The Nicholson family moved from Neptune City to Spring Lake during Jack’s childhood, and he attended Manasquan High School. Manasquan was and is a small borough on the Manasquan River, just across from the beach. The high school drew students from the surrounding communities and had the size and social dynamics of a small-town school: most people knew each other, social hierarchies were well-established, and the children of working-class families and the children of the slightly more prosperous middle-class families all ended up in the same hallways.
Jack Nicholson’s reputation at Manasquan High School, by the accounts that have filtered into the biographical record, was that of a person with energy and presence who channeled it into social performance rather than academic performance. The “class clown” designation in the yearbook is one of those records that, looking backward from what a person becomes, looks like prediction. The person who became one of the most technically accomplished comedic and dramatic actors of his generation was, at Manasquan High School, the person who could hold a room’s attention without necessarily being the person who studied hardest.
The beauty salon that Ethel May ran out of the house was, in the domestic economy of the Shore communities, not unusual. Women’s home businesses — beauty services, taking in sewing, running small dairies or food operations — were common throughout working-class and lower-middle-class American communities in the 1930s and 1940s, particularly during the Depression years when household income needed supplementing and the home was the available venue for business activity. Ethel May’s salon gave her a degree of economic independence and positioned her as a neighborhood figure, a person other women came to and talked to, which in the social architecture of a small community is a form of power.