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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
The following tribute on Teacher Appreciation Week to an RFH teacher who has passed, Bob Berberich, was originally published in 2015.
They’re the teachers who taught us how to communicate effectively, appreciate the English language and even motivate certain writers (ahem) to write — English teachers.
Former Fair Haven Knollwood School teacher Jack Graybill on his 85th birthday Photo/Kristie Kelty
Remember when you were a kid and you thought that your probably 40-year-old teacher was ancient? It’s a pretty common notion for young ones. Then they reach their 40s and wonder what the heck they were thinking.
Sometimes the reflection at the waterfront in the Rumson-Fair Haven area is a mirror glass one. Still. Vivid. A picture with a clear message staring back at you from beneath.
It’s a picture of calm insight. It’s casting back of a similar scene with something new to see in the frame freeze of the water. Reflection. It gives you the chance to see more … without the blindness that the light can bring.
Take a look and find your own retrospective view …
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