Palm Sunday in Ocean City, Part 3: Business

As Spring progresses in Ocean City, Maryland, it gets more difficult every week to keep track of which businesses are open, and which are still closed. With the nice weekend weather we've been having this spring, restaurants and hotels and stores are reopening almost daily.

The picture above of Anthony's is a case in point. They'll be opening tomorrow, Monday. Anthony's, popular for its hand-carved roast beef, has been in business on Philadelphia Avenue since 1954. It's a small drive-in restaurant right out of 1950s Americana. I hope it never changes.

I remember Anthony's from a trip to Ocean City during a college break before Easter in 1968. One student's family had recently purchased a brand-new condo on 47th Street, which was close to the northern edge of town. You could drive all the way to Delaware and not pass anything except sand dunes and Bobby Baker's Carousel (with the Wiretap Lounge).

We stopped at Anthony's, which was closed for the winter, so a friend could use the phone booth on the corner to call her parents.

(It's hard to believe, but college students didn't have cell phones in 1968; I doubt that the term "cell phone" had been thought of. If you were away from home and needed to make a phone call, you stepped into a "phone booth." This was not an inconvenience, because phone booths were everywhere. A phone booth was a quaint and civilized luxury that allowed you to make a call in privacy, if you wanted to close the door, and also protected you from the rain. At one time, it was considered humorous to see how many students could squeeze into a phone booth. You can still see examples of phone booths in ancient "Superman" TV shows. But that era of civilization and comedy is long gone. The phone company did away with the booths and simply attached "pay phones" to poles and the sides of buildings. No more privacy, no more shelter from the rain. No more Superman. Now everyone has a cell phone, and the pay phone has become an endangered species. But I digress.)

So my friend calls her parents, leaving the phone-booth door open so that the rest of us could stand outside and eavesdrop. I distinctly remember her telling her parents that Ocean City was a "ghost town" that spring.

Easter 1968 is long ago and far away from Easter 2009. Ocean City is definitely not a ghost town this Palm Sunday weekend. Plenty of businesses are open. Traffic is almost heavy on the Coastal Highway, and the Boardwalk is busy. Anthony's is still doing business at the same corner. It still has a couple of picnic tables out front.