When Ben Pulcrano set out to write a book that would settle simple arguments about Lakewood, he found writing one to be much more than simple, but less than sufficient.
Pulcrano was a panelist Oct. 21 at a symposium sponsored by the Jewish Historical Society of the Jewish Federation of Ocean County on “The Golden Age of Hotels in Lakewood.”
Pulcrano said he used to listen to arguments about which hotel was where during the hotel heyday in Lakewood in the mid-1900s, when the town was a resort town filled with hotels, tens of thousands of seasonal vacationers, and top entertainers.
“And it got so confusing that I decided I should write a directory of the Lakewood hotels,” Pulcrano said at the symposium, held at the Lakewood Municipal Building. “I didn’t think it would be a difficult job; however, I was wrong.”
He’s now been working on the project for more than 20 years and two volumes of the book. Often, he runs into the problem of what he called the “mystery of the moving hotels.”
“You might have one hotel with 10 different names,” he said, adding that town residents would open up the extra rooms in their homes as boarding houses. “Everybody just did that; it was a way to make money.”
Pulcrano said that in 1945 there were 65,000 winter visitors to the hotels in Lakewood; in 1958 that number was 125,000.
The symposium was organized by Lenore and Richard Turtletaub, the co-chairs of the Jewish Historical Society, as part of their ongoing efforts to gather and record the history of the Jewish community in Ocean County. Earlier this year the Turtletaubs organized a symposium on the Jewish community’s role in the farming history of the county.
Former Lakewood resident and past Ocean County Federation President Mike Levin’s grandparents came to Lakewood in the 1920s. Levin, another panelist, spoke about his family’s ownership of the New Irvington Hotel on Ninth Street and Madison Avenue.
“There would always come a time in your life when the whole family lived in the hotel,” Levin said.

The family of Mike Levin owned the New Irvington Hotel on Ninth Street and Madison Avenue

Business, he added, was good only when “every bed was filled, including your bed.” In those times, he said, you just found somewhere else to sleep.
But as an employee of the hotel, if you got good tips you could make $100 in a weekend, Levin said, which was good money in those days.
Levin said Lakewood’s famously clean pine air was one major factor in drawing vacationers — but it couldn’t beat the jet plane.
“People just developed different tastes and different forms of transportation,” he said of the time when it became much easier to fly commercially, and places like Orlando became the new winter hotspots.
Ira Jacobsen had an altogether different perspective on the hotels than Levin — and most of the other panelists — as both a resident and a bit of an outsider. Jacobsen’s father served all the hotels their produce.
“This was a spectacular town to be raised in,” Jacobsen told the audience.
Of course, Jacobsen grew up quickly in Lakewood. When his father’s bookkeeper was drafted into the Army, Ira’s mother suggested that Ira should be the new bookkeeper.
“Are you crazy?” Jacobsen’s father responded. “He’s 13 years old.”
But a CPA was brought in to help train Jacobsen, and soon he was handling $10,000 a week.
Jacobsen told the audience that Lakewood was a rare breed — it was a walking town and a resort city all in one.
“No matter where you lived you could walk to school, go out at night,” he said. “It was just a wonderful, wonderful thing.”
As the sports editor of the Lakewood High School newspaper, Jacobsen was once invited out to lunch with New York Giants’ Manager Mel Ott. He said Jerry Lewis’s father had a hotel on Forest Avenue, and Joe Louis trained at one of the hotels in town.
“So there was an awful lot going on here in Lakewood that we didn’t appreciate at the time,” Jacobsen said.
Leo Ross’s family came to Lakewood in the 1940s, and he worked at the hotels. He recalled a time when there was always plenty of food and the scenery was unlike any other town.
“Lakewood was a beautiful little town,” Ross said.
Ross said Saturday night was the big night of the week; 9 p.m. was “showtime,” and Jackie Mason or Bernie Burns would go on. Then at 11:30 p.m. — the late show — you could see Alan King, Rodney Dangerfield, or Pat Cooper at the Fairmont Hotel, with security around the block.
Those were long days and nights for the waiters, Ross said, but the guests did their best to reward them for their hard work.
“Mrs. Gold would say ‘Don’t forget the waiter’,” Ross recollected. “And Mr. Gold would say ‘What do you want me to do, take him home?’”
Gregg Sharkey, another panelist at the symposium, could attest to the attractiveness of the pine Lakewood air in those days. Sharkey’s grandfather, Terence Kearns, had a stroke, and Terence and his wife May came to Lakewood because of the lung-friendly pine air.
They founded the Monterey in 1915, and Gregg’s parents, Virginia and Tom, ran the hotel after them.
“I remember going to friends who actually lived in houses and thinking, ‘This is pretty neat’,” Sharkey said. “That was a lifestyle that you lived and experienced and until it was over you didn’t realize how unique it was.”
Sharkey’s father was the president of the hotel association. As the only non-Jewish member of the board, the others took to calling him Sharkowitz.
In fact, local hotelier Max Sachs decided that Gregg shouldn’t be deprived of a bar mitzvah just because he wasn’t Jewish. So, Sharkey said, Sachs planned a bar mitzvah for Sharkey and one other non-Jewish boy in the Fairmont.
Sachs was the “rabbi.”
“And he said ‘We have the challah bread here, we’ll make a blessing and honor these gentile boys because they deserve a bar mitzvah, too’,” Sharkey said.
Panelist Ruben Silverman remembered being a 13-year-old busboy at the hotels in 1945. He eventually worked his way up to working at the Laurel-in-the-Pines, which was owned by the successful clothing manufacturers and future hotel magnates the Tisches. When he came back from his war service, he worked at the New Brighton Hotel.
His boss told him to let him know if guests stiffed him on a tip. One weekend that happened, and his boss added $25 to guests’ bill, telling them “That’s for the waiter.”
Late one night, a man built like a linebacker told young Silverman to clear a table for him and his friends and get them sandwiches. It was late, and Silverman hadn’t eaten all day, but he did as he was told.
After the meal, the man reached into his pocket and handed Silverman a $100 bill. He then signed the bill “Al Tisch”.
“You’re the boss,” Silverman said to him, wide-eyed.
“And you’re the waiter,” Tisch responded matter-of-factly.
“The point is, you treat everyone the same,” Silverman said. “You treat people with respect, they treat you with respect.”
Silverman said Lakewood was a beautiful town, and the hotels served as a way out for residents who wanted to earn some money and go to school.
“It didn’t matter if you were rich or poor, because everyone was poor,” Silverman said.
Charles Mandel’s great-grandfather was Lakewood’s mayor, and Mandel’s family would own Mandel’s Hotel, at Sixth Street and Lexington Avenue.
Both his parents and in-laws owned hotels, though one of them had a special feature: it was one of the few hotels with a revolving door, though that door would give Mandel nightmares about getting stuck in it and revolving forever.
As a youngster growing up in the hotels, Mandel remembers staring in awe at the never-ending assortment of cookies and cake.
“Food at the hotels was just a fairytale for kids,” Mandel said.
Mandel was the final panelist to speak at the symposium, which served as a sort of reunion for the panelists and their audience.
“It’s been great learning from all these folks about the good ole’ days in Lakewood,” he said.