Melissa Ziobro
I would like to share a bit about the Paradoxical Paradise oral history work funded by Monmouth University’s Urban Coast Institute this past Spring 2021 semester. Some of the funding from a grant awarded by Monmouth University’s Urban Coast Institute (UCI) awarded to our project Paradoxical Paradise went towards conducting and transcribing oral histories, seeking specifically to record the historic impact of COVID-19 in Asbury Park, across different demographics.
The Paradoxical Paradise oral history interviews funded by this grant were conducted under my supervision by three students. I have 15+ years’ experience doing oral history, and am the current president of Oral History in the Mid-Atlantic Region. The three students (Gillian Demetriou, Kelly Dender, and Vincent Sauchelli) were trained by me in the Fall 2020, so we did not have to use grant dollars for that. They were ready to hit the ground running.
In setting up this oral history piece of Paradoxical Paradise, we worked closely with the Asbury Park Historical Society and Asbury Park Museum because we wanted to ensure that the community is helping to shape the work and feels shared ownership of the work. I’d like to thank all of our community partners here, for the record, especially Kay Harris.
9 interviews were conducted/transcribed with UCI grant dollars. The transcripts are being edited and will be posted to our Paradoxical Paradise website shortly.
The narrators interviewed under this grant were as follows:
Julie Andreola, Co-founder, Asbury Park Dinner Table
Eileen Chapman, Asbury Park Councilwoman
Dr. Patrick Connelly, Owner, Connelly Chiropractic
Tim Cabrey, Non-Profit Organizer
Douglas Eagles, Boys and Girls Club of Monmouth County
Daniel Harris, Second Baptist Church
Sylvia Sylvia, Asbury Park Chamber of Commerce
Claude Taylor, longtime Asbury Park resident
Pedro Trivella, Asbury Park resident
Each narrator had a unique, irreplaceable story/perspective on the pandemic to share. For example, as Claude Taylor noted:
It is the case that the health disparities get amplified, have been amplified in the COVID experience of Asbury Park. It’s similar to other parts of the state that have the kind of dynamics that we see here in the Asbury Park area within Monmouth County.
So access to equitable health care is one of those challenges, you have to leave town in a lot of ways to get quality health care, to get really much health care. Now, I do know that there are clinics, outpatient and kind of other kinds of medical clinics in town. But the hospitals again, where I was born Fitkin’s General Hospital, Fitkin’s Memorial Hospital, which is now Jersey Shore Medical Center is it’s not walking distance, it’s a trip out of Asbury Park to get to a hospital.
Monmouth Medical Center in Long Branch is the next closest hospital. So, I think the quality and access to health care in Asbury Park has created some of the negative experiences and the drawbacks, and then the harm of COVID-19 in Asbury Park too. And those inequities existed before COVID started and they got amplified during the pandemic and continue now into now, here we are at the end of March and 2021. My perception is that there are still these long-term health disparities in the town, which translate to higher incidence of COVID. And the kind of higher incidence of really extended COVID harm. So like the ways that people are affected by COVID, the illness is more deadly to folks in the town, and access to health care, is one of those areas, I think is really a problem.
Validating the barriers to access to healthcare that Claude noted, Eileen Chapman discussed fighting to bring testing to Asbury Park, recalling:
…one of my concerns was that we were not seeing any areas for COVID testing. So I worked with the county and with my local doctor… who then brought in doctors from urgent care to figure out how we could set up a testing site in our city, and make it accessible to everyone… So we created this whole program and it took months to do this…but we’re doing the same thing now with vaccinations…we wanted to get them … to the residents who don’t …drive. And so, they’re now going into our senior center on Springwood Avenue to do vaccinations.
Availability of vaccines is one issue. Convincing people to take them is another. Daniel Harris discussed African American residents’ concerns about the COVID vaccines, noting:
…What I see right now, and this is something that’s actually a national thing and we’re working on fixing it here in Asbury, is that when they first opened up the senior center for COVID vaccinations, I arrived and I said, “Damn, what is it? Did they have a white folks convention?” There was so many white people out there…I looked at the sign, I thought, “Oh, they’re doing COVID vaccinations here.”
…The… thing we’re fighting is there’s so much mistrust in the black community in reference to government medicine. Black people won’t take it because they think they’ll kill us anyway. You know the Tuskegee Experiment? You know when they didn’t even tell people they were killing them? We have to overcome that…
Thanks to the UCI, powerful narratives like these are now a part of the historical record. They will help us document the current crisis and provide lessons learned as we move forward, together.
Melissa Ziobro is a Specialist Professor of Public History in the Department of History and Anthropology at Monmouth University