Helen Pike:
Telling America's Stories

Stephen Crane:
On the Boardwalk in New Jersey

Stephen Crane Studies *
Volume 18, Number 1, Spring 2009 [pub date: June 2010]

With unbridled energy, blue-black waves swell and crash into white foam on the golden sands of Asbury Park, New Jersey. The tangy salt air breezily finds its way down sycamore-lined avenues. En route it tickles both the hemlines of young ladies and the fancies of their summer suitors. On the spare wooden boardwalk, well-dressed couples from America’s newly minted middle class stroll with pride, showing off their winter-born babies festooned in lace, lying in white wicker perambulators. From the Kingsley Avenue Merry-Go-Round, the jaunty melodies of a carousel’s pipe organ beckon would-be riders for a fantasy trip aboard handsomely carved and majestically painted horses even as one block away, thrill-seekers allow their hearts to jump into their throats as they ride a roller toboggan.

This is not the Asbury Park of rock and roll poet Bruce Springsteen. It isn’t the movie-matinee-filled Saturday afternoons of actor Danny DeVito, either. Nor is it the in-between-address of actor Cesar Romero who played the Joker in the campy “Batman” television series of the 1960s or of syndicated travel writer Lowell Thomas who wrote “With Laurence in Arabia” while his father practiced medicine here. And even though Jack Nicholson used to get his haircut at Red Cardilla’s barbershop on Asbury Avenue, neither is this the Asbury Park of his youth. It is, however, closer to being the Asbury Park of Bud Abbott who was born here in 1895, the baby of a bareback rider for Barnum and Bailey’s traveling circus show and an orangeade hawker.

This Asbury Park of well-appointed Victorian vacation homes, vividly landscaped gardens, a bustling downtown, and an oceanfront divided between the light and airy boardwalk and the enclosed dark rides of Ocean Avenue’s west side was the teenage home of Stephen Crane.

Remembered by scores of high school readers who plowed through his ground-breaking book on the Civil War -- “The Red Badge of Courage” -- Crane’s Asbury Park was one of many therapeutic seaside resorts that witnessed a different kind of battle. This one, believed by some to be waged still today, was for the very souls of red-blooded men and women.

On one side of the moral struggle stood Asbury Park’s born-again Methodist founder James A. Bradley, the Salvation Army, and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. On the other side were the twin enemies of liquor and mechanized amusements which encouraged men and women to ride close together on wooden horses or to sit side-by-side on large wooden disks that, when rocked back and forth, caused the riders to clutch each other in an effort to maintain their balance.

For his part, Founder Bradley owned the mile-long boardwalk and banned rides of any kind that would bring the sexes together. He also forbade the sale and serving of alcohol from all the hotels and restaurants in Asbury Park. Bradley went so far as to endorse a one-mile limit on the sale of beer from the borders of his Christian utopia where he has named the streets after high-ranking Methodist clergy and morals crusaders such as Anthony Comstock.

But on the land-locked side of Ocean Avenue Bradley-the-businessman sold entire blocks of real estate to more flamboyantly entrepreneurial merchants. There, on that west side, painted ponies pranced, new celluloid movies aired in opulently decorated theaters, and mysterious men conjured magic while black-draped women promised to reveal your fortune.

Into this man-made tug-of-war between leisure, liquor, and liturgy came the last child of fervent Methodist reformers eleven-year-old Stephen Crane. With him came his beloved sister Agnes, a schoolteacher, an older brother Luther, and his widowed mother, Mary Helen Peck Crane. Already in Asbury Park was Townley Crane, a correspondent for the Associated Press, his wife, and another brother, Wilbur, a medical student.

Mrs. Crane was already a fierce temperance crusader and writer with as formidable a public life as that of her late husband, the Reverend Jonathan Townley Crane. Three years after her husband’s death in 1880, Mrs. Crane was able to purchase a three-story house at what is today 508 Fourth Avenue. In 1888 she upgraded Arbutus Cottage so there was an extra room for rent on each floor. That summer, one of her boarders was Frances Willard, president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union.

Both mother and daughter joined the First Methodist Episcopal Church around the corner on Grand Avenue. Her sons, on the other hand, were neither church joiners nor goers. Townley was busy supplying New York and Philadelphia papers with social reports of their readers’ refreshing sojourns away from the hot cities. Stephen, the youngest of the 14 Crane children, took up baseball with a passion.

The post-Civil War influences on Asbury Park were every where. For one thing, the end of the war-between-the-states in 1865 marked the beginning of America’s first golden age of affordable travel for the middle class. It started, in part, as veterans brought their families back to such battlegrounds as Gettysburg to point out where they had fought the good fight. Others, eager to match their battle brawn with business success, found opportunities in new communities popping up around the country as the United States began to rebuild its tattered economy after the fraternal war. Waterfront resorts – no lakes too small, no oceanfronts too wide – were ideal for shrewd real estate speculators who tapped the vein of newly made money and aspiring second-home owners. Of the thirty-one founding fathers of commerce in Asbury Park, about half had served in the Civil War. Hotel and boarding house owners, in particular, offered special rates to veterans and their families. Bradley installed a statue of a soldier of New Jersey’s 14th Regiment at the foot of Asbury and Ocean Avenues across from the boardwalk. The founder even posed for a promotional photograph dressed in a Civil War uniform, his right elbow on a barrel, his visage deep in thought.

In the summer of 1888 Stephen Crane was 16, peddling his bicycle on miles of hot sandy roads and gathering the latest names and news on vacationers from Asbury Park south to Avon for his brother Townley’s New Jersey Coast News Bureau. These early writing exercises provided critical discipline in training Stephen how to record detail, capture nuance, and even how to find the telling ironies in man’s struggle to define himself. The journalism of the 1880 and ‘90s was not about generalizations, but about reporting what actually happened at any given event. The fiction style that eventually evolved from this form of journalism is called, by turns, impressionism, naturalism, symbolism, romanticism, and realism.

During Stephen’s passage to young manhood, Asbury Park’s seasonal struggle over the character of men and the morality of women escalated. Bradley had named his resort after the fervid 18th century Methodist circuit rider who launched the crusade against gambling, dancing, cussing, and liquor throughout the colonies. Bradley, himself, went so far as to post moral signs regarding the comportment of young ladies and gentlemen, and banned kissing from the boardwalk. He drafted a clothing code for women’s beach attire that included stockings, pants, a heavy blue flannel top with sleeves to the wrist, and canvas shoes. Its detractors called it the Bradley Bag.

But despite Founder Bradley’s ban against booze, businessmen found a way around the rule. By day and by night, produce merchants as well as soda and milk bottlers, sold pints of cheap whisky and beer hidden among their wares in the backs of their horse-drawn wagons. Alcohol found a more respectable way into polite society via the drugstores where cherry stomach bitters were nothing more than cheap whiskey.

By 1889 Asbury Park was thriving with more than 200 hotels and boarding houses. Because of its proximity to Ocean Grove, the enclave of the ultra conservative Methodist tent camp meeting association, the residential resort attracted not only more liberal Methodists with wealth, but other, less strident, yet equally well-heeled denominations as well. Five-and-dime scion F. W. Woolworth summered in Asbury Park. John Philip Sousa brought his band to town. In 1890 the resort city launched a wildly successful baby parade that sent its rival, Atlantic City, into a panic, causing it to retaliate, in the next century, with a virginal beauty pageant named Miss America.

At the official beginning of the Gay ‘90s, Stephen was enrolled in Syracuse University in upstate New York; in the spring of ‘91 he played baseball for the varsity team, and then dropped out of academic life for good. He went to Manhattan to try his hand as a newspaper stringer. In his spare time, Crane roamed the Bowery where he found inhabitants who embodied the tarnished side of the Gilded Age and began making notes for a slim novel that would be published in 1893 as “Maggie, A Girl of the Streets”.

In the summer of 1892 Crane returned to work for Townley in Asbury Park. His dispatches appeared in The New York Tribune, chief among them titled “On the Boardwalk”, “Summer Dwellers at Asbury Park and Their Doings”, and “On the New Jersey Coast”.

It was this last filing that brought Crane the most notoriety. One fateful day in August Townley left his younger sibling, then 20, in charge of the office while he apparently attended a funeral in Newark. The news to be covered was an “American Day” parade sponsored by the Junior Order of United American Mechanics (JOUAM) of New Jersey. With Townley not there to censor him, Crane first lampooned Asbury Park and its residents with his sardonic words: “Asbury Park creates nothing. It does not make; it merely amuses…” He continued with: “The throng along the line of the march was composed of summer gowns, lace parasols, tennis trousers, straw hats and indifferent smiles.”

Crane then took aim at JOUAM, a group of laborers known for their isolationism and bigotry against Catholics and Jews: “There were hundreds of the members; they wound through the streets to the music of enough brass bands to make furious discords. It probably was the most awkward, ungainly, uncut and uncarved procession that ever raised clouds of dust on sun-beaten streets.”

In the parade were supporters of the Republican nominees for president and vice president, respectively, Benjamin Harrison and Whitelaw Reid. In a dig at both residents and Republican values, Crane ironically pointed out that “Such an assemblage of spraddle-legged men of the middle class, whose hands were bent and shoulders stooped from delving and constructing, had never appeared to an Asbury Park summer crowd.”

Amazingly, or not, the story sailed past the copy desk and into The New York Tribune’s Sunday edition of August. 21. Whether this specific article led to the eventual election of Democrat Grover Cleveland as president can still be debated. But what can’t is the immediate effect the published column had on Stephen’s career. His articles never again appeared in the Tribune, so angered was its publisher, Republican vice presidential candidate Whitelaw Reid.

No matter, as he was apparently in the throes of a summer infatuation. The object of his affection was Lily Brandon Munroe, a charming woman from Washington, D.C., who, though married, was summering without her husband at the fashionably upscale Lake Avenue Hotel across from Ocean Grove.

Mrs. Munroe became the inspiration for a slightly fictitious dispatch Stephen wrote and titled “The Captain” in which a confrontation takes place between well-to-do ladies staying at the resort and a burly fisherman who works double time as a resort fireman.

Love and literary inspiration in Asbury Park came together in another “Tribune” dispatch prior to his firing: “Joys of Seaside Life”. The setting was the Hippodrome. More than likely this was the original Palace, or Kingsley Avenue, merry-go-round, Asbury Park’s first carousel that was housed in a specially designed building open on three sides, and owned and operated by Ernest Schnitzler, a German émigré. Designed by Charles I.D. Loof, the noted Coney Island amusements sculptor, the carousel’s carved animals were life-like and dramatically decorated.

Stephen used Loof’s merry-go-round for a second time as the metaphorical center of a love story he penned in 1893 called “The Pace of Youth”. To this day it remains the most romantic, fictionalized love story to be set in Asbury Park. Here are Crane’s words: “Within the merry-go-round there was a whirling circle of ornamental lions, giraffes, camels, ponies, goats, glittering with varnish and metal that caught swift reflections from windows high above them…The summer sunlight sprinkled its gold upon the garnet canopies carried by the tireless racers and upon all the devices of decoration that made Stimson’s machine magnificent and famous.”

Stephen continued his romanticized ideal of Asbury Park: “The electric lights on the beach made a broad band of tremoring light, extending parallel to the sea…In the darkness stretched the vast purple expanse of the ocean, and the deep indigo sky above was peopled with yellow stars…”

Stephen’s young couple – he, the carousel operator, she the boss’s daughter, “walked home by the lakeside way, and out upon the water those gay paper lanterns, flashing, fleeting, and careering, sang to them, sang a chorus of red and violet, and green and gold: a song of mystic bands of the future.”

Here he is describing his young lovers as they leave behind her father and the crumbling conservatism of an age past its prime:

“That other vehicle, that was youth, with youth’s pace; it was swift-flying with the hope of dreams. [Stimson] began to comprehend those two children ahead of him, and he knew a sudden and strange awe, because he understood the power of their young blood, the power to fly strongly into the future and feel and hope again...”

Eighty years would pass before another young man of Crane’s age and similar passion would write a 20th century love story about youth’s freedom flight for the rock-and-roll generation. Equally entranced by the play of light on the water, Bruce Springsteen wrote in “Fourth of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)”: “Oh Sandy, the aurora is risin’ behind us/The pier lights our carnival life on the water/Runnin’ down the beach at night with my boss’s daughter/Well he ain’t my boss no more Sandy.”

A year after “The Red Badge of Courage” was published, and Crane finally received the attention, and adulation, he so long wanted, at the age of 24 he returned for one more summer season in his adopted hometown before departing to cover the Spanish-American War in Cuba. The dispatch was vintage Crane, with his typical ridicule and disdain:

“From the station Asbury Park presents a front of spruce business blocks, and one could guess himself in one of the spick Western cities….The summer girls flaunt their flaming parasols, and young men in weird clothes walk with the confidence born of a knowledge of the fact that their fathers work…

“James A. Bradley does not meet all incoming trains. He is as impalpable as Father Knickerbocker. It is well known that he invariably walks under a white cotton umbrella, and that red whiskers of the Islandic lichen pattern grow fretfully upon his chin, and persons answering this description are likely to receive the salaams of the populace.”

Nearly four years later, and after the adventures that led to “The Open Boat and Other Stories”, Stephen died of tuberculosis in Germany. He was 28. The year was 1900.

Ninety-three years later, and for nearly the same purchase price as Mrs. Crane’s, Tom and Regina Hayes bought the unassuming, ramshackled house with its modest boarding house rooms on Fourth Avenue. With only one other owner in between, the house had remained virtually the same since Mrs. Crane owned it, right down to the ball-and-claw enamel tubs and sandstone floors in the bathrooms and window-paned doors that open off interior corridors. With the help of devoted volunteers and corporate donations, seven rooms on the first floor were restored, becoming the nucleus of the Stephen Crane House Museum. The restoration process also uncovered a period twine baseball located in the soil near the house’s foundation.

In 1996, during the city’s annual April in Asbury festival, the Hayeses opened the ground floor rooms to the public for the first time. The museum’s opening was also marked by an innovative production entitled “The Middle Years” by New Jersey playwright and director Midge Guerrera, then living and working in Asbury Park. Guerrera brought the Crane family to life during their tenure at No. 508 Fourth Avenue, and had the audience move, scene-by-scene, through the rooms as actors recounted their character’s lives, sharing their thoughts about living in Asbury Park and having Stephen as a younger brother.

Liquor and liturgy no longer play the prominent, defining roles they once had. The 21st century tug-of-war in Asbury Park has more to do how and where the public might spend its leisure time, though. Mechanized amusements are no where to be found: In 2004, Crane’s hippodrome was torn down to make way for a far-reaching oceanfront redevelopment plan. Yet a generous donation by Springsteen afforded Frank D’Alessandro, the new owner of the Crane House, the opportunity to create an intimate presentation hall for lectures, live music, and workshops. Indeed, given that there are no traces left of Stephen Crane in his native Newark, Arbutus Cottage stands alone as the only museum to commemorate his presence in New Jersey.

* Stephen Crane Journal is published by the English Department at Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA.

The original, unabridged version of this essay appeared in Literary Trips: Following the Footsteps of Fame, a travel anthology published in 2001 in British Columbia.
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Melbourne Lesson:
Can Long Branch Regain Its Intermodal Glory?

TriCityNews

January 2010

Spending time in southeastern Australia is an adventure. What’s the diff between being an Aussie and an Ozzie; does it mean biting bat heads or dancing down the Yellow Brick Road?

Where does the British culture end and the Australian begin, I wonder as we pull real poppers at a balmy Christmas lunch?

And, are the Pikes I met at a Nat Geo conference on its global genographic project a missing link that connects my Pikes who are feeding and watering me through Christmas?

I find myself asking these questions on one of the trains I’ve taken into downtown Melbourne. With its lively universities and technical schools (hospitality and maritime are huge here), it’s a bohemian city on the enormous Port Philip Bay with Tasmania and the South Pole somewhere off in the distance.

Thanks to a thriving media committed to civic engagement, it’s a cosmopolitan city that works hard to best at every turn its Gold Coast rival, Sydney. Which is how Long Branch and my TriCityNews deadline wander into my line of inquiries as we pull into Flinders Street Station.

Named for one of Australia’s original navigators, there’s been a station here on the banks of the Yarra River since 1854. It anchors a corner of the city’s landmark intersection that includes St. Paul’s Cathedral and a modern visitors center with architecture you either love or hate. Thanks to the sight lines, you can see the bay and, at the rise on Swanston Street, the river.

The Edwardian exterior, built in 1910, was saved from the wrecker’s ball, largely due to that enviable civic engagement encouraged by Melbourne’s fourth estate. Within 24 hours of its original announcement, the government reversed its decision and agreed to preserve the iconic facade, including the famous clocks that tell the times of pending departures on each track.

Its two-story waiting room is flooded with natural sunlight. Tracks are well-marked; each features an an escalator. There are news and snack stands, and a place designated for sit-down eating. There’s even a ballroom to rent for special functions! The facility swarms with friendly security that will answer any question you have to ask without treating you like a potential terrorist.

Outside the station, there’s more public transport scheduled to get you quickly and easily to any number of destinations that make Melbourne better than Sydney: the CBD (central business district ~ hello shopping on Collins Street!); the docklands (now site of a chic-ed up condo community with fab water views); the unis and original city suburbs, and, south of the Yarra, a whole new neighborhood of immigrants, food markets, and cooking schools.

On an average weekday, more than 110,000 passengers pass through the Flinders Street Station. So, just for a minute, leave aside the political hot potato of carbon footprints.

How many of those people do you think prefer to sit in vehicular traffic, fighting pedestrians and betting on short-timed traffic lights when city trolleys can get them where they want to go more quickly and efficiently?

That question leads me back to Long Branch. Sure, its original train stations mysteriously, or not, disappeared. It’s also well-known secret that public transportation lost the war against the lobbying and marketing efforts by Detroit automakers obsessed with putting a car in every driveway.

But as the new year’s resolutions are starting early with Trenton tightening the fiscal belt on the arts and history, it’s an ideal time to start a civic discourse that explores how to make the public transportation dollar go as far as possible.

For the Shore’s capital city in the midst of a never-ending renaissance that goes in fits and starts that means a multi-functioning train station. Seriously, Mayor Schneider, the time is now to start designing this economic engine.

The intermodal connection comes with regularly scheduled trolleys. A new circuit based on the old tracks would easily facilitate commuters, Brookdale and Monmouth University students, plus those all-important NJ Rep and beach visitors.

Imagine a reliable system that moves consumers in the largest of the tri cities, and its surrounding ‘burbs, in and out of Down Town, Up Town, Pier Village, North Beach, and to any of the health-care pavilions affiliated with Monmouth Medical Center.

Hey, Long Branch Arts Council: Why don’t you sponsor a competitive charette to see what designs architects might come up with? List the criteria as a transportation plaza that complements the hospital’s sprawl while paying homage to the seashore and the city’s presidential history?

Until then, I’ll be on a train, pondering new questions about PM Kevin Rudd and his participation in that backroom carbon deal in Copenhagen, the women without remorse who slept with Tiger Woods, and the journey of one’s genes.
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Laird's Laws of Success

Monmouth University Alumni magazine

Winter Issue 2009

By his own reckoning, engineering courses would have been too easy for Larrie W. Laird.

“I was always mechanically inclined, could get anything to work,” Laird recalls. Laughing, he added, “Still can.”

Soon to turn 70 in April 2010, Laird, C’65, still spends most of his waking hours in the long, brick production warehouse at the rear of the family’s corporate headquarters passersby don’t see from Route 537 in Colts Neck. What catches their eye is the two-story white Colonial Revival farmhouse with the yellow shutters and the roadside sign that simply declares Home of Laird’s Apple Jack since 1780.

Fermenting, distilling and aging alcohol is a production operation that fits naturally with Laird’s talent. But to assume his place alongside his older brother, John, in the tight-knit family’s brandy business, he needed to know more about the process of finance, accounting, and law.

“My father died when I was 15. I knew that if I was going to progress in life I’d have to learn what I didn’t know,” Laird explained candidly one sunny autumn morning as wild turkeys rambled along the edge of the property in Scobeyville, a postal address established during the colonial era.

Married, with a baby girl, and living in nearby Eatontown, in 1961 Laird tried a couple of evening classes at Monmouth College, three years after graduating from Freehold High School. The business courses, in particular, agreed with him. By winter he was enrolled full-time, moving to Oakhurst to shorten the campus commute.

“College was like another job,” explained the pragmatic Laird. “Monmouth provided a great opportunity to get an education. It was close by. It had a flexible curriculum. It was affordable. I went twelve months a year by going mostly to night school.”

His science classes were held in the chicken coops, a few others were in Wilson Hall, but the bulk of courses leading to a B.S. in business administration took place on the second floor of the Guggenheim Library. What he learned there prepared him to manage the cycles that would buffer the liquor industry over the next forty years. The eighth generation to join the family firm, Laird credits two professors, Sidney Nemetz and Kenneth Loeffler, with laying the groundwork for how he would steer the company towards the 21st century.

“Nemetz set the path of my business philosophy, which is conservative,” Laird said. “In accounting, he explained the value of a balance sheet and how good cash flow leads to a good credit rating from lenders. He made it interesting.”

Professor Nemetz also expanded the country boy’s view of economics. Laird’s maternal grandfather had tilled the neighboring farm across Yellow Brook that runs along the company’s northern property line; today, mini estates grace the former agricultural acres. As New Jersey’s real estate prices soared, Laird’s relocated its core operations to Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley where apples are harvested and their juices fermented. From there the liquid is shipped to Scobeyville to be aged, a process that takes anywhere from four to twelve years before a particular blend is bottled.

“Every day I watch the worldwide prices for grain, oil and natural gas,” said Laird, referring to Professor Nemetz’s insistence that students always include foreign factors in any U.S. industry projections. “I watch what the dollar is doing against the Euro.”

Distilling is always in economic flux because the Laird family’s unique hybrid blend of applejack is mixed with neutral grain spirits to make it 100 proof. Moreover, its packaging operations require Laird to keep an eye on costs associated with plastics, glass, and energy; Laird’s bottles vodka, gin and whiskey shipped in from Scotland and Canada as well as Kentucky.

“I watch the costs of all imports,” he continued. While his Scottish ancestors distilled, or “jacked” hard cider into brandy and served it to travelers along the turnpike between Freehold and the shore, the modern Laird and Company imports wine from Italy, Chile, and Argentina for domestic sales.

“We diversified. It’s what we had to do,” the Brielle resident said matter-of-factly. Staying on top of worldwide economic conditions, then, is paramount to the success of the Scobeyville operations. Added Laird, “I check all conditions before we sign for anything.”

In fact, contracts are about the only business action for which Laird uses an attorney. Everything negotiated up until a deal is signed is the direct result of four semesters of business regulations taught by Professor Loeffler.

“There were a lot of laws I had never heard of until I attended Monmouth,” Laird said. Professor Loeffler’s case histories came in handy during the long hours of bargaining in 1989 to buy a Philadelphia distiller of “white goods”– gin, vodka, whiskey – that had been snapped up by investors.

“Because of what he taught me, I was able to do the Kasser’s deal without a lawyer,” Laird said. Chuckling, he added, “That kept our purchase cost down.”

The Kasser’s acquisition came just four years after Laird succeeded his brother as president. Today, his nephew, John E. Laird III, is the firm’s finance vice president and his daughter, Lisa Laird Dunn, is sales and marketing vice president.

Having once sent the recipe for Laird’s apple jack brandy to George Washington, the family no longer gives out its trade secrets. Even its annual revenues are a closely guarded topic. Laird and Company moves an estimated million cases of alcohol a year. Gross annual sales in 2005 were about $50 million.

Because the tax advantages for contract bottling for other distributors have disappeared, the privately held company has more recently sought to expand its market presence by building its own brands. On a handshake, Laird acquired such compatible “white goods” as the Five O’Clock line of vodka, gin and rum from Hiram Walker & Sons as it went out of business. The purchase gave Laird’s access to Midwestern markets while expanding its presence in the Northeast. The former market is not entirely unknown to the Lairds; an ancestor once sold applejack brandy to the Springfield, IL, tavern operated by Abraham Lincoln in 1833.

Laird credits his daughter Lisa with updating the look of and uses for the country’s oldest applejack brandy. In 2005, the company officially celebrated its 225th anniversary with a series of year-long events.

“That’s still paying dividends,” he added, mentioning a September 2009 write-up in Penthouse magazine that featured the company’s signature Jack Rose cocktail. Indeed, consumers’ recent thirst for martinis has brought back an interest in “brown goods,” according to Laird. On the decline for many years, bourbon, for example, has new-found favor thanks to the resurgence in cocktails.

Hugely popular with today’s business majors, building brand awareness wasn’t in the Monmouth course catalogue back in ‘60s. But summing up the bottom line of his Monmouth education, Laird observed, “What I learned is that if you own the brand, no one can take it away from you.”

Larrie’s Top Three
Looking back on his long career at Laird and Company, Larrie singled out three key strategies honed from his business administration studies at Monmouth College:

1) To excel in business, know your business law; the legal knowledge will make you a better negotiator on everything from raw materials and supplies to buying a competitor. “We’re in a highly regulated industry. There are a lot of laws I had never heard of until I attended Monmouth.”

2) Understand the fluctuating value of the U.S. dollar in international markets. Every day Larrie watches the prices for commodities and energy, which can vary daily and even hourly. “They affect when we draw up our purchase contracts.”

3) Common sense, plus logic. Larrie values the less tangible benefits of his college education. “Monmouth taught me how to analyze and move quickly. Thinking on your feet is important.”

This Jersey Guy Takes Manhattan
Larrie stirs his company’s signature applejack brandy into a Manhattan cocktail:
2 oz. Laird’s AppleJack
1 oz. sweet vermouth
dash of bitters
cherry
With ice, gently stir first four ingredients and strain into a cocktail glass. Add cherry.

By contrast, Lisa Laird Dunn shakes a modern martini she christened Jersey Girl:
1.5 oz. Laird’s AppleJack
1 oz. Cointreau
.5 oz. lime juice
2 dashes of cranberry
Shake well with ice. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Add a lime wedge.

Other recipes for cooking, baking, and libations may be found in “AppleJack: The Spirit of Americana”, a Laird’s AppleJack cookbook.
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Mappen’ Jersey
TriCityNews, Sept. 24, 2009

Tell me a good story, and I’ll follow you anywhere.

I wound up as a journalist listening to other people’s stories thanks to the early relationship I had with my father. As a child, about the only time I saw him in those start-up days of Monmouth College was at night. He’d come home from his second shift of teaching in the former bedrooms of the Shadow Lawn mansion in West Long Branch. I’d already be in bed in our suburban ranch house in Eatontown.

If I were still awake, my mother would urge him to go in and tell me a story. Never from a book, Dad spooled out narratives as varied as Edgar Allen Poe’s melodramatic rhyming love poem, “Annabelle Lee” to fraternity songs he had picked up at Dartmouth, to his reminiscences of growing up in the Connecticut River Valley. Since Dad also spent most weekends working at his typewriter on manuscripts he hoped to see published, many stories were true-life tales.

Each had a simple moral that connected me to my father and to my Yankee heritage: the cautionary account of lumber baron George Van Dyke who put too much trust in the omnipotence of automobile technology and plunged to his death at Turners Falls, MA, while overlooking the largest log drive in his company’s history; the unpretentious “Silent Cal” Coolidge from Vermont who restored character and integrity to the White House in the wake of the scandal-plagued Warren Harding of Ohio (and Asbury Park); the military strategies of Revolutionary War patriot General John Stark.

Yep, mine was not a typical suburban upbringing.

With the exception of a fourth-grade class trip to tour Trenton’s military barracks built in anticipation of the French and Indian War, it would take me nearly 40 years to find anyone with a similar enthusiasm for telling stories about the state in which I was born.

Ironically, the raconteur started his own life in Massachusetts. But don’t hold that against Marc Mappen who was graduated from Woodbridge High School in 1963. The Bay State’s loss is clearly the Garden State’s gain.

With a hoary title like executive director of the New Jersey Historical Commission ~ complete with a PhD ~ you’d think the man sitting in that office was dour, arid, and, if you hated history in school, pretentious.

Au contraire.

Marc has an amazing gift for mimicry. He can summon up a whole cast of foreign accents and emotionally charged voices that sweep you along in the momentum of a good yarn. He’s a natural for an open mic night.

Like my father, Marc can pluck a headline from 300 years of a colorful past and recount a story that will give you a sense of cultural identity plus a new form of ownership in a state in which you live and pay taxes.

A couple of weeks ago, eight of my Rutgers media students had the chance to hear Marc, himself a Rutgers alum and former dean, when he debuted his latest book, “There’s More to New Jersey Than The Sopranos.”

The students had never been to a book launch, which was the point of the extra-credit exercise, and they provided Marc with the freshest faces in the SRO crowd at Barnes & Noble in North Brunswick. Yep, he has that kind of following.

The best story of the afternoon was Marc’s multi-layered telling of “The War of the Worlds.” Not only did he enact parts of the script adapted from the H.G. Wells’ novel of the same name, but Marc infused the 1938 Mischief Night airing of the radio play with national nuances.

It was that HUGE.

Trying to be cool, my students who’ve come of age in the Digital Revolution had to work hard to not laugh with the audience. Marc ratcheted up the level of incredulity, marching out fact after each verifiable fact that proved the event set in tiny Grovers Mill had a reach as large as David Chase’s “The Sopranos” in the then-new medium of radio.

I’ll save ruminating about their write-ups for another occasion.

Secretly, I think many of you reading this column share a number of the same observations that Marc and I do. Real estate speculators settled New Jersey. Like the lyrics found in a Springsteen song, the people who live here are humble. We endure city people looking down their noses at us. And, yep, we’ve got a long history of allowing corruption to flourish. Marc devotes 15 pages, the largest chapter in his book, to the topic.

Want to hear him do his best Tony Soprano imitation and tell some of those stories?

Go to the upcoming meeting of the Long Branch Historical Association on Wednesday, September 30. It’s free to the public and refreshments are always served. It starts at 7 p.m. in the City Council chamber on the second floor of City Hall. You’ll find that building, which comes with its own checkered history, at the intersection of Broadway and the railroad tracks.

And, tell Beth Woolley I sent you.

Are 2 Eds Better Than One?

TriCityNews July 23, 2009

New York’s Algonquin Hotel has magazine and screen writer Dorothy Parker.*

Key West has Ernest Hemingway and the house where he wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls and the short story The Snows of Kilimanjaro.

Red Bank has Edmund Wilson.

Who?

Yeah, I expected that response.

Raise your hands if you know where Edmund Wilson Way is located in Red Bank.

How about the house where the culture critic who shaped America’s 20th century literary and theater tastes spent his formative years?

What does ex-mayor Ed McKenna have to do with all of this?

After spending this past weekend helping promote Asbury Park during Road Trip 8 (and fielding phone calls about Long Branch’s original iron pier), I couldn’t help but observe how much the Jersey Shore still struggles to have a dialogue about its cultural icons and the contributions that, elsewhere, would have put the tri cities on the national radar.

Part of the blame, of course, lies with the post-war tax breaks and infrastructure improvements that targeted this region as a resort. A land of leisure. Complete with a Garden State Parkway exit where you can turn off your mind.

At least every summer.

Up in Manhattan, and year-round, the Algonquin on 44th Street, between 5 and 6th Avenues adroitly uses its storied past from the heady years of the Jazz Age to lure the curious to its hotel and public rooms.

Management is not shy about promoting Parker and the members of the Vicious Circle, as the tart-tongued Round Table also was called. Weekly they met for lunch to dish about the up-and-comers as well as the down-and-outers working on a play, an orchestration, a novel, a song, or even a film. Even today you can eavesdrop on similar conversations in the Lounge or listen to torch singers in the Oak Room.

Down in Florida, Hemingway’s compound helps host the annual, and highly regarded, Literary Seminar. I haven’t yet been, but every January newspaper publisher and author Margaret Thomas Buccholz of Long Beach Island always sends me envy-inducing e-mail. Meanwhile, the last literary event I attended was at Monmouth University where I went to listen to Long Branch native Robert Pinsky read his latest poems.

The Q&A consisted mainly of telling the one-time national poet laureate they remembered when he wore short pants.

Oye vey.

Fame by association. It’s what happens in a culture of leisure.

It’s fleeting. Just ask former mayor Ed McKenna. Twenty years from now no one will remember who he is, save the local political pundits.

But the house Boss McKenna lives in on Buena Place will maintain its pilgrimage value. As will the one on the southeast corner of McLaren and Throckmorton Streets. Even if Red Bank does nothing about either.

You see, Edmund Wilson lived in both. The former on the south side of River Road when he was born and the latter, on the north side, when his indomitable mother decided to move closer to the Navesink.

Helen Mather Kimball Wilson also provided Edmund with some family time in Lakewood where his uncle (her brother Paul Kimball) would earn distinction as a medical doctor in the pines and have a hospital named after him (yes, that Paul Kimball).

Here in Red Bank, Mama Wilson also raised Edmund’s daughter, Rosalind, by first wife, actress Mary Blair while providing her only child with a weekend retreat to return to again, and again, between marriages, book contracts, and weekly deadlines.

As managing editor of The New Yorker, Wilson tried to rehire Dorothy Parker after she had been fired for criticizing the fat ankles of Flo Ziegfeld’s wife, hoofer Billie Burke. Dottie was, after all, a buzz-worthy read, and Wilson recognized the cultural bellwether needed Parker’s wit to keep it from taking itself too seriously if it was to continue to influence mainstream tastes.

And how about this for national influence? Reviewing Hemingway’s In Our Times, Wilson linked Papa’s prose style back to Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and forward to contemporaries Ring Lardner and Gertrude Stein.

Though Hemingway was no slouch when it came to self-promotion, he didn’t get into our collective consciousness by himself alone. Critics, especially Wilson who had studied the continuum of literary history, helped enormously.

So, what’s the 4-1-1 on Edmund Wilson Way? And, why does it grace the front of the Two River Theater? Anyone?


* Mark your calendars: This year marks the 90th anniversary of the Algonquin Round Table. Nobody puts on the dog like the history-loving, book-hugging, theater-going crowd that is dotty about Long Branch. On August 16 the Long Branch Free Public Library on Broadway celebrates Dorothy Parker Day, beginning at 11 a.m.

I’ve agreed to read one of her poems, One Perfect Rose as part of the line-up of speakers and other events scheduled around the city, especially in Parker’s birthplace neighborhood of West End.

So, if you know the connection between Mrs. Parker and Asbury Park, send e-mail to news@tcn.com because next month’s column returns to Asbury Park. I’ll weave your response (and name) into what I have to say about YouTube.
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