Seaside Heights: The Town That Fun Built

As a kid growing up in North Jersey, we used to spend vacations at the Jersey Shore in a little community of cottages known as Ocean Beach.  Ocean Beach was located a few miles from Seaside Heights, a boardwalk town where we would often go for amusements, rides, games, and food.  Most Americans know Seaside Heights because it was the former site of the “MTV Beach House” and the place where the show “Jersey Shore” is set.  The boardwalk has changed a great deal since I began walking it in the 1970s.

I have written about Seaside, Ocean Beach, and Jersey Shore culture at this blog before, so I could not resist telling you all about my most recent find: a Seaside Heights promotion video made sometime in the 1960s. 

I was attracted to this video for several reasons:

1.  The narration is hilarious.  As a guy who used to save quarters all year long to try to win something on one of the wheels of chance, I thoroughly enjoyed the narrator’s remark that the games of chance “are unscrupulously fair, and there is a good chance of winning.”

2. My parents first took me to Seaside Heights in the late (1960s) and I probably went on my first “ride” on the Casino Pier.  So I got pretty nostalgic about this video. It represents (roughly) a time when I first began my Jersey Shore sojourns.

Enjoy:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_G-hVZ0rIf4&w=640&h=390]