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Real Estate
in Spring Lake NJ
Real Estate in Spring Lake New Jersey is a very valuable commodity. It’s one of the most exclusive New
Jersey Communities and probably the most exclusive community by the New Jersey Shore. The proximity to the beach make this
small shore community a beautiful place to live or vacation.
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From APP
Author looks to
island for inspiration
Book reveals images from past
BY KIRK MOORE
TOMS RIVER BUREAU
HARVEY CEDARS —
In a small red-trimmed house alongside Barnegat Bay,
near the little cove named for her grandfather, Margaret Thomas Buchholz
has spent years sorting and poring over photo archives.
Organizing her own family collection is still a future
project. But the Long Beach
Island writer and
editor used some of those images among the 320 photographs in her latest
effort, "Island Album." The 207-page book shows the island and
its people from the late 1800s to the present, including many images that
disappeared into attics generations ago and have never been seen in public
before.
A half-dozen volumes carry her name, but writing books is a
second act for Buchholz. She published the Beachcomber weekly newspaper in
Ship Bottom for more than 30 years, a career that gave her a depth of
knowledge about the Shore and its history — and a trove of
photographs.
"I didn't write my first book until I was 60, when I sold
the newspaper," Buchholz recalled, as a sailboat ghosted past outside
in a faint morning breeze.
For a first try, it was a home run. "Great Storms of the
Jersey Shore," written by Buchholz and Larry Savadove in 1993, remains
a classic coastal book now in its ninth printing, still referred to by
weather historians and cited in scientific studies.
In her new book, Buchholz makes a cameo appearance at age 5,
in a photo labeled Poochy Thomas. The childhood nickname comes from the
German phrase for "little doll,' and it's stuck with her through an
adult life of remarkable work.
"With any project that Poochy is involved in, I always
know the end product will be more than originally anticipated," said
Ray Fisk of Down the Shore Publishing, Buchholz's longtime book publisher
and collaborator. "She's sort of like the Energizer Bunny of archival
researchers."
Sifted through photos
Now 73, Buchholz pulled a number of threads together to knit
"Island Album." First was the enormous Lynn Photo Service archive
that owner Carl "Van' Thulin assembled over decades, including
hundreds of historic images and the prodigious work of 20th-century island
photographer Bill Kane.
Some pictures were already well-known, "but hundreds of
them had never been seen," Buchholz said. Still, as Buchholz sorted
and selected the photographs by categories — beachgoers, old hotels,
fishing — she began to think there weren't enough.
"So I went back into my old photo archives from the
Beachcomber. . . and sort of mined them," Buchholz said. Still
wanting, she went into her personal photos, her family's, "and started
bugging my friends.
"Then I'd wind up with a quote without a photo, or a
photo and I didn't have a good quote to go with it," Buchholz said,
"and it went on from there, until Ray finally said "Stop! Stop!'
"
The quotes in the book likewise came from disparate and
previously unpublished sources, including a 1940s diary, Buchholz's
interviews with people, and tapes from the Long Beach Island
Historical Museum
"porch rocker" talks of the 1980s when longtime residents spoke
about island history.
Some come from Buchholz's family. After all, they've been here
since the mid-1800s.
Father was a Marine
Buchholz's father Reynold Thomas was related to the Kinsey
family, who in the late 1800s owned half of present-day Harvey Cedars and
left its name at Kinsey Cove. After serving in the Marine Corps during
World War I, Thomas came home and worked in the Kinseys' eelgrass business
— raking mats of sea grass washed up in Barnegat Bay,
drying and packing it for use as padding in coffins, house insulation and
Model T car passenger seats.
He went to work in New
York City for the Thomas family import-export
business, where he met and married his wife, Josephine, a writer and
editor. The family business failed during the Depression.
"I was born in New
York and brought down as a baby, and they never
left. They carved out a life down here," Buchholz said. "It was a
gorgeous, picturesque place."
Thomas worked as a fisherman before buying a small dredging
barge in the mid-1930s. In the decades before government environmental
regulations, landowners and builders contracted with Thomas to fill in the
island's many low, marshy areas.
In the 1940s he became mayor of Harvey Cedars, a post he held
until his death in 1983. Thomas and his Barnegat Bay Dredging Co. became famous
after the great March 1962 storm, when he filled a new inlet the storm cut
through his town, and kept Long
Beach Island
in one piece.
Marriage, baby, business
By then, Thomas' daughter was running her own business.
The Beachcomber weekly was started in 1950 by Don Craig, a
summer resident who worked in the New
York City publishing industry and saw the
potential for a newspaper geared to the summer population, Buchholz said.
"I got a job working on it when I was in college,"
she said. "I worked there for three summers, selling ads and writing
stuff."
After graduating from Cedarcrest College
in 1954 with an English degree, Buchholz applied for a teaching job at the
then-new elementary school in Ship Bottom.
"I remember my interview with the principal," Buchholz
said. "He told me, "You're qualified to be little more than the
wife of a banker or a lawyer. I showed him."
In 1955, she married Bill Douglas, editor of the Beach Haven
Times newspaper. That same year, Don Craig "wanted to sell the
newspaper. So we bought it. I think it was $6,000," Buchholz said.
"I got married, bought a newspaper, and had a baby, all in one
year."
Two years later Bill Douglas died, leaving his wife with two
children under age 3.
"He died in April and the paper had to start in May, and
one of the real estate guys said to my father . . . "What's going to
happen to the paper?' " Buchholz said.
Reynold Thomas replied: "Poochy's going to run it."
"And he said, "But she's just a girl!' "
Buchholz recalled. "I carried on. The paper grew and grew and
grew."
Delivering papers
Buchholz remarried and divorced, living in New York and other cities but returning
to the island every spring. By the mid-1960s, the Beachcomber was delivered
door to door on the island and southern Ocean County
mainland, Buchholz said. Its circulation peaked around 50,000 and she
remained the very definition of a hands-on publisher.
I was delivering papers — something had happened to the
delivery person — and I was hauling these big piles of Beachcombers
out to the sidewalk in front of the drugstore. All these old guys were
hanging out, waiting for the papers," Buchholz said.
"As I dragged them out and threw them on the ground, one
of the guys said to the other, "What a cheap outfit, hiring girls to
do this work!' I thought, you don't know how cheap this outfit is."
With its essays and art, the Beachcomber was as much a local
literary magazine as newspaper. During the 1980s, Buchholz began thinking
about selling to the right buyer. She ultimately came to an agreement with
Curt Travers, publisher of the Sandpaper weekly newspaper, who bought the
Beachcomber and kept her on as editor.
"It was when I sold the Beachcomber that I had the
freedom, the time, to do this," Buchholz said of her books.
"Most people are very eager to tell their stories,"
she said. "In all the years I've been doing this, I got turned down
twice. And once was by Katharine Hepburn. That was great."
Katharine Hepburn called
During her research for the storms book, Buchholz remembered
the film star's account of the 1938 Long Island hurricane in Hepburn's 1991
autobiography "Me: Stories of My Life."
The publisher rejected a request to excerpt the passage.
Undeterred, Buchholz found an address for Hepburn through a family friend,
and wrote a letter asking permission to use the anecdote.
"I was sitting here one February day working, when the
phone rang and this familiar voice said, "Hello, this is Katharine
Hepburn.' That low voice . . . The first thing she says is, "You
spelled my name wrong.'
"Here I am, an editor, a writer, a newspaper publisher,
and I spelled her name wrong!" Buchholz said, laughing at the
appalling memory. "I knew I was toast when that happened."
Buchholz never did hear from Hepburn again. She does get
out-of-the-blue feedback when someone spots a long-forgotten image in one
of her books.
"I got my first fan mail for this book," Buchholz
said, drawing on envelope out of a stacked bookshelf. "Fellow in Beach
Haven wrote to tell me he's the guy standing barefoot in the Antlers bar
with his back to the camera."
Buchholz said she enjoys seeing people make those moments of
personal connection to her work. One thing she tries to achieve in
"Island Album," she said, is "how the land changed, how the
geography changed, but how the people on the beach, the people playing in
the bay, they may have different fashions but they're doing the same thing.
They're having the same kind of fun."
.
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Tip #19
Home Buying Tip, Online Searching:
Searching online is a very effective way to look for real estate in New Jersey, or
anywhere for that matter. Good
websites allow you to search through multiple MLS’s so you can
cover a wide range. For example
here you can Search for
NJ Real Estate.
After you find the house you are
interested in you can inquiry with the real estate agency to find out
more information or to arrange an appointment to view the house.
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Tip #18
Home Selling Tip, Targeting Out Of State:
When you sell your home you sometimes have to put yourself in the
potential buyers’ shoes. In New Jersey many home buyers are from the
surrounding area, like New York or Pennsylvania.
Knowing this can allow your agent to
market your house more effectively.
If he/she will advertise in a New York publication they can describe
the proximity to NY. This allows
your potential Buyer Base to expand.
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