By Bill Quain
I was born in August 1952. I’m pretty sure that my parents did not bring me to the shore that summer. But every other summer of my life, I came to Ocean City. (There was that one year when I was serving in VISTA and couldn’t make it, but that’s a whole other story.) After Jeanne and I were married, we’d spend a couple of summer weeks in New York with her family and a couple of summer weeks in Ocean City with mine.
But then we had our kids.
Jeanne and I were living in Orlando when our two daughters were born. As everyone knows, kids come with a lot of stuff. Getting to the shore suddenly became much more complicated.
We decided the best way to get from Florida to the Northeast was by car. For several years, we took the Auto Train. We booked a sleeper car with a private bath. During the day, we had two very comfortable bench seats that faced each other. In the evening, the porter would fold out the beds. After having dinner in the dining car, we would all retire back to our room and spend a pretty comfortable night.
So, how does this relate to this week’s Six Words on a Boardwalk Bench? Well, even when our kids were little, we started bringing books with us. When they were very young, it was a stack of children’s classics. “The Cat in the Hat” was in our train suite most years. As the kids got older, the characters we traveled with changed. But we never went anywhere without books.
That train became the Hogwarts Express.
We moved from Orlando to Miami Beach in 1997. Our daughters were really into books at that point. They read all the time. We had a great, independent bookstore just down the street from our house. Amanda, our oldest daughter, became a regular there. One day, the owner of the bookstore told her about a new book. She said it was written by a woman named J.K. Rowling, and was about some wizard kids. No one had even heard of Harry Potter at that time, but Amanda bought the first book in the series and started reading it. Soon, she was helping her younger sister Kathleen read it.
Of course, the Harry Potter series became a tremendous success, and it became part of our summer trips to Ocean City. It was a long drive from Miami to the Auto Train station, and another long drive from the end of the train route in Virginia to our final destination up north. But that didn’t matter. Off we’d go, the car packed with all of our stuff. And now new sets of books – big, fat books – were in the car with us. Our girls didn’t even talk to us on the train ride! They were just reading the latest Harry Potter edition.
Can we get them on tape?
A few years later, we decided to drive back to Florida and see some sights along the way. It was going to be a super long drive. Amanda had a great idea! She heard that “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” was released on cassette tape. That changed everything!
I forget how many tapes the first book had, but there were a lot of them. So, as we drove out across the Ninth Street bridge on our way back to Florida, we popped that first cassette tape in the player. We were transported! Not only was it an excellent book, but the audio producers had hired a fantastic reader, who managed to change his voice for each character. The book was so compelling that when we arrived in Miami Beach, we didn’t go straight to the house. Instead, we grabbed a couple of sandwiches and sat in the car in the parking lot until that cassette was completed. We played the final tape on our stereo system the next night.
My sister Jeannine had a funny Harry Potter cassette story too. She and her kids were looking forward to listening to the book on their drive from Pennsylvania to Ocean City. As they hit the road, one of her kids passed the tape up to Jeannine. It was then she realized that their new car had a CD player … not a cassette player! They had to stop at Kmart to buy a portable tape player!
You can each take 20 books.
Fast forward to 2005. I was teaching at Florida International University. I had a sabbatical leave of absence, and we decided to spend that year in Ocean City. After living here, we fell in love with the town. We went back to Miami, sold our house, then moved to Ocean City permanently in 2007.
However, back in 2005, our intention was to live here for one year. We loaded up our minivan as well as a small U-Haul trailer, then told our girls they could each pick their favorite 20 books for the year. When we arrived in Ocean City, I remember unpacking suitcases from the car, thinking how heavy they were. We had bags that were taped shut that were really heavy too. It seems my girls couldn’t choose just 20 books each. Books were under the seats of the car, packed under clothing, and in every conceivable hiding place. And there were still hundreds of books back in Miami!
We know that books transport you.
Have you ever transported books? Tell me your “books in a car” stories. I’d love to hear them! Shoot me an email at bill@quain.com. As I say each week, “I’ll see ya in the papers!”
Bill is a Professor in Stockton University’s Hospitality Management Program. He is the author of 27 books, and a highly-respected speaker. Even though he is almost totally blind, Bill is a long-distance runner and runs the Ocean City Half Marathon each year. He lives in Ocean City with his wife Jeanne, and his Guide Dog Trudy. Visit www.billquain.com or email him at bill@quain.com.
