudden, beach sort of hit me in the face. LA beach culture is so powerful and so distinctive and, to someone coming in from the outside, from Yorktown Heights, New York, kind of strange, that … It didn’t become necessarily less of a weird and magical space, it just became a differently weird and magical space with big hair and big tans and big sports and all these sort of mellow people shuffling around and lots of tattoos.

Brian Balogh: Where exactly did you fit into that scene?

Joanne Freeman: Sitting on the sand with my friend with my eyes really big, staring all around, I think, was largely what I was doing.

Brian Balogh: Was it a native thing? Was this very much the local culture, or did people come from all over to go to these beaches, Venice Beach or whatever?

Joanne Freeman: Oh, good question. I think it was both. My sense when I was there was that it was mostly local people. I know for sure that, when I was in high school, a lot of people, somehow or other, ended up on the beach from high school. I think it was largely … Santa Monica beaches was really where we were going. It was a local area but it was very much, to me, a dramatic, big sandy beach of a sort that I don’t think I’d ever really seen before.

Brian Balogh: Then, of course, eastern Tennessee is famous for its beaches, so you want to recall some of your earliest memories and encounters with the beach?

Ed Ayers: Well, I wasn’t planning on being defensive, but I will have you know that we have lots of TVA lakes that have what might be called beaches. Those were good for water-skiing and things but, growing up, we were about five to seven hours from Myrtle Beach.

Joanne Freeman: Wow.

Brian Balogh: Oh, yeah.

Ed Ayers: In my childhood, vacation and beach were the same thing. There was just no … That’s … Only place anybody would think of going on a vacation was to Myrtle Beach. The idea of going down to a motel and having actual seafood that had not been frozen was a huge deal. Of course, this is a generational thing. The idea was to get just as suntanned through as many intermediate stages of being burnt as you could in as short a period of time. You would actually lather up with this coconut butter and stuff to intensify the …

Joanne Freeman: Oil.

Ed Ayers: Yeah.

Brian Balogh: Yeah, yeah.

Ed Ayers: I would say that I was only marginally successful in ever gaining anything like a tan, but I was really good at the burning part.
Looking back on it, it was really the first generation of beach culture for the south. When I was younger, they had this great beach music in the pavilion there at Myrtle Beach. Do you folks remember the song, “I’m a Girl Watcher” by the O’Kaysons?

Brian Balogh: Absolutely.

Ed Ayers: Right.

Joanne Freeman: I do not.

Brian Balogh: I’m a girl watcher. I’m a girl watcher. Go ahead, Joanne. Pick up from there.

Ed Ayers: That’s pretty much … You … Watching the girls go by.

Brian Balogh: Those were the entire … Those were the entire lyrics, as I recall.

Ed Ayers: Yeah, exactly. That’s right.

Joanne Freeman: Wow. Wow.

Ed Ayers: That was an example of the beach music. I could … Wasn’t old enough to go inside, but I could stand outside and hear it. Archie Bell and the Drells, all this other great music. It was magic for me. It was magic for me.

Joanne Freeman: That same word, magic.

Brian Balogh: Yeah. It’s funny, in my childhood, I never went on a vacation to the beach. That’s because I lived near one. For me, the beach was a totally, totally different experience. It’s where we kind of went, half the time to laugh at these insane northerners, including people from Canada, who would come down and go swimming in February in South Florida. Who would possibly go into the water? It was freezing. To us, these folks were kind of freaks of nature. How could they possibly do this?
The great irony in all of this, and I do confess, I’ve spent a lot of time around beaches since living in Miami, I am now coming to you from Nova Scotia and I rowed out to a beach today. I rowed out to Sand Dollar Island and it was really interesting because, as we discussed on the show, Americans have tried to privatize beaches, Americans have segregated beaches, but here is a completely public island, yet it was the most private beach experience I’ve ever had.
My takeaway from my rowing trip and just thinking back on my experience with beaches is kind of beaches are us. Beaches are what we put into them and what we make of them, and, boy, do we make a wide range of things out of our beaches. It’s all a bunch of sand.

Joanne Freeman: It’s a meeting point of peoples.

Brian Balogh: Right.

Joanne Freeman: Right? It’s a meeting point of people coming by sea and by land, it’s a meeting point, or not a meeting point, of different kinds of peoples. It’s a meeting point of people from far away and locals, which we all kind of talked about. It’s a place where all kinds of people come for all kinds of reasons, and some of them are extreme. If it’s leisure, it’s really leisure. It’s people lying down for a long period of time. If it’s trade, it’s very aggressive. That’s the sort of point where trade comes in, profit is made or not made.

Brian Balogh: They’ll pull that beach chair right out from under you when your time is up.

Joanne Freeman: Exactly. Exactly.

Ed Ayers: Well, I don’t want to be the one to state the obvious and the embarrassing, but it’s also the place where people are as lightly clad as you are likely to confront people in any other setting.

Joanne Freeman: That is true.

Ed Ayers: I seem to have memories of that being an interesting aspect of going to the beach. It’s … Suddenly, not only is there this diversity of people there for a diversity of reasons, but suddenly they are shorn of a lot of the shielding that they have and the identity. You can’t really tell if somebody is from nearby or far away except maybe by their truck driver’s tan as we called it, just the white shoulders and tanned arms.

Brian Balogh: If they’re going in the water in February, they’re from far away in Miami.

Ed Ayers: Well, and in South Carolina, they would have been taken to the hospital for hypothermia.
I think it’s that combination of land meeting ocean, but also of people of all different backgrounds, without the usual markers firmly displayed. I think we used the word “magic” because we’re kind of optimistic, but it’s also kind of dangerous. You have to be … People were different degrees of comfort, of revealing themselves to all these strangers, and I think that adds a certain thrill to the moment, as well.

Brian Balogh: And the landscape itself is actually in transition. One of the things that we know about beaches is they’re constantly changing, as much as we’re trying to nail them down and wall them off and claim that they’re our private property, et cetera, beaches themselves are incredibly changing objects. We know. At high tide, they’re often not there at all.

Joanne Freeman: In modern times, people are going to the beach for either, whatever reason, for leisure. As Ed just said, they are largely scantily clad, and not only does that make it dangerous, but it’s sort of enforced intimacy. You’re suddenly seeing people in a way that you would never see them otherwise, and you’re closer up to them, if you’re all on the same beach, than you might be otherwise. It … Well, I guess it comes back to magical. It becomes a different kind of space than many other kinds of spaces.

Ed Ayers: Yeah, that’s a really good point, Joanne. Can you pass the tanning oil?

Joanne Freeman: Here you go, Ed.

Ed Ayers: That’s going to do it for us today, but you can keep the conversation going online. Let us know what you thought of the episode or ask us your questions about history. You’ll find us at backstoryradio.org, or send an e-mail to backstory@virginia.edu. We’re also on Facebook and Twitter @backstoryradio. Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger.

Brian Balogh: This episode of BackStory was produced by David [sten-house 00:48:06], Nina Ernest, and Ramona Martinez. Jamal Milner is our technical director, Diana Williams is our digital editor, and Joey Thompson is our researcher. Additional help came from [an-jal-i bish-osh 00:48:18], Sam [lum-steen 00:48:20], Hana Cho, Emma Greg, and Gabriel Hunter Chang. Our theme song was written by Nick [thor-burn 00:48:27]. Other music in this episode came from [ket-sa 00:48:31], Paddington Bear, and [ja-zar 00:48:33].

Ed Ayers: Special thanks this week to our voice actors from the Annette Kellermann segment, Jamal Milner, James Scales, Brendan Wolf, and Lydia Lang. Thanks, too, as always, to the Johns Hopkins Studios in Baltimore.

Joanne Freeman: BackStory is produced at Virginia Humanities. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Provost Office at the University of Virginia, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations. Additional support is provided by the Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities, and the environment.

Speaker 21: Brian Balogh is Professor of History at the University of Virginia. Ed Ayers is Professor of the Humanities and President Emeritus at the University of Richmond. Joanne Freeman is Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University. Nathan Connolly is the Herbert Baxter Adams Associate Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University.
BackStory was created by Andrew Windham for Virginia Humanities.

Speaker 22: [pan-a-blee 00:49:44]