The young waitress spent much of her childhood in Mays Landing and graduated from Oakcrest High School. For a few years in the early 1960s, she lived with her mother, father and younger brother year-round at Sunshine Park. The camp was more than 100 acres off Somers Point Road along the Great Egg Harbor River.
Anton is 54 now and lives in Pensacola, Fla., with her husband of 29 years, Chris; their 21-year-old son, Erik; two dogs; two cats; and a tree frog that sought refuge from last year's hurricane in her bathroom and decided to stay on.
Anton, who once managed a small daily newspaper in Northern California and worked for the online service CompuServe for 11 years, has led a normal life. Health problems have severely cut her mobility and ability to travel in recent years, and that was why, unlike some of Arbus' other subjects, she did not attend the retrospective.
Had she been healthy, she would have "in a heartbeat."
Until an article about her appeared this month in the New Yorker, the Arbus photograph was little more than a footnote in Anton's life. "Until I outed myself to the curator of the Arbus exhibit, I didn't think much about it," Anton said last week. "That I posed for a famous photo - this is the first time those words have crossed my lips."
Being revealed as the nudist girl who posed for Arbus hasn't sparked a "huge onslaught of curiosity," Anton said. "It's been more like old friends from high school contacting me."
Before now, perhaps the photo's biggest effect on her life was when she sold her only print to ease financial problems created by a failed business in the 1990s. She declined to say how much she got for the print. But in April, another print of the photograph sold for $138,000 at Sotheby's.
She doesn't remember a lot about posing for Arbus.
