Kevin Wright:  

For my book, 1609: A Country That Was Never Lost, or for the history of Newton, NJ, including reminiscences, check out my web page at newtonnj.net Check out selections of original music on My Space music page, which ends with kevinwrightnj The child is father of the man: Even as a boy, I was attracted to the history and legends of Old Sussex. I am the second of seven children, five boys and two girls, born in Newton Memorial Hospital to John Ivan and Teresa Wright. My mother and oldest sister still reside in Newton. I remember Chris and Vichi almost from the beginning of my life. We were classmates in Miss Cunningham's nursery school class in the YMCA building on Main Street. I went for two years because my mother taught there. There was a sandbox in the shade of a huge sugar maple and I remember one day a board broke, sending Bernie B. tumbling out in an avalanche of sand. We had nap time when everyone put their head down on the table and pretended to sleep, sometimes even making snoring noises. Two kids were then chosen to go downstairs to the kitchen and bring up crackers and juice for a snack. One day I came to class in a Hop Along Cassidy outfit and was asked to pose for Mrs. Trotfetter's art class. When I was in seventh or eighth grade, I went back to an art show there (shortly before they tore the building down for a car-sales lot) and I saw a beautiful watercolor of me that had been done during that sitting. Either my great-aunt Rosetta Wright, who once worked in Carber's, or my grandmother Mullen would walk me home, down past the original Library/Post Office. I can remember a St. Bernard dog sleeping on the front porch of the Cochran House. I also recall Barney Block's Cigar Store, next to the Sussex & Merchants Bank, with a wooden Indian holding a bundle of cigars chained to the front, and stopped many a time in Klingener's Ice Cream Store, where teenagers for generations carved their initials in hearts on the wooden booths. Monolithic slabs of slate formed the sidewalks. There were lunch counters with malted milk shake machines and hot-dog rotisseries in both Newberry's (later the Globe) and Woolworth's 5&10. Friday and Saturday evenings were Farmers' Nights and the headlights would be lined up on every approach to Newton, which had banks, a theater, Woodward's Hardware Store, Montgomery Ward catalog desk, the Dennis Library, bars (such as the Bucket of Blood) and a bowling alley---all the latest in modern entertainment for rural folk. When I was small, we saw movies in the Court Square Theater on High Street; I definitely remember seeing "Sink the Bismark!" there, which was released in 1960. Newton Theatre on the corner of Spring and Moran Streets re-opened around 1964, because I remember seeing "A Hard Day's Night" there. While my father's family descended from the earliest Dutch, English and Scottish colonists---and we even carry the indigenous blood of native Minisinks, my mother was a Leonia girl, a graduate of "NJC" (NJ College of Women, now Douglass College, Rutgers University). Of French-Irish descent, she was raised Roman Catholic. My own great-grandmother, Celeste Campbell Brink, referred to us as "Papists." So I was an "insider" and "outsider" at the same time. I remember playground discussion during the Nixon-Kennedy election---talk of the Kennedys building a tunnel to Rome so they could take orders from the Pope. I even thought the world was made up of Catholics and Publics: Catholics, who attended Catholic School and Publics, who attended Public School. Sometimes I wonder at how much the world has changed, but then I think it really hasn't changed enough. As a kid, I was close friends with my cousin, Bob A, who lived around the corner on Townsend Street. My great-grandmother Brink lived in a bedroom at the head of the stairs, filled with every prescription bottle she ever purchased. We used to play ball down on the luscious green field by the sewer plant, behind Pop-Pop Boglioli's house. A long ball to right always produced a crash of glass and a rush of sewer workers to chase us away. Bob's telephone was on a party line, so when my aunt needed to make a call, she had to shoo all the eavesdroppers on the block off the phone. You could usually hear her saying, "I know you're still on the line, Inez, because I can hear you breathing." Resistant as a turtle to modernity, my great-grandmother used to make us toast for breakfast and insisted on using her sparky electric toaster with flap-down sides. It turned every piece of bread to charcoal, so she would take it out with a fork when she either saw the smoke signals or smelled something burning. But, like the great chef she was, she would always ask, "How do you like it? Dark or light?" and then scrape it with her knife to the desired color and finish. Thinking back inevitably brings Memory Park to mind. The thrill of the big swings down beside Piss River (more politely known as Moore's Brook), the clank of horseshoe games and excited chatter alternating with creative silences during sand castle tournaments in the sandbox! Anybody remember the terrific hand-pumped merry-go-round, which teenagers always got going at a high rate of speed? Sooner or later, some dare-devil with a "duck-ass" haircut would walk out onto the inner chords that connected the pentagonal ring of benches to the center axis. Of course, a misstep meant instant mangling, so the pony-tailed girls were always duly impressed, whispering in awe. Once the merry-go-round reached orbital speed, the older kids wouldn't stop to let anyone on or off, so you had to wait for a seat to open. Someone would jump off into the white gravel, crunching along until he or she could slow down to a safe speed and thereby make a dignified exit. To get on, you started running alongside, building up speed like a hobo trying to catch a boxcar, and then you dived for the seat, pulling yourself aboard while dangling over the whirling gravel bed below. In the best of circumstances, a friend would grab your elbow and pull you aboard. Sometimes it wasn't pretty, but failure meant walking around for a couple of days with gravel pockmarks in your face. On evenings in early summer, townsfolk filled the big wooden bleachers on Babe Ruth Field, cheering and jeering. Sooner or later, the chimes of the ice cream truck would tingle in the parking lot below, sending kids scrambling, swinging and climbing down the interior superstructure of the bleachers to reach the ground first. Ah, evolution in reverse. On the way home from the town pool, we'd often stop at Blondies, below the Motor Vehicle Inspection Station. I was in the first class to go through St. Joseph's Grammar School from kindergarten through 8th grade, graduating in 1966 in a class of 34 students. While we had no gym, music room, cafeteria, auditorium or science lab, I got a really great education and I still write the Palmer Cursive Method like a red-knuckled medieval calligrapher. There was a price, however: I did see several kids disappear from school under extreme stress, sometimes vanishing over the hill into the old cemetery; I never saw some of them again until High School, if ever. Less than half of those in my class attended Newton High School, making us the smallest "sending" school and a clique of "outsiders" from the start. We hung out either in J's or RN's basement, where we practiced, Rat's house behind Seplo's liquor store, or at Trinity Street. Sometimes we took to the road, hunting ghosts, watching the Perseids from Sunrise Mountain, going to a club on Ledgewood Circle or into the city. I was privileged to belong to a circle of kindred souls who, more often than not, found something interesting & entertaining to do. I wish I knew what became of some of them. From the sophomore talent show, when they closed the curtain on the Fallen Angels, to "Guys and Dolls" in senior year, we survived the E-Level Rush and dreamed of what we might become, trying to discover ourselves. My homeroom teacher in E3 was Mildred Griggs, who also had my grandmother in homeroom. I especially enjoyed the innovative Humanities class, where we studied the same historical periods in Art, History, Literature and Industrial Arts. I always thought our class (1970) was very transitional, squeezed between the Eisenhower crewcut years and the Countercultural Revolution. We stood right in the midst of great change, when the world we grew up in came unglued. I seem to remember Mrs. Bedell crying after Kent State, worrying for our safety on a college campus. It seems so stupid now, but I remember being refused service in the Plaza Restaurant because we had long hair, a rare and dangerous badge in those days. After graduating Rutgers College, New Brunswick, with a major in history, I met Deborah Powell, who was studying textile arts at Rutgers. We married in August 1976 at the Yellow Frame Church in Fredon. Our first child, a boy, was born at home in January 1979 in Broadway, a quiet little gristmill hamlet on the Morris Canal in Warren County, NJ. I started a career in historical interpretation at the water-powered gristmill in the restored village of Waterloo, becoming Tour Director in 1979. I took the state position at the Steuben House in River Edge in 1981. My second son and daughter were actually born in the Steuben House, respectively in 1982 and 1985. In 1984, I became one of the first two Historic Site Caretakers to receive the professional title of Historic Preservation Specialist. As curator of the Steuben House, a Revolutionary War landmark and cynosure of Jersey Dutch sandstone architecture, I built up a large interest and attendance, working closely with the Bergen County Historical Society. In 1982, I and Alex Everitt, of Lafayette, successfully led the fight to preserve the 1848 Sussex Courthouse and Newton's oldest streetscape. I also ...Expand for more