HMB Review of my book: “Princeton-by-the-Sea
Tuesday, January 8th, 2008
As a college student in the 1960s, June Morrall and friends would visit the Coastside and the funky ambience of Princeton.
As an adult, living on the coast and either writing professionally or working to support her passion for writing, she researched, chronicled and shared the history of the area she had come to love.
Her latest undertaking is “Images of America: Princeton-by-the-Sea” (Arcadia Publishing, 127 pages, $19.99) She visits Bay Book Company Friday to discuss her work.
In the style of Arcadia’s Images of America series, which profiles the histories and stories of small communities across the country, it tells Princeton’s story in photographs with detailed captions. Many are historical, but others might be familiar to today’s Coastsiders.
Princeton may be small and quiet, but over seven lively chapters, the book delves into the many worlds that unfolded there.
It presents Ocean Shore Railroad stretching to the beaches. It reveals the rumrunners and roadhouses that gave the area a whiff of scandal during Prohibition. Local icons, and colorful incidents attached to them, include Hazel’s restaurant (and the 1946 tidal wave that struck it) and Ida’s seafood eatery and the small “cannery row” it spawned.
Subsequent chapters follow the drag strip and racers, big waves and surfers, the beatniks that predated Pete Douglas and the Bach Dancing and Dynamite Society, and today’s Mavericks subculture.
“In this place and at one time there were 300 people” here, Morrall said, but “I knew there were layers of history taking place under the scenic photographs.”