Meet Beach Badge Collector Bob Kugel!

00:02 This is Leslie Scherrenbeck, folklife director of the Tuckerton Seaport. Here today, Tuesday, September 5, with Bob Kugel, who is the author of 55 years of Long Beach island beach badges from 1967 to 2022. Bob is also the collector of the largest known to date Long Beach island beach badge collection, with more than 800 in totality. There are over six townships on Long Beach Island, New Jersey. Just for context, and he'll probably have a few more badges after this season. Thank you so much for being here with me today to talk about your collection. So, I think the first thing that we have to do is provide listeners with the context of beach badges, especially because, according to my research, the only other state to charge for its beaches is Florida, and that is done by car, not a person required to have a badge. So, can you tell us what is a beach badge and what types of badges are there here in New Jersey?

01:02 Well, beach badge is basically you're paying for the right to get on the beach, and it covers the expense of the lifeguards, the beach badge checkers, the maintenance workers, the equipment, anything that's on the beach itself. Just maintaining the beach and emptying the trash and everything else. And as far as badges, each town offers, you have the option to buy a seasonal badge, a weekly badge, a daily badge. If you're a senior citizen, you get a discounted badge. And there's also something called the holiday badge, which, in my estimation, is better than a flannel shirt. If you have somebody who loves the beach and you don't know what to get them, this is a gift that they can use for the entire summer and think of you.

02:03 Yeah. So that's my next question. Funny that you should mention them. So, one interesting section, especially for Long Beach Islands, townships are holiday badges, which seems crazy because nobody's going to the beach in the winter. But can you talk about what they are and the designs on them? So each of these badges, right, is different in their color and their design. We'll get into that a little bit later. But what is the story with these holiday badges?

02:28 Um, it's. It's, uh, something like I said, it's a gift for somebody that you don't really know what to get them. Um, they are usually offered for sale, usually, um. Uh, the Monday after Thanksgiving. And the towns sell them, uh, you, uh, until they either run out or the day before Christmas. Either way. Um, and, uh, each town has their own source of the design. Actually, shipbottom has two schools, the Edward Ethel Jacobson school and the Long beach township school, Long Beach Island School, and there's a contest run and it's narrowed down to whatever the best piece of art is. And then that is sent to the manufacturer of the beach badges and they put it on the badge. And each town has their, again, has their own source of where they get their artwork from.

03:32 Yeah, and the artwork on the holiday badges is different than the seasonal badge.

03:36 The seasonal badge basically just says, for example, surf city 2024, seasonal or weekly or whatever. And where the holiday badges, there's some kind of picture, whether it's. And it's usually kind of something that, something about Christmas or something, maybe it's some kind of animal or some kind of fish or something. And it says surf city on it.

04:06 Or ship bottom, and it says holiday badge. And so it gives you maybe a little bit more clout when you're going to the beach that these people might be more local than other visitors or are they more highly coveted for collectors?

04:21 It's highly collectible for those collecting badges, actually. Again, everybody has their own. There are certain things that they want to collect, actually. And a lot of people just collect the seasonal badges. And there are some people that include those holiday badges as well as the regular, conventional seasonal badges.

04:43 Okay, great. And so what made you get started with beach badge collecting?

04:48 Well, like anybody else, if I wanted to go to the beach, I needed a beach badge. So every may, I would go down to in ship bottom here, I'd go down to town hall and I'd buy at the time eight beach badges and I'd use them. And at the end of the season, I threw them in the bag and I threw them in the closet. And this went on for 2025 years at least. And every once in a while, I would take them out and I would look at them and play with them a little bit and throw them back in the bag. And one day I saw some, I was at somebody's house and they had them kind of on display, I think was like on a fishnet or something. I said, oh, that's pretty cool. So I went to Michael's and I got myself a shadow box and I displayed mine and I got a couple of compliments from it. And I thought to myself, well, I wonder if I could, for shipbottom, if I could get the years prior to my initial date, which was 1984, when I bought the house, if I could find the dates of the badges prior to that. So I started looking on eBay and I go to garage sales, and people in town heard of my quest, actually, and a lot of my acquired people just gave them to me. And friend, actually a relative, lives in Surf city. And she started giving me hers. I really wasn't collecting them, but I kept them anyway. And then I started acquiring quite a number of years of surf city. And then one day somebody from Harvey Cedars had a rental unit. They had eight badges for each year going back from like, I think it was like 2000 to 2010 or so. And I got him at a good price. And so it was at that point that I decided I was collecting beach badge. So before I know it, I was in the beach badge business of buying, selling, trading, looking for every single town, all six towns here on the island.

06:50 Wow. Okay. Now one of my questions is, so beach badges, and in your book you talk about this, the prices have obviously changed since 1960. The inflation has reached the beach badges. Right.

07:05 So is everything else.

07:06 Sure. Absolutely. So on the market, when you're buying and selling and trading these badges, what's the cost? Does it depend on the year? Does it depend on the.

07:20 After?

07:21 Yeah.

07:22 Collector usually, like a badge that's within the last ten years is probably worth a couple of dollars because there's so many of them and there's so many around. As time goes on, there's less and less around. They disappear. I mean, currently there's. There is a 1967 Surf city, which is the very first year for Surf City on eBay for $199.

07:46 Wow.

07:47 And I've bought badges for 50 or $60 myself, and I've sold them for $100. So.

07:53 Wow. Interesting.

07:54 It's all about supply and demand and how much you want.

07:57 Yeah, absolutely. And so you mentioned, and we're in your home today, and I'm looking at this beautiful collection of badges. So you've put them all into these shadow boxes, and you kind of talk in your book about how it's, you know, it's folk art, it's surf art because you're displaying it. So what's the inspiration to the way that they're grouped? Is it all by township? Is there any inspiration behind it, or.

08:23 I just leave room for more? I just kind of have them displayed by year. Actually, we started 1967, and I'm kind of anal about things. So if I was missing one, then I'd move 40 badges just to put it in that spot where it actually belonged. So the main shadow boxes have the seasonal ones in them. There's 42 a box, and some of these little weekly boxes that I have, and daily boxes, there's seven or seven for the weeklies and ten or eleven? It could be, depending upon how the town runs their start and finish dates, actually.

09:10 Sure. And, okay, so what was the hardest badge to find and where did you find it?

09:17 My. The very last badge that. That I acquired, that I was missing was the 1968 surf city. And I had a friend, Randy Brown, who did clean outs for these houses that were getting torn down and stuff. So he had acquired a couple of them, and I bought it from him, actually.

09:41 Wow. Okay. So just luck of the badge, right?

09:45 Yeah. You know, I mean, there is. There is a Facebook site called LBI beach badge collectors. There's about 1200 members on it. And we buy, sell, trade, give advice. People throw questions out there and stuff.

10:04 Okay, what is. What is the best story you have about either finding, trading, or buying one of the badges for your collection?

10:14 Well, the best is the. Is the 2006 Long beach township Starbucks badge. And this goes back 2006, probably 2005 Starbucks was entertaining the thought of putting one of their locations here on Long Beach island. So in the summer of 2006, they had these beach badges made up. That was a daily pass. And they had them at various locations in Long Beach Township. And they had some tents set up. They sampled some free coffee. They said, hey, oh, you're going to beach for the day. This is on us. So, um, they gave him this daily. Daily badge, actually. And so that's. That is probably the rarest. And if. If you have that, that is the holy grail of Long Beach. Long Beach island beach badges. I acquired mine from who the woman had. I don't know where she got it. She was only a surf city collector. I bought it from her for $50. But in the end, I don't know what happened. But Starbucks abandoned the idea. I'm sure the little Ma and Pa coffee places were grateful, although Dunkin donuts seems to do okay.

11:42 Right?

11:43 So I think they shot themselves in the foot on that one.

11:46 Interesting. Oh, wow. I had no idea about that with star Starbucks. So, after all of this collection, what made you want to publish a book about beach badges?

11:56 Because we're always asking questions. They would put it put online, like, what was the first year of, you know, of Long Beach Township? When did they start? Or somebody would ask a question of just a question that I knew what the answer was. And I always say to my friends, said, somebody should write a book. Somebody should write a book. So during the pandemic, when I had exhausted all my watching the sopranos and everything else, I started writing a book.

12:25 Wow. And how long did it take you to put it together? Because it's beautiful. You have all of the photographs of the badges. You give a little history on each of the townships when they started their badge enforcement, I guess we should say. And you have some great resources, you know, working with the historical societies here. So about how long did it take you to put together that book?

12:47 It was a couple years, actually. I mean, you know, as long as the pandemic took. And finally, I, my friend, who was also an attorney, I said, rich, I says, I says, he. I asked him to look at this rough draft of this book, actually. And he's. I says, is there anything I can in here that I'm going to get sued for if I was ever to published this? So he looked through it, he liked it. He says, no, it was good. And I asked him, oh, by the way, do you know anybody in the publishing business? And he did know. He knew Ray Fisk, who was the publisher and editor of down the shore. They do the calendars, multiple books about Long Beach island. And so he hooked me up with them. We sat down in December of 2022 for our initial meeting. We had a couple of phone conversations prior to that, but we sat down and we talked about it, and it was at that point we started working together on it.

13:49 Oh, very cool. And so in putting the book together and doing all of the research and the photography that's in there, do any of the badges have a history story or some cool type of folklore, folk legend that is tied to maybe the way that they look or the image? I know we mentioned on the holiday badges that the students of the elementary schools designed them, but in looking at them, some of them do have some interesting artwork. So is there any type of legend or history that is associated with the badge and the way that it looks?

14:23 You know what, most of the towns, every town, except for ship bottom, changes their shape every year. Maybe that's to throw. To throw the people off. But in ship bottom, we haven't changed the shape of our badge since 1990. They change the color, they change the font, but they don't change the shape. But most of the other towns do that. And at some point, some of the towns had serial numbers in them for tracking purposes at the end of the year and inventory and stuff just for accounting purposes. They didn't. It wasn't like if you lost badge number one, two, three. We knew who it was. There's a lot of the towns have different icons like Surf City, for they've all the towns tried various things over the years. It seemed like surf City used their iconic surfer for many, many years. And then they switched a couple things here and there. But they, shipbottom used the sailboat, which is synonymous with the sinking of the fortunat fortuna, which sank in 1909 on 16th street here. And the anchor was rediscovered in the surf there in 1983, I think it was. And at some point they dropped the sailboat and they put the anchor into which we still have the anchor as the centerpiece of our beach badges here in chip bottom. And then various, obviously, barnacle light, they had their lighthouse, so they've pretty much used that one almost every single year. But the Harvey cedars in 1984, they started doing, making their badges. Very artsy. In 84. They. If you remember the yellow smiley face. Yeah, I'm sure you were just a.

16:23 Child at the time, but there was.

16:25 A little yellow smiley face that wound up on everything. And that was their first artsy one. And they've changed some kind of form of art and they've changed the image of the, of the badge every single year. They've had crabs on there. They've had. One of my favorite ones is the 2007, the flip flops, because nothing says summer like flip flops. So every year they've changed all theirs. And they're all very, very unique, actually. And I always look forward to see what they're going to come up with then that year, actually, and that was.

17:02 My next question was, do you have a favorite badge or is there a year or.

17:07 Obviously, my favorite is the, is the, the star. But one of my favorites is the Starbucks badge. And I like that 2007 Harvey Cedars badge with the flip flops on it.

17:17 Very cool. What advice do you have to give to people that are looking to start a collection of badges?

17:27 The only thing I can tell you is you're not going to do it overnight. I mean, it took me 25 years to do the complete collection. But everybody's different. Some people just, they have it. They have a date that they start from there. Most people don't go backwards from to the very beginning when their town started issuing badges. Most people have a starting point of, this is the year I met my wife. This is the year my daughter was born. This is the year we bought our house here on Long Beach island. So that's the year they start from, whether it's 2010 or 2015 or whatever, and they go forward from there. Most, there's not a lot of people that go backwards and try and collect them. I see a lot of people that are looking to build collections now as a gift to their parents or something or they want to put it in their beach house and they've had that beach house since 2000. A little bit more difficult to acquire all those at. You know, it takes a little bit of. A little bit of time.

18:27 Sure. And what was the impetus for you wanting to go back all that way? Because I remember we were talking before your family had a trailer out in Holgatee, you know, so many years ago, but not from the very beginning. So what made you want to start at the. At the genesis?

18:46 I guess it was because I was a homeowner at that point, actually. You know, I don't really know what made me keep them, actually, at some point. And again, I said I bought eight each season and at some point I questioned myself why I was keeping them and I threw half of them out. But, you know, it was. Again, I've probably bought and traded them over time. Many times over.

19:10 Yeah. So my last question today in this discussion, do you have plans for another book in the works or another new collection maybe? Are you gonna expand off of the island at all and try another Jersey beach?

19:23 No, I think if you remember records of the eighties, those one hit wonder songs. I think this was a one hit wonder, actually. And, I mean, this is where my passion was. I mean, I don't really know anything about the other towns and. No, I'm going to say no.

19:40 Okay. Very cool. What is the bat? I know we said Harvey Cedars. Are you looking forward to any of the badges for the upcoming season in 2024? Like, are you the first person online for those holiday badges?

19:55 Yeah, I have some numbers that are number. Serial number one. Serial number two, actually. I got my senior citizen badge this year. I was number two. Last year I was number one. But I'll try harder next year, actually.

20:09 All right. That sounds great. Well, thank you so much for doing this interview with me today.

20:14 It was my pleasure.

20:15 And we look forward to seeing your badge collection grow in the future.

20:19 Thank you.

20:20 Thanks.