Gregory Dittmer:  

Life There are many people that I remember from my school years though none with which I have kept in touch. Most people probably don't remember me if they ever even knew that I existed back then. Then there were a few that I considered good friends and many that I was too shy to even begin a friendship. Well now I sit here, 50 years old. It is so very difficult to actually think that a half century has past in my life. Growing up in a town like Fair Haven and Rumson, many would have thought that my life was lacking in many material ways. It very well may have, but anything that I may have missed materially, was made up one hundredfold in the intangible yet very real terms of love, acceptance and encouragement provided by my family and close friends. Looking back, it may seem that I have gone no where. I live one block from the house where I was raised and still count as my best friend, a man I met 45 years ago. My grandfather was born in a small house on Clay Street and my mother was born in a house on Willow Street. Captain Little of the Albertina was a distant cousin as was the lovely Viola Sickles. My Great grand father settled here in the mid 1800s and married a French Indian woman where they raised five children. My grand father born in 1895 married Ida, his wife of fifty years. Together they raised five children in the house where I was later raised. It is families like mine that had made Fair Haven the beautiful place where living was good even though the work was hard. It was the quaint style of this little fishing village that attracted the upper class from New York looking for a place to summer. Unfortunately, little by little, all those city people seeking the cozy life in this small town of close knit families are what has brought about its demise. It is no longer recognizable as the little village where neighbors knew each other and cared for each other in very tangble ways. All of the outsiders that have come here have torn down, piece by piece, the very nature of what it meant to live in Fair Haven. Now, instead of neighborhood kids getting together for a game of stickball, we have T ball, Little League and Soccor all with there colorful garb making the once happy playful children into win at all cost semi pros before they can even ride a bicycle. Gone are the families that used to spend the days at the dock and on the beaches, fishing and crabbing, just enjoying a happy life in this little town. Now we have a police force that is decked out in SWAT team gear,to chase speeders. We have a police chief that makes $107,000.00, more than twice the average income of middle America. His duties are giving talks on the dangers of drugs at school and waving from his patrol car in the many local parades. The old Lovette Nursery that used to be home to foxes and the only known wild turkey population in the state of New Jersey is a vast green field ...Expand for more