Deep Fake Clam Bake

The Company Picnic 1976 (more or less)

All of this is gone now, except the party in power still scrubs the record to suit its own desires. Some things almost never change.

I hired on as a clam shucker, but I could do just about any job at a clam bake by the time I was eighteen. We were rounded up by Bill, who owned the local fish market, and went all the way to Holmdel Park to put on the glass factory’s annual picnic.

How they got a beer truck into a county park was beyond my pay grade, but they did, and we served beer, boiled corn, and all the typical picnic stuff. I do not remember shucking many clams, or even if I shucked one. There was more than enough work to do. I knew by face, most of the crew, I had seen them all around town since I was old enough to wander around.

I never saw that glass factory, but it had to have been massive. There was a swarm of people at this party. They kept us too busy to visualize the crowd size. I do not even know what they made at the glass factory. I just assumed it was bottles for the major breweries that were then big business in New Jersey.

The fish market, glass factory, even those big breweries are all history, but the party in power nationally still runs the county and scrubs the history. The shift from Anglo-American to syndicate control had some bumps, but all in all has been done nearly seamlessly. None of which will be part of recorded history.

There has never been a better time or place to be wealthy and white in New Jersey than the rapidly gentrifying and steadily whitening Monmouth County, an oasis for fascists in a sea of diversity.