Fleeting Days of Summer

These fleeting days of another summer, we remember Charles Epting Vansant (1892-1916), Section 10, Lot 151 in Laurel Hill Cemetery, his summertime of life cut all too short...

Each and every summer, Philadelphia residents flock to the sun, sands and refreshing ocean breezes of the Jersey shore. This summer has been no different. Neither was the summer of 1916…

Philadelphians were in the grip of an all-too-familiar, deadly heat wave that summer of nearly a century ago. Twenty-three year old, Charles Vansant, arrived with his family at Beach Haven on Long Beach Island on July 1. The young broker and Penn graduate decided to take a quick swim in the cooling waters of the Atlantic before dinner. A Chesapeake Bay Retriever befriended him on the beach and followed him far out into the water. Just as quickly, however, the dog turned around and headed back to shore. Vansant called to his companion, encouraging him to return to their swim. After many vain attempts, the young man opted to return to land himself.

As he swam through the pounding surf, he never heard the shouts from the crowd gathering at the water’s edge. Only feet from safety, Vansant was halted by a terrible pain in his left leg. Blood turned the water red. Onlookers rushed into the water to assist the screaming victim, pulling him ashore as some barely visible creature beneath the water’s surface struggled just as fiercely to pull him back out to sea. The creature’s belly scraped the ocean’s bottom, and he finally released his deadly grip. Despite efforts to save his life, Vansant’s femoral artery had been severed, and he bled to death less than an hour after he had first entered the water to celebrate the start of his summer vacation.

Vansant’s death was one of four that would occur over the next two weeks. A twenty-seven year old man and two young boys would also meet their fate at the jaws of a shark. The national media descended upon the Jersey shore, the "man-eating" attacks inciting a panic that one journalist described as "unrivaled in American history." The negative caricature of the shark became a lasting piece of popular culture, eventually inspiring Peter Benchley’s novel, Jaws, which Steven Spielberg adapted into the iconic film in 1975.