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Cape May resident and fire chief, points up another impact the Coast Guard presence has — emergency service: “It s a great asset to the city to have the Coast Guard here,” Dougherty, who went thru ‘bool camp' here in 1951, says. "Thej/ are a tremendous source of population to call upon in emergencies. I've called upon (hem many times and there's never any hesitation to comply. After the Windsor I Hotel) tire, they helped police the area. I can site many, many instances. The Coast Guard is a tremendous asset to the community and the

county "

TIIKHK ARK ABOUT, 350 RKCRITTS aboard the center at any one time these days. There are a minimum of It recruit companies, each with between 40 and (K) young men and women. A cou-

ple of years ago, there were as many as 15 companies going thru here at any one time. The number Of recruits are down some how" because the number of Coast Guardspeople re-enlisting in the Nation’s Oldest Seagoing Service is running about 63 per cent these

.days. .

Many of the almost 800 permanent party members own their own homes in the area — and pay taxes Together they have more than 800 dependents, including almost 300 children in area

schools systems.

The effect of a significant number of fulltime military persons and their dependents is a stabilizing influence on the area economy, e>en in the non-summar months. And so is the constant flow of recruits who come aboard the center for their eight weeks of training every month except

December.

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"IT DOES HAVE A SIGNIFICANT economic impact upon the county, particularly the lower end — even tho I do know some permanent party lives as far north as Marmora,” says Robert Petterson, executive director of the Cape May County Chamber of Commerce. “It’s a very good economic boost for our off-season — the fact that many of the trainee families come to spend overnight stays for graduation. I’ve always attributed that to part of the. reason why more motels are open in (Cape May) city than the rest of the county. You’re hard pressed to find-more than three motels open in the Wildwoods in the winter.- It) Cape May, almost every oth« motel seems to be open in winter, and I’ve always throught thP Coast Guard had a lot to do with that.” Another person, with an even closer knowledge of the Coast Guard presence here, believes the service’s impact on the area may be even greater than Number Three. “I’m not sure it isn’t Number One, because it’s year round," notes Mrs. J.T. Hobbs of Cold Spring. SHE AND HER HUSBAND (who was away on an extended fishing trip) should know. He was the civilian tailor at the training center for 30 years before his retirement in 1978. J.T. Hobbs moved here with the Coast Guard when it relocated its East Coast recruit training facilities from Mayport, Fla. to Cape May — commissioning its new training center hereMay 31,1948. “They bunt a chapel and a brig (in Mayport) and then moved to Cape May,” Mrs. Hobbs recalls, noting that previously boot camp was in Curtis Pay, Md. (It is believed that the move to Cape May was instigated by the late Cong. T. Millet Hand of Cape

May, who headed the Coast Guard Appropriations Committee at the time. Another widely known native who went thru Coast Guard boot camp at Cape May was the Congressman’s son, Thomas M. Hand, now publisher of thi Cape May Star and Wave.) The Coast Guard had been in capacity before 1948; it’s just that the training center was established here then. In past, facility now known as TRACEN has. been a military installation' since the Navy established Section |Base 9 at a former amusement park on what was then called Sewell’s Point on April 14, 1917, less than two months after the U.S. entered World War I. TODAY THE ONLY VESTIGE of those early, World War I origins are a handful of buildings and the word Bose — neither the training center nor any of its tenant facilities are correctly called a Base. There is no Coast Guard Base, correclty speaking in Cape May County. But the Coast Guards’ presence on the Jersey Cape predates that of even the old Section Base of WW I. Even before the turn of the centruy the Coast Guard was here. An 1896 map of the area shows there were then no less than five U.S. Lifesaving Stations between Cape May Point and Wildwood. And one was on Poverty Beach, the strand behind which today's TRACEN lies. In 1915 the Revenue Cutter Service and the U.S. Lifesaving Service joined to become the Coast Guard. Something Mrs. Hobbs said about she and her husband’s involvement with the Nation’s Oldest Seagoing Service seems to ring true for the Jersey Cape and this branch of the military service: “The Coast Guard was our life, even though we were civilians.”

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