It is 4^th Century, and we are in the southern part of large island called Brittania. A British Roman citizen by the name of Silvianus has lost something. Whether he was out all-night drinking spruce beer or wine, or just visiting friends, Silvianus has lost his prized gold ring. And Silvianus thinks he knows who took it, a guy by the name of Senicianus. You would think that it is time for the constable, or whatever law enforcement they had in the Roman Fort which would become Gloucestershire. Instead, Silvianus went to a higher power, the gods. He brought a curse down on the thief, and the curse and the ring itself would become part of the history of the region and perhaps the inspiration for one of the most famous rings in literature.

   Nobody knows when the ring was found, most believe that it was found around 1785, by a farmer that was plowing a field near Silchester, which is in Hampshire. Since archaeology was in its infancy during the 18th century, much is not known about its discovery or whether it was the only item found there. Archeologists know that area was settled by the Romans about 45 AD and nearby was a large archeological discovery of an Iron Age roman fort known as Calleva Atrebatum. The ring, made of solid gold, and inscribed with the words, “SENICIANE VIVAS IIN DE”, but it is believed by many that this is a misspelled Latin phrase and should have been "VIVAS IN DEO”, which means “Seniciane Live in God”, although there have been other translations about what the inscription means.

   When the ring was stolen from Silvianus, he went to the roman temple for the Celtic god Nondens and had a curse tablet made. This small tablet was made of lead and was inscribed:

To the god Nodens. Silvianus has lost a ring; he hereby gives half of it (i.e. half of its value) to Nodens. Among those who are called Senicianius, do not allow health until he brings it to the temple of Nodens

    Again, since the archeology at the time was sketchy at best, no one knows how or when the curse tablet and the ring made its way to its current residence, The Vyne, which is a 16^th Century country estate which is in Hampshire. In 1888, the owner of The Vyne, Chaloner W. Chute published a history of the estate including a small portion on the ring and the curse tablet.

    In 1929, Sir Mortimer Wheeler, an English archeologist, was working on the site where the temple of Nodens was located, and he made a connection with the ring and the curse to the site. Wheeler was unfamiliar with the etymology of the name Nodens, so he called in for help from a professor from Oxford University. This professor, whose main specialty was Anglo-Saxon and middle English language, was J.R.R. Tolkein. It is believed that during Wheeler’s discussion about the temple the ring was also discussed. 

   It was in 1937 when Tolkien released The Hobbit, and a major fulcrum in the story is the One Ring, which is made by the Dark Lord Sauron. The Ring will then resurface in 1954 when Tolkien released The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers.  Is the Ring of Silvianus the main inspiration for the One Ring in Tolkien’s mythical literature? Perhaps. Even though we have no written evidence of this, there are many scholars who believe that these conversations with Wheeler may have been the final inspiration that Tolkien needed to complete his literary world known as Middle-Earth. I have been a huge fan of Tolkien since I was a boy, and I read The Hobbit in elementary school. The mythical land that he created was inspired from earlier fantasy work, as well as Christianity, and his own experiences in World War One. And, perhaps, at its pinnacle is an old Roman ring…and a curse.

  

Haint Blue

 

   

   It is very interesting to know what motivates me to write. It is around 6:30 in the morning and I am working out at the gym before I go to school, and a text comes up from a friend, Rhoda Rae, “Have you heard of Haint Blue?” I confess that I didn’t know, because the claiming of ignorance is the first step to a new discovery, and next thing you know, you are down a rabbit hole on the color of blue, mysticism and folklore and culture of people known as the Gullah.

   Haint Blue is very southern. It comes from the slave trade when the Gullah people used blue, usually derived from indigo, to ward off evil spirits. They would make amulets or other talismans with the dye to protect the wearer from ghost and witches, also known as a boo hags. You might be thinking that this sounds like a hoodoo thing, and you are completely right. By the 1730s, slaves working on indigo plantations mixed the blue dye, some dirt and lime into milk paint to produce a blue green that is known now as Haint Blue. This milk paint would be used on the porch ceilings to protect the home from haints (ghosts). The paint is sometimes used on window shutters as well for more protection. The mixture of the milk paint and the lime subdued the harshness of the indigo blue and transformed it into soft blue with a little green into it. It is actually quite nice.  

   There is more to the traditional way to make the color. One of the materials that is used in the milk paint is lye. Lye is used in food preservation as well as in cleaning products including soapmaking.  One of the best things about lye is that it is a great insect repellant, which would be a Godsend for a house that was on the southern east coast.

   The subject of Haint Blue would not be complete until I talked about the people who created it. The Gullahs are Black Southerners that lived in the Lowcountry area of the United States, this includes North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. They are a very proud group of people who maintain a good portion of their African culture and their main language is an English-based creole, which had been influenced by the African languages sentence structure and grammar. It is also from the traditions of the Gullah people that some people put blue glass bottles into the trees surrounding their homes to protect them from evil spirits.

    According to a 2022 issue of Smithsonian magazine, indigo farming is once again live in well in the southern United States. Many artists as well as cloth makers prefer the natural color of true indigo as opposed to colors that are artificially created by chemicals.

   Haint Blue is a magnificent color with an incredible past. The process of milk paint with indigo, lime, lye, and a touch of southern history make it a staple of older homes in the region. It is now May and I am gearing up for my summer break from teaching. Guess what I’m doing. Yep, painting the house. And I have a porch. Hmmmmmmmm…..

  

Powwowing in Pennsylvania Dutch Country

 

   The Pennsylvania Dutch has been part of the history of the Americans since the 1600s. They largely originated from the Palatinate region of Germany and that is when people say “ummmmm….Pennsylvania Dutch?” Exactly. If you want to be correct on the subject, they would be called Pennsylvania German. The Pennsylvania Dutch are either monolingual English or bilingual English and the Pennsylvania Dutch language which is a mixture of various German dialects. If you want to find the old Pennsylvania Dutch people you must go to Ohio Amish Country or the Southernmost regions of Pennsylvania.

   Now that I have set you up for the story by talking about the language and the people that speak it, it is now time to talk about the witchcraft that surrounds their culture. The people known to work their magic in the area are known as Braucherei but sometimes they are also called hex workers (German Hexe, Dutch heks) hex is German for “witch or sorcerer”. In English they are called Powwowing. This occult system is mainly Christian folk magic and is known for treating aliments of both humans as well as livestock. Of course, the word powwow is borrowed from the Native Americans from the regions that spoke Narragansett and Massachusetts languages, the word itself means healer or shaman. It is believed to come from an ancient dialect of Proto-Algonquian word pawe-wa, meaning ‘he who dreams’. It is believed that the Pennsylvania Dutch borrowed the word because of the similarities between the Baraucheri and the Native American shamans. The term powwow became synonymous with the Baraucheri in the 1700s and was first published in 1820 in the famous grimoire Der Lange Verborgene Freund, or The Long Lost Friend by Johann Georg Hohman. Hohman immigrated from Germany in 1802 and was an indentured servant around Reading, Pennsylvania. He was a farmer, but he was also known as a Baraucheri and also for his work in Fraktur, which is Pennsylvania German folk art. Fraktur is fascinating, relying on hand drawing geometric designs in ink and paint to create the most amazing artworks including Taufschein, or baptismal certificate, or Vorschriften (writing samples), and also sigils that were drawn on buildings that was later known as Hex- signs.

   The powwow worker like most of the magical practices uses gestures, body movements or incantations “spells” along with material objects or substances, such as the famous Hex bottle or Witch Bottle. Sometimes these old bottles wind up in somebody’s attic for over a hundred years before they are discovered. Most of the Braucherei’s witchcraft is what is known as sympathetic magic, something similar to hoodoo, so it wouldn’t be uncommon for a copy of The Long Lost Friend to make its way into the magic of the Appalachia and the Ozarks. The Long Lost Friend was well received when it was published and it had a heck of a marketing scheme. If you owned it and you carried it on your person, you were safe from harm and if you put the book inside the walls of your house, the house was charmed as well. The book became the main authority on powwowing.

   The powwow practitioner was common up until the 1920s. In 1929 there was the York 'Witch Trial'. In which they tried to eradicate the powwowing by introducing scientific education into the region. When reporters from New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore went to York, Pennsylvania, they found the citizens steeped in “superstition”. Local officials demanded the Braucheri take a backseat to modern progress and after that, the powwow workers began to go underground. The irony is that about the time of the York ‘Witch Trial, several murders took place because people felt that they were hexed or cursed by another and took matters into their own hands.

   You can see powwowing at work in the modern day. All you have to do is go into the small towns in the Pennsylvania Dutch Country. You will see signs that have some sort of geometric pattern on them. It might be a 12-pointed compass rose, or something with hearts or perhaps the Tree of Life emblazoned upon it. You will see them on barns, homes and even businesses. They are known as Hex Signs. For most, they are merely decorations, reminding them of the culture, and some are Fraktur. But for others, it is the most common embodiment of powwowing, and they are said to be “painted prayers”.

   I own a copy of The Long Lost Friend, it is an annotated by an expert on Grimoires by the name of Daniel Harms.  It is an interesting book, and I love it for its history, culture and insight on the people of the region.

  

  

  

The Edmund Fitzgerald

 

   It is November 9^th as I am writing this, and I will be up until midnight just so I can be awake and pour some whiskey for a toast to the 29 souls that lost their lives on Lake Superior on November 10, 1975. I am, of course, speaking of the 50^th anniversary of the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald. Just by naming the ship, you started to hum the melody of the song, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” by Gordon Lightfoot. But let’s not talk about the song now, and let’s just settle on the history of this vessel and its sinking.

   The Edmund Fitzgerald was launched on June 7, 1958, and was named for the president of Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, which invested a goodly sum of their money in the production of iron ore. The christening was done by his wife Elizabeth Fiztgerald, and it was a bad omen from the start when it took three times for the champagne bottle to shatter and during the launch, one of the observers, a man by the name of Jennings B. Frazier, had a heart attack at the ceremony and died. The Edmund Fitzgerald was a record-breaking workhorse. The round trip from the docks where the ship was laden with taconite in the form of pellets, to the docks in Detroit, Michigan took 5 days, and the Edmund Fitzgerald could do the trip 47 times in a season.

   At the time of her sinking, the ship was captained by Ernest M. McSorley, and true to the famous ballad, “With a crew and good captain well-seasoned.” They departed Superior, Wisconsin at 2:15 pm on November 9. At 5 pm that day, she was joined by another freighter, the Arthur M. Anderson, heading to Gary, Indiana. The National Weather Service (NWS) altered their forecast for the Lake Superior region at 7:00 pm, including gale warnings. At 1a.m. on the 10^th of November, the Edmund Fitzgerald reported high winds and waves around 10 feet. By 2a.m., the NWS altered it from a gale to a storm. At 3:30 pm the captain of the Edmund Fitzgerald reported that they were taking on some water and that the ship had lost its radar. The Arthur M. Anderson, tried to direct the Edmound Fitzgerald to Whitefish Bay. The storm continued with winds up to 58 knots, or 67 mph. At 7:10 pm, the Arthur M. Anderson radioed the Fitzgerald and asked them how they were fairing. The captain cooly replied, “We are holding our own.” She was never heard from again.

   There are many theories of what made the ship sink. Everything from Shoaling, a rogue wave, to structural failures due to the storm. She settled in deep water and split into two pieces. For over 20 years there were multiple submarine dives to survey the wreckage. In 1995, the Sault Tribe of Chippewa Indians backed the expedition by co-signing a loan in the amount of $250,000, they contacted Phil Nuytten who was a deep-sea explorer and had designed an atmospheric diving suit. The contract was to retrieve the bell from the Edmund Fitzgerald wreckage and replace it with a replica bell. This replica bell would have the names of the crew that lost their lives that day. There was one other task that Nuytten had to do. He had to leave a beer in the pilothouse for the dead.

         Every year on the 10^th of November, Mariners' Church in Detroit rings its bell for the 29 sailors who perished and now their solemn ceremony is a tribute to all the lives lost to the Great Lakes. Gordon Lightfoot, who wrote and recorded “the Wreck of the Edmund Fitgerald” died on May 1, 2023. Later that year, on November 10^th, the bell rang 30 times. One extra for Gordon Lightfoot. The Edmund Fitzgerald is gone to history or does its ghost remain? Yes, there are some stories out there that the Fitzgerald is still trying to find its way home. A report of some freighter or fishing boats seeing a large freighter moving silently toward Whitefish Bay. One day perhaps, they will finally make it.

  

 

The Sordid History of Edgar Allen Poe’s Grave

 

   After my last issue visiting the 1980s with the death of John Belushi, I wanted to step back to my roots, the Victorian era, and talk about one of the most famous graveyards in Baltimore at Westminster Hall. This 18^th Century church and graveyard used to be the First Presbyterian Church of Baltimore and is the burial site of one of the best authors in American literature, Edgar Allen Poe. He has two burial sites and four headstones, but we’ll get to that.

   Edgar Allen Poe died October 7, 1849. He was found next to a tavern in clothes that was not his own and talking deliriously, as though in an alcoholic stupor. He was then hospitalized and after several days, he perished. By being a lesser-known author at the time of his death, he died as many artists do, poor.  He was then laid to rest behind the church in an unmarked grave. Eventually a man by the name of George W Spence placed a small gravestone carved of sandstone, inscribed with the number 80. After Maria Clemm, Edgar’s mother-in-law, started talking about the lack of upkeep of Edgar’s grave in newspapers, Nielson Poe, Edgar’s cousin, took matters in his own hand.  Nielson contacted a tombstone maker by the name of Hugh Sisson in 1860. A worthy tombstone was made and was getting ready to be transported to the cemetery the following week, until disaster struck. According to a magazine that was published a few years later, Sisson told his story:

    “That tablet was finished and standing in my yard. It was to be erected in the cemetery the following week and would have been but [for] a most extraordinary accident on the Friday or Saturday preceding. My yard adjoins the tracks of the Northern Central Railroad. A freight-train ran off the track, broke down the fence, and did more or less damage to other work; but the only irreparable damage was done to Poe’s tablet. That was smashed to pieces, beyond all power of restoration”

    Only a sketch of the tombstone remains. The inscription place upon it was this: “Hic Tandem Felicis Conduntur Reliquae (translated as “Here, at last, he is happy”). Edgar Allan Poe, Obiit Oct. VII 1849. The reverse side of the stone read “Jam parce sepulto” (translated as “Spare these remains”).

    It would not be until 1875 that another monument would be started. Collections were started under the leadership of Miss Sara Sigourney Rice for this new monument but a goodly chunk of the money with come from a single Poe admirer, a Philadelphia resident by the name of George Childs. George Frederick, the famous architect who designed Baltimore City Hall, started work on the monument shortly after. After it was finished, it was found too big for the original gravesite so it would be placed in the corner of the churchyard. After the exhumation of Edgar Allen Poe as well as his wife, Virginia Clemm Poe, and his mother-in-law, Maria Clemm, they were reburied, and the monument was put in its place. The dedication of the monument took place on November 17, 1875 and was attended by Nelson Poe and Walt Whitman. Letters from H. W. Longfellow, John G. Whittier, William C. Bryant and Alfred Tennyson were read, telling of Poe’s genius as a poet and author

    In 1913, a final tombstone would be installed at the original gravesite for the famous author. The benefactor of this was Orrin C. Painter. First the tombstone was placed well outside the Poe family plot, and then it was moved to a more reasonable location. But in the words of the Edgar Allen Poe Society in Baltimore, “Perhaps in part due to this confusion, but mostly because people simply love a good mystery, a strange rumor has persisted that the memorial committee failed to exhume Poe’s remains, instead moving those of some other poor soul. The improbability of this notion is obvious when one realizes that the exhumation in 1875 was supervised by George W. Spence, the man who buried Poe in 1849, and Poe’s cousin Neilson Poe, who attended the original funeral”. In the end, people are drawn to the original gravesite of Poe, with its realistic raven chiseled at the top of the stone. That’s where pennies and flowers are placed, and as for one, the Poe Toaster, will leave on Poe’s birthday, three red roses and a bottle of cognac.

    If you are visiting Baltimore, there are many things to see there. But if you can have only one day, visit the Edgar Allen Poe House Museum as well as the churchyard where the famous author is interred, which is in walking distance.

The Death of John Belushi

 

    In this article, I wanted to write about a piece of history that affected me when I was a teenager, the death of John Belushi. For someone who basically writes about antiquarian stuff and my knowledge based on history stops around the 1950s, this was a huge stretch for me, but I will try to do the subject justice. John Belushi was a comic legend. Growing up in Chicago is where he met his most famous costar, Dan Ackroyd at the Second City comedy club, famous for producing great comedic talent. They will be part of the inaugural season of Saturday Night Live, and they will put together the iconic band The Blues Brothers. Belushi was a comic genius, which means he had a dark side as well, drugs. And that would be his downfall that would lead to his death in Los Angeles at the Chateau Marmont Hotel on the Sunset Strip on March 5^th, 1982.

    This article isn’t just about the death of John Belushi, but the life of Cathy Smith, the drug dealer who gave Belushi the lethal mixture of heroin and cocaine. Cathy Smith isn’t an enigmatic character, nor is she a person on the streets dealing drugs. Smith, who was born in Toronto, Canada first came into the music scene with her relationship with Levon Helm of The Band in 1963. There she dated several members of the musical group and even became pregnant, and they called the baby “The band baby” because the paternity of the child wasn’t clear.

    In the early 1970s she met Canadian songwriter and singer Gordon Lightfoot. I rather like Gordon Lightfoot and if you have never heard “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” stop reading now and take a listen. Lightfoot’s haunting voice and his ability to tell a story made him an icon of music. Cathy Smith became an employee of Lightfoot, and later his lover.  Their relationship was tempestuous at best, and his love affair with Smith lasted three years. The 1974 song “Sundown” was released as a single and became another hit for Gordon Lightfoot. The song was, of course, about Cathy Smith.

    In the 1970s Cathy Smith became addicted to heroin and became a dealer for such bands as the Rolling Stones. Smith was running all across music circles during this time, as both a back-up singer and drug dealer. In 1976 she first met John Belushi when a band that she was touring with performed on Saturday Night Live. She would not meet him again until March 1982 when he came to Los Angeles after a film shoot. There Smith gave to Belushi the drugs that killed him.

    Belushi checked in to the Chateau Marmont on February 28, 1982. He was then seen at local nightclubs along Sunset Strip. Soon, he was looking for money, so he visited his longtime manager, Bernie Brillstein. At first Brillstein would deny his request for money but would eventually give in. It was in the early morning hours of March 5^th when Belushi had several visitors at his bungalow including Robert De Niro, Robin Williams, and Cathy Smith. After Robert De Niro left for his own bungalow at the hotel, Smith and Belushi continued to do “speedballs” which is an injection of cocaine and heroin. Breakfast was delivered in the morning and Smith signed for it. Belushi was sleeping after he complained about some chest congestion. Around 10:15 am Smith looked in on Belushi and went out to run errands. She took her syringe and her spoon that was used for the injections just in case the maids wanted to clean the room.

    Around noon that day Bill Wallace, a former kickboxing champion and personal trainer, came to the bungalow to drop off a typewriter and a tape recorder that Belushi had asked for the day before. He let himself in with a key that Belushi had given him and he found Belushi on the bed. He tried to resuscitate him but he was dead. Law enforcement and the city coroner did not reveal anything about the case for several days. John Belushi was dead at the age of 33.

   Cathy Smith was arrested for possession of narcotics on March 5^th. Later in 1982, Rolling Stones magazine gave details of the arrest, “On the afternoon of March 5th, Cathy Evelyn Smith had appeared driving the wrong way into the one-way exit of the Chateau Marmont Hotel on Sunset Strip behind the wheel of John Belushi's rented red Mercedes … At that moment, a hundred feet away, Belushi lay naked and dead on the floor of his $200-a-day bungalow. The police who had cordoned off the area were reflexively insisting it had been 'death from natural causes'.” Smith plead no contest to involuntary manslaughter, and she served fifteen months in Chino at the California Institute for Woman, which I drive by almost every day on my way to work.

Belushi is buried at Abel's Hill Cemetery in Chilmark, Massachusetts, on Martha's Vineyard

The Shark Attack of 1916

 

   Growing up in San Diego I spent a lot of time in the water and one of the things that used to frighten me when I was a young man was what surfers called the Man in the Grey Suit also known as a shark.   Sharks have a been a primal fear ever since man took to the water, and today they are still misunderstood. A lot of the fear comes from fiction, from popular stories such as Peter Benchley’s Jaws and Steven Alten’s Meg and their stories being turned into blockbuster movies. Where does this fear come from? It comes from history.

   This is the age of beachside resorts, World War I is still going on, and polio is an epidemic. The year was 1916 and a great heat wave gripped the east coast and so people look to solace in the cool water of the beaches of New Jersey. On July 1st, at a resort town known as Beach Haven, the first victim was struck. Charles Epting Vansant, age 28, was swimming alongside his Chesapeake Retriever when people heard Vansant calling for help. Onlookers on the beach believed that Vasant was calling to his dog, but instead he was being attacked by a shark. Vansant was retrieved by lifeguards, but his wounds were most severe, one of his thighs had been ripped to ribbons, and he bled out on the manager’s desk at the Engleside Hotel shortly after the attack.   

   The next major attack happened on July 6^th.   A Bell Captain of the Essex and Sussex Hotel, by the name of Charles Bruder, 27, was swimming about 130 meters from the shore when he was attacked. Bruder was bitten on the abdomen and both of his legs were bitten off above the knees.   People on the beach heard his anguished screams and a team of lifeguards paddled out to him in a small canoe, but it was too late to do anything and Bruder died on the boat.

    The next two victims were at a place called Matawan Creek, not far from Keyport, New Jersey on July 12th. One of the reasons this is more tragic is that Matawan Creek is freshwater and is an inlet to Raritan Bay and shouldn’t be a location for a shark to be found.   A group of young boys were playing in the creek next to an area known as "Wyckoff Dock".  Amongst them was a boy by the name of Lester Stillwell, 11. The boys saw the dorsal fin of a shark and made their way to the dock.  Stillwell trying to keep up with his friends, was almost out of the creek as he was pulled underwater. The boys ran for help and several men came to the rescue of Lester Stillwell. One of these men was Watson Stanley Fisher, 24, who dove into the creek looking for the boy. After locating Stillwell’s body, Fisher started making his way back to the shore when he was also attacked by the predator.  His right thigh was bitten and he died shortly after in the hospital due to his injuries. Stillwell’s body was finally recovered about 150 yards upstream from where the attack occurred.

   The fifth attack came right after the attack of Stillwell and Fisher, when Joseph Dunn, 14, was attacked nearby. Dunn was bit in the leg but was saved by his brother. The bite was not fatal and Dunn was treated at Saint Peter's University Hospital where he would be released on September 15, 1916.

   News spread throughout the country as journalists ran headlines such as “Shark Kills Bather Off Jersey Beach".  There was panic amongst the beach resort industry and led to the former director of the Philadelphia Aquarium downplaying the threat of sharks.  He made the following statement in the newspaper the Philadelphia Public Ledger. 

“Despite the death of Charles Vansant and the report [of] two sharks having been caught in that vicinity recently, I do not believe there is any reason why people should hesitate to go in swimming at the beaches for fear of man-eaters. The information in regard to the sharks is indefinite and I hardly believe that Vansant was bitten by a man-eater. Vansant was in the surf playing with a dog and it may be that a small shark had drifted in at high water, and was marooned by the tide. Being unable to move quickly and without food, he had come in to bite the dog and snapped at the man in passing.”

   The hunt was on for the “Jersey Man-Eater” as fishermen came from all over to catch the predator. One was Michael Schleisser, the lion tamer for the Barnum and Bailey’s circus. In all honesty, the story is quite outlandish. Schleisser, who was fishing off Raritan Bay, came across a large 7.5-foot Great White shark.  The shark nearly destroyed his boat before Schleissier was able to kill the shark with a broken oar. When they cut open the shark’s belly, they retrieved a “suspicious fleshy material”. Schleissier had the shark mounted and put on display in Manhattan for several years, but unfortunately the shark became lost in history and no one knows where it is now.

   By October, 1916, Scientific American Magazine became involved and added to the public panic.   Robert Murphy and John Nichols wrote in October 1916:

There is something peculiarly sinister in the shark's make-up. The sight of his dark, lean [dorsal] fin lazily cutting zig-zags in the surface of some quiet, sparkling summer sea, and then slipping out of sight not to appear again, suggests an evil spirit. His leering, chinless face, his great mouth with its rows of knife-like teeth, which he knows too well to use on the fisherman's gear; the relentless fury with which, when his last hour has come, he thrashes on deck and snaps at his enemies; his toughness, his brutal, nerveless vitality and insensibility to physical injury, fail to elicit the admiration one feels for the dashing, brilliant, destructive, gastronomic bluefish, tunny, or salmon.

   The shark attacks of 1916 became one of the inspirations for Peter Benchley’s book, Jaws. Jaws became a bestseller in 1974 and would become the first summer Blockbuster movie in 1975 when millions of people became scared of going into the water. In Matawan Creek today there is an eerie reminder of what took place over almost 107 years ago. A train bridge that crosses the area between Raritan Bay and the Creek itself has a mural of a giant shark head looking as if it is ripping through the surface of the water with its mouth open to the still calm sea.