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

Fair Remembrance: Someone’s in the Kitchen

Image September 3, 2020 Elaine Van Develde

Just when the guy in charge of the kitchen has retired, a pandemic comes along and obliterates the Fair Haven Firemen’s Fair and all that annual fine fair food. So, on the year without a fair, we look back again to our 2015 story of fair food, who did it all back in the day, what was done, how and who’s still cooking. Can you wait another year? The absence of fair food wafting through the air likely has everyone drooling for the next fair already … No one’s in the kitchen this year but the ghosts. They’re always there …

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Raquel Falotico at the Fair Haven Firemen’s Fair 2015 working the dining room Photo/Elaine Van Develde
Amanda Lynn and Kim Ambrose at the Fair Haven Firemen’s Fair 2015 Photo/Elaine Van Develde
Present-day kitchen crew, or most, after a ride at the Fair Haven Firemen’s Fair 2010 Photo/courtesy of Evie Connor Kelly
The guys in the kitchen back in the day at the Fair Haven Firemen’s Fair Photo/courtesy of Evie Connor Kelly, FHFD Yearbook
The ladies tending to the sausage, meatballs and sauce upstairs at the Fair Haven Firemen’s Fair back in the day Photo/courtesy of Evie Connor Kelly, FHFD Yearbook

By Elaine Van Develde

Someone’s in the kitchen at Fair Haven Firemen’s Fair grounds.

And while they may have, at one point another been with someone named Dinah, as the old ditty goes, it’s a definite they’ve been with someone named Mike, Dale, Sue (x2), Raquel, Ethel (x2), Mary, Anne, Amanda, Skippy, Hodgie, Mary Ellen, Joe, Evie, and, oh, yeah, Andy and a few others.

And they certainly haven’t been strummin’ on any ol’ banjo. They’ve been way too busy — cutting, peeling, filling, flouring, husking and just plain cooking.

Except there’s nothing plain about what’s cooking in the fair kitchen, who’s cooking it, when, where, why or how.

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Local Life, Opinion

Fair Remembrance: My Balloon Mama

Image September 1, 2020 Elaine Van Develde

The following piece was originally published in August of 2015. Here it is again, on the year without a fair, in honor of the Fair Haven Firemen’s Fair and my mom, Sally Van Develde, to whom this site is dedicated along with my dad, Bill …

Sally Van Develde selling balloons at the Fair Haven Firemen’s Fair Grab Bag Booth

Growing up in Fair Haven with parents in the fire company, Fair Haven Firemen’s Fair time meant time spent inflating punch balls during the day and helium balloons at night.

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Local Life, Opinion

Simple Summer: Guarding a Sea Bright Dawn with a Friend

Gallery August 31, 2020 Elaine Van Develde

On Monday morning, I’m going away with my friend …

It may have been a Saturday in the Sandpipers’ famed song Come Saturday Morning, but it sure looks like this Monday captured at Sea Bright’s sunrise today by longtime Fair Havenite and Knollwood School teacher, Andy Dougherty.

When morning has broken on a final summer’s day, nothing compares to the serene veracity of the moment, especially when shared with a childhood friend.

The softness of the vivid colors, the loud silence, the magic in the clouds’ formations, the whole world inside each droplet of a wave’s crash. The hush frozen in time in a minute’s worth of snapshots.

The simplest of moments atop a lifeguard stand with a best friend. Saturday or Monday, the awakening calm of the dawn, the moment remains, many of them …

“Just I and my friend. We’ll travel for miles in our Saturday smiles. And then we’ll move on. But we will remember … long after Saturday’s gone.”

The simplest of summers. Remember the moments. Savor them. Exhale with a smile.

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Local Life, Opinion

Fair Remembrance: The Fair Art of Candy Apple Making, Cotton Candy Spinning & Ice Cream

Image August 27, 2020 Elaine Van Develde

This Retro Pic(s) of the Day story was originally published on Aug. 25, 2015. It is being run again in honor of the Fair Haven Firemen’s Fair, which would have been running this week. On a historic summer without the fair, we remember how some fair traditions got started, like lost fair art of candy apple making, waffle ice cream sandwiches. Then there’s the art of spinning cotton candy, something that was formerly mastered and commandeered by the late Millie Felsmann, also the champ of candy apple making. This is how they did it and continue to do it at the fair … Until we meet again at the Out Back in 2021 …

When it came to cotton candy — that fluffy spun light blue and pink sugar on a cone that melts in your mouth, on your mouth and many times on your hands, too — Millie Felsmann was the pro at the Fair Haven Firemen’s Fair.

Don’t get us wrong, here. We know that Millie also commandeered the candy apple making. Yes, Candy Bennett was there, too — for many hours a day, making and selling those candy apples, apropos name and all. And, in another Retro Pic of the Day from 2015, we touted her as the candy apple lady.

Well, she was — she was Candy, the candy apple lady. Yes, Candy had a lot do do with those candy apples — but Millie was the boss. She, along with her troupe of kids and Candy, Betty Acker and Mrs. Frank, started work on those apples as early as 6:30 a.m.. And, even further back, to 1965 or 66, Mrs. Topfer made those apples, too.

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Local Life, Opinion

Fair Remembrance: Ode to Opening Night of The Fair Haven Firemen’s Fair

Image August 25, 2020 Elaine Van Develde

The bustle is hushed. The night remains still at the firehouse grounds. Trucks are in their place. There are no empty carnival rides, no tents, no fresh, sweet scents of cotton candy and fried fish wafting through the air. No one is cooking in the kitchen. All is quiet. Lights are out. A beacon in the mind’s eye casts shadows of decades before. The ghosts are all there, snuggled together on their grounds. They still came home. They are everywhere as we remember opening night of the Fair Haven Firemen’s Fair, which would have been this Friday BB, on a historic year without the fair ...

The night is still. A light is on. Trucks are out of the bays. Cartoony faces and ghosts in empty seats on unassembled carnival rides stare back in the dark. Someone’s cooking at the Fair Haven firehouse. It’s fair time.

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Local Life, Opinion

Longtime Fair Havenite, Songbird Lillian Lauer: Still Hitting the High Notes at 90

August 11, 2020 Elaine Van Develde

Longtime Fair Havenite Lillian Lauer at 17 (left) and 90
Photos/courtesy of the Lauer family

Remember those days as a kid when you thought everyone over the age of 30 was ancient? That view from the pint-sized sprouters and adolescent awkward can offer both good and bad perspectives. Better these days, as a near senior (gulp), as it seems that those people we thought were ancient are, decades later, somehow ageless.

That’s the case with one Fair Haven mom and lead Church of the Nativity songstress: Lillian Lauer. The longtime striking blonde, French twist-coiffed Fair Havenite, who loved for decades to tend to her garden, children and lead soprano singing from the church mezzanine, turned 90 on Aug. 7. And, as the Jackson Browne song that was as popular as Lauer’s twist and song in the 70s goes, she’s “still the same … still aims high” in both song and youthful spirit.

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Local Life, Opinion

Retro RFH Best Buds & A Bridge Message

Image July 11, 2020 Elaine Van Develde

With RFHers’ graduation, sentimentality has set in. It’s that milestone summer of senior year … There’s nothing like a few best buds, a graduation summer, a message of forever friendship and the bridge — RFHers’ iconic cement billboard of sorts left over from the McCarter estate in Rumson.

So, to pay tribute to both buds and the bridge, the Retro Pic of the Day offers a glimpse of both in a milestone moment of friends paying homage to one another by painting the bridge way back in time.

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News, Opinion

A Fair Haven-Raised Man’s George Floyd Protest Perspective

June 9, 2020 Elaine Van Develde

A Fair Haven-raised man on Friday walked with his son in peaceful protest of the knee-to-throat death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis, MN police officer Derek Chauvin, police brutality and injustice in the black community — a walk calling for unity.

“Unity, all ages, all races,” said that man, Skip Hawkins. “I’m so proud of these kids today.”

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Local Life, Opinion

Retro Forever Fair Haven Eighth Grade Friendship Snapshot

Image June 5, 2020 Elaine Van Develde

Knollwood Class of ’74 graduation fashionistas Stephanie DeSesa, Elaine Van Develde and Wanda Becker.
Photo/Sally Van Develde

Eighth graders in the Rumson-Fair Haven area are going through graduation rites of passage of a different kind right now — the COVID-19 pandemic era kind.

And what’s different about it is that there are no photos of friends clustered together, arms wrapped around one another or stiff shoulder-to-shoulder stances, signaling the end of a grade school era and beginnings. It’s definitely a missed moment or several this year.

Those ends and beginnings always involve childhood friends, some who stay with us throughout each milestone in our lives. They’re always there, if not in physical presence, in our hearts and on our minds. Those friends were markers in the milestones that are rooted in all that’s home. Our history.

So, while those friendship poses won’t be struck in the isolated pandemic Class of 2020 photos, the kinships inherent in them remain a hallmark of homegrown, hometown life.

Even if you were one of those kids that just didn’t like school all that much, the awkward, trying and exhilarating moments marked with those childhood friends are the ones that stay forever etched in minds and hearts. It’s the stuff that makes you who you are. The stuff that keeps you grounded, or up in the air — always home.

Those questionable fashion pics and fumbling adolescent moments also comprise great friendship blackmail material. Who else would have such epic fashion failure photos to go along with a string of clumsy, trouble-making memories up for grabs?

Your oldest friends. That’s who. And when the time comes to say your final goodbye, a standard eulogy by the most stable adult in the bunch just can’t compete with the memories of childhood, adolescence, teen years and adulthood and all of its ugliness, awkwardness and beauty with best friends.

Crews of grade school cronies, regardless of fashion or common sense, have something special — dating back to the beginning of graduating times.

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Local Life, Opinion

Retro Eighth Grade Grad Close Encounter

Image June 5, 2020 Elaine Van Develde

Knollwood School Class of 2002
Photo/Elaine Van Develde

The Fair Haven Knollwood School grads have always been a styling, close-knit crew — a crew of cohorts that’s always shared many Kodak moments, in pairs, trios, cliques and all together.

Just as photography has evolved from Brownie camera to Instamatic to Polaroid, to phone camera, to full-on professional photo shoots, graduation photo ops have devolved back to single inspired family front lawn shots. That’s where the photo blitz usually began. Now it’s where it ends, too. So, some things never really change — much.

Obituaries, Opinion

Remembering Fair Haven’s Bill Leonard: Mayor, Fireman, First Aider, Friend

May 13, 2020 Elaine Van Develde

Bill Leonard at his fair booth
Photos/Elaine Van Develde

A towering Fair Haven presence has taken leave from the hometown spotlight as his legacy continues to be something to which many look up.

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Local Life, Opinion

Retro Appreciation for a Tres Bon RFH French Teacher

Image May 8, 2020 Elaine Van Develde Leave a comment

To honor some favorite RFH teachers who have passed, we are re-running this tribute to RFH French teacher Joseph Guillory, originally published in 2015, an under-appreciated gem of a language teacher. Thank you, Monsieur Guillory. You are remembered and appreciated …

C’est toute bien.

It’s all good. That’s how things were in Monsieur Guillory’s class at RFH back in the 1970s.

The patient, kind and slightly goofy guy who taught the honors French class for many years is gone. But, no, his students and former colleagues have not forgotten him.

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