Here's the story.

I think that's one of the really most compelling things about the Jersey Coast is that there just are so many different towns, so many different people, and so many different experiences.

Have you always considered yourself a writer or a storyteller?

Is this something that goes back to childhood?

Over the years, little by little, I just, you know, I always did enjoy writing because for me, I mean, some people it might be, you know, sculpting or painting or whatever, but for me, words were always kind of my go-to.

I could express myself better that way than any other way.

When I was a kid, I would take my brother's books, and you know, a book will have a blank page, an intentionally blank page.

Well, I thought those were blank pieces of paper that are meant to be written on.

So I would take my Crayolas or whatever I could find and write in his books.

So he didn't like that, but I think that was my first stab at writing, ruining all his books.

I've always wanted, first of all, to sort of bear witness, you know, to what's going on in the world and people and life around me.

Even before I really started doing it, I always thought, "Okay, someday I'm going to sit around and be writing about these things."

In fact, I don't know if you can see it, but this wood stove right here kept us warm in the winter, and I would sit here and read the newspaper every day.

As a kid?

As a kid.

13, 14, you know.

My earliest memory, I think I was eight years old, when I decided I was going to be a writer in some capacity.

And then there's family footage, there's family photos of, you know, that support that idea that I was always going to be a writer.

It was always a way I was able to express myself way better than, you know, written word versus spoken word.

I've always been able to get out what I was feeling, what I thought about things better on paper than out loud.

And I think this interview is already case in point.

I'm always looking for work, though, as most artists are, and always sort of cobbling it together.

I left corporate America at a pretty young age.

I worked in strategy on Madison Avenue.

I worked in strategy on Madison Avenue.

And after 9/11, I sort of went underground.

I was very fortunate that I could always say through my whole career, I was a writer.

I was an English major.

I went to Rutgers in New Jersey, and I knew even at Rutgers, I didn't wanna teach.

And so what's an English major going to do if the English major doesn't teach?

And I was lucky, I got to be a technical writer, which is not very exciting, but it paid the bills.

And I always did freelance writing on the side.

And my freelance was 99.9% of the time about Atlantic City.

- I'm never away from my writing.

I write for a living, so I'm always writing something.

If I'm not writing, I'm editing.

I'm thinking about writing.

I'm thinking about ideas.

So that's a big chunk of my life, is writing.

It's a big part of my identity, so I'm always writing.

But at my heart, I love for myself to write poetry and essays.

But you just have to do whatever your vision is and set it free.

And the other thing I'll say is if you can find something, if you can produce something that is true and that resonates and that opens people's eyes, people will find it eventually.

Maybe not right away, maybe not today or tomorrow, but things like that, they'll last.

And that's one thing I love about the Beach Badge is making a publication, it's becoming a storehouse for all these memories that can't get published anywhere else.

I consider this almost like a documentary record of the Jersey Shore.

And we don't have any other institutions doing that type of thing.

I moved away from Manahawken after I graduated high school.

I was away for 20 years.

And my mother got cancer in November 2023, and I moved back here home, in the family home, to take care of her.

And so for me, I would come once a week, one week a year for holidays and stuff and see everybody.

But this was my first time living back at the shore in 20 years and taking stock of how much had changed here in Manahawken and on Long Beach Island, but also how much it changed among the people and of course, maybe most of all, within myself and experiencing these places and memories that I really hadn't been near for a long time.

I was out on the beach one day, this is after I'd come home, and I saw a guy with a metal detector and it like set off a dim bulb in my light that my mother and I, she got a metal detector at some point and we went out here and I must have been young, I don't know if it was seven or eight or nine or ten, and I said I bet we still had that metal detector and I went up in the attic and it's a metal detector from a little company in Oregon that was going right up until I think a couple years ago and so I took it out there I loaded it up with batteries and it still worked.

I've got to take it back out again.

I took it out a few times it was pretty cool.

I spent my youth tromping through the pines, creeks, and marshes that permeate our bayside town.

Our gang of friends is always on a new expedition or game of manhunt, pushing through bramble, lingering in open fields, stalking creeks and lagoons, pedaling our bikes along sandy dirt trails, and collecting our own treasures.

One year we found an empty treehouse, other times it was fired shotgun shells, discarded dirty magazines, an abandoned car, a pipe bomb.

I've tried to go back and see some of these places, but some are no longer passable.

Low-lying patches of forest surrounding the Estuarine Creek are now frequently flooded and swamped for months on end, something we never saw in our youth beyond a few days a year.

I can still find the pleasures that remain, often the sweetest of surprises, or that have sprung up since my leaving.

I buy papers and coffee from the man who sold my father cigars when I was growing up, who still helms the register of the corner store he owns in our neighborhood.

On the same block, I can eat the best pizza on earth from a baker who's been tossing pies since I was in grade school.

There's the rural majesty of Battsdale Mansion, the steps of which I climbed one day for the first time since childhood, and the meandering trails of Wharton State Forest.

Summoning the top of Old Barney, beating against the sky with its fresh paint on flawless days as sublime as ever.

Asbury Park still retains some of its majestic ruins for now.

Driving south to meander through a half-abandoned Hamilton Mall, I found a CD vinyl store with stocks of Kim Gordon, Tame Impala, Dropkick Murphys, and Mephiscopheles.

And here now comes Beach Badge, a publication finally devoted to telling our stories.

I personally regard the shore, I mean there are different people have different interpretations.

I mean there are people who simply see that as the beach or maybe just the barrier islands.

And for me I kind of regard it as the entirety of the coastal seaboard of Jersey.

I regard it holistically as the shore.

I think in my view that a lot of people if they're from outside the area looking in or aren't familiar with the area, they have a sort of monolithic interpretation of what the Jersey Shore is, that it's just this big region.

And the reality of that is that it's actually, it's like 127 odd miles or so of like all these wildly disparate little fiefdoms that all cater to completely different, you know, clientele and individuals and lifestyles.

And I think that's really part of the magic of the Jersey Shore is that there is so much here.

My name is Patrick Tandy and I grew up along the Jersey Shore, primarily in Manahawken and Long Beach Island area.

I have lived in Baltimore for the last 25 years.

So to preface the background of Beach Badge, not long after I moved to Baltimore from Jersey around the beginning of 2000, I just, Baltimore is an interesting city.

It is like interesting people, interesting experiences.

And I just found myself like coming up with all these like a little interesting anecdotal stories that, you know, I thought, I got to write that down.

That's just a funny encounter or something poignant or whatever.

And Small Hunter in Baltimore basically collected, in the beginning, it was my stories of just my experiences in Baltimore.

But then beginning a few issues in, I got to meeting enough people, making enough acquaintances that I said, you know, there's, the city is rife with all these great stories that don't necessarily have an outlet.

And so I opened it up to submissions.

And for about 15 years I published Smile Hunter in Baltimore and I did about 30 issues of it, I think.

And it was a crazy array of people that we had.

I mean, it was everybody from school teachers to, you know, city homicide detectives were still, you know, would submit poetry and little anecdotes and essays and, you know, personal experience.

And it was really, really pretty cool.

And I had this idea in the back of my mind that I wanted to take this formula and take it back home to like the area I was from, because I had lots of friends in the area and all.

And I know we had, we alone had like all kinds of crazy stories and great stories of, you know, growing up or visiting the area.

And I just thought, you know, this, I think it could be really compelling.

And so I waited and waited, and I just hadn't really quite felt that spark or drive yet.

And then it was, I think in 2021 or 22, it was right after the hump of like the pandemic when everything had shut down.

And, you know, we had used to enjoy taking longer term, longer distance vacations and things, but we hadn't for, you know, a year or two there, we didn't go anywhere or do anything.

So it was easy to start coming back.

Like in the summertime, we'd come back a few weekends, come to the shore, three hours away, it's not that bad.

And as I come back, I was meeting up with people, revisiting some of the old haunts, but also meeting new people, and also creating new experiences and stories.

And it just slowly started to like melt and click in my mind.

And I thought, this might be the time.

And I sat there for the longest time and I tried to like, what am I gonna, what is this thing gonna be called?

Like, because I want something that conveys what it is, but at the same time it has to be Jersey.

It's not just like a, you know, it's not just a salt life thing, beach thing or whatever, it's gotta be Jersey.

And one day I just had that like aha moment and I'm like, what singular thing screams Jersey Shore without any question or shadow of a doubt than anything else.

Beach Badge.

>> Tell me about your connection to Patrick and Beach Badge.

How did you connect with him?

How did he find you or you found him?

>> I believe that Patrick read my book because it takes place in Atlantic City.

It's all about Atlantic City and he is a shore boy.

He loves the beach.

He's got salt water in his blood and sand in his shoes.

We were on different beaches but he's a Jersey Shore fanatic.

I think that's why we connected.

And then he read my book and then he asked me if he could use excerpts in Beach Badge, his literary magazine.

And I'm excited for him because, as I said, I love New Jersey and the Jersey Shore and what a great literary topic for his magazine.

I was living back in Washington.

This was a couple years ago before I came home.

And I have a friend who grew up in Barney at Light on Long Beach Island.

And she said, hey, there's this lit scene of the Jersey Shore.

And I was sort of shocked and also excited.

Shocked because now I grew up here in Mannah-Hawken, I can say, in Southern Ocean County.

We don't have a ton of culture.

And I don't mean that as a slight.

I mean, growing up, we played in punk bands and ska bands.

And you had to go rent a music hall.

Maybe it was the Knights of Columbus, or we had a father, friend's father who was a pastor.

So we would put on our own shows.

You had to make your own things if you wanted to do it.

We made a little lit scene at the high school.

We'd take like lunch break, and we'd go print out like a hundred copies, poetry and photos and stories and stuff.

But you have to do those things at the Jersey Shore.

Nobody's gonna do them for you.

You know, to the north, you've got Red Bank and Asbury Park.

You know, there's cultural scenes up there.

When you go down south to Atlantic City, there's cultural scene down there.

There's things happening, artists and writers and musicians together.

But for us in this stretch of the shore, we always sort of had to do it ourselves.

And so I was thrilled to see somebody else, a Manohawkin local, no less.

Patrick and I, we never knew each other growing up.

I think we're a few years apart.

But it was just great for somebody to be writing the stories of the shore.

And not just the sort of acceptable Chamber of Commerce stories like, "Oh, the shore is great.

The water is warm."

You know, but like real stories of people that lived here and what their experience has been like over, you know, many decades.

I think there's a lot of value in that.

>> He's got guts.

He has guts.

And he puts so much time and energy and resource into it just because he loves it.

And it would be great if you had all that and you got financial backing or support.

But it makes it all the more special that he's doing it just for sheer love, not for finances.

So he's got guts.

So I wrote the first story in the book.

The book is a collection of short stories.

The first story that I wrote, I wanted to record my parents, their story of surviving the Holocaust.

And then I also wanted to record their story of resilience, of being able to survive that horror, and then being able to come to a new country and learn a new language and find a new life and a profession, which happened to be running this hotel in Atlantic City.

So that's why I wrote that first story.

And then my friends would say to me, "Well, why don't you write about something else that happened and remember the story about this, remember that guy, this."

So eventually there was two stories and there were four stories and there were six stories and then the book became 17 stories about my parents and how they learned to adapt to this new world, new country, new culture in Atlantic City.

After living 15 years on a chicken farm in Vineland, New Jersey, where dozens and dozens of other Holocaust survivors had also found new homes, my family moved to Atlantic City to try their hand in the hotel business.

At the suggestion of several Holocaust survivors who had already moved into the hotel business, my parents rented an entire hotel on Park Place across from the classic Claridge Hotel in 1966.

Similar to a rent with an option to buy deal, my parents operated the hotel from Memorial Day to Labor Day, getting their feet wet literally and figuratively, just steps away from the beach and boardwalk.

I'm not sure if my parents were scared of the new venture they were trying out.

Like most kids, I was oblivious to their fears and concerns, or maybe they simply did their best to keep the anxiety out of my narrow world.

When guests would check in, I would play bellhop by accompanying them to their rooms, which almost always earned me at least 25 cents since they thought my attempts to carry a small bag were so cute.

That payoff guaranteed me several hours of pinball at the neighboring Empress Motel.

After a successful year at the Sheltonham, my parents sold the farm in Vineland and we moved to Atlantic City permanently.

They rented out hotels for the summer season two more years before purchasing the Seacrest Hotel in 1970.

During the school year, we lived in a three-bedroom apartment facing the beach on Atlantic and Jackson Avenues.

On the Ventnor side, just north of Jackson Avenue, was Atlantic City, and the other side was Ventnor.

Once school ended, I looked forward to going to the hotel.

For me, it was a welcome break from residential life, time to breathe air that was not so tame.

Although Ventnor was only two miles away from the hotel in Atlantic City, it was hundreds of miles away in its definition of life.

Every day in Atlantic City brought a world to get lost in for a teenager.

Penny auctions with a shill planted in the third row.

Frozen custard swirled in a chocolate vanilla braid.

Miniature golf courses.

Mr.

Peanut giving away plastic bank replicas of himself.

And fortune tellers who couldn't read a word in a newspaper but were scholarly with any palm holding a five dollar bill.

Boardwalk arcades clanged with the sounds of ten cent pinball machines as the Italian ice vendor pawned his wares.

On the corner of St.

James Place and the boardwalk, the neon sign advertising the Seacrest Hotel could be seen halfway down the block with its "L" flashing and hissing throughout the night.

[Music] You know, there are very pronounced voices here, and yet at the same time, like, there are all of these great individual, personal stories that in many cases just sadly, like, die with people.

When they pass on, their stories go off into the ether.

And I like being able to preserve those moments.

I think bringing all, because all of that is, it's all part of the Shore story, and all part of the Shore diaspora.

You know, whether you're a visitor who came here every summer when you were growing up and now you're coming back, or you just discovered it last year, or you grew up here, or if you're like me, you grew up here and, you know, all your formative memories and experiences are here, and now, you know, you took that out into the world.

It's just kind of, it always fascinates me, every issue, when I put out the call for submissions, it's sort of like, you know, going out on the bay or the ocean and casting out your line.

You just never know what's gonna bite.

I think the thing about writing is that when you want other people to read it too much, then you start changing your processes and your stuff, and all of a sudden it's not necessarily sort of crystal pure within you.

That's sort of a fine line to walk.

I suppose it is important because if you put these words down on paper, you do it partially for yourself, but then it sort of validates it.

If somebody actually reads it, and then God forbid somebody actually gives you feedback, and then double God forbid they give you positive feedback.

But I think for a writer or an artist, the first time you sort of give that piece of you to the public, it's really scary.

Probably like giving a baby over to a stranger, your baby over to a stranger.

But it is a great feeling, like I said, for someone to want to read what you wrote and actually appreciate it.

There is a lot of work, hundreds of pages, tons of journals of work that I started, finished that never saw the light of day, still hasn't, that I wrote just to have for now, like maybe I'll use eventually.

But what I publish, yes, of course I want read.

And not only read, I want it to resonate.

I like to think that everything I put out now has a deeper purpose behind it that could help someone.

Over the years I developed a problematic relationship with this town, which very well may double as your home away from home.

I have had to say goodbye to friends in the funeral home directly across the street from every tourist's favorite ice cream shop.

The lines were always equally as long and I never appreciated the rigid dichotomy between us and them.

I lost my innocence and a number of car keys to the same waves that panicked beach goers were always pulling their chairs back from.

These dualities and experiences led to a growing difficulty in my being able to maintain my balance here.

I started to stumble over my own roots because my town remembered too much.

I was here before and after the hurricanes, both Sandy and the lonely one that ravaged above only my head.

I have been my happiest and my saddest here.

Coming back is not the same as never leaving.

If I had stayed, my resentment might have become irreversible.

Distance has helped me regain perspective.

Now I return with appreciation and gratefulness in my heart.

I visit with my old town and I am reminded that many good things happened here too.

Comfort and normality have returned and I don't white knuckle the steering wheel anymore as I drive down Route 35.

My parents are happy to see me here again and I am happy to not have to use my GPS for a few days.

I meet up with the ocean like I do an old friend who knows everything about me but still loves me anyway.

I am no longer jaded.

I can see why so many flock to these shores each summer.

Because this place does hold magic, but you can only conjure it if you believe in it enough.

And I believe again.

I think that the writer is always a witness and the writer is also always processing through their own moods, emotions.

When you think about what distinguishes really human writing, it's who you were in that moment.

And when I walked into Friedman's, it was this legendary bakery.

It was a reliable part of the Jersey Shore.

It was part of people's commutes in the morning.

You know, people would go in there, grab a bagel or a buttered roll and a cup of coffee and then go to the train because the train is right there.

It was a place that I knew that I would go get bread there with my grandfather after church on Sundays.

So it was that kind of place where I was walking into something that felt really familiar.

But once I started working there, that changes everything, at least a little bit, because now I'm on the other side of the counter.

And I'm also seeing, you know, how this place really functions.

And that might be what the writer does, is that the writer doesn't just accept it, but makes a note.

That day, after some more back and forth, I saw Saul's tattoo.

The one with the numbers.

Suddenly, I understood why it felt like Saul was defending his life with every forgotten tray he had tried to push past Josie.

Suddenly, I realized that old people had once just been people.

Sometimes I visit the old bakery, now home to a craft brewery, and I wonder if Saul is still here, haunting that place.

I wish him peace, of course, but it's kind of funny to imagine old Saul's ghost sighing.

Well, beer is not bread, but at least they use yeast.

Then I imagine Saul leaves, shaking his head, since there is no place left to stock his trays.

No one there to argue.

People love to wave to Saul and thank him for making the breads they couldn't.

They forgave him for sometimes slipping a freezer-burned cream puff into that case, and they definitely forgave him for the times he caused a ruckus.

I don't know how many heard Saul spit the word "Auschwitz" from between his teeth and his tears as he negotiated with his peers.

I imagine not too many customers got to see Saul like that and it was my special gift that I got for pedaling my bike along the train tracks just before sunrise three days a week and on alternating weekends.

So that was my summer of Saul, the first professional baker I ever got to know.

[MUSIC]