As the pasty hordes descend on Jones Beach on Long Island for the first weekend of summer, rentals of umbrellas, striped in the traditional orange, green and brown, will suddenly shoot into high demand. For the park, the umbrellas are a modest side business, in place since its Jazz Age opening. For beachgoers, they are a $10 concession to worried mothers and lecturing dermatologists, a bright buffer from the blazing summer sun.

But to Chris Ann Peters, they are her life’s work.

Ms. Peters, 52, is the sole person in charge of making the distinctive umbrellas that adorn the miles of white sand every summer. It is a job she has done for more than 20 years in a waterside warehouse on the park’s northern side. And her daily labor is carried out much as it had been for decades by her predecessors, using almost the same striped pattern of fabric, stitched together on now-antique Singer sewing machines.

Roughly 1,000 umbrellas are repaired or replaced by Ms. Peters every year, as salt, sun and beachgoers wear them down. This year the work has been particularly frantic because hundreds of umbrellas were laid to waste by Hurricane Sandy. “I just make them, I don’t count them,” Ms. Peters said, standing in the cool of her small factory last month. “If I think about it, I get overwhelmed.”

The umbrellas were first made when Franklin D. Roosevelt was governor of New York, “Makin’ Whoopee!” was climbing the music charts, and the modern version of a now ubiquitous beach accessory — sunglasses — was invented.