We want to hear your family’s story. Email ron.schrader@strollmag.com with submissions.
golden hour, when the air begins to cool and the sky swirls with color. This signified that it was time for dessert. Merritt and her grandfather Joseph would walk into town and make a visit to the 3rd Avenue Chocolate Shop for an ice cream or a handful of nonpareils, a place Merritt so enjoyed as a child that a short bike ride up Morris Ave as a teenager would find Merritt behind those same glass displays serving sweets to many a summer traveler. Just a few small-town proprietors away, Rob grew up on North Main Street in Manasquan, down the block from his Grandparent’s shoe store, Raffetto’s Shoes, which was in business for over 100 years before closing in 2009. Rob’s grandmother Vera fondly recollects afternoons when her parents would send her on “errands” behind that store, bending branches and hopping vines in search of ripe vegetables, in what were acres of gardens stretching all the way back to what is now Church Street. There was much growing to do. His parents, Robert and Nancy, have six children, Rob being the oldest. His mother Nancy is also one of six. His grandmother Vera, now 99 years young, has 23 grand and 32 great-grandchildren. And so there is more growing to come. If time holds steady, many of those great
grandchildren will become 4th generation Manasquan High School students sometime in the late 2030s. Missing these groundings of home, Rob and Merritt clicked their heels and moved back to the beach fromNew York City in 2016, days before their first baby boy was born. They moved onto Atlantic Ave in 2019 where they are raising four boys – Lachlan (8), Declan (6), Callum (4), and Cormac (2). You may find clues as to where these Schatzman boys have been by the milk chocolate fingerprints they leave on post or park, stemming from their frequent trips to that same 3rd Avenue Chocolate Shop, and Rob still wishes that his Grandparents shoe store was open for the business of supplying an endless outgrowth of sneakers. Besides enjoying the spoils of this inheritance of their Mom’s sweet tooth, the boys love bike rides to the beach aka Mercer Ave bubble, exploring the mysteries of the hidden Fairy Garden of Atlantic Ave, traveling in the back of the bucket bike to Sundae Times, or now and again
GUTTER CLEANING • WINDOW CLEANING SIDING CLEANING • PAVER CLEANING SOFTWASH • PRESSURE WASHING LOW PRESSURE ROOF WASHING they may ask for a wagon ride around the block, what Declan calls “Nature Walks”, where you can find them playing “I Spy” or counting birds by song or color or shouting out the “Number Game” by tallying the mailbox numbers as they go by. These late summer weeks read to us those familiar stories of childhood, when the days went unnumbered and we didn’t feel like we had to package everything in a photograph or whip out our phones to trap a memory. Rob remembers early evenings spent waiting for his Pop Pop to flip the “Closed” sign on the shoe store. He’d go out back and sit on the steps underneath the shade of a Fig tree his great grandmother had planted among those rolling gardens and think about something his Mom would always say about those August figs, “have a bite”, she’d say, “they taste better than candy”. Yes, late August, you are better tasting than candy, with your sugary dawns and wandering dusks, the spokes of yesteryear circling in our minds. We are all out here returning to our roots, tasting the sun turn fruit to honey, and watching as these small histories unfold.
Bringing Buyers and Sellers Together! Contact Susan M. Miller for Your Real Estate Needs!
their fruit and bestowing their shade across ancestries. A return to the root, if you will. One will usually find the most fantastic tasting figs in these lingering days of summer, and so it is in fruit and roots where we find the Schatzman family of Atlantic Ave here in Spring Lake, familiar soils for 5 generations on both Rob and Merritt’s family trees. Merritt’s maiden name is McKay, her father Matt and mother Jerri raised Merritt and her two brothers, Matt and Brian, on Morris Ave. Their family history in Spring Lake started in 1956, when Merritt’s great grandparents William and Genevieve Braun moved to Pitney Ave, which for many years held the title of Best Tire Swing in town. The heights of summer however were glimpsed from South End, where a Beach Day meant spending each and every one of those precious minutes on-sand. It was typical for the family beach chair circle to stay intact well into the
Susan M. Miller, ABR, SRES, Sales Associate 1216 Third Avenue, Spring Lake, NJ 07762
Cell: 732-539-6414 smiller@dianeturton.com www.susanmillerhomesnj.com
SPRING LAKE HEIGHTS, NJ
732-449-1122
#SellwithSusan #itmatterswhoyouworkwith #Experience Counts
THECOASTALCLEANINGCREW.COM EXTERIOR CLEANING SERVICE
Susan M. Miller
@susanmillerrealestate @thesmiller
22 August 2024
Stroll Spring Lake 23
Made with FlippingBook - Online Brochure Maker