Category Archives: Opinion

Editorials, letters to the editor and other articles reflecting on iconic people, places and traditions related to them in the area.

Local Life, Opinion

Retro RFH Batty Gym Suit Home Run

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A reprise in honor of the girls, baseball season and not having to wear these horrific mandatory gym suits anymore! Strike! The suits are out! Phew! Remember the fun and the horror with us … (Be sure to CLICK on one photo to enlarge and scroll to fully experience the horror. Ha!)

It’s just plain batty! Batter’s up at RFH as baseball season is in full swing. But, looking back at some RFH 1970s games, you have to wonder when or why, exactly, there was ever a season of the ol’ gym suit, baseball or softball aside.

Really. Ponder it. Those things that made girls look like Stay Puff marshmallows, or, worse, a big baby with a onesie that had enough space for a diaper or, well … you get the picture.

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Local Life, Opinion

Retro Little Tykes’ River Time

Fair Haven river dwellers of the Drake family
Photo/courtesy of Robin Drake Fitch

Quality river time. It’s a rite of passage for any Rumson-Fair Haven area kid.

When the spring air hits, the banks of the Navesink and Shrewsbury Rivers call to kids like mythological Sirens. And they burrow themselves in the sand and tides like hermit crabs.

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Local Life, Opinion

Old News: Being the Easter Bunny

Ahhhhh, the Easter Bunny … the tradition, the joy, the mystery, and, yes, the horror.

There’s a lot more to the symbolically giant fluffy rodent with cartoon eyes in a fixed freaky stare and a head the size of one of the small children he visits on Easter. For instance, his head pops off. It’s also a sweaty death trap. Those are facts, people. I know. I was the Easter Bunny quite a few times.

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Local Life, Opinion

Old News: Valentine’s Day Dough, Perfume and Vinegar

Call it Valentine’s sustenance. Since Cupid’s arrow was first slung back in the dark ages, there have been hard hits, softer ones and total misses since. But there’s always been a little bit of sweet, sour and downright doughy satisfying for the Valentine’s Day palate, with a little kooky sprinkled on top.

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Obituaries, Opinion

Cooper’s Legacy: The Art of Circle Gaming Among Childhood Friends

“We’re captive on the carousel of time … We can’t return. We can only look behind from where we came and go round and round and round in the circle game …” ~ Joni Mitchell

The news hit his nimble-footed, intricately painted-and-penned world like a sledge hammer. Thirty-year-old Thomas “Cooper” Ley had died. He was my best friend’s beautiful boy.

The wound left by the merciless hammer’s mark was a deep one. Somehow it didn’t break the circle, though. It wouldn’t. Never could. That was the consolation, so I was posthumously reminded by his mother, if there was to be any at all in something that seemed so senseless and unfair.

Circle. It was stuck in my head. Once that hammer hit, she started whispering to me as I grappled with how to remember him best for her, for his family, for his friends, with my words.

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Local Life, Opinion

A Tale of Firehouse Santa Tradition

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Santa and Elaine Van Develde circa 1961

Because Santa Claus is everywhere these days … our annual reprise …

By Elaine Van Develde

It’s that time of the year when a longstanding Fair Haven tradition comes to mind and heart — those classic kid photos at the firehouse with Santa. There’s the park. Then there’s the firehouse. That was today.

I remember …

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Opinion

Retro Benched RFH Halloween Paraders

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RFH Halloween of 1977 with a gaggle of girls
Photo/George Day

Well, it’s about that time for Halloween parades. In fact, Fair Haven’s was on Sunday. And, back in the day, RFH had its own high school Halloween parade.

Some bunny — or a few bunnies and other assorted suspicious characters — got dressed for the occasion, paraded themselves around campus and benched themselves for a spell, too.

The Halloween spirit is in the air. And these senior gaggle of girls embodied it. From controversial, yet timely and popular at the time, Playboy bunny costumes, to Raggedy Ann, a ghost, a cat, a gypsy and whatever else, they were parading and pleased with their choices.

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Local Life, Opinion

Reflection: Retro Halloween Parading

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The following opinion piece on Halloween through the generations in Fair Haven was originally published in 2015. It is reprised annually … 

Before the parade passes by, this kid from Fair Haven has some parading memories on which to reflect. Remember this scene?

It’s a longstanding tradition — the Fair Haven Halloween Parade.

I remember it well — from my first parade trek back in the late 1960s to the ’70s, 80s, 90s and now.

It all started at age 7 with a wish to be Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz. I’ve noticed a few in more recent years and the green-eyed jealousy monster of a near senior has reared its head. But I digress … That little dress-up fantasy of the 60s of mine was foiled when my mother couldn’t get the gingham outfit together, my pigtails were not so poised for the silver screen look and my sister refused to crawl down Hance Road as Toto.

I guess it was bad enough that from the age of 3, she was forced by this pint-sized dominatrix 5-year-old Dorothy to crawl on a makeshift Funk and Wagnall’s encyclopedia Yellow Brick Road to Oz in the living room. The neighbors never quite got over it, either.

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Local Life, Opinion

Retro RFH Cheer for the Boys

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The boy cheerleaders of RFH Powder Puff Football 1977 Photo/George Day
The boy cheerleaders of RFH Powder Puff Football 1977
Photo/George Day
The boy cheerleaders of RFH Powder Puff Football 1977
Photo/George Day

Cheers to sunny fall days! The sun is finally out and it’s something to cheer about. So, we’re taking you back, once again, to a special crew of RFH cheerleaders — the boys of RFH’s Class of ’78 in an encore of this Oct. 8, 2015 Retro Pic of the (George) Day from two views! Cheers!

The 1977 RFH Powder Puff Football game was a good one that made for some great photo ops.

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Local Life, Opinion

Retro RFH Teacher-Administrator Moment

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A look back at RFH science teacher James Parker and Assistant Superintendent Donald Trotter Photo/George Day
A look back at RFH science teacher James Parker and
Assistant Superintendent Donald Trotter
Photo/George Day

A reprise, originally posted in 2017, in honor of back-to-school time … 

Back-to-school time has arrived. Students have settled back into the hallowed halls of good ol’ RFH.

And with back-to-school thoughts come hopes of a good teacher or two and memories of the ones who we thought were the coolest. Then there were those administrators who weren’t just a Charlie Brown teacher voice cawing over the ol’ daydreaming student’s non-thought process. Some, or one in particular, are remembered as a real education innovators.

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Local Life, Opinion

Retro School Daze: The Rope Lady

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A reprise in honor of those folks who used to be in charge of keeping the kids safe on their walk to school. Remember when everyone walked to school?

It was a time when kids had to walk the … rope.

The first day of school, last week, was commemorated with a look back to that first day in 1965 in Fair Haven.

It was the very first day of school — for kindergarteners. It was also a finale year. That class was the last of all that walked on a rope to the Youth Center (now Fair Haven Community Center downstairs and the police station upstairs).

While classmates were remembered, the identity of the official lady tugging that rope was not.

So, as an ode to that woman, who was eventually remembered as Mary McDaniel, the Retro Pic of the Day is another look, from the archives of the Red Bank Register, of that kindergarten class walk, headed by Mc Daniel.

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