Rites of Summer: Memories in Margate with Geator

MARGATE, N.J. - At Memories, everyone pretty much is peddling a first time with Jerry Blavat.

"I used to sneak out to go see him when I was 16, on 69th Street," says Linda Eliason, 68.

"I went to Bonner," says Ray Supplee, 68. "I used to go a long, long time ago to Chez Vous [the roller rink in Upper Darby]."

Some people really can't shake the guy.

"I met him in Philadelphia at a dance at Wagner's Ballroom," said Sima Bartels, 73, stuck in an admittedly hard-core Blavat time warp of deejay longing for the self-styled "Geator with the Heater, the Boss with the Hot Sauce."

It was the first Saturday night in June, Blavat's third of the season at Memories. Bartels was watching from the driver's seat of her idling car on Amherst Avenue, looking into the flung-open doors of Memories, where she could see the diminutive Blavat in the booth at the rear, past the bars, the handful of dancing couples, reading glasses on chains bouncing against golf shirts, the music coming from both inside the club and over her car radio, churning up her Blavat brooding, and her two dogs - pint-size, wound up, just like Blavat - acting as happy enablers of this madness.

"I fell in love with him," she said. "I've always been in love with him. I can't get him out of my mind."

OK, so maybe Bartels is an extreme case.

But she has company.

An unlikely 43 years after opening the - even then - oldies club in a moment of pretty much desperation when times were lean, Blavat is still returning to his Memories in Margate every summer weekend, parking his Geatormobile - so designated by the door-size cartoonish stickers he slaps on even a brand-new Chrysler - right out on Amherst Avenue, so there is no doubt, like a raised red flag on a mailbox: the Geator himself is inside, rifling through worn records.

The place has been there so long - Memories and Maynard's are the only places left from the inglorious Barbary Coast days of now-tamed and upscaled Margate - you keep wanting to say, "Hey, remember when Jerry Blavat himself used to DJ?" And then you catch yourself, because there he is, a tiny test tube bubbling over, dressed in black Converse sneakers, black T-shirt, and black jeans like the bartenders, with nothing flashy but the reputation, the teeth, and the track record. He is working, personally regulating the flow all night long to give people the Blavat fix they seem to endlessly crave, maybe never more than at the beach.

Blavat never stays overnight. He has no Shore house. He drives the Chrysler in from his place in Society Hill Towers like a shoobie, with tomato pies sent to the club in boxes courtesy of Iannelli's on Passyunk Avenue - they have a Shore house - for the gig at Memories on weekends. He and sidekick Joel Stephens are booked every day through Labor Day, somewhere.

That Blavat, who will turn 75 on July 3, has kept this now-very-oldies cultural phenomenon for the shoobs going pretty much single-handedly for four decades is a testament to his eager-to-please 5-foot-6, 126-pound, 20-minutes-a-day-abs-workout with a 28-inch waist bundle of you're still the same crazy teenager you were when you first danced to me - come on, dance to me one more time. It's seductive.

Spinning his records, with a dozen or two people in the club, the sun not yet set, the Geator is locked in, like a pitcher in Citizens Bank Park in the Phillies’ good years, foot tapping, tea bag hanging in a Dunkin’ Donuts cup. Some of the record labels are so rubbed out only Blavat knows what they are. “Hambone, hambone,” he says, testing the mic. “These are the O’Jays - ‘Use Ta Be My Girl’.”

His grandson Joey Downey and Downey's girlfriend, Lindsey Ervin, manage the place. His daughter Deserie is behind one bar (she also works at Joey Merlino's place in Boca), and sweetie mob wife and Blavat loyalist Kathy Ciancaglini is behind another. Frankly, everyone working at Memories seems part of a Blavat entourage, la famiglia, or maybe it's the mishpuchah (Blavat's father was a Jewish racketeer). At times, with the circle dances, the banter back and forth, the drunken embarassments, the way everyone kind of knows one another, the Italians in from South Philly, the Jews down from Bala Cynwyd, Memories seems like a scene out of My Big Fat Italian Bar Mitzvah.

"He's working day and night. I don't know what he's thinking," Deserie says.

What keeps it going may just be that Blavat deeply cares about the music, the beat, the alchemy that keeps people dancing, that makes people buy houses so they can walk to Memories. It makes 64-year-old Bettyann Cottonaro and 60-year-old Lou DiOrio return just to find each other because they really know how to dance.

"He's still as into it today as he was back then," Cottonaro says of Blavat. And so the unspoken challenge from Blavat becomes, Why aren't you?

This is the equation he has juggled in his head, in his bones, all his life, since he was an older-than-he-looks kid at pre-Dick Clark American Bandstand, wide-eyed, surrounded by women he'd later sleep with. (Not later that night, but later nonetheless).

He has no deep answer for why he's still at it, except, "I entertain people. It's what I do. A doctor's a doctor." He'll keep going until he can't. "It's always been about the people," he says, then jokes: "They meet, they get married, they come back divorced."

"He used to do the Aquarama, where they used to have the fish," says Geralyn Gaudio, 58. Yes, Blavat has played every venue known to man.

"It is exactly the same, except entirely different," says Supplee, fighting off a whiff of melancholy as his wife, Tessa, an Air Force officer, stays on the dance floor while Blavat spins "The Morse Code of Love" by the Capris (Dit dot ditty dit dot a ditty ditty / Dit dot ditty, Baby come home to me).

Supplee brought his wife from Florida to experience Blavat. "I expected to be 40 years younger," he says. "What is this fantasy?"

George Bochetto has arrived in blue-tinted sunglasses. In the Philadelphia lawyer and former state boxing commissioner, Blavat has a live one.

Blavat likes people who are somebody - anybody, really. He spends all night making somebodies out of nobodies ("Come on, Regina!" he patters for hours to a woman whose birthday it is.) He's not shy about friendships with legendary crooners or lifelong casual ties to mobsters (the moms go back to Abruzzi). It's what it is, but, maybe, he allows, it cost him that next level, once upon a time. Never mind.

"There's never, ever been a boxing commissioner like my man George Bochetto!" Blavat enthuses over the mic. "Come on, Regina!"

"It's in his blood," says Bochetto, who had to walk his companion back to the boat they stay on at the marina after she got wobbly on the dance floor, but he came back to sit at Ciancaglini's bar. "If he didn't do this, he wouldn't know what to do."

It's what Blavat literally grew up with, like his neighbors the Bruno family, and not for nothing, if you want to hang on to the past, he's your guy, long separated but never divorced from his wife, a "mystery lady" in Florida.

And even though you can play one or six degrees of mob separation all night long, (Ciancaglini is married to reputed Philly mob captain John Ciancaglini), the place is pretty tame. It gets way younger as the night goes on, the music edges forward, through disco to Mark Ronson, veers back at the end.

"Anybody who is anybody isn't here anymore," says a guy in a suit at the front bar. "They were here in the '80s. That's when it was interesting."

Just as Ciancaglini predicted, when everyone had finally left, the paychecks signed, Blavat sat down at her back bar with his usual "light vodka tonic in a tall glass" and took stock of the evening: not terrible, not terribly crowded. Though it's advertised as running until 4 a.m., Blavat pulled the plug at 2 in the morning.

He'll go home and be be back for a gig in Sea Isle in 12 hours.

"He's never unready," Stephens said. "He's been ready since 1960."

It's after 3 a.m. and Blavat's headed back to Philly alone in the new Chrysler, which has no slot for CDs.

It is a rare instance when Blavat is thwarted from the mission, distanced from the sound track. He’s just another Pennsylvania plate at the Shore fiddling with his radio. “I can’t put CDs in it,” he said. “So now I’m going to listen to KYW.”