OC Unfiltered >> What do LOCal stickers say about us?

Last Updated on Friday, 03 February 2012 12:16 Written by Cindy Nevitt Friday, 03 February 2012 00:00

Tammy C, a year-round Ocean City resident since 2005, put this LOCal sticker on the back window of her van because of what it signifies to her. Have you noticed the creative ways the word local is spelled in this town? Judging from the stickers slapped on cars, where the OC is supersized and of a different shade than the neighboring letters, one must assume Ocean City drivers enjoy random capitalization and colorization.

L-O-C-A-L. Play those five letters in a game of Scrabble and you’ll earn seven points. Play them in the game of life on this island and you’ll learn plenty of opinions.

“There’s a distinction between just Ocean City and ‘LOCal,’” says Tammy C, who asked that her full last name not be used for fear of anti-local backlash.

“‘LOCal’ says not only that I’m here, but I’m here year-round.”

Tammy, a stay-at-home mother of a first-grader living in Ocean City’s north end, put an oval, red-and-black lettered LOCal sticker on the back window of her van when she purchased the vehicle more than two years ago.

“That sticker means a lot to me,” she says.

A year-round resident who moved here from Texas in 2005, Tammy says it was important to her that she wear her allegiance to Ocean City on her sleeve, or rather, her vehicle.

“I made a conscious decision when I bought that sticker on the boardwalk to pick that over all the others. When I saw that LOCal, it jumped out at me.”

You’ve got to give the woman credit. She put more thought into choosing her bumper sticker than some people do when selecting a tattoo design.

Pat Juliano, a Gold Coast resident who’s lived in town for 35 years, says he sees the appeal in the design.

“It’s eye-catching and neat,” he says. “First you see the OC in it, then you see the local.”

L-O-C-A-L. It’s not just how you spell it. It’s how you spin it.

At Local Gym and Fitness on Asbury Avenue, the entire word is lowercased and rendered in red with the OC outlined in white.

“Local describes not only what we are as individuals, but it also describes exactly who we care about and want to frequent our gym,” says Russell Snow, one of the gym’s owners, adding that local includes summer clients, too. “The name gives a sense of belonging.”

What is it about Ocean City that makes people so fiercely possessive of the place that they plaster their cars with the sentiment and emblazon it on the front of their business? You don’t see people in Sea Isle City or Cape May haphazardly capitalizing letters in the middle of their towns’ names and then bandying them about.

Lane Groff, a real estate agent with Weichert, uses another of Ocean City’s famous slogans when framing his answer: “Even though it’s so cliché, this is America’s Greatest Family Resort.”

Tammy says it’s a way of identifying herself from other drivers trolling around our roads. Snow says his gym’s name “says it all, we’re local.”

For these people and others, showing their love of Ocean City in this fashion is as natural as a sports fan displaying a team logo. It can be just as divisive when a resident encounters a non-resident as when a Phillies fan runs into a Yankees fan. Advertise your affiliation and you risk alienating someone.

It can be argued that there’s a bit of elitism behind such a logo, where the ‘OC’ in local is emphasized so that it’s clear you either belong or you don’t. And even when you belong, your membership is subject to judgment, where your rank is determined by how blue your Ocean City blood is.

You can pretend that this is not the case, but it is. Ocean City has a definite hierarchy.

At the top are the people who were born in Ocean City and have lived their entire lives here. Directly below the Ocean City-lifer is the year-round Ocean City homeowner, though the Ocean City native, who has grown up and moved out of town, often considers himself above the year-round resident who has not lived here since exiting the womb.

Below the year-round homeowner is the year-round renter. The second-home owner is in the middle of the ladder, below the year-round people, but above the transient traffic that is further ranked according to length of stay: seasonal renters, weekly renters and overnighters. Day trippers, who inspired the term “shoobie” and wore the label exclusively until it began to be used indiscriminately to describe everyone who doesn’t live here year-round, are at the bottom of the local ladder.

I, with 30 years of residency in Ocean City, am still a shoobie in my family. My father-in-law graduated from Ocean City High School in the 1940s. My husband graduated OCHS in 1976. My children graduated from the high school in 2006 and 2010. I, who graduated elsewhere in New Jersey from both a high school and a college that no longer exist by their original names, cannot compete with that kind of legacy.

So I’m a shoobie. And, no, I don’t have a LOCal sticker on the back of my car. Don’t even bother looking for it.

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The reason Local Gym exists is advertised in its name. Ocean City is not just a resort. It's a state of mind.