Island Tales with Edith Dalland Parker
By Reilly Platten Sharp
The cool night ocean breeze flew in the window, the curtains waving in its wake, and brushed the faces of young Edith and Jane Dalland lying in their beds. Soothing them to sleep were Ingvald Dalland singing a Norwegian lullaby and Ingeborg Risnæs Dalland joining him as she lightly strummed a guitar. This was the quiet scene inside one Barnegat Light cottage of the 1930s, a scene of love and Scandinavian roots that echoed up and down the ramble of that still mostly untamed old town. For Edith Dalland Parker, now in her 90s, the memories of her childhood are as fresh, vivid, and potent as if they happened just yesterday.
These tales are from a time when Long Beach Island was still lingering in the remote and simple 19th century way of things, when the vast open spaces were still desolate, and when a strong back and a love for this special place was necessary to overcome the trials of life. This was an island on the overlooked eastern frontier of America that ironically sat on the doorstep of its most cosmopolitan epicenters, New York, and Philadelphia. Yet nothing from Tucker’s Island to Barnegat Light was comparable to the world over the horizon.
For Ingvald, who had lived and worked in Brooklyn, New York for years, it was love at first sight when he found himself visiting Barnegat Light for the first time in the early 1930s. “When my father came here, he thought, ‘This is it!” Parker shared of her father’s reaction. “‘This is where we’re going to be. Oh my gosh, this is so peaceful and quiet. And not like [the] first World War where everybody stood in line and there was no food. We’re never going to go through that again!’” Between vegetable gardens and bountiful fishing, Barnegat Light was a veritable Eden where one only needed to roll up one’s sleeves to provide — in contrast to the cobblestone streets of New York City that were dependent on everything arriving from somewhere else. Parker underscored this practicality when remembering how they got their dinners. “Every day, my father’s idea of fresh fish was, ‘the fish ate its breakfast in the ocean, and we ate ‘em for dinner that night.’”
For Ingeborg and stateside family members, the attraction wasn’t as alluring. “Relatives all came down and saw where [Barnegat Light] was and they were shaking their heads,” Parker chuckled. “My mother wrote home to her family, ‘the mosquitoes in Barnegat Light are as big as birds!’ It was the most god-forsaken place she’d ever been to.” This would be an adjustment Ingeborg would struggle with all her time there, preferring the civilized life of the city.
Reservations aside, the Dallands moved to Barnegat Light following a unique and already established route that spanned the vast Atlantic Ocean back to the old Scandinavian countries. Many who emigrated in search of work in the United States would find themselves along the Jersey shore before long. Some settled elsewhere, from Point Pleasant to Cape May. Often, Barnegat Light was where scores landed on American shores for a second time. Word of the excellent fishing and boat building opportunities found there was in the air of the Norwegian Seaman’s Church, Sjømandskirken, in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn, an epicenter of Norwegian American life that rented rooms, served meals, and hosted traditional celebrations on the holidays. Some from Barnegat Light would find their way back to join church activities and entice new arrivals who heard tales of a place in New Jersey similar to, though warmer than, the coastal villages they came from. By the 1930s there was a bus, Parker explained, that would take folks from Brooklyn to Lakewood. And there would be transportation waiting for anyone interested in getting to Long Beach Island from there. Once these men, mostly single, arrived in town, they could find lodging at many friendly houses of their brethren and secure quick work.
One option awaiting new arrivals was a package deal for housing and work with Dick Myers Sr. over at his docks off West 6th Street. “If they worked for Myers fishery, they lived in this shanty,” Parker explained. Years earlier the shanty bunkhouse housed the curiously named Berkley Fishing Club. “It was like a boys’ dormitory; it was a mess.” And as often happened over the years, the hard life of an unmarried fisherman could lead to bad habits. Most of the Myers fisherman would spend their down time a few blocks away at Paul Kaetzel’s bar, now known as Kubel’s. “They would go there with their pay and unfortunately most of them became alcoholics.”
Some would get a room in one of several cottages that were open to fellow countrymen. One place where “they could find a place to stay would be Gudney and Jack Svelling’s house, which is still standing [on the Boulevard next to the Barnegat Light firehouse],” Parker said. “They had made the second floor into an apartment.”
Another was the home of Otto and Evelyn Olsen. They put the whole thing up for rent, in fact, one year. It was the Dallands who would take up their offer, and helped Otto build a new larger house next door, according to Parker. “That’s what [the Olsen’s daughter] Anna Lisa called the ‘big house,’ and the other the ‘little house.’” Moving in next door to each other deepened a life-long friendship between the two. And it was on this block that an era began when all the Scandinavian ladies organized daily gatherings to socialize and harmonize in the old ways of their country.
Parker fondly remembers the daily ritual and how it brought nearly everyone together. “At 3 o’clock every day they had what they called ‘coffee klatsch.’ You had to come in from playing outside, have a bath, change out of your play clothes, and we played indoor games – parcheesi, monopoly, checkers. Then my mother, if she was the hostess, would serve whatever this delicious coffee cake was with coffee. So, the kids and Norwegian women would get together. I’m sure [for the women] it was just crying on each other’s shoulders. But it was all in Norwegian.”
These touches of the old country in their new country remained a constant. Around the holidays, these traditions made for especially memorable and warm times.
“My father and I would go in the spring and pick out our Christmas tree” on Barnegat Light’s formerly wide, brush-filled bayside meadows. “I didn’t know what he did, but we would pick out a tree that was almost perfect. Of course, one part of it probably didn’t have any branches on it. But what my father did was go get another tree a couple weeks before Christmas and he would bring them down to the dock to drill holes in them, replace [the bare spots] with real branches, then made a stand for it.” For Christmas Eve, Ingeborg would often play hostess, which meant a lot of preparation. “They’d cook all these fancy cookies until 3 o’clock in the morning.” Then friends, and the single fishermen from their bunks and guest rooms, would descend on the Dalland cottage and find a little bit of home a world away in Barnegat Light. “That’s the first time I ever saw a man cry. We’re singing these songs, ‘Jeg er saa glad hver Julekveld’ [‘I am so glad each Christmas Eve’], and we’d clap our hands. Seeing these grown men — tears running down their faces — clapping their hands, and singing their hearts out,” it was a scene Parker still remembers fondly. “And everybody played an instrument. My mother played the guitar. My father didn’t so he taught himself to play on the harmonica.”
Little Edith, though, also welcomed new traditions from the country she and her little sister Jane were born into. “I liked to read by flashlight at nighttime my favorite book ‘Dick, Jane & Baby,’” Parker said, an early influence from the Barnegat Light one-room school and a special teacher.
Hessie Younghans, the sole teacher of first through fifth grade at the Barnegat City School in the late 1930s, “was the best thing that ever happened to any of us,” Parker stated matter-of-factly. “Because we were Norwegian, do you think any of us ever heard of red light-green light? Do you think we ever heard of Prisoner’s bars? Liberty batball? Softball? Tennis? Nothing, none of that. And spelling bees.” Parker credits Younghans with introducing American games, culture, and patriotic identity to her generation, ideas which they took home with them and excitedly shared with their parents.
Where the old and the new ways mixed would often be at Hans Benestad’s Bar & Grille, formerly located on the site of Daymark Bar & Restaurant. In the winter, Parker detailed, Benestad had a clubhouse at the West 6th Street docks. “That’s where I learned to ice skate on the bay” when it was frozen over. Inside, occupants would play cribbage. On Saturdays at the bar, Hans would host a Norska celebration. “And they would play all Norwegian songs. There were more tears in there than there were in a hospital. Everybody reminisced after a couple of beers.” The dart games played there were a “big deal,” according to Parker.
It was a life that required effort and did not benefit from most of the conveniences of modern life that would arrive in the decades ahead. It was, indeed, peaceful for the most part as Ingvald had predicted when he first set eyes on Barnegat Light. But it was not without hardship and tragedy as a consequence of the time and the “god-forsaken” remote place Ingeborg once described.
Many who knew him still remember Dr. Bill Dodd; a sort of frontier doctor who did it all and served the community tirelessly. Parker is one of those who owes much to his care.
All the children were “petrified” of Dodd, she remembered. A big guy with a jiggling belly, but a “heart as big as gold.” The experience of receiving vaccinations from him at school is traumatizing for Parker to this day. But later experiences exemplified that everything he did was because he cared so deeply for everyone who came under his care.
One July when she was twelve years old, Parker caught a bad splinter coming back from the beach. “Blood was pumping out of my foot. It was terrible.” At that time during the war there was a triage center in Brant Beach akin to today’s urgent care facilities. “If you went there at 10 o’clock in the morning you were lucky if you saw somebody by 5 or 6 o’clock in the afternoon,” Parker explained. Her mother was trained in first aid as part of the war effort and she did what she could with what was on hand, getting a piece of the splinter out and putting on a salve. But the condition of her foot worsened. “It blew up in size,” Parker recounts. “I think I wore a size five [shoe] and I had one of my girlfriend’s size eights on that foot.” She ended up on crutches for the rest of the summer and as school approached, her foot was not improving. A return visit to the triage center that included x-rays could not come up with any explanations. Ingvald decided it was time to take her to Dr. Dodd, who was in great demand not only at his Island office but as the primary surgeon at the old Paul Kimball hospital in Lakewood. The wait to see him, if he was called away, meant a long day in the waiting room. When it was suggested they might come back tomorrow, Parker’s mother declared, “Vee vill stay.” Finally, late in the day, Dodd took Parker back to examine her.
The infection on the bottom of Parker’s foot indicated something was very wrong. After an examination and more x-rays Dodd was unable to find the cause and asked Ingeborg to approve exploratory surgery. “Well,” said Parker. “My mother was okay with anything at this point.”
When Dodd began to perform the procedure, Parker began to sweat. “Whatever they injected didn’t take. And he looked at me [asking], ‘Can you feel this!?’ He felt so bad. He reached over and he laid me down. Told [his nurse and wife] Mabel, ‘Get another pillow.’ I don’t know what they gave me [then], but it knocked me out.”
After he was done, Dodd revealed that the cause of all the trouble was a long sliver of wood that he removed from the arch of her foot; and wood is undetectable by x-rays. What happened next brought a smile to Parker’s face and a warmth in her voice all these years later.
Dr. Dodd was an avid shell collector and kept a large cedar chest of them he’d accumulated all over the world in his waiting room. “This man, after it was all said and done and I came out of it, had seen see me looking at the big cedar chest of shells.” To Dodd, these were ones he didn’t want to keep and had available for any child to take. “But nobody did,” said Parker. “We were all just so polite” and put them back after looking at them.
In surgical recovery, Dodd came in and asked Parker, “‘Do you like shells?’ I said, oh yeah, I got a collection of shells. And he picked me up and carried me into his private office. And he’s showing me all of these shells, some came from some place in South America, that one came from Nigeria.”
A huge one in the yard entrance caught every child’s eye. “He said, ‘when you leave, go out and you can write your name on there,’” Parker divulged. “But make sure you write it near the bottom because I don’t want anybody else to see it. [This way] I know you were here.’
Parker smiled and looked away wistfully. “He was my buddy from that time on.”
Dodd would always go the extra mile if it could help someone. He proved it again for the Dallands when Parker’s older stepbrother became ill.
A son from Ingvald’s brief first marriage in Norway, Sven was a bashful, shy boy, according to Parker. He wanted to emigrate and be with his father years before, but there were rules in place about such things and standards that had to be met. So, Sven remained in Norway with family. When he finally emigrated at age eighteen it was difficult adjusting to a new country, new people, and a new stepfamily.
Not long after he arrived, he began feeling sick. He didn’t say anything at the time to his father or stepmother, and the men at the dock who he fell in with fishing thought he was just reacting to something in the local water. Their solution, which helped them in similar situations, was an old-style laxative that came in bar form resembling chocolate. What Sven and they did not know was his ailment was in fact appendicitis. His condition was worse when he began suffering from severe dehydration due to the effects of the laxative. When his appendix burst and his condition became dire, the Dallands immediately called Dr. Dodd. Parker remembered that day with a soft, sad voice.
“Dr. Dodd drove from his house down in Beach Haven all the way up to Barnegat Light, picked [Sven] up, carried him out to his car, wrapped him in a blanket, drove all the way to Lakewood and operated on him. He died on the operating table.”
It was a tragedy that affected the family for the rest of their lives. “I don’t think my father ever really recovered.” Parker still has knick-knacks that Sven made displayed in her Beach Haven Gardens home today, alongside old family treasures including a tapestry made by her Norwegian grandmother with a stitched message sending a greeting.
Parker had many other adventures and memorable times growing up then making her own life on Long Beach Island. But those are for another day. Some of her earliest days recounted
here paint a portrait of a simpler time when the American dream could be realized if you just put your mind and back into it, when little girls and their fathers walked the sunny meadows in search of Christmas trees, and when mothers and fathers sat by their children’s bedsides enveloped by the sweet soft breath of the sea to sing them to sleep. This was Barnegat Light once upon a time.
