Remembering ‘Jaws’

“Jaws,” the 1975 thriller film classic, had its 50th anniversary in June. Steve Spielberg’s “Jaws” became the highest-grossing film of its time. It was the first major motion picture to be shot on the ocean.

Filmed mostly on location in Martha’s Vineyard in 1974, the mega movie starred Roy Scheider as a police chief, who, with the help of a marine biologist (Richard Dreyfuss) and a professional shark hunter (Robert Shaw), hunts and seeks to destroy a man-eating great white shark that attacks beachgoers at a New England summer resort town.

Anyone who saw the original blockbuster will never forget it. To this day, I won’t swim very far out into the ocean for fear that a shark is lurking beneath the waves. While visiting Naples, Fla., one time, I remember being shocked when a man fishing from the beach, not 20 feet from me, reeled in a bonnethead shark. My grandson was out there swimming, and I was worried that he’d get attacked.

The fisherman assured me that bonnetheads are generally harmless to humans, which gave me a sigh of relief. Bonnetheads are the smallest of the hammerhead family, reaching an average of 3 to 4 feet. That’s still too big for me to encounter.