Pearl S. Buck: A Shoobie Who Didn’t Appreciate Other Shoobies

Posted July 29th 2024

Fifty years ago this summer, The Press of Atlantic City published a tribute to a longtime Stone Harbor seasonal visitor who had passed the year before, legendary writer Pearl S. Buck. Buck won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932 and then became the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1938.
The tribute featured a story related by Bruce Gimmey, a onetime bartender at Fred’s Tavern who apparently enjoyed walking his dog on the beach. On one of his beach outings, he was stopped for a chat by a tall woman with gray hair whom Gimmey described as “severely handsome.” As the story was told, the woman was carefully attending to a waterside stroll with a developmentally disabled child. The child was no doubt her daughter Carol, who needed long-term care and lived her life at the Vineland Training School in Cumberland County.
After leaving the beach, Gimmey couldn’t erase the memory of the “striking” woman and her intelligent conversation. Gimmey later mentioned the casual encounter to Marshall Fisher of Diller Fisher Realtors, who informed him that his encounter was with none other than the highly acclaimed author of “The Good Earth” and other works about peasant life in China, where she grew up as the daughter of missionaries.
Fisher told Gimmey that in 1961, Buck purchased an “upside-down house” in Stone Harbor, with the living room on the second floor and bedrooms and garage located on the first floor. Fisher went on to tell Gimmey that Buck’s house, which sat on the northwest corner of 105th Street and First Avenue, was valued at about $65,000 in 1974 and that she spent a good deal of time writing at the house from 1961 through 1969.
Gimmey was told that she enjoyed spending the winter and spring months in Stone Harbor because she didn’t care for “people pollution.” She especially avoided the summer months when the island was filled with “society folks” and business executives. It appears that Pearl Buck was a seasonal visitor who didn’t appreciate other seasonal visitors. Who knew?
Among her works, she wrote about swimming, fishing, and crabbing in New Jersey. She once wrote, “I do not need books to tell me about New Jersey. For years my life has been caught into the manifold variety of this small seacoast state.”
Buck attracted quite a bit of attention in local media in 1974, a year after she died. The Press of Atlantic City wondered why no historic markers were placed outside her former home on First Avenue. And in another tribute, The Press of Atlantic City attributed the following paragraph to Buck, written during her time on the Seven Mile Beach.
“I am always moved with grateful wonder by the goodness of people. For the few who are prying or meanly critical, for the very few who rejoice in the grief of others, there are thousands that are kind. I have come to believe that the natural human heart is good, and I have observed that this goodness is found in all varieties of people, and that it can and does prevail in spite of other corruptions. The human goodness alone provides hope enough for the world.”
One can only wonder if Buck, who had joined her parents in serving as Presbyterian missionaries, ever made her way to Wells Memorial Church, the only Presbyterian church on the island when she was here in the spring … before the crowds of a half-century ago sent her back to her Bucks County farmhouse. So, for those people who don’t love the crowds of summer, Pearl S. Buck is a woman after your own heart.