Kirjahaku

Saltwater Taffy is about first loves. It takes place during one summer at the Jersey Shore in the early 1950s, when Johnnie Ray cried on jukeboxes, you drank Coke from six-ounce bottles, and lovers used condoms primarily for birth control. Saltwater Taffy delineates love affairs that are complicated by cultural and age differences during an ignored time period--that short breath between the post-war boom and Rock 'n' Roll. The setting is once-fashionable Essex Beach, NJ, a community where Victorian mansions built with old money have been converted to summer boarding houses for Italian-American families from New York and New Jersey. Saltwater Taffy explores how people fall in love. It compares the mature love of Sonny & Emily, the adolescent love of Bobby & Camille, and the violent love of Ralph & Toni. These relationships play out as intertwined melodies that climax in surprising ways on Labor Day weekend.

It was still The Fifties in the summer of 1963. By the next summer, the fan was spraying it against every wall. In less than a year, Martin Luther King went to Washington with his dream, President Kennedy was dead, and something happened in Vietnam's Gulf of Tonkin. The "Waldo Sun-Advertiser, a small daily newspaper in suburban New Jersey, reported the events with its community news. It assigned a reporter to cover local civil-rights advocates who went to the March on Washington. When the President was gunned down in Dallas, the "Sun-Advertiser got reaction to the assassination from town fathers. The "Sun-Advertiser's main stories about Vietnam came from wire services. But, it did run staff-written obituaries on page one to honor the war dead from its circulation area. This is the story of what happened on the "Sun-Advertiser when the trouble started.