Mary Ann Gunther has spent 72 summers of her 76 years in Ocean City, the fabled resort that becomes Maryland’s second most-populated city between Memorial Day and Labor Day.
This past summer, the mother of eight and grandmother of 19 saw something she hadn’t seen for decades: vacancy signs at the height of the season.
“It was a mediocre season for business — a double whammy of the [overall] economy and gas prices,” said Gunther, who deflects snickers when she puts on a bathing cap for an ocean dip by saying that if it was good enough for Keira Knightley in “Atonement,” it’s good enough for a grandmother.
Though April and May were rainy, said Gunther, “the summer weather was great.”
“But we saw more people coming down just for the day,” he said. “And there were vacancy signs in the middle of the season. It was rare that I saw a ‘No Vacancy’ sign downtown.”
To boost business, said Gunther, “the mayor [Rick Meehan] went on TV to tell people that a tank of gas gets you to the beach and back.”
A full tank of diesel fuel on the Ocean City charter boat that Capt. Ed Zajdel runs with his son Ronnie — the 47-foot “Zipper” — costs double what it did just a year ago.
“We head out 60 miles from the pier,” said Ronnie Zajdel, 25. “Last year, we could fill up for about $900. We’re paying $1,600 a day now just for fuel.”
Given that the Zajdels charge $2,200 to take a half-dozen anglers out to deep water for everything from white marlin to dolphin and blue fin tuna, there’s not much margin for profit after filling the tanks.
“We keep doing it because we’re into catching fish,” said Ronnie, noting that late July was splendid for 80- to-150 pound blue fin tuna — “the kind the sushi places like” — but the catch fell off considerably in August.
“The water has been too warm, up to 78 and 80 degrees — the fish have been staying deep,” said Ronnie. “We’re hoping to do better this month, as the fish start moving south.
“September is a good month for white marlin.”
As every month is both precious and poignant for the families who stay with the Believe in Tomorrow Children’s Foundation, which evolved from the Grant-A-Wish project and operates beach guest houses for kids with cancer.
More than 70 families spent time down the ocean with the group this summer, said Eastern Shore Believe director Wayne Littleton. In mid-June, a newly rehabbed condo opened bayside at 28th Street for military families of young cancer patients.
“We’ll stay full all the way through Christmas,” said Littleton, 49, and an Ocean City native who remembers when O.C. became a ghost town after Labor Day.
“We just don’t give them a key and say ‘have fun.’ We’ve got 134 [local] volunteers who are constantly doing things with our families.”
The fun includes fishing trips, golf and tennis clinics and trips to the amusement park in addition to just sitting by the surf and taking a break from repeated trips to the hospital.
“We try to give the kids the best possible week they can have,” said Littleton, a graduate of Salisbury University. “What you really want is for [a survivor] to come back years later and say they were here with us.
“These days,” he said, “not everyone who gets cancer dies.”
Where nostalgia lives
In “Atlantic City,” a song about the slot-happy Jersey beach town some 200 miles north of Ocean City, Bruce Springsteen sings, “Everything dies, baby, that’s a fact … but maybe everything that dies, someday comes back …”
The way a pickle is reborn as a fried pickle at Pickle’s Pub, a comfortable, neighborhood joint at 706 Philadelphia Ave.
Or the improbable fashion in which Melvin’s steak house — an Ocean City landmark since the Eisenhower Administration — has come full circle a few blocks away near the corner of Division Street.
Founded by Paul Melvin back in 1954, the restaurant changed hands in the late 1970s, was closed for all of 2005 and is now owned by a 45-year-old named . . . Keith Melvin.
“When I turned the key for the first time, it was like walking back in time,” said Melvin, who is not related to the founder. “This isn’t some [corporate] re-creation of a family steak house. It’s the real thing.”
Like the thrill of the Himalaya is more real in John Elliott IV’s imagination — bigger, wilder, more seductive — than the actual ride at First Street near the Boardwalk.
“As a kid from Pigtown, getting away to Ocean City was worlds away from the concrete jungle,” said Elliott, 40, who grew up on South Carey Street and recently visited the “time capsule” of the Maryland shore for the first time in years.
“My cousins were carnies who ran the Trimper [amusement] rides. The first time I heard Foreigner’s “Hot Blooded” was on the Himalaya,” said Elliott, who stuffed himself with Thrasher’s fries, salt water taffy and Fisher’s popcorn, but not all at the same time.
“The Himalaya is still there,” he said, “but they play different music now.”
Everything in Ocean City is simultaneously different and the same for 39-year-old Brian H. Clark, a native of Olney who grew up at the beach and had the good fortune to come of age in the last Ocean City soda fountain back in the 1980s when his family owned Rayne’s, an American classic from the Roaring 20s at 8 Dorchester St.
Rayne’s is gone now — long gone, the building vacant and hung with a “For Sale” sign for most of the summer — after several years as a Subway sandwich shop.
When Clark walks by, as he often does, he sees his life story, his deceased parents and the old pinball machine through the plate glass.
“We would always know how many people got arrested and were in the jail downtown because the cops would order a cheeseburger and soda for each inmate,” said Clark, recalling that the Boardwalk’s blind banjo player was also fond of a Rayne’s burger with cheese.
“That place was a window on the world that I miss and never appreciated at the time,” said Clark with the pangs of a man in the vestibule of middle age.
