Making Tomatoes
Making Tomatoes at the Jersey Shore by Glen R Shaw 8/10/22
As a North Jersey child born in Kearny in 1956, on perfect summer days I remember helping the grown folks “make tomatoes” down the Jersey Shore.
My parents, myself and my two older brothers spent summers at Ideal Beach in East Keansburg, NJ from the mid 1950’s to the early 1970’s. My family started going there before the Garden State Parkway was built. The GSP when finished would later provide faster access to the beach towns further south, bypassing the northernmost shore towns and changing their economies forever.
Seaside, Point Pleasant and many other towns saw their visitors rise when the newly built Parkway was finished while Keansburg, a favorite haunt of comedian Jackie Gleason from “The Honeymooners” television show fame, would lose visitors due to the GSP and declining health of Raritan Bay at that time. Thankfully the Bay has recovered but the Parkway remains.
Once school let out, we would pack up the car with all that would fit and take what my Mom would later call “the old road” from Kearny down to the Raritan Bayshore.
As a child, seeing the large Newark buildings that dwarfed my hometown structures was always a treat as we drove out of the urban centers towards the relatively rural beach towns. My anticipation of a summer down the shore would easily melt away any cares my child’s mind may have been carrying. Plus, my first real friends, Anthony and Johnny would be there.
Another highlight was our usual stop for lunch at the Wetson’s Hamburger Stand in Hazlet on Rte 36. Wetson’s, an early Macdonald’s rival, always started the summer off right.
Every year, we returned to the same small bungalow located between Bayside Parkway and Sea Breeze Ave, just west of Pews Creek. Pews Creek is where Monmouth Cove Marina sits today.
There, the swimming was good, the fish were biting, and the crabs were plentiful before an Army Corps flood control project disrupted the crabbing.
Raritan Bay was at our front doorstep with New York City, Coney Island, and the Verrazano Narrows Bridge glistening in the distance. There were no sand dunes at that time to block the view.
Anthony, Johnny, and I were “The Three Musketeers.” We played “Boats” in the sand as toddlers and in later years shared music tastes and dreams of what we were going to do when we “grew up.”
One summer we found pieces of plywood washed up on the beach which we turned into “skimboards.” There’s nothing finer than running full speed without fear as kids are able to do, and to jump onto a slice of wood that you have thrown on the receding wave of a flat sandbar at low tide. We’d skim yards across the sand until the laws of physics ended our rides. The speed was exhilarating. You can now buy “Skim Boards” in surf shops. We invented our own.
In later years, I watched the First Moon Landing and the traffic jams of the Woodstock Music Festival on television there as we discussed asking our parents if we could go to the festival. Mom didn’t let the 12 year-old me go. Wise choice, Mom.
I played The Who’s “Who’s Next” album and Cream’s 45 rpm single “Sunshine of Your Love” until the needle wore the record grooves out as the bay breezes gently rustled the window curtains. Maybe it was the sound waves from the record player rustling the curtains. It was hard to tell because there was never a complaint. The days spent swimming on the beach bronzed our tan lines and lightened our hair color.
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We rented there for those years, seeing the same groups of families from the other North Jersey towns of Nutley, Belleville, and West Orange. Those families would also return to the surrounding bungalows every summer from June through September.
Grandparents, parents, aunts , uncles and their friends would spend summers together with the dads commuting to their jobs up north. The children of all would spend our days on the beach, in heaven.
We’d have fires on the beach, share meals and play board games, and most importantly for the kids…grow up together. Who’s better, “Beatles” or “Monkees?” That was a much discussed topic for a time.
There was a Beach Stand and Grill just a short walk up the Bayside Parkway that sold burgers, sundries, and candy. They had pinball and a pool table. Best of all, they had a Jukebox with all the latest songs. One song for a dime, three for a quarter. It was popular with our group.
After we spent the glorious summer swimming, fishing for snapper bluefish, and crabbing for Jersey Blue Claws, summer would be winding down. The end of August came fast and just before school started back up, the Monmouth County Farm tomatoes would be fully red and ripened. That was the time to “make tomatoes.”
Sometimes three, sometimes four or more households would throw in together and buy bushels of the local tomatoes sold at the nearby Monmouth County farm stands. “Station Wagons” were highly prized conveyances for delivering the bushels of tomatoes from farm to beach. This endeavor was a wonder to behold when the cars driven by the dads arrived loaded with bushels of tomatoes.
In a fashion that would have made Henry Ford proud: Grandmas, kids, aunts and moms would wash tomatoes and the repurposed refillable “Brookdale” and “Vigor”soda bottles that were destined to hold the freshly prepared manna from the fields. The youngest children were not allowed to handle the soapy and slippery bottles as they could be cut if there was a mishap.
Everyone helped deseed and salt the tomatoes. The dads would carry and organize everyone’s bushels and bottles. While all this went on we would be eating copious amounts of the delicious, perfectly ripe, field fresh NJ Roma Plum tomatoes. To this day, I still love ripe, NJ summer-kissed tomatoes with just a bit of salt on them.
Grandpas would work the electric tomato grinder which had hardware similar to a ground beef grinder powered by an electric motor. I can still recall the pulsating sound of that motor as the fruit was pushed into the top funnel by a wooden pestle held in an experienced hand. The tomatoes were ground up via a corkscrew grinder which let no juice escape its clutches.
The tomatoes were pushed through the grinding machine by a grandpa 2 or 3 times until all that was left were dry skins bound for the garden as fertilizer. The thick tomato juice which left the grinder opposite the skins collected into a large tub.
From the tub it was ladled into the aforementioned quart soda bottles with a sprig of fresh basil by anyone with a steady enough hand to do the filling.
After capping with a large handled bottle capper, they were wrapped in newspaper and placed in horizontally modified 55-gallon drums filled with water.
There they slowly simmered over a wood fire for many hours tended to by the grandpas, who enjoyed sipping a little beer or wine, keeping the fire, and discussing the topics of the day as the water bubbled around the group’s creations.
The children were always rewarded for their labors with much love and some nickels and quarters slipped into small hands destined to be used for penny candies or for the older one’s Jukebox favorites at “The Stand” up the road. Everyone involved shared in the bounty the following day when the cooled bottles were removed from the barrels and divvied up.
There was great pleasure found in enjoying these fruits of your labor in the long winter months ahead in the days before jars of readymade tomato gravy were stocked on store shelves.
The children involved enjoyed helping and we all looked forward to doing our part in “making tomatoes.” I believe those experiences were my first exposure to the concept of teamwork and helped me develop a work ethic that served me well later in life.
The end results were great tomato gravy to be enjoyed all year long, a rich sense of family and belonging, and priceless memories of New Jersey summers long gone by. Those were the days. GS 8/10/2022
