The sun! The sand! The surf! Get your towel, sunscreen, beach chair... and just one more thing: The price of admission ― your beach badge. It's a fact of summer life for most of the New Jersey Shore and all of Long Beach Island. The beach badge has been a fixture of LBI's summer season for over half a century. Badges have become souvenirs, collector's items and mementos. They've marked the passage of time; a child's birth year, family vacations, summer jobs, and relationships that lasted a lifetime. In this book are hundreds of LBI's symbols of summer along with fascinating badge history. Stroll down the endless summer's memory lane with this remarkable colorful collection of seasonal, daily and weekly beach badges (as well as holiday, senior, and specialty badges) issued in all towns on Long Beach Island over 55 years. "Destined to become part of any well-curated beach house library. Kugel's eye-catching coffee table book offers a pictorial look at half a century of beach badges on LBI... A visual journey." -- The SandPaper, Long Beach Island, NJ Bob Kugel grew up in Edison, NJ, but has a long history on Long Beach Island. His family’s first one-week LBI vacation was in Beach Haven Gardens in 1970 when he was 13. He was hooked on the Island . Fast forward a decade, and in 1980 he owned one of the classic Holgate trailers. Four years later he bought a house in Ship Bottom. He became a full-time borough resident in 2005. A veteran of New Jersey’s telecommunications industry, he retired in 2005 and took advantage of the beach life ― surf, sand, and fishing ― when not doing carpentry and home improvements. He also worked from 2005 to 2022 at Southern Ocean Medical Center, which he says was “was an education about life, death, illness, medicine, and the importance of taking care of YOU.” When he’s not making surf art, you can find him on Facebook on his favorite LBI beach badge group, or giving online weather reports all summer long. “Only New Jersey — yes, only New Jersey — requires that in most towns along the Shore, in the summer season, you must pay a fee to get on the beach. Why, you ask? Because this is Jersey and that’s the way we roll. In New Jersey, nothing is free, baby, or so it seems.” — from the Introduction