Hooper Drives The Boat, Chief!

At the risk of my close friend Tjie calling me Sophia, allow me to begin with, Picture this: Cape Cod, 1975. Gerald Ford is President, gas is .53 cents a gallon, and a carefree, 11 year-old yet already ocean-nerd, future coral conservationist/blogger is spending the summer with family in the sleepy town of Orleans, Massachusetts, right on Nauset Beach.

This is the summer he's been waiting for... the summer of the cinematic release of Jaws. Together with his brother and cousins, he begs the adults to take them to the opening night. No dice, but cousin Monica is 19 and has a drivers license! They all load into the enormous station wagon (with genuine 1970's fake wood panels) and wait in line for at least an hour with other summer tourists for this gala event.

Finally seated (with many boxes of buttery popcorn) the lights dim, the low basso strings start-in with the now famous Dum dum, Dum dum, Dum dum, Dum dum. Cheers erupt! Could it possibly get any better than watching a shark terrorize a New England resort town while staying in a New England resort town? The young boy is ecstatically happy. That is until the severed head pops out of the boat! The boy doesn't sleep well nor swim in the ocean for the rest of the summer. But oh, what a summer nonetheless.

The reason I'm walking you down my memory lane is that I found my childhood ocean scrapbook while cleaning out some storage boxes this week. News and magazine clippings, photos, and other paper odds and ends that I collected as a child as part of my early ocean obsession. I guess it was my pre-internet version of information at my fingertips. The scrapbook has held up well over 40 years though it has that old library smell to it. Inside, I found the entire June 23, 1975 issue of Time magazine with a cover story on Jaws. I still remember finding the cherished issue in the morning pile of mail and immediately spiriting it away to my room before anyone else could see it.

While my professional ocean science curiosity over the years would see me pursuing interests in seaweeds, evolution, and tropical ecology, it was sharks that initially got me hooked. And the summer of Jaws was just fuel for the fire. I've lost count of how many times I've seen Jaws since that summer of 1975. But I remember thinking, even as an 11 year old, when I became a marine biologist I wanted to be as cool as Richard Dreyfuss' Hooper. The left arm, head, shoulders, sternum and portions of the rib cage are intact... Do not smoke in here, thank you very much.

As an added bonus to rediscovering this gem of an issue, I got a quick reality check on how much has changed in 32 years. Aside from the full page cigarette ads on practically every other page, other notable ads popped out. First of all, were cars really this cheap?



And then there's the 1975 version of word processing:



But of course, the more things change, the more they stay the same: