Submitted by Debi Unger, November 2019
Evergreen Avenue, February 1961 and October 1969: I have two love stories that involve Bradley Beach. The first one did not end well but produced two children, Anthony and Elizabeth. The second one is still ongoing after 50 years and gave me three stepsons.
In 1960, I worked on the Democratic write-in campaign for Adlai Stevenson and met my first husband, Bob Marcus. I was a junior high school teacher and he was a graduate student in history at Columbia University. In February 1961, during a President’s Day Holiday, Bob suggested we go to Bradley Beach, which my grandparents had first discovered in 1912 and to which they kept coming back every summer from Newark. In 1950, my grandmother decided she wanted to live in Bradley Beach full-time. They bought the house on Evergreen Avenue. Unfortunately, my grandmother died the day the house closed, and my father promptly bought it from my grandfather. Lucky me, I still live here.
Bob and I spent a few days here, and one morning, we watched the sun rise over the Atlantic Ocean, something I had never done before and haven’t done since. He told me he was going to graduate school at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois and would I like to marry him and join him. I said I would. We got married in the spacious backyard of the Evergreen Avenue house on August 13, 1961, the day the Berlin Wall went up, and then we went to Illinois together. We spent two years there, then a year in Washington D.C., three years in Indiana and then moved back to New York. Each summer, no matter where we were, we spent a lot of time in my parents’ house in Bradley Beach.
Bob and I spent part of the summer of 1965 in Washington, D.C., where Bob was doing research for his PhD thesis at the Library of Congress. It was there we met Irwin Unger, a fellow historian and a professor at the University of California, Davis, who had just won the Pulitzer Prize in History. He was also doing research at the Library on his next book. Since both families were living in Maryland at the time, Bob and Irwin took turns driving each other to the Library, and we all became friends.
Fast forward to 1969, both families were living in New York again. But both marriages had gone sour and broke up. In October, on the Columbus Day weekend, when I brought my children to Bradley Beach to spend the holiday, Irwin came to visit us. My parents babysat the kids, and Irwin and I went to Vic’s. We married the following May and spent every summer in Bradley Beach with my children and his.
My mother deeded the house to me and spent the summers with us until she died in 1999. Before Irwin retired from teaching at New York University, we spent two years talking about whether we should live in New York in our rent-controlled apartment with three bedrooms and views of the Hudson River or the house in Bradley Beach. We realized that we could always get to the city if we had to but it would be difficult to sell our house full of memories and try to rent every summer. So here we are.
Eventually all the children grew up and got married and moved away. But they still come to visit, and Anthony, who lives in New York with his two children, visits us as many times as he can each summer.
Irwin Unger passed away on May 21, 2021, at age 94.
