Voices of the Past Record

Historic Preservation Committee

Oral History

Interview with Tom Brackin by John Grossmann for the Historic Preservation Committee of Mountain Lakes, New Jersey, April 9, 2009.

JOHN GROSS- MANN:	I’m sitting with Tom Brackin in his real estate and insurance office on the Boulevard. With us is Patty Herold, who is at work on the centennial history book, though right now she’s pouring over some files of documents and photos that Tom has kept. She may chime in with a question or two. We’ll see. Let me start by asking you how many generations of Brackins have called Mountain Lakes home?
TOM BRACKIN:	Three.
JG:	So take us back to the beginning.
TB:	My grandfather moved to 194 Intervale Road in 1909. That house was built by Mr. (Goeller), also of Intervale Road. My grandparents bought it when they have given up the farm. He had a little farm in Parsippany, where he had a horse and a wagon and a small crop of vegetables which he took to Newark each day. After he got done with farming he took on a job at Dawson’s Hardware in Boonton, which is where the Sovereign Bank is now, and he worked at Dawson’s for 30 years after he gave up farming. I lived in that house myself until my parents passed on in the eighties.
JG:	Do you know when that house was built?
TB:	Probably shortly before 1909. I would say 1908, 1907.
JG:	You were born in what year? And tell us about your siblings.
TB:	I was born in 1935 and my sister Sally was born in 1939. She and I both went K-12, all the way through Mountain Lakes High School.
JG:	Tell us about your schooling.
TB:	I started off at the Lake Drive School. My father also went to Lake Drive School.
JG:	What year was your father born?
TB:	He was born in 1909.
JG:	Right when your grandparents moved to the house. So we’ve got grandparents, father, you, what about your kids? Any of them live in Mountain Lakes?
TB:	No, we had moved to Green Pond after I got out of college and so my kids went through other schools.
JG:	What about your sister Sally’s kids?
TB:	Sally lived in Mountain Lakes with my parents and her kids went through the Mountain Lakes system.
JG:	So wouldn’t that give us four generations?
TB:	That’s right, it would.
JG:	Which makes me wonder how many four-generation Mountain Lakes families there are. Do you know of any?
TB:	I’m not sure of any.
JG:	You could be ribbon holders. PATTY HEROLD: I think the Popes are up there with you. Maybe four generations.
JG:	So, you had started telling us about going to Lake Drive School. What do you remember about that?
TB:	For me it was seven years, kindergarten through sixth grade. In those days the high school took us in at 7th grade. The high school was the Briarcliff School. So we left Lake Drive after seven years there. We started off with Miss Calendar. She taught kindergarten. She had quite a handful with our class. We had two-dozen kids—that was all we had in our class.
JG:	This was half day or full day kindergarten?
TB:	I think it might have been half-day.
JG:	What are your fondest memories of kindergarten?
TB:	Well, I learned how to draw. I learned a lot of things in kindergarten. I was thinking about one today. We had groups of kids that were sorting out how they would grow up. and some were bigger than others and some were more athletic than others so they sort of distilled into different types of groups, but we all seemed to get along pretty well. We had a lot of projects. We had a dragon. Miss Calendar had put together this long dragon and we would get in that and our feet would move the thing along. She had a little Victrola and we had scratchy little records that would play on it. Right in the classroom.
JG:	Now up on the second floor is the big gymnasium with the stage.
TB:	Lake Drive School they had a gymnasium downstairs. Upstairs was the auditorium and it had a stage. We had the assemblies up there. Along those walls along the corridors were other rooms that were never used when I was there. They were locked up and blocked off. We had assemblies there for all the usual activities. I remember a number of them were very interesting.
JG:	Back then, that was the room for town gatherings and there were cultural events held there, were there not?
TB:	That might have been. I know Scout meetings and Cub meetings were held there. Then we moved to the Community Church for Cub meetings and Scout meetings.
JG:	You were a Cub Scout and Boy Scout?
TB:	Yes.
JG:	What are your recollections of those activities?
TB:	Well, they were a lot of fun for young kids. The Cub things were ramming around for most of the meetings. And refreshments. The usual things kids like. But we did acquire uniforms, which were our first uniforms to wear, and they were a lot of fun and we put them on for the meetings and we had to go and learn things. Cubs, as you are aware, achieve by getting little badges and little arrowheads for subsequent achievements. Scouts did the same thing, only on a higher level.
JG:	Were there any particular service projects that had to do with the town?
TB:	There wasn’t as much of that in those days. The Cubs mostly did things for themselves, to better themselves. There wasn’t a great deal of outreach into the community. They went on camping trips and things like that.
JG:	Now, if you lived on Intervale, you were a bit of a ways from Lake Drive School. Did you walk to school everyday?
TB:	I did, yes. I used to cut across Neafie’s Field. Do you know it?
JG:	Yes, I know it by that name and I know it turned into Diaper Village. Tell us, what was it like before there were houses there.
TB:	Well, it was a rolling field which was absolutely wonderful for playing. Kids loved it because the grass grew about as high as your nose and you could run through all these paths. There were trees on the borderlines. There was a family who owned it, a Mr. Neafie, I guess. It was called Neafie’s Field, and the only way you could get from Intervale Road and Yorke Village, you had to cross through that and then you were up by the Station, and on to school.
JG:	And even as a kindergartener you made that walk by yourself?
TB:	I did. Except for one morning.
JG:	Tell us about that.
TB:	One morning I got up to the edge of the field and there was so much fog I couldn’t see across the field. I was alone. I turned around and walked back to the house. My grandmother who lived there, too, said: "What are you doing back here?" So my mother and she drove me to school that day. But it was a walk to and from every day.
JG:	You were five years old. Today, kids that age can’t cross the street alone.
TB:	I’m sure I didn’t walk fast, but I got there every day.
JG:	Any other adventures on the way to school or coming home?
TB:	Yes, I remember we used to cross the lake when it was iced. I remember going across and got halfway across and somebody was shouting at the other side, and I thought he was saying: "Brackin. Brackin." I said: "What?" He wasn’t saying Brackin. He was saying, "The ice is cracking." Well, as you may know when the ice is freezing it often makes this loud cracking sound.
JG:	Even so, it’s unsettling. I’ve heard that skating on Wildwood Lake and it still shakes you up pretty good, even though you know you’re not in trouble. You’d also go by The Market would you not? Would you stop there on the way back from school?
TB:	We did.
JG:	What was The Market like when you were a boy?
TB:	It was called Yaccarino’s and it had candy in the front and groceries in the back. We always stopped at the candy counter on the way home. I did stop in there a few times when I was older to see if I could get some meat scraps or bone scraps for my dog. And they usually had some for me. Lord knows how old it was, but the dog enjoyed it.
JG:	Did you pay out of your pocket or did your family have an account?
TB:	We had no account there. It was nickel candy in those days and I could squeeze out a nickel.
JG:	What are your recollections of high school years here in town?
TB:	Once we got into ninth grade—in seventh and eighth grade we were out for track and things like that, so mostly it was a sports oriented movement through the schools, because we had the junior varsity and the varsity of baseball and football. That’s pretty much what it consisted of for the guys. We didn’t have anything like soccer. There was no lacrosse. The girls used to play field hockey.
JG:	Was sports emphasized as much or was a seemingly important in the town as it is today?
TB:	I don’t think it was. It’s much more refined than it was.
JG:	What was important in the town back then? What got people excited? What was on people’s minds? What brought the community together?
TB:	Social events, like the Cub outings. The high school dances. They had at least four dances: the senior prom, the junior jump, the sophomore hop, and the freshman frolic.
JG:	Where were they held and what were they like?
TB:	They were in the gym. It was decorated, but still smelled like a gym. It was decorated by each class that did their own. The older ones were able to decorate more than the younger ones.
JG:	If it was the freshman frolic, would just freshman attend?
TB:	Yes, but they would try to sell tickets to other classes as best they could. As the kids got older, more would go to the bigger dances. Not too many of them frolicked.
JG:	How many kids were in your class when you graduated?
TB:	I think it was 43. Hard to believe. Pretty small.
JG:	Did it seem small at the time?
TB:	It seemed normal to us, because we didn’t go to other schools to see what they were like, other than to go to football games.
JG:	How many of those 40 kids had you known in kindergarten, all the way up the ladder?
TB:	Most of them, although some dropped off the vine because they moved away over the years. When we’ve had class reunions we’ve tried to recapture some of those names and addresses. But the preponderance of that group went on through.
JG:	When you have your reunions now, of those 40 or so, how many attend?
TB:	It’s pretty well attended. Can’t remember any numbers, but I’ve got records in the other room, because I was the treasurer for several reunions. But we’d get back 25 to 30 people. Pretty darned good ratio.
JG:	Are you still close to a number of those people?
TB:	Oh, yes. Although I don’t see them often, because they’re mostly away. They’re not around town like they used to be. Except for Betty Ann Steere Meritt and Joan Grenier Ostrow and Sandy Trim Robinson. I see them a lot.
JG:	It sounds like you’ve got some very early memories of kindergarten. What is your early memory altogether of Mountain Lakes?
TB:	Hmmm. I remember moving into the house, when we lived across the street. When I came down from where I was born, in Norwich, New York. I was born in Norwich where my mother grew up. We went up there for my birth—at the time we lived in Binghamton, New York, and my mother had this one doctor who did everything, so he delivered me and we went back down to Binghamton. And then we moved to Mountain Lakes. First we stopped in Parsippany, because there was nothing in Mountain Lakes, and we lived across the street form 194 Intervale in a little rental house. That was 1940. Here’s what happened. They wanted to enroll me in Mountain Lakes and you had to live in Mountain Lakes. So Earl Anibel, the superintendent said, "He’s going to have to live here." My father said, "Well, he can live across the street at his grandmother’s." Which I did. I moved in their house and lived with her and my grandfather for the kindergarten year and part of first grade, while my family lived across the street, on the Parsippany side of Intervale Road.
JG:	What do you remember about him?
TB:	I was always afraid of him. He was a stern superintendent. But he was really a very nice guy. I know the teachers liked him. He went to Hamilton College. They said he spoke very well because they had a strong public speaking program at Hamilton. He was a good guy.
JG:	You said he was stern. Do you remember any stories about him that would be evocative of that?
TB:	No, I don’t remember any encountering any problems with him. We steered clear of him when we were throwing snowballs, and things like that. We never got into any trouble with Earl Anibel
JG:	You were starting to tell your earliest memory as a boy…
TB:	Well, that’s when we first moved from Parsippany to Mountain Lakes, which was a pretty tough move. I don’t know if you want to hear this story, but, coming down from Binghamton, my father was leaving Metropolitan Life. Didn’t make a lot of money selling life insurance. He was renting up there. To get down here, he had no cash. He got a chattel mortgage on the furniture in the house to borrow money from a bank to pay for the move down here. I don’t remember that part. I learned that subsequently. But the trip down here was a normal trip and a normal move. It was a lot of fun because we were in a new house and the house was really tiny. It had a woodstove for cooking and a coal furnace and had hot air pipes that came out of it. One pipe went to the center part of the house and that divided. So the whole house was heated by one pipe here and a little pipe going out there, and all the cooking was done on this wood stove. Seemed neat to me. Didn’t seem neat to my mother. We were only there a little over a year.
JG:	And then?
TB:	We rented at 21 and then 27 Dartmouth. One year at each. The first one, a Mrs. Orr owned 21 Dartmouth. Then we moved next door to Mrs. Loney’s house. She had a very good friend who was active in the women’s liberation, vote for the women…
PH:	Belle De Rivera.
JG:	Then where?
TB:	After that, the war ended then, because I remember sitting in the living room of 27 Dartmouth and hearing about the first atomic bomb being dropped at White Sands, New Mexico. and hearing about the end of the war, listening on the radio. We moved out of there and moved into my grandfather’s house and at the same time they fixed up the barn behind it. My grandparents moved into that and we occupied 194 Intervale.
JG:	How long did your family occupy 194?
TB:	Until my parents passed away in 1986 and 1989. My father passed away first. My mother continued to live in the house for a little bit until she had to go into a nursing home. And then we sold the house. I was living in Green Pond at the time.
JG:	So you go through high school and end up going to college, where you studied what?
TB:	I studied business and psychology at Colby College.
JG:	And after you graduated?
TB:	After that, [laughs] I had been in the Air Force ROTC, with a mind to fly jets. However, one night in the middle of the summer at Intervale Road, I wanted to go to over to Yorke Village to play with Oliver Thurman at our little clubhouse. I got up and walked down the stairs and out the back door in the middle of the night. My father heard me, followed me, and brought me back in the house. When I got to Colby we were taking the pre-flight physicals and they told us to put down everything. So I came to this question that asked: Have you ever sleep walked? I said Yes. Well, that was the end of that. I got a letter saying, "We’d like to take you into the Air Force, but we can’t let you fly." Well, it was a crushing blow. So I spoke to the detachment commander and he said, "This is nonsense." So he wrote a litter to the Marine Corps and the Marines said, "We’ll look at him." So I had another chance. They did take me. So I became a Navy Pilot and flew for the Marines.
JG:	So this very building has been a real estate office for how long?
TB:	It started in 1947. However, my father first opened up with Rusty Sanders as Sanders & Brackin in probably 1945 or ’46. But let me back up a step, because I’ve left out an important part. When my father first came back to New Jersey he rented a little house on Lake Intervale on Lakeview Road. It’s where you come close to the railroad tracks and there’s a road that goes across that curve and right on the corner there was a little house, which was the real estate sales office for Lake Intervale, when those houses were being built. He rented that with a partner, a Mr. Myers. My father did insurance and real estate and Myers did only real estate. They had one fund and one checkbook. My father came into work one Sunday morning to catch up on some details and he looked in the checkbook and a check was missing. There was a note from Myers saying, "Sorry, Tom, I’ve gone to Canada." He took my father’s insurance funds and all the rest of the funds and headed to Canada, never to be seen again. My father then teamed up with Rusty Sanders. And they opened up a little office over top of what was once Blair’s Drug Store next to Yaccarino’s. Then they found this building. This room was empty. There was a dirt floor out there [the entrance room].
JG:	When was this building built?
TB:	I don’t know for sure. Probably 1920 or so. It was originally a fruit stand. Produce. I’ve got a picture and it shows the railroad tracks coming down and you can see the edge of this building and a sign sticking off the top of the building says hot dogs. The trolley tracks crossed right here.
JG:	Hot dogs?
TB:	Pete Onorati still refers to this as "the stand." There was a dirt floor where they sold produce and over there was an office-like environment. They had a floor heater and no insulation. John Carey owned it. I think he did plumbing, mostly in a little building that is now gone. It was mostly a store—it was these two rooms. He had a store, mostly novelties, candy and ice cream and things like that. But other people occupied it. I was told—I never knew this—that it was a grocery store, operated by a whole different family—all this was pre-1947—maybe late 30s, early 40s. But it’s been a real estate office since 1947. They had a month-to-month rental here for a number of years.
JG:	Did you join the business when your father was still involved?
TB:	Yes, I here after a 4 year tour with the Marine Corps. I came back here and he said, "I’d like you to go in business with me." I said, "All right." He said, "And I’m going to make you president." So from that day on, I started buying it out and eventually bought the whole thing. It was my business from day one. He’d go up to Maine for the summer and I was the boss.
JG:	In your twenties?
TB:	Yeah, that’s right.
JG:	What happened to Sanders?
TB:	He was putting on his coat one morning to come to work, around 1960, and dropped dead of a heart attack. He was a real gentleman, we really missed him.
JG:	And you graduated from Colby in?
TB:	1957.
JG:	And joined the business in?
TB:	1961
JG:	So your father was solo for a little bit and then it was the two of you in partnership. What’s changed the most and what’s stayed the same in real estate in Mountain Lakes in all those years?
TB:	As you can see, this office hasn’t changed much. [laughs] The changes were when the big ones came in. Jim Wiechert decided he was going to grow like that. And Dick Schlott did the same thing. Then he merged with Coldwell Banker and those became national organizations. Huge. So we were juxtaposed: the big and the little. One by one, the little ones dropped off the vine, little shops like this.
JG:	Are you the last little guy?
TB:	As far as I know. Howie Hubler, he’s got a small shop in Boonton.
PH:	What about Mountain Lakes Realty?
TB:	They came here when they closed down. Many of their sales people came here.
JG:	What’s changed the most selling houses in Mountain Lakes over all those years?
TB:	The sale of them—I don’t think there’s a great deal of difference, other than the regulations and statutes have tightened up the sales process a great deal. We do things much more by the book than we used to. In the old days they used to write up a binder and it had terms and mortgage information. It was on a piece of paper, like pad paper. But that was turned over to the lawyers. In those days, the attorneys did the contracts. That’s changed. Laws against discrimination came in.
JG:	As a realtor, what qualities of Mountain Lakes do you stress to people new to the area who come here looking for a house?
TB:	Same ones we did. In the old days, the schools were stressed. Today, it’s the same thing. We find people still wanting Mountain Lakes because of the schools. The other thing, and I can remember my father saying this many times to people: "Come to Mountain Lakes because you don’t need to go on vacation. You’ve got lakes, you’ve got the club, bowling, tennis. There’s everything you could want right here in town." A lot of people agreed with that.
JG:	Did your family belong to the club?
TB:	No.
JG:	So what were summers like for you and recreation here as a boy?
TB:	We were pretty wide open because you didn’t have to worry about being kidnapped or pedophiles or things like that. And we just roamed the streets in Mountain Lakes, day and night.
JG:	For better or for worse?
TB:	Almost always for better. We didn’t cause a great deal of trouble. We caused some noise. I remember one time in particular. There was a water tower being constructed up on Tower Hill. Somebody had the bright idea of going up there and throwing some rocks at it. We were maybe seniors in high school. We threw rocks at that thing. There must have been 20 of us. That thing, you could have heard it resonating all the way to Dover. It was horrendous.
JG:	How long did it take for someone to start squawking or the police to show up?
TB:	We didn’t stay around to find out.
JG:	Where did you and your family shop?
TB:	In the early days, I remember shopping was done in Newark. I remember having to go all the way to Bamberger’s in Newark for Christmas shopping. Driving in the car, a 1935 Hudson Terraplane. This was a used car my father picked up somewhere along the line. It was long after that we could afford a new car.
JG:	Was Intervale Road paved back then?
TB:	Yes it was. All of Mountain Lakes was paved. The only road that was not paved, was Summit Road, I think.
JG:	Do you remember a tree in the middle of Woodland Avenue? I’ve heard talk that when the road was made they did it right around a tree.
TB:	No, I don’t remember that. What I do remember is that there were two blinkers in Mountain Lakes. They had a system with a big casing and at the top was a glass with acetylene gas and this thing would blink. Quite a bright light. One was on the Boulevard, right at Lake Drive—right in the middle of the Boulevard. It was for Lake Drive, I guess. It would blink constantly. It was on a box. It said: Keep Right on it.
JG:	What years was that?
TB:	That was in the war years. And there was another one down on Intervale Road, and Rte 6 in those days. Bloomfield Avenue. What is today Route 46. It was also in the center of the road and you’d approach that thing and say, "Oh, that’s where I turn," and around it you’d go. I’d forgotten about this until long after and I just happened to pick up a document. The Masons were sending out a letter to kids who were going to come to an outing at the Masonic Temple and they had a little map on there. Blinker was on this map. I thought: I hadn’t thought about that blinker in 50 years.
JG:	You had a family car. You started driving at the requisite age?
TB:	Yes, age 17 in those days.
JG:	Any interesting stories about learning to drive in Mountain Lakes?
TB:	Well, my father acquired a ’39 Ford station wagon from a fellow--he was a science writer for The New York Times, Walter Sullivan, who lived out in Rockaway Valley. I never met him. He did give me his mineral collection. I was able to use the station wagon That was my car to use.
PH:	Tom, going back to the real estate memories, was it always the case that you weren’t allowed to put signs up in front of houses for sale in Mountain Lakes?
TB:	Up till just recently. I was talking to someone the other day who has one. He said the ordinance now permits a small sign and he said, "My sign is just within that limit." I think the ones you see around town are a little bit smaller than they used to be. It always was a good thing not to see a lot of For Sale signs, because in the early days, when the big crash came in the twenties, a lot of these homes went into foreclosure.
JG:	What borough residents stick out in your memory for their service to the community?
TB:	There was a Wally Hill, who was a scout leader for many years. I remember we had a scout master for a long time, Bob Scott. When he left we were just heartbroken. We really appreciated having him. He did a lot. He showed up at all the meetings, all the extra associated meetings, all the camporees. And he worked in New York. It was difficult for him but he always showed up. Dick Wilcox, of course, was so active on Riverside Hospital. He’s well recorded in Mountain Lakes. Has a street named after himself.
JG:	Do you have any special memories of him?
TB:	He shared a lot of his knowledge. He’d just gotten out of the Marine Corps. He shared a lot of his ways and knowledge with us, as little kids. I played with his son. Next door on Yorke Road, lived Herb Warren, was quite a guy. He was on the council, too. I remember him helping me with my first project. I was interested in electronics. I got a multimeter for Christmas. I was in maybe seventh grade. I wired it all up, because it was a kit. Took it over to Herb. I said: "It won’t work." He got out the diagrams and said: "Tommy, I have bad news. You have wired the entire thing backwards." I took it home and spent three or four hours undoing it and redoing it. And it worked. He was very proud of me and he helped me with a number of other things. He helped the whole community. Christmas Eve, Herb had this huge speaker and he put that out on his porch and inside he had a record player. He would play Christmas carols all Christmas Eve(for all of Yorke Village. Loud. He did this for years.
JG:	When Diaper Village got built, Neafie’s Field disappeared out from under your eyes.
TB:	That’s right. Much to our disappointment. My own father--he was the realtor/developer for an outfit called Fox Homes Incorporated. Sam Fox and his two sons, were the builders. And the bulldozers came in. There were already some roads started. I think Crescent Road had some poured concrete. I guess somebody was going to build in there before the war. And it started and stopped. But it was hard for me to see it go, because we played there.
JG:	What kind of playing did you do? So far we just have visions of you walking to school.
TB:	Playing was typical kids play. We’d go down there for ramming around, playing cowboys and Indians. There was field there with baseball markings.
JG:	I’ve heard it described as a sand field.
TB:	It was a dirt field. The older people would play softball there on Sundays, quite regularly. And there was kind of unique thing. The fire department felt it was a good idea to control the burn on the field because if it caught fire when everybody was away, it would go. So what they would do was, come down and do a controlled burn in the fall, and all the firemen would turn out. They had trucks there. That was fun because they let us light the fires. We had a grand time of it. So it became a burned down field and not subject to a wild fire later.
JG:	When you were working here in the office, you were living in Green Pond. Why did you settle in Green Pond and not Mountain Lakes, where you grew up?
TB:	Well, we first bought a house, one I could afford, up on Green Pond Road in Rockaway Township. We lived there, raised two children. As they got older, there wasn’t anybody for them to play with. They’d had a lot of friends. They pressured us to consider moving up there. So we did. We liked it very much. I was well aware of Green Pond and always liked it. I thought: This would be great for them. And it was. It was a village. So we moved up there.
JG:	Did you miss not being in Mountain Lakes?
TB:	Sure, though I had very few friends here still, because of the turnover. There were hardly any young people I knew here anymore. But the town, of course, I’m here every day, it’s not as though as I was away from it. But I was in things here, too. I was in the Men’s Glee Club, until its demise.
JG:	Okay, tell us about that. It dates back how far?
TB:	To the start of Mountain Lakes, I think.
JG:	So it was a high school group of singers?
TB:	No, these were men. There were a few young men. Maybe two or three high school kids.
JG:	So how old were you when you joined?
TB:	I was 24 or 25, right after I got out of the Marine Corps. They was no audition. They were just happy to have participants.
JG:	How good a voice did you have?
TB:	Average. I still sing. I’m in the New Jersey Conservatory, a Symphonic chorus that rehearses up here at St. Peter’s.
JG:	Tell us how often you would practice and where you’d perform?
TB:	We performed in the Mountain Lakes Briarcliff School and we rehearsed weekly in the Community Church. I don’t remember which night. Probably a Wednesday night. There was a spring concert and a Christmas concert. There was pretty close to 50 men. After performances, people would go out to dinner.
JG:	What kind of music were you singing?
TB:	Things you’d expect at a nice concert. Beethoven, Bach, Christmas carols. Ted Milkey was the director. He was the music teacher at the high school. He would come over and teach the little kids in the mornings. So I had him kindergarten on up. His wife also taught us. She was mostly a substitute there at the Lake Drive School. They lived in town on Cobb Road.
JG:	Any special memories of him?
TB:	Wonderful guy. Good musician. We all loved him. He was a friendly, good guy to work for. We had good concerts with him. As he got older he lost a little bit of interest himself and we did get another conductor, but the years he was in he did a wonderful job.
JG:	With all the years you’ve been living in town and also working in town—even though you don’t put your head down on a pillow in Mountain Lakes anymore, you certainly know what’s going on here—I’m wondering what your recollections might be of how various world events played out in town? Do any have certain distinctive resonances that might not have been the same in other communities, that somehow they played out differently here?
TB:	I don’t know if things were any different here. The kids were very smart and a lot of them got off the track and got into the Vietnam-era type of attitude. Hated the police. Things like that. There were a number of nasty little things that happened around town and it was all due to the war.
JG:	Is that worth going into?
TB:	There was an actual firebombing of a police car. It was parked in back of the borough hall. Reduced to cinders. That was probably one of the worst things that occurred. The other things were just the usual signs--clothing, hair. You look through the yearbook at that time. The yearbook actually reflected some of this too.
JG:	World War II you were in town.
TB:	That was an interesting thing, because as little kids we loved guns, tanks, and bombers and would play that stuff, dawn to dusk. And we listened to it on the radio and saw it in the magazines and newspapers and just followed it constantly. I remember each year the Memorial Day service and speakers from the military and people talking about people who were shot down. I remember demonstrations and warnings done by police and army personnel. How to use a fire extinguisher. What to watch for. Don’t spread rumors. If you learn something about a troop ship, don’t repeat it. Lots of things like that went on and it scared all of us. "Oh, this is serious." It was serious because we heard about it. Not because we knew of it. Nothing came here. We did in grade school have to go into the center hallway and cover our heads during an air raid warning. We had air raid drills. We used to bring to Miss Calendar’s class--we’d gather the milkweed pods and bring those in and they’d hang them up and they would dry and then somebody would come from the military and pick them up and take them away. They made life vests from them. Instead of air inside, they had milkweed pods.
JG:	That was your contribution to the war effort?
TB:	This was one of them. Another was, we had a place where the parking lot is by where they sell Lionel trains today, there was a little shed and we’d bring scrap metal down there. We collected newspapers and bought war stamps, all for the war effort.
PH:	I’d like to ask how your father came to develop Diaper Village?
TB:	Well, a lot of people felt it was needed, because there were no small houses in Mountain Lakes. You came in as a pretty well off person, or not at all. This was developable. It was a nice area. The builder built pretty good quality homes. They were steam heat with radiators. They had plaster walls. They were not bad homes at all.
JG:	Do you remember what they sold for?
TB:	I remember S. Beech Jones’ wife came out. He said, "Alison, find us a lot. We’re going to build in Mountain Lakes." She and my father went down to Vale Road and there was a hole in the ground, an excavation. She said,"I’ll take it." She bought the hole in the ground. That was $13,000, I think. They were as low as $9,000.
PH:	Houses or lots?
TB:	Houses. The lots are small.
PH:	Was there any opposition to putting the small houses there?
TB:	I’m sure there was. I don’t remember much about it. It went through the borough process, so it didn’t have a great deal of adversity. But I’m sure there were people who owned large homes nearby who thought it was not necessary.
JG:	It was largely veterans from World War II moving in there?
TB:	Yes, that was part of the drift—all these veterans coming back and there were VA loans available and the government was encouraging towns to have homes for them. Where else were they going to go? A lot of them came in -- they had landed a job and now a house, accumulating funds, and the next step would be a Hapgood. A lot of them took that path.
PH:	Does the Diaper Village name come from the town people or what did you father call the development?
TB:	Midvale Acres. It was also called Fertile Valley because of all the children that arrived.
JG:	Do you have any idea who gave it the name Diaper Village? Do you know if there were negative, positive, or neutral connotations to that nickname?
TB:	I would guess it was neutral. I don’t know where the name came from.
JG:	It has such a nice ring to it, at least from the distance of time.
PH:	Who was the developer of Yorke Village?
TB:	That goes way back and I do not know. That was pre-World War II.
JG:	We didn’t talk much about this 1909 house that your grandparents moved into and you ended up in. What was that like?
TB:	That was a plain vanilla—I don’t know what the style would be called—American style, perhaps. You see a lot of them around. It’s a two story with a bathroom, kitchen attachment on the side, a bay window and front porch wrapped around the front. It had an attic. The chimney comes up and then makes a 45 degree angle and comes out the peak.
JG:	Drunk mason?
TB:	No, the furnace was over here and the peak was over here. So they had to do that.
JG:	Are there any other memories of growing up or favorite Mountain Lakes stories you can share?
TB:	There probably are. I’m not sure I can come up with any that are worth hearing right at this moment.
JG:	Did you ever attend a performance at The Little Theater?
TB:	I did not, but I do have a brochure from there.
PH:	Can you say more about what distinguished Mountain Lakes? You talked about education as being so much a part of the marketing of Mountain Lakes. Anything else that comes to mind it terms of what set Mountain Lake apart in those days?
TB:	The town itself, the way it was laid out was spectacular. Its woods and lakes, like you find in very few other towns. They laid out the roads so they’re curvy and not grided. So when people come here they say: "Oh this is beautiful." It’s well laid out. Now it’s got sewers. Then, it didn’t. The aesthetics of Mountain Lakes have always been excellent. And the availability, of course, of things like fishing, golf right next door. It seemed to have all you could possibly want. I think that is an attraction for the average person. So many things right here. You asked about the schools: they held a big magnetic draw for everybody and still do. Back in the World War II days, the people who ran the town really had the town in mind. They were mostly Bell Labs engineers and executives from New York and they really wanted to help the town. They had no personal agenda. I think it’s kind of that way still. That’s carried though, because the attitude was established years ago and I think it’s still carried on today. I like to hope it is.
JG:	One last try for an old memory.
TB:	Here’s one. My father had an old car. This was when he was in his late teens. It had a rumble seat. The top had been taken away, so it was a convertible. And he was getting rid of it. He though, "Maybe I’ll have some fun with it." So he put a bale of hay in the back, lit it on fire way down at the end of the Boulevard, and when it got going pretty good, he hunched down behind the wheel and drove down the Boulevard 40 mph with smoke and flames coming out the back. One resident phoned the police to report a car on fire roaring down the Boulevard -- with NO driver!
JG:	There are lots of stories about practical jokes and pranks in this town’s history. Certainly charming in the telling. It seems like much less of that goes on nowadays. I guess there’s not that much tolerance for that kind of thing.
TB:	I tell you one story I was involved in, when I was about a sophomore in high school. Somebody knew where the mine was that has the bats. What they call the bat cave now. It’s in Hibernia. That was an open tunnel when we were kids. We went up there one Sunday afternoon. It was almost dusk. We went in there and picked bats off the wall and put them in a box. They were sleeping. We took them down to Mountain Lakes. On one of the doors to Briarcliff School, I knew how to push the glass, slide it up, so I could reach in and open the door. We went in that door, went upstairs, and let the bats out and left in a hurry. The next morning they were flying up and down the hall. Kids were screaming, bats were flying, and teachers were very unhappy. I would hope kids don’t do things like that today.
JG:	Do you remember the uproar that caused?
TB:	There was considerable uproar. I don’t think anybody knew who did it, and they didn’t for years. Keep my name out of it. [He laughs.]
JG:	Too late. Well, thank you very much Tom. It’s been fun seeing the town through your eyes and you’ve chipped in with some wonderful nuggets that we haven’t heard from anybody else. Just knowing what this building was, in different incarnations before the real estate office. To picture a hot dog sign on the front with the trolley going by is wonderful.

End of Interview

Transcribed and edited by John Grossmann of the Historic Preservation Committee, June 2009.

Oral Histories and Recollections