Historic Preservation Committee

Oral History -- George Wilson

Interview with George Wilson by Peter Holmberg for the Historic Preservation Committee of Mountain Lakes, New Jersey, September 9, 2003.


PETER HOLMBERG: This is Peter Holmberg on September 9th, 2003, preparing for an interview with George Wilson of Boonton, New Jersey. My relationship goes back with Mr. Wilson to when I was in school, growing up, always knowing him as the basketball coach here in town, later, having him as a gym teacher, and always seeing him about town, around school, etcetera. So I’ve known Mr. Wilson practically my whole life. But you were here -- you grew up here yourself?
GEORGE WILSON: Born and raised.
PH: Born and raised.  Where were you born?
GW: Right, there’s a little house there by Dixon Brothers Coal Yard on the corner of Pocono and Valley Road.  And as you look in Dixon Brothers Coal Yard, the house right there on the pond by the waterfalls.  I was literally born -- five of my six brothers and sisters were born in that house.
PH: Really?
GW: One of us was born, my oldest brother Howard was born in Boonton, but the other five of us were all born in that house.
PH: Why don’t we start there, then?  We’ll drive down there now.  How long had your parents been in town then?
GW: My parents moved in there in 1917.  My Dad was the first employee that Dixon Brothers ever had.
PH: Really?
GW: He was the first employee Dixon Brothers ever had, and we lived in that house.  And by my mother and father, the coal yard used to close at 4:30, and my Mom and Dad were in charge of the coal yard until seven in the morning.  Therefore, we got the house rent-free, fuel-free, water-free, electric-free.  But we also -- my Mom and Dad never had a vacation, ever, in their lives.
PH: Really?
GW: And we really -- and people could come, like, at five o’clock, and pick up a piece of ice.  People could come at six o’clock at night, and they used to sell coal for their furnaces by the bag, a fifty-pound bag.  [Telephone rings]
PH: I have two messages.  It’s probably Bagley again.  Yeah.  I’ll get him later.  I have this thing on vibrate.  So fifty--?
GW: They sold coal, fifty-pound bags, three bags for a dollar.  And we’d go down, I’d ride down with the people in their car or their truck, whatever they had, and my brothers and sisters and I would load them in the car, and they’d pay you a dollar.  Everything was done in cash.  You even got paid in cash, and no taxes were taken out.  My Dad raised six children on -- started out at four dollars a day, six days a week, twelve hours a day.  No vacations, and if you didn’t work, you didn’t get paid.
PH: Wow!
GW: And his employer was a good man.  The three brothers, Russell, Homer and Brian Dixon.  Brian Dixon dropped out of the business in 1947 and started Smoke Rise out there in Rockaway Valley.
PH: Really?
GW: Township, yes.  The Dixons became very wealthy people.  You go out there in the township and look at that Dixon estate over there.
PH: Oh, Dixon Pond and the whole--?
GW: Exactly, yeah, yeah.
PH: What is that, Diamond Spring Road extended?
GW: Yeah, and they literally cut the ice out there off those ponds, bring it down by a big truck, and then the little trucks would load up over here in Dixon Brothers Coal Yard in Mountain Lakes, and the men would go around and deliver ice to your house.  You usually got a house delivery every other day.  You’d buy -- a normal piece of ice was fifteen cents, and that got you twenty-five pounds of ice, and that would have lasted you two days.
PH: Wow!
GW: And the iceman would come, and you’d have a card, a white card, I guess about eight by ten, you’d put in the window.  It just had "Ice" on it.  And then you would cut the piece of ice, put it in a canvas carrying bag, and you would carry it into the house, and you’d sit it down on the back porch, go in and move the food from around the ice, put it in the sink, take the little piece of ice left over, put that in the sink, put the new piece in, put the little piece from the sink back in, put everything back in.  And you had a card there, and you’d write down fifteen cents.  And then payday was every Friday.  You had to pay every Friday.  And most people got deliveries every other day: Monday, Wednesday, and Fridays.  And my Dad had two ice routes, because he also delivered on Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, to another community.
PH: Okay.
GW: Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday -- excuse me.  And that was his whole life, or delivering coal.  You didn’t have oil burners -- ninety-nine percent of people didn’t have oil burners, and they usually bought a ton of coal.  And coal was either, they called it buckwheat coal, which was the finest, and a little bigger, maybe about a quarter inch, was rice.  The normal coal that most people bought was what they call nut coal or chestnut, and that was about maybe three-quarters of an inch.  Then they had oat, and there was one bigger, and I forget the name of it.
PH: Where were they pulling the coal out of?
GW: They’d come in by train on the Delaware Lackawanna.
PH: Oh, okay.
GW: They’d come in by train and they’d back it down there, and the cars, they’d dump it down what they called the coal pockets, down there at Dixon Brothers.
PH: Oh, really?
GW: And their biggest business was coal and ice.  They also sold tile to put in the trenches, you know, to run the water away from the house.  They sold slate; they sold cement, Portland Cement in ninety-four pound bags.  A bag of Portland Cement weighed ninety-four pounds; I’ll never forget that as long as I live.
PH: Yeah.  What was -- what kind of expense was that to an average household, the ice or the coal?  You know, if I look at my bills each year, the electric is a big one.  Was this a big expense?
GW: A ton of coal would probably cost you around eight to ten dollars.  And a ton of coal would probably last you, probably at least a month.  At least a month.  You’d probably use three to four to six scoops of coal a day to put in the furnace.  And the thing is, you had to watch the coal-burning furnaces, because at night, you had to watch out for coal gas.  So most people slept with a window open, maybe six inches, so you wouldn’t be overcome.
PH: Really, even in the winter?
GW: Right here.
PH: Okay, let me make sure.
GW: Nineteen Valley Road.
PH: Nineteen Valley Road.  And which houses were here?  All the Hapgoods?
GW: This house wasn’t there, yeah.  All the little Hapgoods.  This was very little.  One of our school principals lived here: Bob Smith lived here.
PH: And what number is this?  This is twenty-five Valley.
GW: Now it changes up here.  This is the oldest house right in Mountain Lakes.  I can tell you right now, that house was put up in 1732.  The beams in the cellar are half of trees.
PH: No kidding!
GW: Yeah.  This well, they tell me this well was over a hundred feet deep.
PH: Is this the Robinson’s old house?
GW: Yes, yes.
PH: Okay.
GW: When I was a kid, Tim Delchamps, who lives on Laurel Hill Road, he lived there.
PH: Okay.
GW: And I was born in that room right there, downstairs on the right of that house.
PH: Is that cedar shake shingles?
GW: Yeah, I was born right in that house, and my Dad worked there from 1917 to the day he died.  That was in 1957, so my Dad worked there forty years.
PH: Wow!
GW: And when he finished working, he was making $56 dollars a week, seven days a week.
PH: And your Mom -- did she stay in the house?
GW: My Mom stayed in the house until she passed away, and then my sister Hazel and my brother Bob stayed there until Dixon Brothers sold out.  But that was their home.  It had four bedrooms in it.  Well, we made the room down on the right a bedroom for my grandfather and my uncle.  Then the room upstairs was my brother Bob, and Howard and I.  We slept three boys to a room on small cots.  I don’t know how we got a dresser in the room.  There was no closet, and you had to go through our bedroom to get into the bathroom.  And my mother and Dad had the room in the middle, and my sisters, three sisters, they each had three cots in the far room.  And my grandfather and my uncle were born downstairs.  And both my uncle, excuse me, my grandfathers, Romine and Wilson, died in that house and were buried from the living room.  They kept the coffin across the couch.
PH: Really?
GW: Yeah.  Everybody -- you took care of your grandparents.  There was no such thing as a nursing home.
PH: No.
GW: There was no such thing as a nursing home.
PH: Is this pond man-made?
GW: This pond was man-made, and the water comes from Rainbow Lakes.  And when I was a kid -- you talk to Timmy Delchamps or Peter Haas, or Tony Tippy or Bill Moulton -- old Mountain Lakes people who are still around -- Harrison VanDuyne, Worry VanDuyne -- that water was the cleanest water in Mountain Lakes.  And this was where we played hockey, and this was the best swimming hole in Mountain Lakes, because the water came in there, and came straight across.  And so you had a steady stream of water coming through, and we had a diving board right here, and it was six feet off the diving board.
PH: Right off the main--?
GW: Right off the wall right here, in front of that tree right there.
PH: Okay.
GW: And we used to swim there.
PH: Those buildings back there --
GW: Those buildings were all there.
PH: Off-loading for the train station?
GW: And the big icehouse was over here, where what you see is the shrubbery across the pond?  That was the icehouse, where the ice was brought down from Rockaway Valley and stored there, and the trucks would load up there.  And the cement shed was right where you see that building there, through there.
PH: Okay.
GW: And the oil tank was not there.  That’s new in the last, say, thirty years.
PH: Okay.
GW: And the main office is in back of that house right there.
PH: And then what about this cement building?
GW: This was the garage; this was where they fixed the trucks.  And then the garages beyond that were where they stored the trucks at night.  And my Dad’s job was to get up at five o’clock in the morning.  They had two stoves in that.  He’d go over there and get the stove roaring to get the garages warm so the trucks would start, because in the old days the trucks started -- you had to crank them.
PH: Wow!
GW: And that was my Dad’s job.  And then that job, up until -- that building over there in 1932, that end of it over there, there were six stables for teams of horses.  And there was a manure pit for the horses right on the end, and I remember it used to smell! Oh my goodness gracious, that would smell!
PH: [Laughs]
GW: And my Dad -- it was the last team of horses he had.  I saw my Dad cry twice: the day they took his horses away from him, Tom and Prince, and the day I went in the service.
PH: Wow!
GW: In 1945.  He ran down through the coal yard crying like -- I never saw a man cry so hard! And he was the strongest man I’ve ever seen, and the best father.  Never touched us.  But he would walk downstairs, and when he would say, "George, cut the grass today," then you just cut the grass.  And he’d say, "George, you go fishing today if we want something to eat on the table for dinner," and you went fishing, you know.  And he was the gentlest man, but he had a way of telling you.  The neat thing that I think about parents back then, and I wish I could have done it with my children, Peter, was they could speak to you, and you didn’t question.  It was just it.  And I remember my two sons, who I coached at Mountain Lakes.  We were talking one day about smoking and drinking; I’ve never smoked and drank.  I never broke a training rule in four years of high school or four years of college.  And one day my son Bobby said to me, "You know, Dad, why didn’t you ever smoke and drink?" I said, "Because my mother and father told me not to." He said, "Well, you had rights." I said, "Not when it came to my mother and father.  I didn’t have any rights."
PH: Yeah, wow.  Do you ever remember this well working?
GW: Oh yes, when I was a kid, sure.
PH: Really?
GW: We used to drop rocks down it and we’d hear them splashing.  But our parents were scared to death, and they had the wheel in there and everything, and you put the bucket down.  The water was ice cold.
PH: Is that 99 Valley Road?
GW: 99 Valley Road.  And this house, the Haineses lived here: Billy, Davey and Ruthie.  And Billy got killed in Korea where he was a jet pilot.  He got killed in the Korean War.  Alan and Ellen Van Deusen went there, and Peter [unclear] was born over there.  And this is all great memories.  And Roy Westcott lived here, and the Randalls lived up here, up this street.
PH: Randall Road.
GW: Now you’re going up Randall Road.  Now --
PH: And this was here?  And what were the roads like then, dirt?  Cobblestone?
GW: No, Crestview was dirt.  A few roads in town were still dirt, but most of the -- I’ll tell you the big thing that I remember, since I was born in 1927, was most of the big houses on the hill were vacant.  Now there’s a little history here.  This house wasn’t here.  The Kayes lived here, Thornton and Bob Kayes, and one of them is still alive down in Vero Beach.  When the stock market crashed, their father went in the garage and killed himself.
PH: Wow!
GW: I never forgot that.
PH: Twenty Randall Road.
GW: Yeah.  And now the house up here was a Dolling house, D-O-L-L-I-N-G, and Lou Dolling and Normie Dolling -- he’s coming to the October 11th football game at Mountain Lakes, Lou Dolling from Alfaretta, Georgia.  And over here, Bob Conniver.  It was Bob, and he had a brother and a sister, and he’s coming.  Bob was our fullback in high school.
PH: Oh, no kidding!
GW: Yes.
PH: Oh, so the old neighborhood?
GW: Yeah, yeah.  And it was a neighborhood -- everybody -- and here the Birdsall girls lived here, Joan and Ann Birdsall.  Ann was in my class, the class of 1945.  And this, we always called this the green, here.
PH: In front of the cove?
GW: Yeah, this was all grass, and you couldn’t drive on it.  It was beautifully landscaped.  They put the shrubs in the last ten years to try to keep the geese off, you see.
PH: Right.  Now do you remember a lot of ice-skating going on here as well?
GW: Oh yes, yes.  I can tell you stories about the lake.
PH: Yeah?
GW: We had two boys who made up a diving helmet, and they went in off the dam over here, past the island there.  And they damned near drowned.  But they got them back out.  They got them back out.  Turn right here.  I can tell you, Endress out there, he also -- that big beautiful white house on the point?
PH: Yes.
GW: Where [unclear] used to live -- that was Endress, and he killed himself in the stock market crash.
PH: He did too, huh?
GW: Kimbers -- this was a little brick house.  Kimbers lived here.  They rode to school with me.
PH: This was ten?
GW: Yeah.  The Gleasons lived here on the corner of Valley and Morris.
PH: And that’s the Brennan’s house, or was the Brennan’s house?
GW: I don’t know, but Peter Meinke, the most famous college writer today in American colleges, lived in that house, and was a great athlete at Mountain Lakes.  He’s at Eckerd College down in Florida, and he’s the leading college author in the country.
PH: Really?  396 Morris Avenue.
GW: Peter Meinke.
PH: And when you say he wrote for--?
GW: He writes everything; he writes poems, he writes essays, he writes literature.  He’s recognized as the leading college writer in the country.
PH: Up here?
GW: Go up there if you want to.  This is Fernwood.
PH: This is, I think -- yes.
GW: I don’t know.
PH: Yeah, Fernwood.
GW: Now this house was here.  People by the name of Carroll lived there.  Eddie was in my class.  And this house was not here.  The first house in here was the brick house.  And I honestly don’t remember the name, and I should, but the house off the point, that was a great people.  The Noyes’s lived there, Bobby Noyes.  And the parents were so great.  And we used to like to come here and swim off the point here.
PH: Oh, sure.
GW: Because this was the deepest water, and they had a big rock out there.  And it was just great swimming.  And the dam was here, and this was one of the popular beaches.  Island Beach was put in some place when I was in high school.
PH: Okay.
GW: And there was a beach over here always called the dam.  This was the deepest part of the lake.
PH: Oh, really?
GW: And there was a beach here, and you’d come up off Lake Drive.  And this woods here, right down here, is the lumber mill.  For example, if they were going to build a house here, they would cut the trees down in the yard, take it over here, cut it into lumber, bring it back, and it would come into this house.  That’s why the old Hapgoods you see in town so much, the space between the floor and the walls --
PH: Yeah!
GW: Because the wood was kind of green.
PH: Oh, really?
GW: But there was neat wood here, because there was a lot of chestnut, which is almost extinct.  Chestnut wood is almost nonexistent now.  They’re starting to bring it back, but they’ve got what they call a blight, I believe?
PH: Yes.
GW: And it just, you know, there’s no more chestnut wood.  That’s why I hate to see these old Hapgoods where people have painted the chestnut.
PH: Yes, yes.
GW: But I guess there’s so much wood, it’s overwhelming to some people.
PH: Well now this is -- okay, so they had a whole sawmill?
GW: A sawmill in there, yup, a sawmill.
PH: When was that taken down?
GW: Oh, you know what?  I never saw it, Peter, so it had to be between -- I’d say they probably took it down in the late twenties and early thirties.
PH: Okay.
GW: I used to walk this way to school every morning from over there at the coal yard, right over Lake Drive, 3.3 miles to the Lake Drive School.
PH: [Laughs]
GW: School was never postponed because of inclement weather, because there weren’t any buses running.  Now the sawmill was in here.
PH: Do you know anything about this [unclear]?
GW: Well, Fleetfoot I know well.  The Fleetfoots lived down on Kenilworth Road, and just the nicest people and gentlest people.  And their daughter was married to the former mayor, I think, quite a few years ago, or head of the tree commission: Wilson.
PH: Oh, yes, Lyman Wilson.
GW: Lyman Wilson, yes, that was her husband.
PH: Okay.
GW: And Bruce O’Day was in my class here, and that’s a tragic story.  He died in third grade.  But we used to walk to school together.  And Shoeharts lived here.  If I thought long enough, I could --
PH: Name every --
GW: Nixon’s partner lived right here, right here on the left, that stucco house up in there.
PH: Up in there.
GW: That house -- that’s where we used to go up to the beach, there.
PH: Oh, okay.
GW: This house right here.
PH: The Maypole’s house.
GW: I’m trying to think of the people who lived there.  But that was Nixon’s partner in the law business after he was president, in New York City.
PH: Oh, no kidding?
GW: Yeah.
PH: 157 Lake Drive.
GW: And these were famous people here, the Clems.  It’s a great story.  They had a maid, Hazel, who lived on the third floor.  I’ll tell you how good a people they were.  When I was a junior in high school I couldn’t get a summer job.  I ran a day camp; I ran it in their front yard.
PH: No!
GW: I had about twenty kids in their front yard every day.  They’d let us come in and use the bathroom.  Hazel would bring us out lemonade and stuff.  It was just a neat place to grow up!
PH: Are you kidding?
GW: And one fall day walking to school here --
PH: What number is this, do you remember?
GW: That was -- no, it’s higher numbers.  It’s three something.  It has to be three, because one of these houses is -- this is 324, the next one.  This ought to be on a tree here someplace, Peter.  Can you see it in there?
PH: Oh yeah, I can’t.  I worked on this house.  This was one of the first renovations they did on a Hapgood.
GW: That could be like 350 or something.
PH: Scott Dignes and I worked on this in the mid-eighties.
GW: And Kay Perotti -- you remember the Perotti kids in school?  They were ahead of you.  But Kay -- her name was Rourke, and they’ve got a big garage down on the lake, and there was a dock off it.  We used to fish and swim off that.
PH: Wow!
GW: And one day coming up here, a deer come running through this yard like this, and a greyhound dog after it, and the dog caught it and killed it here on the grass, the deer.
PH: [Laughs]
GW: This house was always empty during the war, but over the garage there was a pool table, and we found a way to get in.  There was a door open, and we used to go in there and play pool!
PH: [Laughs]
GW: And this house was always empty.  This was a haunted house.
PH: The 135?
GW: This house, all during the war and my childhood, this house was always empty.
PH: Why were these houses empty during--?
GW: People lost their money, and --
PH: The just lost their money and left?
GW: Just left, yeah.
PH: Now, were any of these considered summer homes still then?  I know, I grew up over in Lake Arrowhead.
GW: The only summer home that I know of in Mountain Lakes deals with further on down.  This house was a garden, beautiful garden, to this house.
PH: 130, Okay.  Do you remember when these -- I mean, it had to be post-war -- that these started popping up?
GW: Yeah, after the war.  Dr.  White lived back there with Bill Kogan, 131.  The Tippy family, Harold Tippy and his son Glenn Tippy, and I don’t know her married name, but the daughter -- that was their house, 120.
PH: [Unclear]
GW: And their mother -- think about this.  This is how slow we were in school about growing up.  She was a junior in high school.  We were playing after school.  We were playing hide and go seek, juniors in high school.
PH: [Laughs]
GW: And she tripped and ran into a tree, and skinned her face open right there on that tree.
PH: Oh, Jees!
GW: Jean Kerr, yeah.  We used to stop there on the way to school when it was warm, and Mrs.  Kerr would give us something to drink.
PH: Oh, yeah?
GW: Yeah.
PH: How about -- there seems to be a path -- this path going down right here?
GW: This was Dr.  Williams’ house.  Great doctor, a legend around Mountain Lakes.  Dr.  Dave Williams.  These people were -- now, how about this, Peter.  Think about this.  Now you talk about snowstorms, no exaggeration.  See this wall?
PH: Uh-huh.
GW: The snow drifted so deep that you didn’t see the wall.  I had to walk in front of that house right there.  The people’s name was Carpenter, and I just had rubbers on my shoes, and they chased us out of the yard because they didn’t want us walking by the hedges.
PH: Oh, Jees!
GW: The Carpenters.  And Muesers, Roland Mueser, still lives in town.  That was the Mueser’s house; I believe that’s 105 there.
PH: Oh, wow!
GW: And that’s the nicest piece of property on the big lake.  This is all their property.
PH: All right here?
GW: And it was landscaped, and down on the lake it was always beautiful lawn.  Now I don’t know what it’s like; I haven’t gone down in a boat.
PH: Is this their -- I mean, this is all briar I see.
GW: This was all theirs.  That was Manson’s house there.  That was 115, right there, back there to your left.
PH: Oh I see, uh-huh.
GW: But that’s a new house; Scott Dignes put that up.  Then Haas’s put this up, Pete and Rosemary Haas.
PH: Oh really?
GW: Brian and Peter.  And this was the Mueser house; I’m pretty sure that’s 105.
PH: Okay.
GW: And I think this house is 100.
PH: Yup, yup.
GW: [Unclear] lived there.  This house is new.  I can never remember these people, but these people here -- this is a great story.  The Hansons lived here.  This is 95, I believe.
PH: Yes.
GW: Right?  The Hansons lived there.  He had a maid that lived on the third.  A lot of people had maids, and he had a maid that lived on the third floor.  One time in the twenties he asked her to invest some money for -- she asked him to invest some money for her?  He invested it.  She wound up with more money than he had!
PH: Really?
GW: And still worked for him!
PH: Really?
GW: Yup, yup.  And the Lonecamps lived here, and the daughter, after her parents died -- she never married -- she lived there and she attended St.  Peter’s Church, and just a great, great, great girl.
PH: Now we’re coming up on the boat dock.  Do you remember--?
GW: The boat dock was always here, but not as well done as this.  And by the way, the town is prettier now than it ever was.
PH: Really?
GW: The trees are bigger, and I guess I’ve got to talk finances.  There’s much, much more money in town then ever was in town, except there were a few big, big money men in town.  But so many people rented, because there was bad time in the thirties and forties.
PH: Right, right.
GW: And so many people -- but we always came down to the dock.  But there was no dock.
PH: Oh, there wasn’t?
GW: It was just --
PH: This was like a launching--?
GW: Yeah, just opened up.
PH: Was it a beach of any kind?
GW: Nope, never a beach.  But Island Beach was the big place to go in the summer time, because Birchwood was not a beach.
PH: It was not a beach?
GW: Birchwood was not a swimming lake, although we’d go up there to the third lake and swim.  But the beach was across from where it is now.
PH: Okay.
GW: And then, on where the concession stand are, about two big trees up, we had a rope, and you’d swing out over the water and drop.  There’s no way you could touch.  I never saw water so deep.  No one ever touched bottom, but they filled it in a lot when they put the docks in there.
PH: Right.
GW: The man who put the docks in, a steelworker by the name of Joe Clockner --
PH: Sure.  He lived right over here, right?
GW: Yeah.  Well no, that was his brother Cam.  He lived down on Cobb Road, right as you go over Cobb from the Boonton end, and turn to go up the hill.  He lived at the back of the house towards the ballpark, right there as you went up Ball Avenue.
PH: And Dave played for you, Dave Clockner?
GW: Oh yeah, Dave Clockner, and so did his brother play for me, Joe Clockner.
PH: Do you remember when they put the beach in?
GW: Yes, I do remember.
PH: Was that like -- what kind of deal was that?
GW: That was in the late thirties.  No, it wasn’t near as nice as this.
PH: It wasn’t?
GW: And the Club burned down to the ground once or twice, you know.
PH: Oh, I didn’t know that.
GW: Yeah.  And Lake Drive School was K to 6.  I went to kindergarten in there.  I can name you every teacher.  I had Miss Callender in kindergarten.  I had Miss Boone in first grade, and she taught us all -- you couldn’t leave her classroom.  You had to learn to read, or you didn’t go to second grade.  And she had reading all morning every day of the week to teach you to read, because her theory was: if you can’t read, you can’t do anything.  And she was right!
PH: Yeah.
GW: I don’t know why schools don’t do that still! Put your best teacher in first grade.
PH: Yeah.
GW: If they can’t read, they can’t do anything.  I had Miss Youngs in second grade, Miss Lofthouse in third grade.  Miss Lofthouse was a character.  She would dye her hair a different color every month.
PH: [Laughs]
GW: And at Easter she’d have green hair.  In fourth grade I had Mrs.  Corbett, who was also the principal.  In fifth grade I had Miss Bodine, who I think maybe she had asthma or something, because she was always drinking coffee.  In sixth grade I had Miss Phelan, and she’s still alive.  I’ve taken her out to lunch a couple of times.  She’s 95.  She lives down on Highland Avenue in Boonton.
PH: You’re kidding!
GW: Yeah, and I just had -- and we’d skate to school.  The lakes would freeze so early.  Now think about this: Dixon Brothers out in Rockaway Valley, the ice had to get fifteen inches thick before they could cut.  You never see ice fifteen inches thick anymore.
PH: Yeah, you’re right.
GW: And we would skate to school, and come right in at the Club there.  We’d carry our shoes in our hand, take our skates off, go into school, put the skates over on that radiator where they’d thaw out.
PH: To warm them up?
GW: Yeah.  So, life was so easy.  You know Peter, my kids think -- if I wasn’t the best athlete in my class, I was the second best.  Dick Evans may have been better.  But I never went to a party where anybody drank.
PH: Really?
GW: I never saw boys smoke, all the way through school.  Now I noticed some older boys that said they did, but I never personally saw them.  And I’m not saying that someone didn’t have something outside, not in a car -- you didn’t have a car.  I remember the first boy who got a car was a guy by the name of Al Mayer in the class behind us.
PH: [Laughs]
GW: You’d walk every place.  And by the way, if you guys were young then, you’d have walked, too.
PH: Yeah, yeah.
GW: It was the way to go.  Don’t think that we were, you know, we walked to school five miles uphill both ways.  You walked to school because that’s the only way you could get to school.
PH: Right, right.
GW: But you know, it was kind of fun.  By the time you got halfway to school, there was twenty kids walking along!
PH: Wow!
GW: And you flirted, you joked, you fooled around, you threw rocks at squirrels running down the wire.  It was fun.  But it never got called off.  I don’t care how long it rained, and you walked to school.  They just said, "Oh, you walk to school," and the teachers would put your clothes on the radiator and let them dry out.  And the teachers were just -- I had fantastic teachers.  I could tell you some of the nice things about teachers.
PH: What was Lake Drive like, going to school there?  Big classrooms?
GW: Oh, it my favorite school I ever taught in in Mountain Lakes.  I taught fifth grade Phys.  Ed.  for a couple of years, and then they were having problems with students in the high school, so they came and asked me to come to the high school.  So I came to the high school, but I would have preferred to stay at Lake Drive.  Lake Drive on a snowy day in the winter time was so cozy and nice, and just --
PH: Yeah.  How many kids were in your class?
GW: My graduating class was 49.
PH: Forty-nine, and was that considered big at that time?
GW: That was about a normal class.  They were smaller before that, though.
PH: Really.
GW: Yeah.  If you go in the Reservoir Tavern, on the wall you can see a picture of the first football team in 1937.
PH: Oh yeah?
GW: And the coach who’s there, he’s coming to the game on the 11th.
PH: Oh!
GW: The first coach is coming, Abe Smith is coming.
PH: No kidding!
GW: We think, we think right this minute, Abe Smith, Tony Charty, Al Clark, Doug Wilkins.  We hope to have them all in the field October 11th at the Glen Ridge game.
PH: Wow!
GW: All the Phys.  Ed.  teachers at Mountain Lakes are still alive.
PH: Tells you something, huh?
GW: It tells you something.  And by the way, I’ll put a little thing in the friendship thing.  Jim Bagley was the best Phys.  Ed.  teacher ever in the school system.  What a crime that he became a principal.  He ought to be Superintendent.
PH: Yeah.  Why do you say he was the best Phys.  Ed.  teacher?
GW: Because he taught skills.  You didn’t just play kickball and dodge ball, and this, that -- he taught skills.  And he took pride in his classes.  We lost two great teachers when both he and Doug Wilkins went into administration.  Doug Wilkins was a tremendous social studies teacher.
PH: Really?
GW: And Jim Bagley was by far the best -- and I’m a Phys.  Ed., and I think I was good, because we had square dancing, we had tumbling, we had marching.  We had everything -- archery -- we did everything.  We didn’t just play volleyball and fool around and shoot baskets and stuff.  Physical Education -- now it’s just recreation.
PH: I always enjoyed your classes.  I always had a ball.
GW: Well, when they made it coed, it changed all the [unclear].
PH: Well, that’s true.  That’s true.  Because we always had a lot of people standing around.
GW: And then I’ll tell you about [unclear].
PH: Lake Drive?
GW: Yeah, go up Lake Drive.  Coles Endress’ father was a colonel.  He was in charge of a war crimes trial against the Germans in 1946.
PH: You were in high school then in the forties?
GW: I was in high school from ’41 to ’45.
PH: So what was it like in Mountain Lakes during World War Two?
GW: It was great, because everything was so close to it, you couldn’t go anyplace.  Now, you talked about a summer home?  I don’t know for sure, people could correct me, but the people who lived in there, their name was Mead and Crane.  And that house -- you never knew if they were there in that house or over in the corner of Briarcliff and Laurel Hill, where Dr.  Shragman lives now.  That’s 50, I’ll guarantee it.  That’s 50.
PH: Okay, 50 Lake Drive.
GW: Because Mertz’ house was 55.  Now Mrs.  Thompson who was our school librarian lived here.  Is there [unclear] in back of you?
PH: No.
GW: Mrs.  Thompson was a die-hard Republican.  Her son got killed at Pearl Harbor, Bill Thompson got killed on the Oklahoma, right?
PH: Forty-four Lake Drive, Jud Breslin’s house, the current Mayor.
GW: Yeah, and he got killed -- [Tape off/on]
PH: Now we’re at the -- what number is this, then?  That’s fifty -- no, that’s forty-four.
GW: It’s going down.  No, it’s got to be more than that, because I think this house is 46.  No, this is 34, so that could be 46.  This was Schneider, S-C-H-N-E-I-D-E-R.  Schneider lived there.
PH: So wait, you remember there were black students in--?
GW: Oh yeah.  John Jones was in my class, and Jimmy Douglas was two grades ahead of me.  They were both good athletes, and great guys.  And you never knew they were black; you never even thought of them as being black.
PH: And so at that time in Mountain Lakes--?
GW: Take a right here.
PH: It had to be somewhat of a big deal?
GW: Oh, somewhat a big deal! If you were Italian you didn’t live in town; if you were Jewish you didn’t live in town.  If you were Polish you didn’t live in town; if you were Oriental you didn’t live in town.  There was only one Democrat in town, the Davises.
PH: Wow!
GW: And very, very few Catholics.  And that’s the first house ever built in Mountain Lakes right there, 46.
PH: Okay.
GW: Ferris.
PH: What can you tell us about this, because I know then you eventually lived right down the road here.
GW: I can’t tell you too much about the Ferrises, except they had a daughter who was three or four years ahead of me in school, very popular.  But that was the first house right there, the house on the hill right there.  And this was the Singer family here, lived over here.
PH: And the Gibsons.
GW: And none of these houses were here.  None of these houses were here.  That was the first pre-fab.  That was a ranch put up by a teacher by the name of Mr.  Otto, and he put that house up -- it had to be somewhere in the fifties.
PH: We need to jump ahead, because I know we’re coming up to your home.
GW: This is 27 Dartmouth.  That house there was the eighth house built in Mountain Lakes by a woman by the name of Belle DeRivera, and she was a theatrical person on Broadway, in New York City.
PH: Do you know this gentleman?
GW: No.
PH: Okay, wait a minute.  [Tape off/on]
GW: And one of my son’s good friends knows your wife really well.
PH: Oh, interesting.
GW: Right.  That room over the porch -- I used to walk to school here, and I used to say to the kids going down there, "I’m going to live in that house some day."
PH: Really?
GW: And then my friend Peter Haas, they lived in that little white one in the back.  He lived there and he said, "Mrs.  Loney’s going to sell the house."
PH: Peter Holmberg, how are you?
GW: George Wilson, one of the original owners of this house.  UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Yeah, this is the Wilson house!
PH: [Laughs] UF: When we bought it they said, "Oh yeah, it’s the Wilson’s house.
GW: So Peter Haas came over and said -- [Two conversations go on at once.]
GW: And then when I tore the ceiling out of the porch, well, there had to be a million black ants! It was so bad, it was wet, the beams were wet; there was a leak in there.  So I got a vacuum cleaner.  I filled the vacuum cleaner up twice with the black ants.
PH: [Laughs] UF: [Unclear]
PH: He’s not going to sleep tonight! [Laughs]
GW: That’s the best house! I would move back here.  If I could afford it, I would buy it from you right this minute.
PH: We have a couple of questions for you, too.  UF: Let’s just --
PH: Yeah, let’s take a look.  UF: [Unclear] Who did that?  The extension from the dining room? [Tape off/on]
GW: I planted all this, all the pachysandra, all the shrubs, all that stuff.  UF: What was there?
GW: This was a porch, just like this.  UF: But then there was a flower bed there in back?
GW: There was never a flower bed.  Right to the wall, it was nothing.  But see, the pachysandra has taken over, which it does.  UF: Mr.  Wilson? UNIDENTIFIED MALE: [Unclear]
GW: One day, [unclear] and they were going away, and they said, "Would you kindly keep your eye on the house?" And my wife and I slept in that bedroom.  And so, I don’t know what made me do it, but I looked out the window, and over there I could see this little bead of light going around the windows.  So I knew someone was trying to break into the house.  So I called the Mountain Lakes Police Department.  Now wouldn’t you think they would come down?
PH: Yeah.
GW: But they come down with the sirens going! I watched the two guys run!
PH: Yeah, yeah.
GW: But another night I was here, and I heard something on the porch.  And I happened to like -- I had a lot of shotguns.  I loaded a shotgun, and to this day I don’t know why I didn’t shoot him, but I came down the stairs, and right in that window, here the guy was [unclear].  And it had to be a Mountain Lakes kind -- thank God I did, because it had to be a kid.  Because when I came out here, he went running up that side.  I shot up in the air like this.  You want to see a guy -- his hair went up off his head! Oh, my God! But it was some kid trying to break in.
PH: Oh, yeah.  UF: [Unclear]
GW: Well, we paved the driveway.  We put that down; it was all gravel.  Matter of fact, the day Roger McWilliams died, the next day Ellie McWilliams, his mother -- she used to come down.  I could hear her coming down the pathway on the gravel.  Oh my God, how I loved this fireplace.  UM: That’s one of my questions for you.  Why so shallow?
GW: Huh?  UM: It is too shallow.  And the previous owner [unclear] said, "Our feeling is maybe somebody put it up on a back wall to make it so shallow?"
GW: No, I’ll tell you what you’ve got to do.  You’ve got to put four bricks under your, and let air get up under that, and then you’ll never have a problem.  UF: Even high up?
GW: Yes.  UM: Now we have it more or less -- this is not from us.  We got it like that. UF: The black thing is still from here.
GW: It wasn’t that black; it was never that black.  UM: We have figured it out now, how it works, but it needs a little bit of attention.  I think actually we think it still needs a copper boot, or something.
GW: When I bought this house -- UF: You did that, huh?
GW: No, I didn’t do that.  No, it was a screen porch.  When I came in here, you could walk over here, take the wallpaper, lift it off, and stand in back of it.  Mrs.  Loney had the house, but she was so nice to me.  My Dad worked for Dixon Brothers, and so when I was teaching school -- I first delivered mail.  I was the first mailman Mountain Lakes ever had, ever.
PH: Really?
GW: Bill Hockner and myself did all of Mountain Lakes, and she used to do it for me, and if she had a little problem I’d do this for her, and that for her.  So when the house was on the market, it was an estate from her mother.  It wasn’t in her name, and so her lawyer said, "Well, you have to put in bidding." So I was the first person to bid.  I bid sixteen thousand dollars, and she closed the bidding.  And I got the house.
PH: Wow! Wow!
GW: So I sold my house in Parsippany for 18, and I bought this for 16.  And a guy who lives down on -- Morinovitch, on Intervale Road -- every ceiling, every wall was -- especially the ones in the middle bedrooms upstairs.  When I took the plaster off, you should have seen the squirrels’ nests come down.  Oh my God, there had to be squirrels living there for thirty, forty years.  But this was a great -- UF: We still have a problem in one of the rooms in the back.  The ceiling we have to do, the sheetrock.  We have to do that now.  Yes, also the middle room?  We had to sheetrock that.
GW: Yes, because the [unclear] over towards that window.  UF: Here, you know, we have a leak somewhere over there.  So we had to put out the window [unclear].
GW: I never had any leaks.  [Tape off/on]
GW: Four or five thousand dollars.
PH: Really?
GW: Many of them were vacant.  And the hill, you hardly saw anyone up on the hill.  The houses were all -- the people just went bankrupt during the Depression.
PH: Huh!
GW: My class was 49 kids.  One Democrat in town.  No Jewish people were in town; no Polish people in town.  One Italian family in town.  But two blacks: John Jones who was in my class, went all the way through, because his mother was a maid and they lived on the third floor here on Lake Drive.  And Jimmy Douglas lived over on Cobb Road, he and his mother.  So we had two black students all the way through.  But one Democrat, and very few Catholics at the time.  It wasn’t very nice.  We didn’t know any different, so we thought everything was great, but I will say this: John Jones ate more meals in my house, you know, being a black youngster, than any white kid.  So you never treat -- you didn’t deal with somebody, you didn’t know any difference.  I never did.  [Unclear] about John Jones.  UF: There was, I think the last black family left last year, at least with our kids that went together to Wildwood School, and [unclear] you know they are moving, because he’s the only one of that color in the village!
GW: Think about it.  I don’t care how much money you had.  If you were a black person, and could maybe buy the best house in town, why would you, if your children had to go to school with all white children?
PH: No.
GW: I don’t think most people would care anymore.  Well, if you’re a good person, and took care of your home and everything.  UF: I have another question: so the family room, you know, where you wanted to have the expansion -- you didn’t do that.  That was a screen porch?
GW: That was a screen porch.  UF: Above?
GW: Above there was a room.  That’s where my two boys slept.  My one daughter slept in this room, my next daughter slept in this room, my wife and I slept in that room, and the two boys would go through our room to get out to -- that’s where they wanted to be.  And we had the little toilet here, and we had the bathroom upstairs on the pedestal.  UF: Yes, it is still there [laughs]!
GW: Yeah, that’s nice in there.
PH: The bathroom?
GW: Yeah.  Now these are the same beams.  I put these up, and I never knew how to do it, but I just -- common sense.  But this is much nicer.  We had nice cabinets, but we were just a normal Formica, and our fridge was there.  So this is all the same, but this is completely different, and that room is completely different.  That was our TV room.  UF: Yes, that’s [unclear].  Oh, what, the dining room?
GW: No, we didn’t have a dining room.  This was just like a little sitting room.  UF: Oh, [unclear] where the closet is?
GW: There was no doorway here.  The back door was right over there.
PH: There’s -- I know the one over on, I think it’s Oak?  There’s only a few style homes.
GW: They’re the same house.  UF: Three.
PH: Three.  Where’s the third like this?  UF: One is behind the Community Church, and the other one is on Lake Drive.
GW: Right, by the canal.
PH: Yes.
GW: Which it just sold for a couple million bucks! That’s [unclear].  UF: Yeah, but the other one with the same style, the lady moved in there, they still have this knockout, and they have the office in there.  She’s very sweet.  If you just knock on the door, she would definitely show you around.
PH: Well, I’ve actually been -- when I moved into town, I looked at both houses.  I couldn’t afford either one! [Laughs].
GW: Mrs.  Loney was basically the first, although it was her mother’s house.  I was the second, the Fees were the third.  UF: We’re the fourth.  And there was three kids.
PH: No, the Arenas.
GW: I meant Arena.
PH: Yeah, [unclear].  It’s only a little number [unclear].
GW: And I think it was the eighth or ninth house in town.  I think it was the eighth or ninth house.
PH: So Hapgood didn’t build this then?
GW: This was the first school in town.  UF: It’s a Hapgood house.
PH: It is?  Interesting.  Hapgood did build this?
GW: Yeah.  UF: It’s 1912. UM: If you look at the Mountain Lakes brochure, it’s in there.  There’s a picture.
PH: Oh, okay.  UF: Did you see that?
PH: I can’t recall it.  UM: [Several words unclear]
GW: I’ll bring it and drop it off.  UF: [Several words unclear]. UM: I got a lot of old pictures from the first owner’s granddaughter. UF: She stopped by last year.
GW: Did she?
PH: Oh, gosh.
GW: I’d like to see those.  [Tape off/on]
GW: This is newer because the trees.  If you could see pictures of old Mountain Lakes, there were hardly any trees around.  That could be a little newer.  But there’s a side porch for you.  UF: Yeah.
GW: There was a side porch.  So that’s not real new.  That’s got to be ’28.
PH: That’s the first owner.
GW: Is that the lady?  UM: Yes.
GW: That’s Belle DeRivera.  UM: Just on her way to New York City.  She had a granddaughter that --
GW: She was a big theatrical person.
PH: That’s another one from the old one.
GW: Look at the size of the trees now.  UF: It’s amazing, yeah.
PH: Oh, yeah.
GW: I always wanted to own it.  I was so lucky I did get to buy it.  I always wanted to own it.
PH: [Unclear]
GW: Yeah.  That’s about a ’27 or ’28 automobile, 1927, 1928.  That’s a year after I was born.  UM: Because she came here this year, and she wasn’t sure if the house would still be standing.  And when it was, [unclear], come in.  She really enjoyed it.  She told us exactly that the closet in the kitchen was a bathroom, a toilet.  We didn’t know that. [Tape off/on]
GW: Smith as a coach.
PH: Was he that bad?  [Laughs] [Tape off/on]
PH: Up on the hill, Karen was saying they’re going to take down.
GW: That one there?
PH: Yup.
GW: What’s it, in bad shape?
PH: I don’t know, I don’t know.
GW: Or a big lot?
PH: Well, it’s a tough lot because of the hill, and the rocks.  Briarcliff School, this was the high school --
GW: Was finished in 1937.  The first graduating class was 1939.
PH: Okay.
GW: They went their first two years to Boonton High School, or Morristown.  Mountain Lakes kid had the choice of going to Morristown or Boonton.  And that was finished in 1937 by the W.P.A., a government project.
PH: Oh, really?
GW: Yes.  Mr.  Annabel, the principal, lived right in that house right there.
PH: Oh, really?
GW: Yup.  And the high school was meant to have been built here.  They left the back -- how they came out the back?  They were supposed to come all the way out, you know, whatever size thing they wanted on the back of the school, before they put up the one down there on Pal Hill.  And this school was so well built, you know.  And this was the best basketball court in Morris County when I was in school.
PH: Why was that?
GW: All the walls -- it was the newest, and nicest looking, and had a decent sized court, at that time.  And all the walls up until the wood around it, about as high up as the backboard, I guess, over there on the walls?
PH: Yup.
GW: That was all cork, blocks of cork, to absorb the sound.
PH: Oh, wow!
GW: And there was great acoustics in the auditorium.
PH: Now this was always the ball field here?
GW: And that’s the original backstop.
PH: Yeah, it looks it.
GW: And we’d practice on this field, football and everything.  There was only three sports: football, basketball, baseball.
PH: Baseball, that was it.
GW: And in 1944 or ‘43, the business teacher, whose classroom was right up there, Dick Wellings, started a cross-country team, and they called them the trackless runners.  Matter of fact, 1946 I think, if you looked in the record books, they went to the Penn Relays and won them.
PH: No kidding!
GW: Mountain Lakes won it with a team of Howie Tizzer, Alan VanDeusen, Dean Knoll, and I’m not sure the fourth player.
PH: Wow!
GW: Dean Knoll just died a couple weeks ago, a real gentleman, a great guy.  But, yeah, and the headlines in the New York Evening News, that was the big paper in those days, was: "Trackless Wonders from Mountain Lakes".
PH: How about the path here going down to the high school?
GW: That was always gravel.  There’s no high school, just down to the football field.
PH: Oh, it’s down to the football field, sure.
GW: And we cleared that.  The gym classes cleared that football field, except for the big trees.  But we were all told to bring hatchets and little saws to school --
PH: Come on!
GW: And we cut down all the small trees, I would say, maybe three or four inches thick.  And then Decker’s Sawmill from Mountain Hibernia came down and cut down the big trees.
PH: Really?
GW: But when I was in school, the first two years in high school, we played our baseball games down in the village.  That was Neafie’s Field, down in the village, where the village is.
PH: What?
GW: That was a baseball/football field.
PH: I had no idea!
GW: Oh, yeah.  That was our baseball field.  And where the stores are, about a third of those stores burned down, and two people burned up in that fire, when they burned down.  And there was a drugstore, Blair’s Drugstore.  Yaccarino’s was next, and the next building down, same as the buildings that are still there, was an ice cream and a confectionery store called Rhodes’s, R-H-O-D-E-S.  And they had the wooden booths in there, the big, high wooden booths?  And we’d go in there and sit and have your ice cream and your soda.
PH: What year was that?  What year was the fire?
GW: I would say in the late thirties, late thirties.  Now the other thing that you wanted to see --
PH: Yeah, is this beach.
GW: Now, somebody must have some pictures of this, Peter, but there’s some tragedies.  The people that lived in that house, in there, Lillian Doll -- they were involved in a murder case in the state of New Jersey.
PH: That occurred at this house?
GW: This house right here.
PH: Sixty-seven?
GW: Yes.
PH: No, this is -- that’s the corner.
GW: That’s Bates’s house.
PH: Sixty-three.
GW: Yeah, because Yonas -- does Yonas still live there?
PH: Yup.
GW: That house -- those people -- if you look in there, some papers, or the library maybe might have them -- those people were involved in a murder case in this state.
PH: Wow!
GW: Yeah.
PH: So now we have -- oh, this is one of my favorite areas right here.  This Community Church, and of course this park in here.
GW: This park was always here, but never well-used.  And Wildwood Lake, starting from the dam, somewhere down below the dam, you had a boardwalk all the way down the shore, and then it came around that corner.  And they had a ramp going out, and they had a high dive, and they had a slide.  It was called Leonard’s Beach.  And up in there where those houses are now, where Ted Peters lives, that was a park.
PH: Really?
GW: And they had picnic tables up there, and fireplaces.  There was a dirt road that went in, a path up to it -- you could drive up it from just at the edge of Wildwood School right up into where that first house is.
PH: That’s great!
GW: And that was called Leonard’s Beach.  And while I was in school, like in seventh grade, there was a kid that lived on Cobb Road by the name of Bobby Bowen -- great swimmer.  It was a cold fall day, but a beauty day, like today, but cold.
PH: Yeah.
GW: He went out in a wooden rowboat and it filled up with water.  And he was out -- I’m just guessing now, because I was in seventh, eighth grade -- and he dove in to swim to shore, and he drowned.  And they didn’t find him for days!
PH: Oh, Jees!
GW: Yup, he drowned.  Then two kids got killed sleigh riding on Pollard Road.
PH: Really?
GW: One boy, I think his name was McEwan -- they were riding on top of one another, and went down and hit a telephone pole.
PH: Oh, Jees!
GW: And then two boys drowned in the lake, just went through the ice, and they didn’t find them until spring.  So there were some --
PH: Wow!
GW: But the Community Church has been there, was just a little church, compared to what it is now.
PH: Now, you were a parishioner here?
GW: No, St.  Peter’s.
PH: Okay.
GW: Now up here straight ahead was the old fire house.  There’s a great story about the first Police Chief.  I can’t say he was the first, but the one ahead of Harry Dennis.
PH: Is it these houses here?  I’m always curious about --
GW: They were both there.
PH: They were both there.  But don’t they look as if they were connected at one time, with the gardens?
GW: Never, never.
PH: No?  Not physically, but maybe one was --
GW: They could have been relatives, but I didn’t know that.  But -- and probably the richest man in town lived in this house right up here.  It’s on the Boulevard.
PH: Mautes, Mike Maute’s house.
GW: No, after that.  The man’s name was Hardin, and Pete Haas could tell you.  I think he was President of Nabisco.  Now that’s all added, but all his property came down here.  And then the fire house was here.  Here’s a good story, and I’m pretty sure it’s a hundred percent true: we had a police chief by the name of Morgan, and he was very much overweight.  And he was very miserable to people from Denville and Boonton.  And he would watch for them going up the Boulevard, and he had a Studebaker car.  And the fire house used to be here, and the fire trucks were parked, and the doors were facing out this way.  And one night he’s here, and he’s parked in his car there, and he’s inside, I guess, resting or sleeping, whatever.  I don’t know, really.  And he gets a phone call that there’s an accident down on Glen Road, which is one block down.  He’s here at Briarcliff.  So he goes out to get in his car, and he couldn’t run because he was so heavy.  He got in his car, and his car wouldn’t start.  So, and whoever must have called him set it up.  They must have fixed his car so his car wouldn’t run.  And here was a miserable man.  He had had trouble on 46, somebody had hit him out on 46 on purpose, went down the Boulevard here, somebody came down and back and ran over him, and backed over him.  He lived for about six months; he died.
PH: Wow! What was that officer’s name?
GW: Morgan was his name.
PH: Jees!
GW: And then Harry Dennis, the police chief that was here forever, Mrs.  Barton, who was the secretary of the Guidance Office, Marie Barton -- her Dad was Police Chief, and they lived over on Morris Avenue right next to where Mike O’Donnell lives now.
PH: Yes!
GW: The house this side of him, one house from the corner.  Paterson was the silk shipping company for the world, and they ran big tractor and trailers out of Paterson to Chicago, Detroit, St.  Louis.  And the name of the trucking company was Arrow Trucks.  Well in those days, the trucks had no air conditioning, and no sleeper cabs.  So in the summer time, when they came up that big hill out there, coming out towards the Fridays on the hill, the trucks would go like as slow as a truck could go, because they were loaded with silk, which is a very valuable cargo.  So the trucks must observe that -- they put the trucks into first gear.  It was hot, so the guys would open -- the doors to the trucks had no handles on the outside so people couldn’t get in, and the drivers were armed! So they’d open the door, and they’d stand out on the running board, and hold the right hand on the steering wheel and just steer, and get cool going up the hill.  So going up the hill, halfway up the hill up there, you could still see the house sitting there.  Well, that was the people by the name of Cole, and matter of fact, Anna Cole still lives there.  She was there when this happened.  So coming up the hill, the guy never -- here this big, big touring car roars up, and these two guys jump right on the running board, and they’ve got revolvers on the guy.  So they stopped the truck, got them off, they tie up the drivers, and put them in the back of the truck.  Excuse me, in the trunk of the car.  Mr.  Cole sees it.  He’s a carpenter.  He calls Harry Dennis.  Harry Dennis is babysitting his daughter Marie.  So he puts her on the floor of his car, and goes over Morris Avenue, out Crane Road by the Coldwell Banker office -- there comes the truck.  He pulls out on the highway in front of it, stops it.  The guy in the truck leans out with a revolver and points it at him, and it misfired, and he caught them all!
PH: Oh, my gosh!
GW: He caught the whole group! Our police chief, Harry Dennis, caught them all.
PH: That’s a great story!
GW: Yeah,
PH: That’s a great story.
GW: That’s a true story.
PH: Now this building here on the right --
GW: That was a real estate office, Clinthrops.
PH: Oh, that was Clinthrops.  So that was really the commercial, 150 Boulevard.
GW: There were -- I got to think now, because there was a real estate office down here on the Boulevard.  There was Sawyer, there was Clinthrop, there was Brackin, and oh golly, there was another real estate lady down here on the right hand side.  This guy over there was a German World War One U-Boat commander.
PH: Oh, wow!
GW: His name was Hartman, and during the war we used to give him a hard time.
PH: [Laughs]
GW: We figured he was a Nazi, right?
PH: Yeah, yeah.
GW: Sure, sure.
PH: That’s great.  Now this path -- was it always this busy?
GW: Yes, but that was the trolley tracks.
PH: That’s right.
GW: The trolleys ran to Denville.  That was a trolley track.  That was a trolley track.
PH: I want to bring you down this way, and ask you about the Belhalls that started coming in here.  But I guess that was also around the time you were being born, some of these houses in here.
GW: In here?  All these houses were here when I was going to school, and was far as I can remember.
PH: Remember this is, yeah, my wife’s family.
GW: Davis, sure.
PH: Davis.  They still live here.  But anything about this house that you remember?
GW: Not at all.  None I could tell.  [Tape off/on]
PH: Oh, yeah.  But he’s --
GW: You know, the piano people -- Steinway.
PH: Steinway!
GW: Steinway Piano, there it is.
PH: Get out of here!
GW: That’s it, Steinway Piano, right there.
PH: The Calorey’s house.  I don’t remember what the number is.  Twenty Glen.
GW: And this was all started the park, Leonard’s Beach.  All this was woods, and there was a park up in there, a big opening, dirt, sand, you know, gravel.
PH: Wow!
GW: Yup, all that was Leonard’s Beach.  There was not a house in there.
PH: I told you I’d have you for an hour, and I’ve had you for two.
GW: Who cares?  No, we’ve got a couple things we ought to look at still.
PH: We’ve got to do the downtown.
GW: Yeah, we’ve got to look at Neafie’s Feld.
PH: Yeah!
GW: I’ll explain that to you.
PH: Holy mackerel!
GW: And Leonard’s Beach, you went right up into the dirt road going right up there, and right down around here was a boardwalk.
PH: When was this built?  I’m sure everyone in the historical --
GW: This stuff?  After the war.
PH: Wildwood was built after the war?
GW: Oh, Wildwood, yeah, way after the war, yeah.  If I thought long enough, I could tell you when Wildwood was built.  How about this: we have a Medal of Honor winner from town on Castle who was an Army general.  He took his bomber, and his was hit badly, and put it into a big munitions building and killed himself.
PH: Really?
GW: Jimmy Doolittle, who raided Tokyo in World War Two?  His brother lived in Mountain Lakes, and we used to see him in town.  How about Johnny Weismuller, Tarzan?
PH: Yeah.
GW: He used come and visit the Wykoffs that lived on the corner of Ball Road and Rockaway Terrace.  We used to go up to the green and watch Johnny Weismuller swim.
PH: You’re kidding!
GW: True story! True story.  Shut the recorder off for a minute.  [Tape off/on]
PH: McFarland.
GW: Yeah, and Jean Simmons who lived down in the last house down the right hand side here on Briarcliff, married Hap Arnold, the famous Army general in World War Two.  Carlson’s Raiders, the first Marine raiders who raided in the South Pacific in World War Two?  His brother lived in Mountain Lakes.
PH: Now this area here -- was this all backing up to Briarcliff, these homes?
GW: Duke Smith’s home, and those homes, were new.
PH: Were newer, okay.
GW: All these are Hapgoods.
PH: Okay.
GW: All these homes are here.  All these homes are here, but they’re much better now than they were, believe me.  I hate to say that.
PH: Wow!
GW: Turn left here.
PH: Okay.
GW: This house in here to the right, Jean Simmons married Hap Arnold, World War Two -- famous general in World War Two.  She married him.  And the house over here -- this house burnt down badly and three children burned up in it.
PH: Really!
GW: And I think the family’s name was Wood or Woods.
PH: Because that looked like a Hapgood before they just did the renovations.
GW: It was a Hapgood, but it was a small Hapgood.
PH: Oh, okay.  Now, this is -- the Falcons lived here.
GW: Yeah, great people.
PH: And then next door was the Bartons, right?
GW: Barton, right.
PH: And Clockners were here as well?
GW: I don’t remember Clockner living here.  I remember Clockner lived on the Boulevard, and I don’t think it was Joe Clockner.  It had to be Cam.
PH: Yeah.
GW: That was Harry Dennis’s house there, and Marie Barton’s house.  And then Manahan lived in this house here on the corner.  I think that’s 220.
PH: Okay, want to go down here on the Esplanade?
GW: And the Esplanade used to be beautiful! They kept the grass cut, and flowers.  And the Mountain Lakes Railroad Station was the nicest one on the Delaware Lackawanna.
PH: Oh, yeah.  This is an interesting story to me, because you mentioned earlier that there was very little diversity in town, including no Catholics.
GW: Oh, yeah.
PH: Now I know Mimi Schwartz, or the Schwartzes over there, who owned this property.
GW: She still owns it; she leases.
PH: She still owns this.  Do you know the story around why they gave that land to the Catholic Church, why, they sold that land to the Catholic Church?  Why this was theirs, and who was he?
GW: He was a builder.  If you go up Glen Road to Laurel Hill, that Cape Cod on the left?
PH: Yes.
GW: Pretty big Cape Cod?
PH: Yes.
GW: He built that and lived there.  He made a lot of money in the building business.  But this is a shame.  This place was a showplace.  And believe it or not, four railroad lines went through here.
PH: Really?
GW: There were four lines of Delaware Lackawanna.  And this -- my God, it was all grass and shrubs.  This is a disgrace.  Pete Haas and I go nuts every time.  And there were big covered places here where you could stand underneath and not get rained on.  And everybody went to work on the train, the whole town went to work on the train.  But this was all flowers and shrubs, and it went up into the Esplanade.
PH: And were there any town functions held here?
GW: Oh yeah, sure.  Yup.  And the Post Office was over here.  And there was a Post Office, a little coffee shop, and a tailor.  The Post Office was on this end.
PH: Of these, now the railroad station.
GW: Three stores in there, right.  That little railroad station.  And the stores used to come down about to where this building right here.  And then the rest of this was open.
PH: Okay, so this was all open here?  So we lost one of those buildings?  A third of it?
GW: A third of it, I would say.  [Tape off/on]
PH: This is one of my favorite buildings in town, I just think it’s beautiful.
GW: Yeah, art deco.
PH: I mean, it’s huge.  Was it always a filling station?
GW: Yeah, a gas station, a very busy gas station.
PH: Were the owners always up top?
GW: Always lived up top, yeah.  They had son went to school, Burr Hamilton, B-U-R-R.
PH: Okay.
GW: Burr Hamilton.
PH: And then down here when these buildings I guess -- when was this built, this plaza?
GW: Oh, way after the war, too.  It used to be a medical supply business.
PH: Yes.
GW: And that’s the guy whose daughter got killed going home from Briarcliff School one day.  A lady who was intoxicated in Mountain Lakes hit here.
PH: Oh, yeah, yeah.  What was that name?
GW: I forget the name.
PH: Do you want to say anything about this basketball court up here?
GW: No, except that it was built after the war, and it was, of course, before computers and televisions and everything became so popular.  It was used, oh, tremendously, and the town was nice enough after my first wife Janet passed away to dedicate to her.  So I keep doing the shrubs and the flowers and everything.  But it was nice of the town to do that, and so they dedicated that to the memory of my wife Janet Chute Wilson.
PH: I have a lot of fond memories of this court.  The lights used to be working here, and I remember after school, and just during summer and into the night, like a night like this, there’d be a steady stream going back and forth as we played, going up to the Market to get refreshments, or soda, or whatever.  But this was always a lot of fun back here.
GW: Peter, no one complains more about youngsters nowadays than I do, ‘til I stop and think about it.  Now think about this Peter, even yourself, and you’re not that -- how old are you?
PH: Thirty-five.
GW: Thirty-five.  Think about this: now when I went to school here in Mountain Lakes, and even when you went to school here in Mountain Lakes, I’m not so sure how many houses had air conditioning and fans.
PH: Yeah.
GW: You guys probably had them.  But in my -- you never knew what an air conditioner was.
PH: No.
GW: Now, the stove to cook on at my house at Dixon Brothers Coal Yard was coal or wood.  Now in the summer time, it’s ninety degrees, and that stove’s got to be burning, because you cook and iron.  My mother used to iron with two cast iron things -- she’d [unclear] one and iron with one.  So when you got up in the morning, it was hot in the house, so you got the heck out of there.  And you were really out all day.  Where would you go?  We’d come down here.  Yaccarino’s was the store right here, where the Market is.  We’d come down here, and this is our ball field down here, Neafie’s Field.
PH: Yeah, I want to see about this.
GW: And we would literally go down to Neafie’s Field all day!
PH: Really!
GW: And play.  Because it was hot in the house, plus if you went home, your Mom wanted you to do yard work, or do this and that.  And so we’d walk down here under the bridge, and down the steps here.  A little patch of woods, and then right field foul pole was right down here where these houses are.
PH: Oh, no kidding!
GW: And the field went that way.  It was called Neafie’s Field, N-E-A-F-I-E-‘-S.
PH: Who was it named after?
GW: After people by the name of Neafie who I think donated the property, or maybe even owned it at the time.
PH: Okay.
GW: And just let the town use it.  Now, there were no roads going in here, so don’t go in here.  This was the first house built down here after the war.  Those houses were put up for around $7995, I think that’s what they sold for.
PH: Wow!
GW: After World War Two, in the early -- just about ’47, ’48.  Now go up a little easy.  There was a dirt road right here.  It was a sandpit in here, where these houses are, and the field was up.  You had to go up a little dirt driveway to get to the field through the sandpit.  And the back stop was right up here, and left field was going towards Wilcox.  Center field was going towards, let’s say, Mountain Lakes, you know, the center of Mountain Lakes?  And right field went towards the railroad tracks.
PH: Wow, 118 Midvale here.
GW: Yeah.
PH: That’s a heck of a field! It’s a big ball park.
GW: Called Neafie’s Feld, and the people, Neafie’s, lived over here.  And I told you that --
PH: Was Midvale Field there at the time?
GW: No, it was just woods.
PH: That wasn’t cleared.
GW: And then down here -- this corner was open.  There was no house here, and the first house on your left up there, that’s another 1700 house, built up in the 1700’s.  Our school nurse lived there, Miss Trippett.  Go this way, and I’ll show you the other oldest house in town.  And this was my mother’s aunt, and her name was the same as my mother’s: Mary Louise Romine.  And the house after this one -- you won’t recognize it, because they put additions on it.
PH: Oh, yeah!
GW: But this is a very, very, very old house.
PH: I remember this, yeah, yeah.
GW: This is a very, very old house.  It’s all done over now, and enlarged.
PH: Yup.
GW: But that’s as far --
PH: Next to Bevacqua’s.  I’ll get the number.
GW: Yeah, Bevacqua, yeah.  He was my age.  He went to high school; he’s two years younger than I am.
PH: Oh, yeah?
GW: Yeah.
PH: Turn around in here.
GW: And this is York Village in here, and there’s not much to tell you about York Village.
PH: This was built after Diaper Village, is that correct?
GW: No, before Diaper Village.
PH: Before.
GW: But there weren’t that many houses in there.
PH: No.
GW: Now the chains on the Boulevard is another interesting thing.  They came over off a German, I believe, I think I have the name correct: a captured German luxury liner the Leviathan.
PH: Ah!
GW: Those were the anchor chains off that ship, and the man who had that property -- I believe the people’s name -- there’s no sense in going this way, you’re going out of town.  I think the people’s name who lived there down -- what, that house is on for what, 2.7 million now, or something?
PH: Yeah, yeah.
GW: That house burnt down during the war, too.  I think the people that lived there were named Buchanan.  But I’m not sure he put the chains in.  I’d have to get somebody -- see all the real old people -- but Peter, there’s another man to contact in town who’s older than I am and he’s lived here his whole life: Osgood Wells, on Pollard Road.
PH: Oh, gentleman! He was at the Memorial Day Parade this year.
GW: Yeah, Osgood could tell you a lot of things better than I could tell you, and maybe correct me on a few of my things.  Also the second lake, where they just fixed the dam -- what do they call that?
PH: Crystal.
GW: Crystal -- that was used as a government testing laboratory during World War Two.
PH: Really?
GW: Very secret work went on there for underwater devices.  We never knew what.
PH: No kidding!
GW: Yeah.  Now this road was a dead end.  This road ended up there when you see the brown shingled house on the left-hand side up there on the hill.  That was the last house on the street, and the people who lived there’s name was Jansen.  And he was an excellent baseball player.
PH: And this is our home here.
GW: This is your house here?
PH: This is it, yeah, 22.
GW: Well Brownholer lives in here someplace, don’t they?  Or are they gone now?
PH: I think they’re gone.
GW: How about the doctor’s parents?  Oh, Christ -- he’s my skin doctor.  Jimmy --
PH: Oh, Milbauer.
GW: Milbauer.
PH: Yeah, they’re right across the street from us.
GW: She just died.
PH: She did, yes.
GW: This was dead end.  This was the last house.  That’s the last house.
PH: The Woods house.
GW: Right.  This is all new.
PH: Let me turn around here.  And yeah, this were probably built --
GW: After the war, too.
PH: Sixties.
GW: But a little bit after the war.  Not real quick, buy maybe ’55, someplace in ’55 to ’65, somewhere in there.  This was a dead end, Woodland Avenue.
PH: I didn’t know that.
GW: These were my first stops on my mail route, here, Woodland Avenue.
PH: It’s a great neighborhood.
GW: Jansens lived there.
PH: Jansens?
GW: Yeah.
PH: And then I can’t remember these people.
GW: Brownholer lived right here, in maybe your house.  Brownholer lived in one of these.
PH: Well, this was Haymeyer’s.  Do you remember them?
GW: Oh yeah, I taught Richard Haymeyer.  He was in [unclear]’s class.
PH: And this was Milbauer’s here.
GW: Milbauer here?
PH: Yeah.  Oh, the Glicks -- remember Phil Glick?  He was a year behind me?
GW: Yeah.  I was a little interested in buying the first little house.  Maybe that one or the next one, but they wanted way too much money for it.
PH: Oh, really?
GW: Maybe that one, yeah.  I forget what they wanted, but it was ridiculous.  But see, the railroad station had a full-time stationmaster there for years.
PH: Wow!
GW: You could go in there any time of day and buy a ticket.
PH: So that must have stopped -- gosh, I don’t ever remember it being there, so --
GW: Where the high school of juniors and seniors.  Their fathers -- everybody -- I always remember, the train went out at 7:25.  I would guarantee you that a quarter of the cars parked there were started up and gone, the kids would come down with the keys!
PH: Oh, really?
GW: They’d use the car all day, and then they’d get their friend to put gas in and they’d run it down and park it like at 4:30, five o’clock, and their dad would come home.
PH: [Laughs]
GW: The kids would be running around in the cars all day!
PH: So can I go up to the lakes, because it sounds like you have a lot of stories up there?
GW: Sure.  I don’t have a lot to tell you about the big lakes, except the water in them is much better now, because of the sewers in town.
PH: Oh, sure.
GW: The septic systems in town really goofed our lakes up a lot.
PH: I know you enjoy --
GW: Take a left here, and I’ll show you a couple of things.
PH: Okay, onto Ball?
GW: Two or three of the richest people in town that I knew of lived up here.  On top of the hill, the house -- they put a house in where the tennis court was, on the left-hand side.
PH: Oh yeah, the Johnsons.
GW: The house up on the left-hand side, yeah, with the big pillars?  Those people were named McGreavey.  They had big money.  It was known that they had big money.
PH: McGreavey.
GW: McGreavey.
PH: It’s not Art McGreavey, the same?
GW: No.  That house there.  And they had a daughter, we called her Tish, and she was a great -- oh, was a great person! And either this house or the next house was McFarland.  They were famous government -- one was an ambassador.  I believe this house was the McFarland house.  And then this house over here, one of the richest guys in town, 100.  And that guy’s name was -- they put the additions on, and that guy’s name was Ben Cole.  What a nice family! I used to deliver mail there.  You always had to stop for lunch! Oh, if it was raining, she’d make you come in and she’d take my shirt and iron it to get it dry.
PH: Really!
GW: You know, there were so many nice people.  It was really -- it was just a great place to grow up! And you walked all over, and you always cut through people’s yards, and nobody bothered you.  And you couldn’t fool around, because they’d discipline you like the parents! And you listened to them.
PH: Yup.
GW: This is down here on the left where the Wykoffs lived.  As a matter of fact, Jerome Wykoff is still alive.  His brother went to Annapolis with Johnny Weismuller.  This little house right here on the left -- right there.  And Johnny Weismuller used to spend two or three weeks here in the summer on leave from Annapolis, and we’d go up to the green and he’d swim.  We used to say we were watching Tarzan!
PH: [Laughs] That’s great! That’s something else.  Now, I’m curious, I know you enjoy the Tourne a lot now.  Was it something you all went to as kids, and played in those woods?
GW: Yeah, but more a place to go camping, and you only swam in the day time.  You were afraid to swim at night, because it was deep, and you know, your parents had the fear of God in you.  And also it was a place where kids could go devil a little bit.  You can imagine what they did or what they didn’t do.  I have no idea.  But you used to hear giggles about it a lot, you know, and stuff.
PH: How about any of the animals?  You hear so much about bears coming into the yards, and the deer.
GW: You never heard of a bear or deer.  There are more deers and bears and coyotes now, and turkeys, than ever! As a matter of fact, when I was a kid, you never saw a goose except maybe once in a while flying.  You never saw a turkey, hardly ever saw a deer.  The only thing the deer were years ago -- they were bigger.  They’ve interbred so much now, and they’re just all over.
PH: Right, right.
GW: And you never heard of a coyote.  We always thought of coyotes out in Wyoming or out west.  You know, you never saw a coyote.  I know this house is number 57.  Parry lived there, was in the class of ’48.
PH: Do you remember the Borough Hall going up as it is today?
GW: Oh sure, as a matter of fact, Pete Haas had that put up.  The Borough Hall was always down there on the corner of the Boulevard and Briarcliff, where it’s a little park like, now.
PH: I’m always curious about the -- you know, we have politics about these new fields going in.  We have people, like -- when they put in Island Beach, or when they decided that they were going to build the Borough Hall over here, what were some of the townspeople’s reactions at the time?
GW: Well, I think they kind of didn’t object to either one, because the beach was needed because Leonard’s Beach was sold by the people, Leonard.  I guess people by the name of Leonard owned that, that’s the thing I could guess.  And so they needed a swimming beach.  And then because of Bill Kogan, that’s how we got Birchwood.
PH: Oh, really.
GW: And between Bill Kogan and Kingsley, and Al Hopkins, and some of those men, we got the town to go through to develop Birchwood.  And Birchwood is really the only really deep lake, except the second lake, what, Crystal?
PH: Yes.
GW: That was deep on this closest end here, when you’d go into Birchwood.  That was pretty deep, but the rest of the lakes aren’t deep.  I was told, but I don’t know this -- these were always called propagation pools.  And I was told this little pond up here is deep.  I really don’t know it.  And maybe over the years because of leaves and debris it’s filled in a lot, but we were always told that this little lake in here was deep.  I’ll tell you something, we’ve talked of Sunset and Crystal and Birchwood.  The real names are Howells’ Ponds.
PH: Howells’ Ponds.
GW: A man by the name of Howells owned them, and he’d harvest ice to sell off the pond.  And they were called Howells’ Ponds.
PH: And you’ve referred to it a couple of times as the second lake.  Is that the order in which they were built?
GW: Yeah, we always called them first, second, and third, just because -- no, because they’re the closest.  First lake was the closest, then the second lake, and the third lake.
PH: [Laughs] It’s getting pretty dark, but the other thing I wanted to ask you about up here, two things, is the rifle range, and the sled run.
GW: Yeah, there used to be a pistol shooting range, just for the police.  It wasn’t for everyone.
PH: Oh, really?  Okay.
GW: Yes, in here.
PH: Right down --
GW: And then we had a sleigh riding thing --
PH: Yeah, I’ve actually had a chance to enjoy this the last few years with my kids.
GW: Yeah, but it wasn’t ever used.  It never went over well.
PH: It wasn’t used then?
GW: I’ll tell you why: because they used to block off Glen Road and Pollard, and that was just easier to get to, and get in to a bathroom, or you could get in to get a cup of chocolate, or something, you know.
PH: Okay, so do you remember when this was put in?
GW: Yes, this was put in after the war also.
PH: Oh, okay.  It had lights.
GW: I would say more in the sixties than in the forties or fifties.  And there were lights here, I honestly believe.
PH: Well there were -- I’ve also noticed some stone foundations, but I think those are old.
GW: Those houses were never built on them.  Let’s see, now that’s another thing.  I can show you a lookout across from Joyces, that big house that sits down in there?  That was the biggest house.  A man by the name of Johnson lived there.
PH: A hotel, uh-huh.
GW: And he actually had every house, it was relatives all the way down to the next corner.
PH: Really?
GW: And the one place which is the closest this way, down in the hole, that was the garage, and people lived over there.  Matter of fact, the people that lived over it were named Flat, and the boy was in my class.  And they were like workers for the Johnsons.
PH: And is it true that there’s a tunnel connecting those two homes?
GW: I don’t believe that.  I don’t know that.  I don’t want to say I don’t believe it.  I never heard that ‘til this day.
PH: Okay.
GW: Now these chains came off a German luxury liner that was captured in World War One.
PH: I’d also heard that some of these chains were from upper West Point, that they would use to raise, in case enemy ships were going up the Hudson, they would pull those chains.
GW: I never heard that.  We always heard that they came off -- and by the way, that could be just as true as what I said, because I’m just talking from what people said.
PH: Yeah, I know.  Your word is better than mine.
GW: Yeah, but that doesn’t mean it’s right, Peter.
PH: [Laughs]
GW: So when I say all of these things to you today, you know, it’s not etched in stone.
PH: Well, it’s now 7:45.  I’ve had you for a few hours here, so I’ll take you back.
GW: That’s no problem.  [End of Interview] Transcribed by Tapescribe, University of Connecticut at Storrs, 2004, edited by Margarethe P.  Laurenzi, coordinator, Oral History Project of the Historic Preservation Committee of Mountain Lakes, June 2006.

End of Interview

Transcribed by Tapescribe, University of Connecticut at Storrs, 2003, edited by Margarethe P.  Laurenzi, coordinator, Oral History Project of the Historic Preservation Committee of Mountain Lakes, October 2003.



 Oral Histories and Recollections