Editorials, letters to the editor and other articles reflecting on iconic people, places and traditions related to them in the area.
There’s nothing like a best buddy — or a few best buds. There was also nothing like the combination of best friends and the iconic bridge that was a leftover statue or cement billboard of sorts from the McCarter estate in Rumson.
So, to pay tribute to both buds and the bridge, the Retro Pic(s) of the Day offers a glimpse of both in milestone moments of friends paying homage to one another by painting the bridge way back in time.
In light of baseball season and honoring high school firsts in the breaking down of gender barriers, this Retro Pic of the Day, originally published in 2015, is being recirculated …
Yes, it’s all about baseball right now.
And the idea of RFH girls breaking into sports that were traditionally boys’ is something to think about.
So, who was on first, or, rather who was first to be somewhere on the field with the guys in the 1970s? It was RFH Class of ’78 alumni Nancy Whelchel.
Yes, Nancy got onto the baseball field with the boys at RFH a year or two after Chris Bowden scored a goal for girls in soccer.
It all happened back in the day when girls had just made strides to change the dress code and wear pants to school. That was a mass effort. There were a lot of girls walking around wearing skirts or dresses with pants underneath. But that’s another girls’ liberation story for another day.
It’s about those singular sensation girls who defied a status quo form of sexism when literally playing the fields.
So, the Retro Pic of the (George) Day honors one of those girls — Nancy Whelchel. It’s a snapshot of Nancy on the field with Ward Tietz.
We’re not sure if this is an actual team practice shot or just one in which she was just tossing the ball around for fun with a couple of the guys from her class.
Still, there she is playing ball. She had the guts and the sports acumen to break the good ol’ — or young — boys’ sports network.
Home run.
I somehow don’t recall any sort of rebellion from the boys. She was good. That was all that mattered.
Any firsts for girls on the football field? Anyone? What was Nancy Whelchel’s specialty on the baseball field?
Many thanks, again, to George Day for this classic!
— Elaine Van Develde
Today would have marked the 89th birthday of Fair Haven’s Frank Leslie Sr., owner of the iconic Whistle Stop. In honor of that, we are sharing this piece originally posted on July 20, 2016. Happy Birthday, Mr. Leslie! Thanks for the many smiles and simple good times!
By Elaine Van Develde
Sometimes all it takes is a jawbreaker, a slice of Elio’s pizza, pinball and friends all enveloped in a gingham-curtained room with a jovial giant of a dad host to make a bunch of kids smile.
Sometimes. Some simpler time back in time.
Continue reading Retro Whistle Stop Smiles; Timeless Celebration of a Fair Haven Icon’s Birthday
The mourning buntings have once again been hung on the Fair Haven Firehouse. The marquee is a mere microcosm of the long story of a lifelong Fair Havenite’s service to his town and his passing.
“A heart is not judged by how much you love; but by how much you are loved by others.” ~ L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
A lot of heart is what the Rumson girl everyone knew as Kit Rowett had. A lot of people loved her — some who even only knew her for a moment. I guess you could say that this impish-grinned, twinkly-eyed Wizard gave her heart to the Tin Man.
And, boy, did he cry. He smiled a lot, too. This Tin Man, embodied as the many loved ones who had a piece of Kit’s heart, smiled a wide, collective, rust-proof smile on Saturday as a celebratory goodbye was bid to the Jersey girl loved and lost on Sept. 19 after a valiant battle with cancer.
Continue reading Saying Goodbye to Rumson Jersey Girl Kit Rowett White
Photo/courtesy of Hetty Tegen
The Hunt. The Hunt. It was the annual October social gathering of the century in Monmouth County — from 1932 until 1996.
The Hunt, really the Haskell Hunt or Monmouth County Hunt Race Meet. It was where all good Rumson-Fair Haven area hob-knobbers, uppercrusters and hill voyeurs of the famously elite lifestyle gathered on the Amory Haskell Estate in Middletown, pretended to watch horses race and chase a fox, clinked crystal champagne flutes, donned designer duds, and sometimes did a little tipsy debutante tumble in the mud — all in good company. And there were many cheers to the festivity of it all!
Photo/courtesy of Thompson Memorial Home
She had bright red lips, a pearly white smile, twinkly eyes and always a wink, a wave and some love for a neighbor. She was former Fair Havenite Carly Emmons and she passed away peacefully on Sept. 19 at the age of 84.
Her voice had a distinct ring. It was unabashedly friendly, even a bit exotic. She gushed community love when she said hello in the aisles of the Fair Haven Acme back in the 1970s — always the fashion icon of the supermarket, usually capping a tasteful outfit with some sort of fashionable hat as she waved enthusiastically with a, “Hello, dear!” and a cheek kiss and hug to all she met up with.
Continue reading Remembering Former Fair Havenite, RFHer, Neighbor, Carly Emmons
Photo/courtesy of Eileen Kubaitis/Facebook screenshot
It’s not every day that a bunch of longtime Fair Haven Knollwood School teachers from the 1970s era get together. It’s one day — for the first time in decades.
Continue reading Scene Around: A 70s Knollwood Teaching Moment
Students were back to school in the Rumson-Fair Haven area this week. Those classic first day of school shots were plastered all over Facebook.
And 50 years ago, or 51, to be exact, in September of 1966, while 91,000 students and 4,700 teachers headed back to public school classrooms in Monmouth County (13,014 to parochial), according to a Red Bank Register story of Sept. 6, 1966, the anticipation of the photo taken with that Brownie camera mounted as that picture of the day developed — taking weeks at times.
And those photos were classics … Mom-styled hair gone awry, buck-toothed and missing tooth grins, shiny Mary Jane shoes, Buster Brown penny loafers and, well, cheesy fashion in which to pose and say, “Cheese!”
At Knollwood School in 1966, half a century ago, there was a first-grade class, headed by Mrs. Ginny Kamin (deceased Red Bank Register editor Art Kamin’s wife) and filled with some area kids who ended up becoming entrenched in the community. One of those kids was me.
Some are no longer with us. Others have moved away, but keep in touch. Others, still, have stuck around and raised their children here, too. One common thread is that none of them have forgotten their hometown and likely that walk to the first day of school so many decades ago.
For me, the memory of the badly side-combed bangs kinda sticks like the Dippity-doo that was in them. Sorry, Mom. So do those little faces that seemed to loom like the Man in the Moon back in that slightly nerve-wracked elementary school daze. And it seems like yesterday. Yes, that’s scary. It’s especially scary since it wasn’t, in fact, yesterday.
Back in those days, we walked to school with a buddy. For me, those buddies were my best friend and neighbor Pam Young and Jeff Lang. Pam and I met up with Jeff at the corner and the three of us walked the rest of the way together. Yes, Jeff occasionally would carry my books. I remember that vividly. He is gone now, but that memory is a vivid and enduring one. So is the memory of Mrs. Lang waving to us from the front porch and reminding him to do just that.
The first day of school photos were taken on the front porch, in the front yard or on the sidewalk before the first stroll back then. There was that wait for the film development. Remember that? Then there was the wait for the annual class photo, like the one above, when the picture people grabbed a comb from a tub and gave all the kids a really bad comb through before that elementary school grimace moment. Not a good hair day for most of us little kids subject to Mom’s fashion whims.
It’s all a walk down a Fair Haven memory lane with a stumble or two for good measure.
What’s your first day memory? Stumble? Who did you walk with?
— Elaine Van Develde
Saying goodbye is always tough. It’s especially tough when you didn’t expect the person to go anywhere anytime soon. It’s what happened when 32-year-old Fair Haven native Will Jakubecy died suddenly. An especially tough goodbye had to be said.
Continue reading Saying Goodbye to Fair Haven’s Will Jakubecy
We say it every year, and it bears repeating …
Yesterday was Father’s Day.
And, we at Rumson-Fair Haven Retrospect are of the mind that the day is really about much more than flipping a burger and patting a good ol’ dad on the back.
It’s bigger than that. It goes way beyond your own dad’s back yard and a grilling or two.
Growing up in a small-town niche like the Rumson-Fair Haven area carries with it that family tie feeling. Some of us were fortunate enough to have great dads. Some not.
But, what we all somehow did and still do have is a strong kinship to the dads of our towns. Even if we just recall a look, a bellowing chide or a chuckle over some stupid kid thing we did, we remember the dads with whom we grew up.
Now, many of those kids are dads, too, and living where their dads raised them. Perhaps, or likely, finding themselves bellowing the same chidings, trying to impart the same wisdom.
So many of these men were volunteers we saw all over town, characters whose nuances or sayings we remember, or that one poor patient guy who ended up being the poor soul to pick us up when we were stupid enough to get caught hurling eggs and toilet paper on Mischief Night — or something equally as dumb.
Yes, we do and should memorialize our own dads. Believe me, I, for one, am still looking for that money tree my dad told me was in the back yard and that gal named Dumb Dori whom he said I emulated when lacking “street smarts” to a pathetic degree.
Yet, I also vividly remember the calm, “I’m going to kill those idiots” smile on my friend Stephanie’s dad when he picked us up at the police station after following through on a really dumb dare. Then there was the “To tell you the truth, my friend, I don’t know” quote that consistently came out of Daryl’s dad’s mouth as he shook his head in wonderment over our mangled teen logic.
There were those dads for all of us — each leaving his own patriarchal imprint in our juvenile minds. For them we are grateful — for raising us here, for coming together to protect and nurture us and for offering a communal scolding or 100, for loving all their village’s children.
They were part of this community’s foundation — everyone’s founding fathers.
Our Retro Pic (or video) of the Day honors the area’s dads of those days for those reasons and so many more.
We don’t have nearly enough photos to encapsulate all the love and all of the dads, but this is a sufficient sampling to get the message across.
Happy Father’s Day to all the dads in the community who have been there for us and given us lessons and words to live by!
— Photos/courtesy of Rumson, Fair Haven family members via Facebook
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