Grassy Sound

Back in the days of Prohibition thirsty Americans relied largely on Canadian whiskey to satisfy their taste for alcohol, so whiskey smuggling became a lucrative if bloody enterprise in the Roaring Twenties. Al Capone monopolized the Lake Michigan/Chicago armada of booze boats and generated himself a fortune before Elliot Ness and his Untouchables rang him up on charges of income tax evasion. Hey. Whatever works.

Meanwhile, revenuers and the Coast Guard patrolled the Atlantic Seaboard, so East Coast whiskey smugglers kept their freighters out beyond the three-mile jurisdictional limit and sent swift power boats out at night to transship the hooch ashore, unloading at piers secreted among the innumerable bays, sounds, tidewaters, and canals that now constitute the Intracoastal Waterway connecting Key West to Boston. Whip out your Google Earth app and zoom in on Wildwood, New Jersey, and then on Grassy Sound Channel on Wildwood’s back bay.

Back in the day, the railroad crossed Grassy Sound Channel on a trestle of pilings driven into the muck, a few yards north of the present-day Highway 147 overpass. That train trestle exists no more, but the boardwalk that intersected it does. On one side of that boardwalk, grassy marshland. On the other side, deep water — perfect for mooring and offloading whiskey boats. And so it was that the rickety still-existing boardwalk along the bank of Grassy Sound became the hub for whiskey shipments on their way to Atlantic City, Philadelphia, and Baltimore.

Related enterprises sprung up — speakeasies, brothels, gambling parlors — with customers ambling in every night from the unofficial railroad stop at Grassy Sound Boardwalk to enrich the scoundrels and look-the-other-way officials who liked this illicit backwater debauchery just fine. Boardwalk business boomed until the Twenty-First Amendment was ratified in 1933, nullifying Prohibition and removing forever the financial incentive for whiskey running.

Things died down along the Grassy Sound Boardwalk and over the decades the buildings started settling into the mud . . . until various happy fringe types and renegades bought up the old bordellos, pounded down some new pilings, and converted them into summer cottages where they can drink beer and smoke weed and engage in neighborly squabbles as the tide ebbs and flows beneath the floorboards.

Among these characters is a Class A raconteur and tale-teller by the name of Haldy Gifford who also happens to be the guy who first befriended me in seventh grade, played football with me for the next six years, pulled some outrageous stunts along the way (just ask him), and has somehow managed to retain my friendship and affection since 1959. Haldy is the unsubstantiated source of all the information in this blog, and I have no intention of fact-checking him.