Long Beach Island makes a New Jersey Shore summer fact of life interesting—with six towns each requiring a different badge for their beaches. Despite being a single strip of sand no more than a half mile wide, there is no "All-Island Badge!" Island towns adopted beach fees in the late 1960s and '70s to fund lifeguards and beach maintenance. Today, beach badges are so accepted that most objections have vanished and badges have become hot souvenirs. Communities sell not only seasonal, weekly, daily and senior citizen badges, but holiday and commemorative badges too. Residents and tourists alike proudly collect and display these tokens of summer, surf and sand. This book takes a breezy pictorial look at more than a half century of beach badges on Long Beach Island with fascinating bits of history, fun facts, prices and rules, and of course, hundreds of beach badges! This remarkable collection includes all seasonal and an extensive sampling of daily and weekly beach badges issued on Long Beach Island over five decades. Presented within each of the Island's six towns chronologically—along with some history and unique holiday and specialty badges—this is a gallery of summer icons familiar to generations of LBI beachgoers. How many friends were made, how many loves were found, how many children had their first dip in the ocean when these badges were worn on the sugar-sand beaches of LBI? On old board shorts—on salty towels and beach chairs—on weathered beach bags and cotton hats, these small plastic tokens are infused with memories that bring us back to happy, sandy moments of summer innocence.