Putting His Stamp on Long Beach History

If you love something, you should share it with others.

That’s what Doug Sheer believes, and he puts that philosophy to practice whenever the opportunity arises to display and talk about his nearly 400 vintage postcards, mostly of Long Beach and many that are more than a century old.

Earlier this month he used them in a slide show and talk when the Long Beach Island Landmarks Association, of which he is a member, held their annual meeting at the Long Beach Library.

“I find people always show an appreciation for this, whether they’ve been here five years or fifty,” Sheer said about the talks he gives about Long Beach of yesteryear.

His postcards offer a variety of images, from the original train station and City Hall to the boardwalk and its bathhouses to the People’s Church in the West End.  

They are divided into “real” cards, that is, those with a photograph, and others that are paintings of the featured building or structure. Sheer appears to have a monopoly on the cards showing the Lido Golf and Country Club, a hotel built in 1928 and once Long Island’s largest. (Today, the building is the Long Beach Towers condominium complex at 2 Richmond Rd.). During World War II, the owner of the pink seaside hotel rented it to the U.S. Navy, and Sheer has several postcards of sailors that were stationed there.

“Some times I look at these pictures and wonder what was it like to be a soldier at Lido Beach Hotel,” he said.

Sheer reads the back of one of these postcards, written by a sailor to a “Mrs. H” in Minnesota. “And he talks about how he is only 200 feet from the ocean at the Lido Club and about to get off onto the water, which I assume it means he’s going to go off and fight,” Sheer explains. “And so you kind of wonder: Gee, what was going through his mind. He’s at a nice hotel on the water, but in a few weeks he might be overseas.”

These literary tidbits of people’s lives is one of the distinctions Sheer enjoys about collecting postcards over decades-old photos. He even likes that most of what is the senders wrote is rather routine: “They write the same things we write today: ‘Having a great time,’ ‘Wish you were here,” said Sheer, who is a retired social studies chairman at Garden City School District.

The 62-year-old started his career as a history teacher at a junior high school in East Meadow in 1973, around the same time that he bought his first postcard — a painting of a Long Beach bungalow — at South Street Seaport. Initially, he bought many cards at postcard shows in New York City, most for mere cents, but with the inception of eBay, he’s paid as much as $60 a card.

“The trick now is to find something you don’t have,” Sheer said about his collection that he estimates is worth $5,000. “That gets harder and harder. And if it’s hard for me to find, it’s hard for others to find, and it gets bid up.”

A postcard of a home entirely covered in ivy, at 368 E. Chester St., is among his rarest, as are the ones he has of the Long Beach Hotel after it burned down on July 29, 1907.

One of Sheer’s favorites is of several beach-goers on the Long Beach shore, circa 1913, who stare at the photographer, some of who are women wearing full bathing clothes.

“It just shows the culture of the times,” Sheer said. “People were just dressed so differently. The women are all almost wearing dresses with stockings and hats. So it shows a different era.”

Sheer, who has lived in the same Canals home since he moved to Long Beach in 1952, has given a bus tour of landmarks on Long Beach island, and he lectures on cruise ships about celestial navigation, a subject he teaches at Nassau Community College. He writes questions for the New York State Regents, as well as for The Challenge, a Jeopardy-like high school game show that airs each weekdays at 5:30 on Cablevision Channel 14, and he serves as one of its judges. 

Alexandra Karafinas, president of the Landmarks Association, said that it's difficult to find a person with Sheer’s knowledge to join and help the organization.

“Doug is a big asset because he’s a history teacher, a person whose family in Long Beach goes way back, and he’s able to tie Long Beach to different times in history, going back to the American Revolution and even the glacial period and show how the island was created,” Karafinas said.

While Sheer’s favorite period of history is early America, including the Revolution, the history of Long Beach is a close second.

“If you like the ocean, you can’t help but like Long Beach,” he said. “And it has a great history. It has many neighborhoods and an eclectic mix of people. It’s a real cosmopolitan area on Long Island.”