“Stir thy lethargy!”

My great-grandfather, Howard Heinkel, at Brigantine, c 1928 (still from home movie). I’m lucky to have known my great-grandfather, Howard Heinkel, an extremely energetic Philadelphia doctor of German ancestry who lived to be a healthy, cogent 96. Gramps built one of the first houses on the island of Brigantine on the Jersey Shore, where he […]

A Fish Story

Dr Constable pilots Belle 76 to Weakfish Thoroughfare, Brigantine Bay, 1976. My first apprenticeship was at the helm of a Boston Whaler, hunting for flounder and weakfish in the back bays of South Jersey with my dad in the summers of the late 1970s. I could pilot a boat years before I had my driver’s […]

Clam Skiff Vernacular

Brigantine beach cottages, alleyway view As a teenager in the seventies I spent summers on the South Jersey shore cooking at a seafood restaurant in Brigantine, a tiny island just to the north of Atlantic City. My great grandfather had built one of the first houses on the island in the 1920’s, my dad worked […]