Coney Island Bathers

The overcast weather limited the crowds that day, which I'd guess from the women's shapes and hair styles was more like 1908-1910 than later. Not one of those "wall of human flesh" days on the beach that prompted Casey Stengel's "Coney Island? Nobody goes there any more - it's too crowded."

It's stuck me from time to time when I've looked at old photos with lots of people in them that, in many instances, I'll bet, the camera inadvertently captured the only proof that someone ever existed.

I get this same feeling when I watch old film clips - like people coming and going on a busy street, for instance. They are always the people in the background, not the people the camera is focusing on, that make me wonder if, in some back corner of that person's subconscious, a little message was sent to them saying "Be sure to walk down 3rd Avenue, at Elm Street, on your lunchbreak. Somebody will be taking a movie of the horse-teams there and you'll be captured there, too, for posterity. It'll be a way for you to tell the world: I existed! My life was valid!"

the ratio of wool bathing suits to exposed skin in this photo must be about, what? 3-to-1? 4-to-1? How times have changed.

(Not that we see much in the way of scantily clad people on beaches here in Alaska, mind you! But we do get down to Hawaii every once in a while.)

Denny Gill
Chugiak, Alaska