4 Shark Agamst Man 



indomitable, did not faint. She went to the phone in her room, called 

 the manager, and told him what she had seen. She also asked that her car 

 be brought around. Three minutes later she was speeding to Deal Beach, 

 some 5 miles north. Her niece took a plunge in the surf there every 

 afternoon, and Mrs. Childs wanted to get to Deal Beach before the shark 

 did. 



Bruder was dead. The doctor called to tend him was treating the 

 women who had fainted. At the Essex and Sussex, the telephone operator 

 was ringing up every central switchboard from Point Pleasant to Atlantic 

 Highlands. Within 12 minutes, swimmers were streaming ashore along 

 20 miles of New Jersey beaches. 



But was it a shark? Was it true that man-eaters were prowling the 

 shore of New Jersey? Hotel men, resort operators, summer colonists 

 wanted to be told that it could not happen. They anxiously awaited the 

 verdict of Colonel William Gray Schauffler, an eminent physician and 

 Surgeon General of the New Jersey National Guard. He had examined 

 Bruder within 15 minutes after he had been taken from the sea. 



"There is not the slightest doubt," Colonel Schauffler reported, "that 

 a man-eating shark inflicted the injuries. Bruder's right leg was frightfully 

 torn and the bone bitten ofi^ half-way between the knee and ankle. The 

 left foot was missing, as well as the lower end of the tibia and fibula. The 

 leg bone was denuded of flesh from a point half-way below the knee. 

 There was a deep gash above the left knee, which penetrated to the bone. 

 On the right side of the abdomen, low down, a piece of flesh as big as 

 a man's fist was missing." 



That night, while hotel residents, at Mrs. Childs' suggestion, took up 

 a collection for Bruder's mother, motorboats equipped with searchlights 

 slipped out to sea in a futile hunt for the shark. Colonel Schauffler called 

 a meeting of resort owners and town officials to discuss ways to make 

 the beaches safe from sharks. Rifle-toting boatmen were hired to patrol 

 the beaches. Fishermen volunteered to fish for the shark with great 

 hooks, sturdy lines, and chunks of prime mutton, reportedly the best 

 shark bait, donated by cooperative Spring Lake meat markets. "I am cer- 

 tain that the bathing beaches will be made safe within two or three days," 

 Councilman D. H. Hill announced . . . No shark was caught, shot, or 

 even seen. 



The day Bruder was killed, 24 people died in New York City of polio, 

 then called infantile paralysis. Bruder's death received far larger coverage 

 in the New York papers. Such is the glamour and the terror of the shark! 



Each resort town along the New Jersey coast went its own brave way. 

 Atlantic City was more upset by a ban on bathing suits that exposed 

 "the nether extremities" than by sharks, although some daring souls made 

 an adventure out of the shark scare by contemptuously swimming be- 



