History · 1939–2025
The People Who Work Here
A town that multiplies by forty-four every summer has always been staffed by people who are not counted in it, and the record names them only when they become a municipal problem - a wage to be set, a crew to be found, a visa that did not arrive, a body asleep on a bench. The labour that makes Ocean City possible appears in its own archive almost entirely in the third person.
Stella Bowen worked fifty-two weeks in 1939 for $175. Ocean City set its lifeguards at $17.50 a week in 1941, used ten war prisoners to clean the beach for a fortnight in June 1945, and settled its 1946 garbage problem on a single line - 'decided to employ five colored help to load trucks, and Secretary ordered to contact men and employ them' - naming no man, entering no wage, and leaving the finding of them to the clerk. In 1970 the council heard protests against a work permit ordinance, the resort beginning to license who may work in it. The police budget went from $250,000 to over a million in under eight years. By 2005 the town was being told by a food bank that the international students who work its season were among those it fed; by 2019 the Public Works Director brought the town's homeless to the Police Commission because his staff were finding people asleep at the transit centre; and in 2021 the season nearly stalled because the J-1 students could not get here at all.
This is the thread the archive is worst at, and the gap is the finding. A council minute book records what a government decides, so the people who serve the food, guard the water, load the trucks and clean the rooms enter it only as a line item or a difficulty. Not one of them speaks in this corpus. The two fullest accounts of Ocean City's seasonal workforce are given by a priest and a food bank director, on their behalf.
7 beats · 17 dated facts · 3 open questions
The arc
1939–1943
A hundred and seventy-five dollars for fifty-two weeks
The wage figures survive because the town or the census wrote them down, and they are startling. **Stella Bowen worked fifty-two weeks in 1939 for $175.** Ocean City set its lifeguards' pay for the last pre-war season at $17.50 a week in 1941, and by August 1943 the town's own reckoning put the Life Guard cost at fifteen hundred dollars. The 1940 census names Black Ocean City for the first time in three decades of this record - which is to say that until 1940 the people doing much of this work are present in the town and absent from its documents.
1940 on the timeline1941 on the timeline1943 on the timeline
1945–1946 · pivotal
Ten war prisoners, and five men the clerk was told to find
In June 1945 Ocean City used ten prisoners from a Maryland camp to clean its beach and streets for a fortnight. The following year it solved its garbage problem in one sentence: "The handling of garbage was discussed, and decided to employ **five colored help to load trucks**, and Secretary ordered to contact men and employ them." That is the entire entry. No man is named, no wage is entered, and the finding of them is left to the town clerk - and it is **the only reference to Black labour, or to Black Ocean City, in the first two-thirds of the 1946 minute book.** In the same season an Ocean City advertisement offered an experienced cook $25 a week and large living quarters with a private bath, "white or colored".
1970–1979
Licensing who may work, and paying who must
In February 1970 several people came to the council to protest a new work permit ordinance - a town of some 1,600 registered voters, filled each summer by people from everywhere else, deciding for the first time to license the labour it depended on. Nine years later Kelley described what the boom had done to the one workforce the town does pay directly: "If anybody was on the Police Department in 1970 you hadn't had a raise in 5 years. You had four Police cars in operation. The seat of your britches were out. I think probably some of them were making $75.00 or $85.00. **We've gone from 250,000 to over a million dollars in that same Police Department in less than 8 years.**" The same session noted a retirement system that allowed for "the possibility of 65 year old patrol officers responding to serious emergency calls."
1987
Eighteen hundred signatures, and a charter that forbade them
The one moment in this record when Ocean City's own workers organise on their own behalf, and it fails at the ballot. Officer Bill Jones brought the council close to 1,800 signatures asking it to strike the charter clause providing that no union, association or other collective bargaining organization shall be recognized as a bargaining agent. The council refused him a special ballot; he came back with legal opinions from the Fraternal Order of Police and AFSCME Council 67; a 4-3 vote put it on the October ballot, and the voters rejected it 446 to 1,171. **The town's employees asked its property owners for the right to bargain, and were refused.**
2005 · pivotal
A food bank tells the town about its own workers
The first time the people who work the season enter this record as a subject rather than a labour supply, they enter it through a priest and a food bank. In February 2005 the council heard a "Presentation of Goals for Living Standards of International Students" from Rev. Father John Klevence of St. Mary's Star of the Sea and Youth Coordinator Anne Marie Conestabile. In June, Edward Tinus of the Delmarva Food Foundation and Worcester County Foodbank told the Mayor and Council how much food his agency had provided to those in need in the county, "including the international students who come in during the season", and urged them to address the growing needs of these students. He was asking for a small stipend and an office. In the same June the students appear once more, as volunteers who might paint a utility box.
2019 · pivotal
Forty people, twenty-four of them still outside
A hundred and fifty years into this record, it counts the town's poor for the first time - and it does so because the men who empty the bins raised it. Public Works Director Hal Adkins came to the Police Commission on 16 October 2019 to describe two situations his employees were experiencing: people sleeping on the benches and sidewalk at the transit centre, and people sleeping in vehicles and on the beach near the Inlet lot. Lt. Eade then described the Homeless Outreach Team - OCPD, the Worcester County Health Department, Social Services, **Diakonia** and others - which "goes out every 2 weeks" and had identified **forty homeless in the Town, twenty-four of whom have not been housed.** The detail that stays is the one nobody dwells on: some of the people sleeping at the Inlet are not homeless at all.
2021
The season that nearly stalled for want of people
The bounce-back summer of 2021 nearly failed on staffing. J-1 visa students - the workforce a food bank had been feeding in 2005 - could not get here, and a town with 35,000 available accommodations discovered that accommodation is not the binding constraint. It is the clearest demonstration in the record of the thread's argument: Ocean City has spent a century building rooms and a century assuming the people to service them will simply arrive. In 2024 the town scored a sports complex operator on how many room nights it produces; nobody scored anybody on where the staff would live.
What we still cannot show
Recorded by the research itself, with where the answer would come from.
- 1939–2025 **Not one seasonal worker speaks in this corpus.** Every account of Ocean City's workforce - the five men the clerk was told to find in 1946, the international students of 2005, the forty homeless of 2019 - is given by someone else on their behalf. This is the thread's central limitation and it is a property of reading a town through its council minutes.Where to look: Maryland Coast Dispatch and Ocean City Today; oral history; the J-1 sponsor agencies; St. Mary's Star of the Sea and Diakonia records
- 1946 **The five men hired to load garbage trucks in 1946 are unnamed and their wage is unrecorded.** The minute says only that the Secretary was ordered to contact men and employ them.Where to look: 1946 town payroll or warrant book, if it survives; Worcester County land and church records
- 1946–2025 **Where seasonal workers live has never been established in this record**, in any decade. Employee housing appears as a zoning question in the 2020s and never as a description of conditions.Where to look: 2020s zoning files on employee housing; Maryland Coast Dispatch
Threads that cross this one
Black Ocean City: present from the second season, recorded almost entirely by other peopleThe Hotels: the town's cause, its whole economy, and its standing riskThe Franchise: who counts as a voter where almost nobody lives