As near as my memory can recall events, The Brown family moved to 198 Morris Ave in Mountain Lakes, in 1922.  The picture of that house, which I have enclosed, also shows a 1921 Buick automobile with the writer standing next to that car.  The other car in the picture is unknown to me.  I show this to indicate my rather tender age as I tell my story.  The house at 198, no longer exists.  It was a Hapgood house and was torn down about three years ago and was replaced by the two new houses that now occupy the same property.  The only things that remain of the original are the four stone posts that defined the entrance and exit of the circular driveway that came up to the front entrance to the house.

In order to paint a word picture of the nearby residents that made up the neighborhood I will start with the properties directly across Morris Ave.On either side of Briarcliff Rd.  Where it intersects Morris Ave were wooded lots.  West of the west side lot, was the Driggs family.  East of the east side lot lived the Pietz family and east of them were the Turners.  To the west of 198 were the Bendixons and to the east the Edwards family and next to them were the Boetigars.

It is primarily the Boetigar family that are central to the story that I am about to tell.  In addition to Mr. & Mrs Boetigar there were two sons, Russell and Dick and a younger daughter Beatrice.  The Boetigars did not own an automobile which was quite common in those days.  Houses within walking distance of the station as well as the Post Office and the stores were quite desirable for that reason.  However the Boetigars did have a garage.  That Garage and driveway were on the east side of the house and the back of the garage was just a few feet from the railroad fence.

In that garage lived a man by the name of George Gray and he is really the subject of my story.  George was a veteran of the Spanish American War and in that war, on the Island of Puerto Rico, he lost his right leg just above the knee.  George wore a wooden leg that was very plain and simple and in no way resembled the type of prosthesis provided to amputees today.  I have no idea regarding the arrangement that George had with the Boetigar family but I do know that he did such chores as lawn mowing, snow shoveling, furnace tending and gardening for which he was allowed to occupy the garage.  In that garage there was a medium sized "pot belly stove", a steel framed cot was his bed and a simple wooden chair in front of the stove.  There were a couple of old trunks and that was about all.  Although I don’t know for sure, I suspect that George received a small pension from the government, which allowed him to buy food but little else.

George shopped in Boonton walking to and from that town along the railroad tracks.  In those days the Lackawanna Railroad boasted four tracks and they were in constant use.  The outside tracks were for passenger trains and the inside tracks for freight.  Certainly the greatest volume of freight traffic was coal deliveries to New York and other cities on the Jersey side of the Hudson river.  The coal came from the Scranton area of Pennsylvania.  Inevitably, some coal would fall off the open coal cars and land between the tracks.  George always carried a burlap bag on his trips to and from Boonton and was always on the lookout for these fallen pieces of coal.  That is how he kept the garage warm in the winter time and made it possible for him to cook on his stove.  Such was the way that veterans were looked after before World War Two.

After meeting George, I became a frequent visitor to his garage.  He was a good storyteller and told many stories about the war that he was in.  He also showed me how to cook things like potatoes in the ground and I would frequently bring a couple of potatoes from my close by home.  We would dig a small hole in the ground, place the potatoes therein, put the dirt back in the hole and then build a small fire of twigs and a few larger pieces of wood right on top of the hole.  After a given length of time the potatoes were dug up and we had a potato feast.

Having much time on his hands, George loved to carve things out of wood.  One time he carved a length of chain links out of solid pine.  I kept that memento for many years and as I grew older, I passed that piece of wooden chain to one of my grandsons after telling him the George story.  George was a kindly man who had very little in life after the loss of his leg.  I think that the social implications of his story are very telling.  Were it not for the kindness of the Boetigar family he may not have survived as long as he did.

When the Brown family left the Morris Avenue location for a short stay in Brooklyn, N.Y.  before moving to 21 Larchdell Way, I lost track of George Gray.  Some years later, perhaps in the early sixties, I had the opportunity to visit Mrs. Boetigar in Charlotte, N.C. and later in the 1970s I visited her daughter Beatrice who, with her husband owned and ran a Ski Lodge in western Mass.  Both of her older brothers had passed on by then.

There were two other events of note that took place during our Morris Ave. stay.  The most momentous was the explosion of the magazines at Piccatinny Arsenal during and following a thunder and lightning storm.  It was on a Sunday afternoon and I believe that it was in 1926.  The men of the community gathered in the street to try to figure out just what was happening.  One suggested that it was the end of the world.  Others did not know.  My father decided to drive up to Lookout Rd.  For a look and when we got there we could see the explosions as they occurred.  There were many broken windows in Mountain Lakes and much damage in Rockaway.

Another rather major event at the time was the fire that destroyed the house that occupied the property where the Mountain Lakes Library now stands.  That fire was the only one that I can remember that burned a house to the ground during the years that I lived in Mountain Lakes.

Sincerely -
Jack Brown