the season for the Wilmington area
beaches. The Azalea Festival draws
a nat!onal crowd that week, but
most of the Carolina and Wrights-
ville traffic is semi-local, people from
Alabama, Georgia and Tennessee .
Farther north, near Morehead
City, the beaches are even less
developed. Atlantic Beach is a hub
for the area, with a small village
square of restaurants, fishing boats
and arcades in the center of miles of
quiet, lonely beaches.
With most of the summer traffic
living there for the summer in
summer homes, table soccer does
considerably better among the
younger set , while pachinko draws
coins from the adults . Skee ball is
rare.
Atlantic Beach is a far cry from
Myrtle Beach, worlds apart.
In
Atlantic Beach the kids cruise the
streets on skate boards, and fisher-
men wade into the surf without fear
of snagging swimmers .
And Cecil Sherrill and his wife,
who operate a large portion of the
local machines, are glad that Easter
will be late this year .
"We depend on high school kids
for a lot of the summer labor around
arcade crazy
( ontinu d from pag 41)
200 and 300 pieces found in Myrtle
Beach -type places.
Skee ball is still the standard and
baseball and bowling machines are
next, according to Garland Garrett.
His company, Cape Fear M usic in
Wilmington, has the pulse of every-
thing going in that region and
Garrett says 1976 will be a good
year .
The F-114 and Indy 800 have
proven themselves and he expects
Biplane and Bullet M ark to be the
best new pieces, he said.
Table soccer is strong in the
locations where the year-round and
summer residents visit, bu t short-
term tourists don't play soccer at
the beach he noted.
The game depends on challenge
playing to keep the tables in action.
Tourists are strangers and don't stay
long enough to get into the soccer
circles, he said.
The last week of M arch will open
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58
here and most of them can't work
until school is out in June . Easter
being late means we can take it easy
a little longer and that there'll only
be two months from the start of the
season until school is out. I like
that ," Mrs .Sherrili said.
And, she said, Atlantic Beach has
a winter population of about 400
people . In the summer it swells to
15,000 or 20,000 . The extra weeks
of peace and quiet will be nice .
****
Atlantic Beach is quiet. It was the
quiet mood of that beach that
convinced me I could take one more
beach, Sunova Beach about 20
miles north of Atlantic Beach.
It was a fatal mistake. It is a small
place. I stumbled into the only open
bar and here I sit in the Inequity Den
Bar and Grill writing this story and
hoping I'll make it out alive.
Across the room from me, the
Nazguls, a chrome-and leather-plat-
ed outlaw motorcycle gang, are
shooting pool. At least if the quake
dumps this place into the ocean, I
don't have to worry about sharks
messing with these animals.
Sharks! This place is filled with
sharks. Four days on the road and
I'm not even tempted to make a try
for any of the women around me for
fear they might accept.
Women? I use the term loosely.
They aren't bad looking; emit the
most heathen animal vibrations that
ever tempted a man. But they look
like the women on the Bally bingo
machines, the one's with the whips.
They look like they would enjoy a
good chain whipping before going
to bed, and it wouldn't be me doing
the whipping.
One of the guys is shooting pool
and using the breast cleavage of a
woman as a rack for his cue .
Another fellow is watching the
game, sipping on a chocolate and
raw hamburger malt.
And I'm sitting here trying to
make a life raft out of empty beer
cans, working on this story and
emptying the cans on Play Meter's
expense account.
It serves you right Ralph Lally II,
sending me on a winter tour of the
beaches, not a bIkini in sight, and
trapping me here with these exhibits
for abortion on demand. And the
only reason they haven't stomped
me into a bloody pulp is that I'm
buying beer for the house and
charging it to Play Meter.