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As flags rise and parades roll this Fourth, five families share the rituals that call them home.
Photo by Sean Murphy Summer beach traditions rarely begin as traditions. Someone cooks breakfast in the sand, buys a tiny bungalow, starts a parade as a joke, teaches a child to dig for clams. Then, year after year, the ritual draws them back, until it becomes part of the family itself. Here, five families from five seaside communities share the summer traditions that call them back each year.
Fourth of July in Grayton Beach starts around 3 a.m. That’s when hundreds of vehicles begin lining up for parking spots in the sugar-white sand. After the sea turtle watch team finishes its rounds checking for new nests, they give the all-clear, and the procession heads onto the beach. “If you’re not down there before sunrise, you’re out of luck,” said Wells Buzzett.
Every year, the 34-year-old sets up 50 handmade bamboo flagpoles, each 30 feet tall and strung with an American flag, across a roughly 40-yard stretch of sand between the coastal dune lake and the Gulf.
Grayton is one of South Walton’s original beach neighborhoods, established long before the 30A area became widely known. Wells’ grandmother, Bets Haynes, was one of Grayton’s earliest residents and is widely credited with helping protect the area from overdevelopment in the 1970s. Today, Wells, his parents, and his brother live blocks from one another in Grayton. For the family, the Fourth of July has always meant Grayton. “Me missing a Fourth of July in Grayton is non-negotiable,” Wells said.
After setting up at the beach, Wells heads back to town. It’s still early, but nobody really feels like going back to sleep. “The town is already buzzing,” he said.
The parade begins at 8 a.m. During the procession, Wells’ parents, Billy and Kelly Buzzett, set up a mimosa bar on the corner near their house. “I think they must go through 100 bottles of champagne,” Wells estimated. It’s on these corners that the generations mingle, sharing stories and catching up. “I see people I see once a year, but they are people I have known for as long as I can remember.”
The stories often start humbly, like the first parade, held in the mid-1990s, which included a grand total of about five cars. “My friend Carol started it,” longtime Grayton resident Kitty Taylor recalled. “We just drove around, honking and waking people up. We all had little kids, and we thought we’d do something to entertain them.” Today, over 250 people participate in the parade and over 1,000 line the streets to watch.
After the parade, everyone heads to the beach. What was once a small potluck for the few families who spent summers on this once-isolated stretch of beach has bloomed into something much bigger. People bring electric grills and even pizza ovens. “They’re making five-star meals out there. It’s a little unreal,” Wells said.
After sunset, fireworks light up over the lake.
As a child at his grandmother’s house, Wells slept in a bed under a window overlooking the Gulf. He remembers watching the Fourth of July celebration unfold. Years later, he’s helping carry it forward.
Ezra Glenn grew up on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, where a beach day meant hours on public transit, sweating in swimsuits with his parents and two older sisters before touching even a grain of sand.
“It was such a big production, but one that my parents put up with regularly because they’ve always loved the beach,” Ezra, now 35, said.
In 2005, when he was 14, his parents, Nancy and Mitch, made an unexpected move. They purchased a one-room bungalow on Rockaway Beach, on a peninsula jutting out from Queens, a far-flung corner of the city Ezra had never even been to.
The family began spending summer weekends there. The bungalow barely slept three: his parents in a loft over the kitchen, Ezra in a closet-like nook the size of a twin bed. It was a 45-minute drive from home, but a world apart, so quiet and different from the rest of Ezra’s life in the city.
Until then, Ezra hadn’t thought of himself as a beach person, primarily because of how complicated it was to get there. But at Rockaway, he fell in love. It took 92 steps, he counted, to get from his front door to the sand.
The Glenn family’s bungalow shares a small lot with eight other bungalows, an arrangement known as a court. Today, many are still occupied by the same families. The families arrive around April or May and stay until the owners decide collectively to shut off the water for winter, usually around October.
Every Labor Day, the court throws a big party, usually with a DJ. When he was a teenager, the younger kids would perform cover songs or choreographed dances. “Now some of those kids have kids, and they do their own thing at the parties,” he said.
The bungalow has become Ezra’s family’s summer gathering place. His eldest sister now brings her two boys. His retired parents live there all summer. “So if you want to visit them, that’s where you find them,” he said. Once or twice a year, the entire family gathers for a full week.
Days are spent in the sand and surf. Meals are shared back at the bungalow. Nancy seasons the meat, and Mitch cooks it on the grill outside. Ezra and his mom prepare a side or vegetable, most often served raw, using whatever is in season at the farmers market, since they try to avoid the oven and stovetop. The bungalow heats up fast.
In 2012, Hurricane Sandy devastated Rockaway. On Ezra’s parents’ block, nearly everything was damaged except the courts, which sat a barely perceptible six feet or so above sea level.
Since then, Rockaway has rebuilt and evolved, with a new concrete boardwalk, ferry service, concessions, and a hotel. But the hurricane and the changes that followed only strengthened the tight-knit community Ezra’s family joined 20 years ago.
The tiny bungalow also became Ezra’s place of peace. “I’m somebody who struggles with slowing down in most parts of my life and not doing multiple things at once, but the beach is a place where I feel safe to relax and not feel like I need to be doing really anything else.”
It’s enough to just be there.
Sallie Branch Levitch’s family cottage at Nags Head, North Carolina, has passed from one generation to the next. No one in the family has managed to escape a love of the beach.
“Not one of them is like, ‘I could take it or leave it,’” the 58-year-old said. “It’s in their blood.”
In some ways, Sallie’s entire family history began on the beach in front of the cottage her grandfather had built in 1950 using wood from his farm in eastern North Carolina. The following year, her mother met her father there. He opened with a line about needing help with his fishing tackle. They were engaged in October and married the next May.
In the 1970s, when Sallie, her sister, and her brother were young, the beach at Nags Head was their summer camp. Their father built a wooden frame with a canvas sail that served as their shade for the season.
Ahead of her time, Sallie’s mother insisted on sunscreen. “God forbid you get a sunburn,” Sallie said, because then she had to wear one of her father’s white work shirts over her bathing suit, the shirt heavy and clinging once it got wet. Her mother also strapped the kids into ski belts, the old foam floats worn around the waist, as if that might keep them safe in the rough Atlantic surf. It made her feel better, anyway.
Evenings meant dinner on the porch. With no television, Sallie’s mother read aloud from books like Charlotte’s Web. With no air conditioning, they slept in hammocks or beside open windows, listening to waves and music drifting over from The Casino, a nightspot where her parents had worked as newlyweds. Sallie’s father died when she was 19, but her mother kept the beach cottage, and it remained a special place for family gatherings.
Years later, Sallie brought her own twin daughters back for the same kind of summers and a few new traditions.
One Fourth of July, Sallie’s mother handed pots and pans to Sallie’s daughters, the first of her grandchildren, and declared they were having a parade. The children marched up and down the street, clanging their makeshift instruments. Adults joined in. The next year, neighbors did too.
Sallie’s mother has since passed away, and now she and her siblings own the cottage. Even as the five grandchildren have grown into young adults, they still parade up and down the street every Fourth of July. They have a grand marshal and everything.
The cottage sits in a row of about eight beach houses that have been passed down through the generations. “We’ve all grown up together,” Sallie said. “We sit on the porches, have our meals and our cocktails, and we talk to one another. We have cried together, had children together, had our parents’ funerals together.”
For Sallie’s family, the cottage has become a line from the past into the future.
“Every generation has made some sort of improvement to the cottage so that future generations can be there,” she said. “So they can bring their children and experience the same thing.”
For Angela Dials, a fifth-generation Oregonian, summer means being immersed in the bounty and magic of the northern Oregon Coast.
“I have a deep love for Oregon and living in a place where nature is so alive,” the 47-year-old said.
Her parents separated when she was 10, but each passed on their own love for the coast.
From her father’s side, she learned to fish, crab, clam, and take from the land and water with care. Her mother, the artistic one, took Angela and her siblings to explore the beach towns dotting the coast. They peered into tide pools, flew kites, and built sandcastles.
Angela remembers wading into the water with her dad and uncle, using shovels and rakes to dig for clams. In late summer, her father took the kids to harvest crabs and haul them back to her grandparents’ house, where they were cooked in big pots over a propane burner. After a set amount of time — every crabber has a secret for how long — the boiling-hot crabs are cooled with cold water from the garden hose, dumped on the driveway, and eaten by hand, using the claws to pick meat from the shell. “If you’re into crab, fresh, warm crab is amazing,” she said.
With her mom, the family would visit the beach, rising early to walk the sand, collect shells, and explore the tide pools teeming with anemones, sea stars, and other creatures. They waded knee-deep for sand dollars, still intact and tumbling in the waves because few people went out far enough to break them underfoot.
Today, Angela lives about 45 minutes outside Portland with her husband and two sons, ages 15 and 10. She and her parents have passed these nature-filled summers on to her husband and the boys.
Angela’s dad, older brother, and uncle taught her eldest son to fish. Every summer, he attended “fish camp” with them at the coast. For the past five years, he has made Christmas wreaths by hand and sold them to save money. This year, he finally bought his own boat.
When Angela was young, her mother dreamed of renting a beach house for a full week in the summer. Recently, Angela has made that dream a tradition, taking her kids and her mom to the coast for a week each summer, usually in Manzanita. Her mom takes them out early for beach walks and, after sunset, builds a fire in the sand for s’mores under the stars.
“It means everything to have our children have that same connection to nature,” Angela said. “As the world changes, I think about how it might not always be here. But right now it’s here, and my kids get to enjoy it, and I hope the more people enjoy it, the more they will want to protect it for the future.”
In 1974, the Sage family started cooking breakfast on the beach in Destin, Florida. My grandfather, Frank Sage, and his childhood friend Elmer “Blackie” Black came up with the idea for Mother’s Day that year. The women hung out in the sugar-white sand while the men stood over camping stoves, scrambling eggs and browning potatoes, the smell of frying bacon mixing with the salty Gulf air.
It brought everyone together: grandparents, grown children, a first grandchild, and old family friends. The breakfasts on the beach soon became a family ritual, the go-to celebration for weddings, kids coming home from college, and visits from out-of-town friends.
The gatherings always followed the same rhythm. Frank, Blackie, and the men arrived early to snag a pavilion and set up stoves, griddles, propane tanks, and coals. Everybody had a job. Everything had its place.
The women came a little later, though much of their work had been done the day before. They prepped potatoes, chopped fruit, made melon balls, and mixed the famous Bloody Marys, served over ice from a plastic thermos with a pump.
Then on breakfast day, they set up beach chairs and towels in the sand, caught up on the latest news, swam, and sipped those Bloody Marys.
“It was the first time we’d done adult things with our parents,” my aunt Sally recalled. “These grown-ups had been in our lives forever, but it was the first time I thought of them as my friends too.”
Frank and Blackie had a rule. The newest man to join the gathering had to cook the toast.
New boyfriends got a fair warning. “They’re going to make you do the toast, and they’re going to give you a hard time about it,” said my mom, Nancy.
It was a persnickety task. Frank and Blackie heated coals in a tin can, then poured them onto a griddle. The toast man had to take slices of my grandmother’s homemade cinnamon bread, dripping with delicate, sugary frosting, and toast them by hand, four pieces at a time, rotating them over the coals.
My father, Dick, was once one of those boyfriends. “The evil part was that the newest man had to cook the toast,” he said. “You couldn’t get sugar on the grill, and you sure couldn’t burn it. And you couldn’t have breakfast without it.”
Toast was the first stop in an informal apprentice program. One boyfriend tried to skip ahead by bringing pancake mix. “That was not the right thing to do,” my dad joked.
Frank died suddenly of a heart attack in 1978, leaving a hole at the head of the family. After a while, the ritual began again. My parents brought me as a baby. The family grew. And grew.
For Mary Margaret Sage’s 90th birthday in 2014, family and friends gathered to celebrate her. She, her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren lined up along the sand for a large family photo, the legacy of Frank and Mary Margaret stretching wide before the blue-green Gulf. The festivities ended with a breakfast cooked on the beach.
Hey30A AI
