Old-School Back to School: Looking Back at the Labor Day Exodus
By Dave Coskey
The end of summer was always a sad and tough time for generations of kids lucky enough to spend their summers at the Jersey Shore. For them, the dog days of August signaled the inevitable: the coming of Labor Day weekend. It meant it was time to gather your belongings, start saying goodbye to summer friends, pack the family car, and prepare to go back to school. Families would pile into the car after the last day of school and spend the entire summer at the Shore. This was home until Labor Day weekend.
Forget what the weather forecast might indicate, as it does now; the school calendar signaled the end of summer for parents and kids alike. Schools and even most colleges didn’t begin classes until a day or two after the Monday holiday. Today, the reality is that most colleges are in session by mid-August and more local school districts are beginning before Labor Day rather than after. Add in the demands of fall sports leagues, and over the past two decades, Labor Day weekend has been rendered just another fall weekend, albeit with an extra day.
But back in the day, weather permitting, most families would try to make the most of every possible minute of their summer. Sure, some parents might sacrifice a day, much to their children’s chagrin, hoping to “beat the traffic” by leaving on Sunday, but most families stayed put and added to the mass exodus on Monday. Cars were overstuffed with people and boxes; traffic was always what you might imagine on Labor Day – a disaster that often stretched late into the night for those who decided to hang in there for at least part of the day on the beach on Monday. After all, it was the final opportunity to spend a Monday on the beach until next Memorial Day.
The long drive home gave kids who had spent their summer having more fun than their friends back home could ever imagine lots of time to think while stuck in traffic. And thoughts invariably wandered to those friends that they left behind. The “lucky” kids. The kids who lived in shore towns. Summer and winter.
Occasionally, during the summer, conversations would stray to what it was like “here” once everyone went home. There were always jokes about “getting our town back” once everyone else goes home on Labor Day. What was it like to live in this place that seemed magical to summer visitors?
The answer? Living at the Shore was much like living anywhere else, albeit with some special benefits. The day after Labor Day, kids at the shore got dressed in their school clothes and headed off to their first day of school just like their summer friends who finally made it home but extremely late on Labor Day.
“Labor Day to me?” says Joe LaRosa, a retired educator who grew up in Sea Isle City. “It meant that I had to put my shoes back on. I had taken them off after my last day of school back in June and hadn’t put them back on since. Labor Day meant that it was time to put my shoes back on. I hated that.”
“I always remember riding my bike down to Hoy’s, to get supplies that I needed for school,” says Pat Maier (nee Cremin), who now resides in Ocean County but grew up in Avalon. “There was no one on the road, great for riding your bike, and once you got to Hoy’s, you had the entire store to yourself. I loved that.”
Just like her summer friends, Maier needed to shop for school clothes. For that, she relied on several local summer favorites supplemented by national and regional chain stores at the closest mall, which was in Pleasantville.
“I remember shopping at Moxie and the Mimi Shop; both located in Stone Harbor,” she says. “I remember that the Mimi Shop had lots of Hang Ten clothing, which was pretty cool at the time. And of course we’d also go up to Sears, too.”
Summer kids were home, probably heading to the Cherry Hill, Granite Run or Echelon malls or even the King of Prussia Plaza (which believe it or not, hadn’t blossomed into a full indoor mall yet).
Kids at the shore kept it closer to home. Andy Bednarek, who grew up in Sea Isle City, found much of what he needed at Libertella’s Dry Goods on Landis Avenue. Near the site of Diamonds Liquors today, Libertella’s was one of the county’s earliest dry goods stores and carried clothing for summer and winter, including winter coats. “And they had a couple of curtained dressing rooms in the back of the store to try things on,” he still can remember many years later. In the years after Libertella’s closed Anthony Edwardi remembers, “We always shopped Sands first,” they always had much of what we needed for school.”
Another Sea Isle City local, Mike Monichetti, owner of Mike’s Seafood, still has vivid memories of heading north, but not necessarily to the Shore Mall in Pleasantville. “We’d go to Garwood Mills, a department store located just outside of Atlantic City,” he says. “We’d make a day of getting ready for school. It was always that last week of August.”
Shopping was only part of the end-of-summer experience for the Monchettis. “We’d also go over to Captain Starn’s in the inlet,” he notes. A world-famous restaurant and attraction at the time, Starn’s also offered ocean motorboat and sailing rides along with live marine animal attractions. “They had seals,” he remembers with a smile. “We’d buy small bags of herring to feed them. After we fed them, we’d walk up the boardwalk to Salty Dogs, which was a stand on the boardwalk with incredible hot dogs.”
After feeding and being fed, Monichetti would grab his new garb, including a suit jacket (then a requirement at St. Joseph’s Regional School in SIC) and a new winter coat, before heading back to the family’s fish market, which was a Sea Isle City landmark even back then.
“We had summer and winter friends,” Bednarek explains. “After your summer friends left, and you collected their addresses so that you could write to them, to be honest, we whooped it up,” he added with an impish grin. “The ocean was still warm, so we’d be on the beach after school or surfing. We fished, too. I remember fishing from a lifeguard boat. Walking down the Promenade, you could still envision the beaches being filled with sunbathers and umbrellas. But we had it to ourselves.” Just as most summer kids imagined.
“I remember the sense of freedom [post Labor Day] that we all felt,” says Marybeth Campanella (nee Buchanan), formally of Avalon but now a Monmouth County resident. You could ride your bike anywhere and everywhere in town. And the tennis courts were open all the time. For Campenella, shopping for school clothes often meant a trip to The Shore Mall. “There were two stores where we shopped, Horsefeathers and The Deb Shoppe,” she notes.
Campanella and Maier attended the Avalon School at 30th Street and Ocean Drive and then Middle Township High School. Chuck Gargan, another Avalon native, now living in the Orlando, FL area. has a couple of years on some of the others mentioned here. He attended the old Avalon School then located on 26th Street. He still has memories of the two-room school. “My brother Tom reminded me of something really funny pertaining to the old Avalon School. The teachers would occasionally give us apples at lunch, and they were usually awful. They were mushy with big brown spots.
At recess we would take them outside and try to throw them up into the Chimney! That old school also had a dunce corner for those who were in trouble and you were shamed in front of the whole school. It was a chair facing a corner and the person being punished had to wear a cone-shaped hat.” Despite the memories of embarrassing punishment, Gargan still has warm feelings for his days at the Avalon School. “It’s the only time in my life that I can say that I actually looked forward to being in school. Perhaps it was because it was so small and each class only had several students. I loved being there.”
Life for kids living at the Shore was actually very similar to their summer-only counterparts. They too got ready to head back to school but with a greater sense of freedom. Don Henley probably said it best in his song, “The Boys of Summer.” “Nobody on the road. Nobody on the beach. I feel it in the air. The summer’s out of reach.”
But not really. For those keeping track, once we hit Labor Day it’s only 266 days until Memorial Day 2026.