Nostalgia buff Allen Gill, 66, remembers that from 1949 through 1959 his family stayed in rooming houses in Atlantic City.

"One of those big houses where you got cooking privileges," he says. "Now Ocean City and Cape May have our hearts today. But traffic to the Shore is unbearable."

Like many readers, Gill recalls going to Steel Pier. He'd go before noon when admission was slightly less expensive and remembers seeing Milton Berle's show there.

Gill, who lives in Northeast Philadelphia, recommends the Web site www.steelpier.com for photos of a "kinder, gentler time."

Reader Ron Horseman of Roxborough says he bought a home on Long Beach Island in 1953 for $10,000 and kept it for 45 summers.

"I still have sand between my toes," says Horseman, now 83.

Helen Cubbage remembers staying with her girlfriends at rooming houses in Ocean City, Atlantic City and Wildwood in the 1960s.

"It was $3 for the room, or $5 if you wanted a bath in the room," she says.

Tom and Marg Sexton, who live in Huntingdon Valley, are Shore devotees who recently went to Ocean Grove, which is near Asbury Park, in what we would consider North Jersey.

"The thing about Ocean Grove is that it is one square mile and it is owned, quite literally, by Methodists . . . a group called the Camp Meeting Association. The homes are mostly large Victorian homes, some in need of repair, others newly repaired. The town also boasts summer tent 'cottages' for rent. It is all so old time!

". . . It seemed like that town from It's a Wonderful Life. We were the only ones out walking around and there were no cars."

And Anne Campo of Haddonfield wrote in with this remembrance:

"For my dad, getting to the beach early was paramount to the whole experience. He would not dream of arriving past 10 a.m. because surely even five minutes after that time, we would not find decent parking.

"He'd carefully load the Ford LTD station wagon with my three short but rather portly grandparents squeezing in the backseat, all the beach gear in the far back, leaving about six inches of space between the raft and my mom's orange picnic jug for my sister and me to squeeze in for the three-mile journey across the bridges spanning the marsh and back bay.

"My grandparents did not take their shoobie role any less seriously than any of their other jobs in life. My grandfather crossed the bulkhead separating the street from the sand wearing his knee-high black dress socks and black lace-up leather dress shoes with his swim trunks. My grandmothers did not go near the water's edge without donning their flowery rubber bathing caps with chin straps firmly secured.

"But of course the best part of all was the unveiling of the Italian-shoobie packed lunch. The smell of the homemade pepper and egg 'sangwiches' mixed in with the sea air brings it all together for me when I recall the days of my youth spent on the Jersey shore."

- Dianna Marder