Historic Preservation Committee
Oral History
Nathaniel and Robin Bedford were interviewed by John Grossmann in their Franciscan Oaks home on January 12, 2008.
| John Grossmann: | Nathaniel, I understand that you're known to many by the nickname Buz. Is there a story behind that nickname? |  |
| Buz Bedford: | Yes. I played 150 pound football at Princeton and I was pretty good at it. I played fullback, and they called me Buz. | |
| JG: | Tell us when you moved to Mountain Lakes and how you came to do so. | |
| BB: | I lived with my parents in Pelham Manor, New York, when I was in law school and we had an apartment in New York City, and during that time we searched the suburbs far and wide, and fell into Mountain Lakes in 1948. | |
| JG: | How did you fall into Mountain Lakes? | |
| BB: | We were looking around Pompton Lakes and didn't like the houses we save for veterans there. We came down The Boulevard after passing through Boonton, and there was Sanders & Bracken's real estate office. It was advertising homes for veterans. I was a member of the 101st Cavalry New York National Guard when World War II started. They called up the 101st and I went off to war. | |
| RB: | Buz said, "Oh I have a friend in Mountain Lakes from Princeton. We'll swing through there and see what they're doing." Mr. Fox was building veteran housing down on Nefie's sandlot field. Diaper Village. | |
| JG: | Can you describe exactly where Nefie's Field was down there below the railroad tracks? | |
| RB: | Go under the underpass. On the right hand side. There are 90 houses in there. | |
| JG: | The field was all of that? | |
| RB: | It was a sandlot. They used to play baseball on it. | |
| JG: | So it was a really big field. | |
| RB: | Oh, it was huge. | |
| BB: | And it was great because it was sand and you could get away with cesspools instead of having to put in full septic systems. | |
| JG: | So you found out there were houses being built for veterans? | |
| BB: | Not only that, for $9,900. | |
| JG: | And how big a house was that? | |
| BB: | Two bedrooms and a bath on the main floor and a dining room and kitchen. | |
| JG: | Cape Cod? | |
| RB: | Yeah, they're all Cape Cods. | |
| BB: | They've been added onto and they go for around a quarter of a million now. | |
| JG: | Did you have any children when you first moved to town? | |
| BB: | At the time we had one son, Robert. Dr. Robert F. Bedford. | |
| JG: | They called it Diaper Village because there were so many kids down there? | |
| RB: | Sure. | |
| JG: | Did you add to the population? | |
| RB: | Sure. | |
| BB: | Yes, didn't everybody? She was in charge of that. | |
| JG: | Tell us about that. | |
| RB: | In those days we had to go to Morristown to have a baby. No Saint Claire's. Nothing closer than Morristown. You'd race to the hospital. In the meantime, all the women were out hanging diapers because there were no electric dyers in those days. If you can imagine 90 lines with diapers on them. Every house had kids. We had 25 kids under five in one block. It exploded down there. | |
| JG: | Does anybody, by chance, remember who coined the term Diaper Village? | |
| RB: | No. Wish I could. Somebody in town did. | |
| JG: | How long after you moved here did your second child come along? | |
| RB: | Dianne was born in 1948. And we had two more children when we lived on Crane Road. | |
| JG: | What was your address in Diaper Village? | |
| RB: | Number 3 Maple Way. First house on the right as you turn off Midvale. | |
| JG: | How many years later was it when you moved to Crane Road? | |
| RB: | Five years. We were outgrowing the house. | |
| BB: | I began scouting around town to see what was available. And I fell into a great buy on property on the corner of Crane Road and Cove Place. The address was 33 Crane Road. | |
| JG: | Did you build a house then? | |
| BB: | I spent two years designing it. | |
| RB: | Almost divorced him over that. | |
| BB: | Beg your pardon? I finally built it and it worked out very well. | |
| JG: | What's the style of architecture? | |
| BB: | Bedford. | |
| JG: | I guess I'd better be a bit more specific. Was it another Cape Cod? Was it in the Hapgood style? | |
| BB: | It was modern. It was built for comfort, not for speed. | |
| JG: | You moved into that house in 1953? | |
| BB: | It had certain things that I wanted particularly. It was on the lakefront at the south end of Mountain Lake. The living room had a window wall that looked out on the lake. | |
| JG: | What was your profession? | |
| BB: | I was an attorney. Always in a law firm. I worked for corporations from time to time, but I never became a kept attorney. | |
| JG: | You commuted into New York on the train? | |
| BB: | Twenty-five years. | |
| RB: | The 7:33 train. | |
| JG: | So you lived in two homes in Mountain Lakes and you moved here to Franciscan Oaks how many years ago? | |
| RB: | Almost nine years ago, in May 1999. | |
| JG: | What was it like living on the lake? | |
| RB: | Beautiful. You could sail. You could fish. You could swim. But I never let my kids swim there, because I wasn't going to play lifeguard. I told them if they wanted to swim they could go to Island Beach or to the Mountain Lakes Club. | |
| JG: | Tell us about the Mountain Lakes Club. | |
| BB: | Originally, the Mountain Lakes Club had a beach on the shoreline. And a nice rock you could stand on, if you knew where to find it. | |
| JG: | How far out? | |
| BB: | Oh, about 50 yards, I would guess. | |
| JG: | Any reason to think that rock is still there? | |
| BB: | Yes. | |
| JG: | Ever see people standing on it any more? | |
| BB: | No, because most people don't know where it is. And of course eventually they came along and said we want to build a swimming pool. | |
| JG: | What year was that? | |
| RB: | Around 1967, I think. Before the pool there was a beautiful oak tree and I can remember having a baby baskets out there for the last two kids. They chopped it down when they built the pool. | |
| JG: | And your children were little then? | |
| RB: | Yes. | |
| JG: | When did you join the Mountain Lakes Club? Were you members when you were living in Diaper Village? | |
| RB: | Yes. | |
| BB: | We're the oldest members of the club. | |
| JG: | Why did you join? | |
| RB: | They had tennis courts and bowling alleys. Only two then. And a black man who used to set up the pins. No automatic pinsetters. | |
| JG: | Would you pay to bowl back then? | |
| RB: | It cost you 25 cents a game. | |
| JG: | Was that to pay the pinsetter? | |
| BB: | I don't think we paid him. The club did. He was an awfully nice guy and very good bowler and a good coach and the ladies used to love him because he always showed them what they should be doing. | |
| JG: | What was his name? | |
| BB: | I can't recall. But I remember when he no longer had to set the pins. Eddie Parker was president of the club then and president of the Tetley Tea Company. He found a sale on a second hand pinsetter so they installed automatic pinsetters. | |
| JG: | When did those go in, do you think? | |
| RB: | Memory test, eh? | |
| BB: | It's a very nice little social organization. We used to have some big parties at the club.
The men's bowling party was a raucous affair. Lasted half the night and had maybe 100 members of the bowling organization. The men bowled in the evening. The women bowled in the afternoon. You'll find plaques all over the place. |
|
| JG: | I saw two plaques when I was at the club the other day. One was your plaque for 50 years of bowling: 2004. But you probably bowled before 1954 there. | |
| BB: | That was my Yale friend who put that plaque up. He used to brag that he had an octogenarian on his bowling team. He was the last captain of the team before I retired. | |
| JG: | Did you retire in 2004? | |
| BB: | I would guess about that time, yes. | |
| JG: | You don't still bowl? | |
| BB: | Can't get the legs and the ball to coordinate. I'm coming up 90 in May. | |
| JG: | So you were still bowling at 86. That's pretty good. Was bowling for you the most important part of the Club? | |
| BB: | Bunch of lovely people. Good parties. | |
| RB: | The swimming pool was good. | |
| BB: | We used to have great beach parties there for 4th of July. | |
| RB: | And New Year's too. | |
| JG: | Was this where you made and kept your best friends, at the Club? | |
| RB: | I think so, yes. | |
| BB: | Well, we had friends all over the world, but our closest friends were members of the Mountain Lakes Club. It was a pretty sophisticated organization. A lot of us belonged to clubs in New York. I belonged to the Princeton Club and the Lawyers Club. | |
| JG: | How would you compare the Mountain Lakes Club to those institutions? | |
| BB: | Well, Mountain Lakes Club is a country club and those two are big city clubs. | |
| RB: | I've got to tell you about the party the town gave for Diaper Village. I was very impressed, because they invited all of us to come to a dinner and dance at the club. | |
| JG: | Now when was this? | |
| RB: | Not too long after we moved to town. Because the kids in the Village were having such a good time -- they wanted to get to know us because we were not making any effort to meet the older folks in town. So I got to dance with the mayor that night. I'd never danced with a mayor before. | |
| JG: | And since? | |
| RB: | Or since. Mayor Calvert it was. And the town provided us baby sitters. | |
| JG: | And everybody came, right? | |
| RB: | Dinner was good. It was a complete freebie, although I don't think they paid the baby sitter. It was a lovely gesture. | |
| JG: | What was the outcome of that? Did that start to integrate you folks with the rest of the town a little more? | |
| RB: | I think so. But all the war veterans were having such a good time. As we said, we were all "house broke." We were putting in lawns and trees and decorating our houses, so it was great competition: who had the best yard. | |
| JG: | How big a part did the Mountain Lakes Club play in defining your years in Mountain Lakes? | |
| RB: | Very important. | |
| BB: | It was a social gathering, no doubt about it. Don't think we had more than a couple hundred members. It got pretty thin some times. We had some economic setbacks during the years we were there. I remember there was one year that we had to get the membership out to paint the ballroom and dining room. | |
| JG: | Josie Pitcher told me about that. Obviously things aren't like that any more, but there was a time when the members did a lot of the work themselves. | |
| BB: | Had to. It was one of the recession years. | |
| JG: | I've also been told that before this recent renovation there was an upstairs balcony or pavilion that was built by the members and that at one point a room that was added on was also enclosed by the members -- that's now the Crest Room, is that right? Do you remember any of those projects? | |
| BB: | No. | |
| RB: | He wasn't a carpenter. It was going on, though. | |
| BB: | I do remember I was president of the Princeton Club of Northwestern New Jersey. I encouraged them to have their fall dance at the Mountain Lakes Club. The club was really run down at that time, which was one of the reasons the members had to come straighten it out. | |
| RB: | Remember the time we brought the band from Bermuda up? | |
| BB: | Oh yeah, that was a great event. | |
| JG: | What was that for? | |
| BB: | Just a dance. In the 1950s, I guess, we used to go to Bermuda. | |
| RB: | Late 40s I think. We went to Bermuda four times in the late forties. What was the name of the band? We brought all nine members, flew them up here. | |
| JG: | That wasn't in the hard times for the club then? | |
| BB: | We had our eras of ups and downs. The Talbot Brothers. | |
| RB: | Yes, Talbot Brothers, that was the group. | |
| BB: | They had some strange instruments. They had a gutbucket that you couldn't believe. For several years we attended their dance sessions regularly in Bermuda. Then we got them up to the Mountain Lakes Club. I said, "Why did you ever want to leave Bermuda?" He said: "When you get right down to it, it's a small island." | |
| JG: | Do you have any other stories about the Mountain Lakes Club? | |
| BB: | We used to have these wild New Year's parties when we were younger. One of them, this friend that I used to sail with a lot, at midnight, he and I ran around and kissed all the girls. | |
| JG: | That doesn't sound so wild. I think you weren't the first person to ever do that. | |
| BB: | No. But the first person to come down with chicken pox the next day. That was me. | |
| RB: | The only person to come down with chicken pox was another man at the party. Twenty-one days later. | |
| BB: | I didn't kiss him for sure. | |
| JG: | I take it, on 4th of July you'd be at the Mountain Lakes Club, watching the fireworks. Tell us your earliest memories of the fireworks. Do you go back to the days when the Fusee flares were on the lake? | |
| BB: | Fusee used to pass out the flares. We were on the lakefront. At the signal, everybody around the lake lit their flares. A gun went off. Some kind of bang. | |
| RB: | At nine o'clock. | |
| JG: | How many flares would you have had on your property? | |
| BB: | Maybe six or eight. | |
| JG: | How big were they? | |
| BB: | They were about 10 to 15 minute flares. Then all the fireworks went off from Island Beach. | |
| RB: | Everybody knew everybody around the Cove so you could go from one house to another house if you wanted to. | |
| BB: | And a lot of people went out in their boats on the 4th of July. | |
| JG: | Were they still doing the 4th of July games, the greased watermelon thing and the canoe tilts? | |
| BB: | The 4th of July games used to be very, very active. Then the town fathers began to worry. I was in the canoe tilting. | |
| JG: | Describe that for us. | |
| BB: | You'd have one man paddling in the back of the canoe and you'd have a man standing up in the front with a bamboo pole with a 16-ounce boxing glove on the end. | |
| JG: | So it's like a jousting. | |
| BB: | That's exactly right. | |
| JG: | He's standing on the gunwales of the canoe? | |
| BB: | Yes, and balancing. And then when you hit him with the glove and knocked him in the water, you won that match. | |
| JG: | It's one against one? Not like demolition derby where you've got six or seven going off at once. | |
| BB: | That's right. | |
| JG: | Anybody ever get hurt? | |
| BB: | No, but the town fathers were afraid somebody might. I was a tilter. My partner was manager of American Metals Climax Development Corporation and he'd get into all the back parts of the world and did a lot of canoeing and he was really great at handling a canoe, and he and I were a little older and we tilted mostly against the college kids. But this guy could handle a canoe like none of those kids could. So he and I were the club champions. | |
| JG: | You'd have been in your twenties? | |
| BB: | No. | |
| JG: | Thirties? | |
| BB: | Forties. | |
| JG: | You were beating college kids in your forties? I guess the nickname Buz still applied then, didn't it? | |
| RB: | There was also the Island Beach swim, from Island Beach to the Club. | |
| JG: | A race, to see who got there first? | |
| RB: | Yes. Separate for women and men. Every 4th of July. | |
| BB: | It was always fun watching the canoe races because the canoes would always get off course. My son bought an Adirondack Guide Boat. He worked one summer up at a lodge in the Adirondacks and he brought this guide boat back. There were about 1,000 screws and he redid the whole thing. He used to take the guide boat out as a canoe. | |
| RB: | It was a little sturdier than a canoe. | |
| BB: | It has a keel about this big and it was enough to maintain course, which the canoes couldn't do. So for two years we were the champions with the guide boat. The lines on that thing were beautiful | |
| JG: | Did you have a sailboat? | |
| BB: | Admiral Smith of the Coast Guard was a close friend of mine. He had an old clinker sailboat, a Cape Cod Mercury. He was about to retire and he'd built himself a new yacht and asked me if I wanted this 14-foot sailboat. It was a very sturdy boat but it turned out to be leaky. | |
| RB: | Orange sail, of course. | |
| BB: | Our son Robert got us into the Sunfish fleet. Sunfish became very popular. There was a big Sunfish fleet all around Morris County and some of the adjacent counties. | |
| JG: | Isn't that Sunfish club one of the oldest in the country? | |
| BB: | Yes, and one of the most successful. | |
| JG: | When was it founded, do you know? | |
| BB: | I have a hard time putting a date to that. | |
| BB: | We used to have the national championships up in Connecticut. I sailed right up to the time I found I didn't have enough strength to lift myself out of the water into the cockpit. I sold the boat to the daughter of one of my Princeton friends. Far as I know she's sailing it. | |
| JG: | So you sailed on the lake from the 40s to the 90s. Fifty years of sailing too. | |
| BB: | You got a chevron put on your sail. I was three years lake champion on the sunfish. | |
| RB: | And one September the kids decided they'd seen enough of that and came up to me and said, "Robin, do you think they'd mind if we took Buz's sail from in front of the Mountain Lakes Club and put it up on the dance floor on the second floor?" I said, "Not as long as you remember to put it back down on the lake where you picked it up." So up it came. | |
| BB: | That's right, we won the championship for the sailing association. They put my whole boat up in the ballroom with the sail up. | |
| RB: | This was the annual dinner of the sailing association, held at the Mountain Lakes Club. | |
| JG: | Before we turn to some other topics, are there some other details about the Club you can share? | |
| BB: | The ballroom that they rebuilt, after the fire, was probably the biggest and best ballroom -- certainly in this part of the state. We had some big parties. It's now about half of what it used to be. | |
| JG: | Do you remember any big entertainers, besides your Bermuda band, or celebrities or politicians who've come through the Mountain Lakes Club? | |
| RB: | Pete Freylinghausen, your senator was there. It was a busy place. Something going on every weekend. | |
| BB: | It was sort of a central gathering place for the town. | |
| JG: | How many days a week do you think you went to the Club? | |
| RB: | Nearly daily in summer. Three or four days a week the rest of the year. Besides bowling, I played tennis. | |
| BB: | I'd say two or three times. Most of us commuted to the city. We had arranged -- not Club members, but Mountain Lakers, for a private car on the Lackawanna on the Lakeland Limited. We had a lot of fun on that car, too. We used to have really big Christmas party. | |
| JG: | Yes, Duke Smith told me about that. They slowed the train down. | |
| BB: | We tipped the conductor to keep barely ahead of his schedule. | |
| RB: | All the mothers would come down and put their husbands in the car. | |
| BB: | They used to say they'd come down with the station wagons and stack us in the back. We were pretty raucous. | |
| RB: | Two trains in the morning and two at night. The 7:33 and another a half hour later. I would drop him off. If we missed the train in the morning, I would have to drive 60 miles and hour to get to Boonton to get him onto the damn train. Not till I hit the straightaway, that's when I hit 60. | |
| JG: | You did that more than once, I guess. | |
| RB: | Yeeeees. I got to be an old hand. He got to be relying on it. He wouldn't finish his scrambled eggs. He'd put them in the car and keep eating them. | |
| BB: | This was the old steam trains, before they put the diesels in. The steam trains were fun because you could stand on the platform, and if you were really skilled, from watching the conductor, you'd wait till the train came by and you'd grab the handle and pivot right onto the bottom step. With the steam engines, the acceleration was slow and you watched the conductor, to see how he did it. | |
| JG: | So you did this a few times to catch the train when you were a little late? | |
| BB: | Constantly. | |
| RB: | Too many times. | |
| JG: | So the conductor could have called you Buz, too. | |
| BB: | The Mountain Lakes subscribers' car remained until they transferred into diesel. Then we couldn't get them to give us a private car. They said the state was paying for it. We said, yeah, but we're paying $4,000 a year, how can you afford to give up the money? | |
| JG: | Didn't work though, did it? | |
| BB: | No. | |
| JG: | But you've made a point. Something as simple as commuting had a big impact on the quality of life and the sense of community in this town. It brought people together. | |
| BB: | Well, it was more than that. Particularly the subscriber's car, which our then mayor Dick Wilcox started. | |
| RB: | We had real interesting people in town. | |
| JG: | Yes, you've mentioned Edward Parker, the president of Tetley Tea. | |
| BB: | John Rice lived on the Boulevard. He started the first United Nations weekend. | |
| JG: | Do you remember the first one? Do you know when that was? | |
| RB: | We had guests from Russia, Costa Rica, and Switzerland the first three years. Everybody who signed up tried to take a guest. We had a tea for them at St. Peter's Saturday afternoon. They'd come out by special bus. Then everybody would feed them. Then we had a square dance afterwards at the high school cafeteria. It was fun. | |
| JG: | What are some of your special memorials of living in Mountain Lakes a half century. That's a long time. What makes the town special in your mind? | |
| RB: | Recreation and education. Two words. | |
| BB: | Along those lines, I was chairman of the Princeton Alumni Schools Committee for this area, northwest New Jersey. We had kids that would apply for admission. When I first got involved in it, Princeton didn't take anybody from Mountain Lakes, so I got busy and the school developed very nicely, so I gathered all the information on the school and sent it in to Princeton. The final result: two years in a row I got four in. With a graduating class of 100. Our son went to Lawrenceville School and our eldest daughter went to the Emma Willard School. | |
| JG: | So they didn't go to Mountain Lakes public schools? | |
| RB: | The last two did, all the way through. Dorothy and Bonnie. | |
| BB: | We sent Bob to Lawrenceville because the old high school, which was built during the Depression... | |
| RB: | WPA money. | |
| BB: | It's a nice building but it was much too small because the population kept growing and they were talking about going on double sessions in high school. I was a graduate of Lawrenceville and had some pretty good contacts there. So Bob went the full three years at Lawrenceville and then went on to Princeton -- 25 years behind me exactly -- class of 64. And then Dianne went on to Skidmore College, but she went to Emma Willard first. She wanted to go to her mother's prep school. Then the second two girls were both graduates of Mountain Lakes High School. | |
| JG: | Robin said recreation and education. Would you say the same or would you add anything to that? | |
| BB: | I don't think I would. | |
| RB: | The first trout derby was established and Dorothy and Bonnie were the first two winners. You'll see their names on a plaque at borough hall. They were six or seven years old when they won. | |
| BB: | Oh, our family controlled that derby for several years and one of our granddaughters, Lisa, has a big trophy at borough hall. | |
| JG: | This must pre-date you, but I've seen photos of an iceboat on Mountain Lake. | |
| BB: | I built one. But it didn't work out very well. I can't remember whom the other two guys were who built it with me. It was built in front of our house and then we sailed it down the lake. We ran out of lake before we got the boat going. | |
| RB: | You had three boards and slats across. Then the sail went up. | |
| JG: | So this was a makeshift thing. You're talking about a go-kart with a sail. | |
| BB: | I wouldn't even dignify it by calling it a go-cart. | |
| JG: | You did make it down to the Mountain Lakes Club, though? | |
| BB: | Ran it right up on the beach. I don't think we could turn it. | |
| JG: | So, you're a respected Manhattan attorney by day. And then on the weekend or when you come to your home in Mountain Lakes, you behave like it's Little Rascals or something. And happily so. | |
| BB: | Oh yeah. I was a member of the bar of the United States Supreme Court, the highest courts of New York and New Jersey. Except on weekends. | |
| JG: | And Mountain Lakes was the place to do this, wasn't it? | |
| BB: | Yes, I think there are a lot of distinguished people in Mountain Lakes you'd never recognize on weekends. | |
| JG: | All these memories because you took that detour looking for a home. | |
| RB: | To avoid Levittown, where our other friends had gone. | |
| JG: | How things would have played out differently. | |
| RB: | Don't even mention it. | |
End of Interview