RECREATION The fine-limbed young woman rising from the foam on TIME’S cover is neither a naiad nor the creation of a fashion editor’s imaginative whim. She is Mrs. William J. Anderson III, named Michael because she is the third of three daughters in a family that had been hoping for a boy. She is swimming not at Saint Tropez but at Sea Island, Ga.; she comes not from such routinely celebrated places as Manhattan, Boston, or Philadelphia, but from Nashville, Tenn. In Nashville, her family is well-to-do but not rich, social but not all that social. Yet she and millions of other young matrons are enjoying what is becoming an increasing pleasure and privilege for a growing number of Americans—a summer home away from home. In Michael Anderson’s case, it is a cottage with a sun deck on Sea Island’s five-mile stretch of white fine-grained beach whose gentle slope is ideal for her two small children, Sayle, 4, and Jody, 1. Such a beach would be hard to find in all of Europe. And more and more Americans are realizing that the U.S. has some natural advantages that can outmatch Europe’s best. Europe, for example, has no stretch of shore that surpasses Cape Cod’s Great Outer Beach with its soaring bluffs; no mountain lakes that are more breathtaking than those in Colorado or Wyoming; no more challenging golf courses than Pebble Beach and Pine Valley; no finer sailing than Cape Cod or the Maine Coast. Moreover, all the food is American, and all the natives speak English. Not so long ago, going away for the summer was a privilege of the rich, and the oh-so-rich at that. Baedeker’s United States, published in 1909, rated Bar Harbor and Newport as the two top resorts, and after that the Grand Tour was only a question of whether one preferred the Berkshires to Saratoga, White Sulphur to Hot Springs, or how long to remain at Tuxedo Park. Because the rich were so few, they clustered together in tight little colonies. Their “cottages” were turreted mansions, marble palaces and crenelated castles; they entertained only each other. Their summer colonies were located within a stone’s throw of early U.S. wealth—New York, Philadelphia and Boston. Times have changed. Depression and war shuttered many a resort, but 20 years of relative peace and an almost continually prospering economy have given them new status and new life. Where there once was one mansion, there are now a hundred $50,000 summer “cottages”—a euphemism that still lingers. Along with the economy and the population, resorts have proliferated westward. Founded on less rigid social standards than those that governed Eastern watering places, resorts in other parts of the country often start with a structure or an area rather than with people. And they offer facilities, rather than snobbery. Today there is scarcely a U.S. family of means, in any section of the country, that is not going away somewhere for the summer or contemplating it—with nary an envious thought for his neighbor who may be planning a quick trip to Europe. Where do they go? To the tried and true. To the new and provocative. Among the old, only the best survive. Among the new, only those with real merit are chosen. Herewith a partial guide to the most durable of the old and the most stimulating of the new. THE OLD RESORTS
