The skee ball universe of Asbury Park circa 1972 was one of strangeness and disrepute. Enter sisters Gussie Solomon and Jean Kabatchnick. Leaving thriving careers; Solomon as a coat check girl at the renowned West Orange, NJ discotheque, The Mushroom Farm and Kabatchnick as one of Columbia Records most in-demand session drummers; they stitched together a skee ball sisterhood whose power was rarely eclipsed during its day. Born of beauty school rendezvous and squalid apartment circumstance; the society was the most exhaustive attempt thus far to unite and document the Asbury Park skee ball sphere and developed Jayne ‘Triple X’ Essex, who fashioned an exploding slice of skee ball boogie that unfortunately never found an audience outside the Palace Amusements mirror maze. Get reintroduced to the Ocean Ave Skee Ball Society; a boardwalk creation that clawed and threatened its way to Asbury crossover glory.

While the US halted the printing of the $10,000 bill and feet were mired in the mud of Woodstock, boxing mania swept through the West Side of Asbury. The son of a prominent Nicaraguan lawn service manager, Jose ‘Joey Blades’ Jardena was an obvious target when Sandinista rebels hijacked a San Carlos bound flight from Teterboro, NJ in April of 1969, ultimately putting numerous rounds through the budding boxing impresario’s body. After several years and as many surgeries, he would break ground in founding and forming Asbury Park’s first boxing institute. These (mostly) child pugilists, whether fastidiously trained or shockingly green, included 10-year-old Institute member Irv Abramson, who, fighting under the moniker ‘Kid Moskovitz’ earned a shot for the Super Mini Flyweight belt at the 1973 Parve Championships held at the Red Bank Armory in July of that year.

The APFC legend could almost be fiction. The fashion house passing as a home, the harem passing as a family, the lead designer who’s still attending middle school. The dream. The con. The end. APFC inhabits the same Asbury landscape as Elmore Leonard’s characters; taking equal measures of inspiration from Rudy Ray Moore’s Dolemite and Huggy Bear from Starsky & Hutch. Drawn to the underground and fancying themselves rogue entrepreneurs, the APFC label operates somewhere in the space between money laundering outfit, cult and driving school.

Having been rejected from both the Long Branch Speedway and Wall Stadium, this fruity blend of Monte Carlo pool boys, Deal Lake lifeguards, second deck cruise ship karaoke contestants, armchair drag racers and double-dutch runner ups were led by Akron, OH transplant and 1935 Soap Box Derby champion Maurice Bale Jr. With the team assembled at the intersection of Bond and Main Streets in Asbury Park, Bale declared it the gravity racing capital of the nation, even though there was less than a 2% gradient rise.  The Bond St. Boxcar Racers were a fusion of its captain’s engineering genius and their limited economic means; utilizing left over balsa from the high school wood shop, stolen rod collars and borrowed steering wheels.