On the Atlantic City Boardwalk, Other Stories Remain to Be Told
By PETER APPLEBOME
ATLANTIC CITY
You can’t be an Atlantic City historian these days without a Nucky Johnson experience, so both Allen Pergament and Ralph E. Hunter Sr., retirees who became obsessive collectors of local artifacts and lore, come prepared with tales of the political boss, racketeer and kingmaker whose fictionalized spawn is at the heart of the HBO series “Boardwalk Empire.”
At what he calls his “Booseum” — a phantasmagoria of 20,000 pictures, 10,000 postcards, the lost world of Miss Americas, diving horses, men in suits on a packed Boardwalk — Mr. Pergament, known as Boo, recalled the time his father, the chief clerk for the county board of elections, took him along when he visited the great man after Mr. Johnson’s release from prison in 1945.
Sure, Mr. Johnson, fictionalized as Nucky Thompson in the series, took bribes, flouted Prohibition and went to prison for tax evasion, but in real life he was far more charming and less menacing than the Sopranoesque figure in the HBO series, Mr. Pergament said.
“They didn’t make Nucky like Nucky was; they made Nucky like they wanted him to be,” he said of the premiere. “It was a wonderful picture; they did a fantastic job, but Nucky wasn’t a Capone. He had a way of being appreciated, ingratiated, respected. Nucky had a smile on his face 95 percent of the time.”
Mr. Hunter, a retired business executive, who turned his collection into the African American Heritage Museum of Southern New Jersey, holds court at the All Wars Memorial Building, originally called the All Wars Memorial Building for Colored Soldiers, that Johnson built in the ’20s. He brings along political literature in which Nuck Johnson highlights the black jobholders of his era like Dr. Leroy Morris, Physician to the Poor and Miss Edna Aiken, Stenographer to Chief Electrician.
Later, Mr. Hunter visits a friend, Alvin Washington, and they trade Nucky stories. “He’d come up with jobs for people, $10, $20 a week, but sometimes he needed a title,” Mr. Washington said. “They’d say, ‘Well I saw a fireplug that froze up last night,’ and he’d say, ‘Well, you’re the night fireplug inspector.’ ”
Like an aging prom queen being courted for the first time in years, Atlantic City is smitten with its most recent star turn. There are “Boardwalk Empire” posters and billboards everywhere, at the toll booths, on the Boardwalk, billowing in the breeze in front of Caesars Atlantic City.
Hotels and restaurants offer rooms and meals for $19.20 in honor of Mr. Johnson’s heyday. About 1,000 people turned out to watch the “Boardwalk Empire” premiere at Caesar’s and listen to six panelists, including Mr. Pergament and Mr. Hunter, discuss the city’s past.
The show’s initial ratings were boffo. The first episode was viewed by 7.1 million people, HBO’s biggest premiere audience since 2004. A second season has been ordered. It’s hard to know who wants it to catch on more, HBO looking for a hit or Atlantic City desperate for some buzz.
Still, there are rich stories as well on the other side of what Mr. Hunter calls the Mason-Dixon line in a city more than half black, where African-Americans formed the bulk of the city’s work force for decades.
There was the old Chickenbone Beach, at Missouri and Boardwalk, which was the black beach; Madame Sarah Spencer Washington, the cosmetics entrepreneur who was one of the first black female millionaires; the black clubs like the Club Harlem, and Golden’s Cocktail Bar, featuring its one-armed bartender.
Beneath it all is the fascinating, largely untold story of the vanished black businesses and institutions that flourished during segregation and then died with integration. It is not “The Roaring Sopranos,” as some are already calling “Boardwalk Empire,” but it’s pretty fascinating grist for someone’s mill.
It turns out that Nelson Johnson, the county judge who wrote the book that inspired the HBO series, actually tells this story in another book, “The Northside: African Americans and the Creation of Atlantic City,” to be published in November.
But TV fodder? We’re in what’s billed as television’s second golden age, all those smart, novelistic shows about mobsters, ad men, cancer, polygamy, sexy vampires and funeral home owners — television informed by Coppola and Cheever. Virtually none of it reflects the ever-increasing part of America that’s not white.
Maybe someday television will find room for the universe of Ralph Hunter and Boo Pergament’s — for Chickenbone Beach as well as mobsters with Tommy guns. Or maybe not.
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