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JERSEY
Sharon Stabley for The New York Times
By KEVIN COYNE
Published: Sunday July 8, 2007 Reprinted from the Front Page of the
Sunday Edition of
The New Jersey Section of the New York Times
Holgate
ON a morning when the ocean was a lake, offering hardly a ripple to
ride, Bob Muroff left his surfboard stowed in his garage and strolled
the pebbly lanes of his low-slung village at the southern tip of a summer
island that has grown taller, denser and richer all around him.
“My father and I planted these, Japanese pines,” he said, stopping at
one of the trailers that had been camouflaged by years of care until
it looked more like a bungalow — rose arbor, picket fence, patio, all
the trappings of a permanent beach retreat.
The Long Beach Island Trailer Park was mostly a raffish fishing camp
when Mr. Muroff’s family bought it in 1953, and they have held onto
it through the decades when the meadows around it filled with houses
and land values grew so dear that its very name began to sound like
an oxymoron. And as another summer unfolds, it remains a sanctuary for
an increasingly endangered species: beach lovers of comparatively modest
means who want a toehold on an island that has largely been priced out
of their reach…..
Bob Muroff describes himself, at 68, as the island’s “oldest active
surfer.” He was also among the first, starting in 1963. “I saw this
thing happening out there, and I said, ‘My God, this is what I want
to do,’ ” he said about the early surfing scene. “Once I saw that this
is the world I wanted to live in, then this is the world I’ve lived
in.”
It is a world that he came into, though, through a twisting path. His
father and uncle had traveled widely in the import business — furs,
rugs, cashmere — but started buying real estate in New York and New
Jersey after the Communist takeover closed China to them. The trailer
park was managed by another uncle and aunt, Gus and Sys Lindell, who
drowned as they were being evacuated during the annihilating storm of
March 1962.....
Mr. Muroff, who grew up in Kew Gardens, Queens, and who left his job
as an accountant on Wall Street to rebuild the park. “I learned a whole
new set of skills, as well as values.”
His office is the house where his aunt and uncle lived, a block from
the ocean in one direction and a block from Barnegat Bay in the other,
and on the wall next to his desk hangs a map of the 142 units in the
five-acre park. Some of the stickers, marked with the name of each unit’s
owner, are new and white, but more are yellowed and faded with age.
“How could you get, even at today’s prices, that close to the ocean,
and that close to the bay,” said Bob Reagan, 67, who works for a coffee
distribution company and bought his trailer 20 years ago after he had
paid off the Milltown home where he and his wife raised their four children.
The annual rent at the park, which includes water, sewer, trash collection
and taxes, is quite reasonable.
“There’s all kinds of people, which makes it very interesting,” said
Mr. Reagan, who spends most weekends from April through November at
the park. “There’s teachers and lawyers and laborers and union people
and nonunion people. It seems that when people come down to the trailer
park they leave all that stuff behind.”
Mr. Muroff leaves after Thanksgiving, too, for his winter home on the
island of Nevis in the Caribbean. He has traveled the world as his father
did — its warmer latitudes, though, in search of surf, not furs — but
he has remained firmly rooted on the two square blocks that developers
have mostly stopped even asking about buying from him
.
“We have more than enough to be very thankful, and when you have more
than enough, there’s no reason to sell,” said Mr. Muroff, who is also
a partner in a family real estate investment company that owns garden
apartments in northern New Jersey. “People would say to me, ‘Bob, when
are you going to sell that place?’ And I’d say, ‘Never.’ That was the
answer I gave all along, and when you tell people ‘never’ enough times,
they finally hear it.”
He was raised without much religion by his Swedish Lutheran mother and
Russian Jewish father, but he has fashioned for himself a kind of surfer’s
Buddhism. “How could I believe in these principles of being a good person
on the planet and sell these people out?” he asked.
He tends to surf every other day now, rather than daily, but he still
swims long distances, all year round in the endless summer of his life,
outlasting many of his younger companions. “I take two strokes for every
three that they’re taking,” he said, sounding, as he often does, as
if he is quoting a Zen koan. “I’m long and easy and consistent.
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