Photography By Ryan Hulvat
Mr. Amusement
Buddy Jenkins, owner, Jolly Roger Amusement Park
For the past thirty-five years, a fifty-foot pirate has stood sentry outside the gates of Jolly Roger Amusement Park, his swarthy face a symbol of what has become one of Ocean City’s most popular spots for family fun. Opened in 1965 by Buddy Jenkins, Jolly Roger began life on 13th Street as a twelve-acre pirate-themed driving range and miniature golf course. Today, it has grown into a thirty-six-acre entertainment empire. “We knew it would be successful,” says Jenkins, a Crisfield native with a gentle mannerism and a mind for business. “We just followed the mood of the public and let them tell us what they like.”
And, oh, how they like it—love it, actually. Each year Jolly Roger attracts between 500,000 and 700,000 people to its dozens of rides and Splash Mountain Water Park, complete with tropical rainforest and forty-five-foot-tall water slide, and Speedworld, the nation’s largest Go-kart complex. “We’ve got five to six generations of families that continue to come back—that’s constantly rewarding to know. The entertainment industry on the Shore is still totally family oriented, and that’s the backbone of the repeat business.”
Jolly Roger is only one of Jenkins’ claims to Ocean City fame. He also owns Thrasher’s french fries and three hotels in town: the Days Inn Oceanfront on 23rd Street, Howard Johnson Oceanfront Plaza Hotel on 12th Street, and Howard Johnson Oceanfront Inn on 24th Street. And that’s not all. In 1974 he bought the Ocean City Pier Company and in 1998 began Ocean City Golf Groups, a company that organizes golf vacations. At the height of the season, Jenkins estimates that he employs somewhere between 500 and 800 people, without which, Jenkins insists, none of his success could have been accomplished.
But he’s by no means an all-business businessman. The humble-hearted Jenkins helped found the Worcester Country Day Preparatory School in Berlin, Md. He’s been on the board of the Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C. And in memory of his daughter, he began the Joan Jenkins Foundation, a drug and alcohol addiction counseling facility just outside Ocean City.
At age sixty-eight, Jenkins continues a meeting-filled, five-day workweek and spends his weekends on his farm near Berlin, Md. And he isn’t slowing down anytime soon. “I intend to work until I’m one hundred and eight,” says Jenkins. “I’m not interested in pushing a grocery cart around behind my wife in a store. I intend to work as long as I can and to the best of my ability. It’s good to be in the business of creating fun. It never lets you be bored. And it’s positive. And that’s the greatest thing in life."—Kessler Burnett
The Candymakers
The Dolle Family
Saltwater taffy, cotton candy, fudge, caramel popcorn—these are the sweet things that Ocean City’s boardwalk is made of. And if you love these sugary snacks, you know that no one makes them like Dolle’s.
Originally from Brooklyn, the Dolles were encouraged to move to Ocean City by their friends the Trimpers, owners of the amusement park at the end of the boardwalk. Carousel makers by trade, the Dolles built a merry-go-round on Wicomico Street. When it burned down in 1911, great-grandfather Rudolph asked the taffymaker housed nearby to teach him and his son how to make the saltwater treat. He sold the business to the Dolles, and a candy dynasty was born.
Today, more than 1,500 pounds of taffy are turned out each day by Rudolph Dolle, Jr., and his children Anna and Andrew and a handful of helpers. Both Anna, twenty-four, and Andrew, twenty-one, are serving their apprenticeships in the family business. “There’s always a Dolle on the premises,” says Andrew.
Inside the cozy boardwalk shop, under the flashing sign with the familiar script logo, are mountains of caramel corn and handmade fudge. There are exotic specialties like chocolate pizza slices, topped with cherry gummy pepperoni, chocolate cell phones, and peanut butter-chocolate scallop shells. “Dad uses the down times in the off season to experiment,” says Anna.
While its prime location has been important to Dolle’s success, it’s the quality of the candies that keep people coming back. They buy popcorn specially developed for caramel corn, the best sugars, and use only pure butter. Explains Rudolph, “A fellow who worked for my dad back in the thirties always said, ‘What goes in good comes out good,’ and I’ve always remembered that. We are very conscientious, very conscious of quality. We have a money-back guarantee, and I don’t remember a time when it’s been used.”
The Hoteliers
The Conner Family
The Santa Maria is a family business in a family resort town where parents bring the kids and the grandparents, and everyone feels comfortable. It’s the kind of place where guests know the long-standing housekeepers, and the housekeepers remember who needs an extra pillow or a few more towels. This was Ocean City’s first motor inn when it opened in the mid-1950s, and its giant rooftop sign has been an easily recognizable landmark ever since.
It took a gutsy lady named Willye to start this family dynasty. Her husband, George Conner, originally from Chincoteague, opened Ocean City’s first restaurant, Conner’s, in 1886, downtown on South Division Street. When he died in his early thirties of tuberculosis, leaving Willye with three little boys to support, she took over the restaurant, teaching school in Salisbury and making hats in the off season to make ends meet.
After three years, she sold the restaurant and bought the Hastings Hotel on 3rd Street. It was 1923, and everyone thought she was crazy, says Lauren Taylor, Willye’s granddaughter, but she made a success of it by courting Baltimore society to her hotel.
During the next thirty years, Willye added to her hotel holdings, acquiring the Westchester Cottages north of the Hastings and building the Miramar to the south, where the Park Place Hotel now stands. At one point, she owned the whole block. “People would come with their trunks and their whole families and spend the entire summer, eating all three meals at the hotel,” recalls Taylor. “There was none of this running in and out like they do now.”
In 1956, Willye completed the property she had long dreamed of, the Santa Maria, complete with individual balconies, bellhops, and twenty-four-hour room service—deluxe details for the time. At age sixty-five, the bank wouldn’t give her a mortgage for such a daring experiment, so she took out a personal loan to make it happen. Today, Taylor and her brother, Edmund Conner, run the place, along with Taylor’s sons, Daniel, who works in the office, and Brad, who manages the kitchen with nephew Rob. Brad’s wife, Rebecca, worked there as a waitress as a teenager and is an assistant manager now.
The Conner family boasts six graduates of the School of Hotel Administration at Cornell University and owns five O.C. hotels and counting. Lauren’s cousin Lynne Gillen and two of her daughters run the Park Place on the boardwalk; her Uncle Milton bought the Dunes and his widow built the Dunes Manor on 28th Street; and her brother George has the Brighton Suites at 125th Street and the brand-new Bonita Beach on 81st Street. And grandfather Conner’s restaurant genes are still intact: The Captain’s Table at the Santa Maria still turns out some of O.C.’s most delectable meals in a casual setting where you can find the same family atmosphere that Willye provided. “We don’t go for modern and glitzy,” says Taylor. “We go for traditional and subtle. And we’re still seeing parents, grandparents, and children—just like what my grandmother wanted.”
The Fisherman
Lloyd Lewis, owner of Talbot Street Pier and M.R. Ducks
If you know fishing, you know Ocean City’s Talbot Street Pier. It’s been the place to watch anglers return with their daily catch since 1933, when a big storm opened easy access to the Atlantic. “Back in those days,” says Lloyd Lewis, owner of the pier since 1970, “it was quite a fishing operation. Most people didn’t have their own boats, so they would come for a day of fishing” on the charter boats. The early owners, the Bunting family, promoted the sport heavily, even inviting Franklin D. Roosevelt for a day of sport fishing.
Lewis started working at the Talbot Street Pier in the early fifties, when he was about sixteen, fueling boats, hauling fish, and taking care of the requisite tasks. After returning from the University of Maryland and the Air Force, with a tour of duty in Vietnam, he bought the pier from the estate of his uncle, Talbot Bunting, his former boss, who had taken it over from his dad.
What began as a simple fishing operation blossomed into an empire for Lewis, who also owns the O.C. Rocket, a speedboat ride; the Assateague Adventure, a pontoon boat for nature tours; a fishing charter boat; and the Talbot Inn, a thirty-four-unit motel.
In 1982 Lewis built a tiki bar near the pier as a place for fishermen and tourists to watch the boats come in. He named it M.R. Ducks, a play on the Eastern Shore colloquialism between two duck hunters, “Them are ducks.” The next year, Lewis created a T-shirt to advertise the bar. It was a huge hit. Today, there are six M.R. Ducks shops (four in Ocean City and one each in Rehoboth and Myrtle Beach) selling men’s, women’s, and children’s clothing, stuffed ducks, hats, belts, and more—all emblazoned with the M.R. Ducks logo. Lloyd can’t explain why M.R. Ducks took off like it did, but muses that “We put our design on the back; everyone else’s was on the front. And it wasn’t a comic figure; it was a real, living thing.”
Pondering his success, Lewis says, “You never know what’s going to happen when you start something.” But he’s ready to let the next generation—his sons Stephen and John—carry on. “Hopefully the boys will take it over one day shortly, and I can spend more time fishing and playing golf.”
The Lifeguard
Captain Butch Arbin, Ocean City Beach Patrol
With his sandy blond hair and youthful grin, Butch Arbin looks right at home on the Ocean City beach. But to him, being in the surf is all business.
A member of the Ocean City Beach Patrol (OCBP) since 1977, Arbin became captain in 1996. (The OCBP began in 1930 and has had only two other captains since 1935: George Schoepf and Robert S. Craig, who stood at the helm for fifty-two years.) As captain, Arbin, forty-six, oversees more than 200 OCBP employees, including 130 guards stationed on eighty-seven stands along ten-and-a-half miles of Atlantic beach, one of the longest stretches on the East Coast.
As much as Ocean City has changed, the mission of being a lifeguard has stayed the same: to save lives. It’s still a profession where the fastest and strongest thrive. Most guards are between eighteen and twenty-two and must pass the same lifeguard tests Arbin himself went through: a 400-meter swim to the inlet jetty and around the pier, a 300-meter run, both timed. The test must be completed in ten minutes or less. “Back then, my training consisted simply of taking the swimming test on one day and the very next, I was sitting on a stand with an experienced lifeguard. The following day, I was on a stand by myself. I had no CPR course, no formal training, and limited equipment.”
It wasn’t until 1988 that Captain Arbin, a former teacher who works in LaPlata, Md., as a computer network administrator for the Charles County school system, helped institute the OCPB’s Surf Rescue Training Academy. The four-week program teaches potential guards necessities like CPR and how to read the weather and the tides. These courses are followed by supervised probation on a beach stand. Many candidates wash out, unable to handle the rough waters and tough physical demands. But the survivors stay on to make a difference, like the Sunday in the summer of 2001 when lifeguards made 974 saves. Guards who make it into the patrol also enforce beach laws. “It used to be that when you went up to people they were very respectful,” says Arbin. “Now there is a lot of defiance, questioning authority. The most common offense is young people playing their radio too loud.”
Because of the job’s demands, a sense of humor helps, as the oddball questions from the crowds keep coming, like “When do you let the dolphins out? Where do the jellyfish go at night?”
Captain Arbin is still excited by this ability to serve. “What motivated me to be a guard as a young man was the idea that I was going out to save a life. And now I’m interested in being the head of one of the premier lifesaving organizations. This job keeps me young.”
