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BACK IN THE DAY - 08/31/2008
(by Bryan La Placa - Webmaster and Argus Managing Editor - September 03, 2008)
Gathering places and Pompton days of yore
NORTH JERSEY – Here’s a look at what was published in Suburban Trends around the end of August over the years.
Aug. 29, 1963 – A real barnburner
“A two story barn, said to be used by teenagers as a night meeting place, was destroyed Tuesday afternoon in a spectacular fire. The smoke was seen from the West Milford fire warden’s tower nine miles away,” it was reported in the top story in the Thursday, Aug. 29, 1963 Suburban Trends.
Wanaque Fire Chief Don Ryan, who was badly injured a few weeks prior when a piece of fire equipment fell on him, said the barn literally exploded just after his men arrived.
Almost the whole thing was gone within a half-hour, but the skeleton remained. The barn was next to Lakeland Regional High School.
Mrs. John Beam, a neighbor who had formerly owned the barn, said local children played in the barn during the day, and “teenagers” used the barn at night for parties.
The barn was contemporaneously owned by a real estate firm, and was slated for destruction anyway, “to make ample room for development,” it was reported.
Three unidentified “boys” were seen running from the barn just after the fire started.
Aug. 25, 1963 – Old Pompton Days
Unless it’s raining today, you should be celebrating Pompton Day. Here’s a look at the old town.
An old man from Pompton Lakes recalled the REALLY olden days.
Charles Edward Turse was 86 at the time we talked to him. He lived on Clerihew Lane and was proud that his great-grandfather, John de la Tours, a French immigrant, settled in the Pompton Lakes area long before the Civil War.
“At that time, the rolling countryside was sparsely dotted with farmhouses, usually constructed of native logs. Fishing in and along the many small streams was very rewarding and a good hunter and trapper could bag bear, bobcat, fox, coon, beaver and muskrat, to say nothing of herds of white-tailed deer. A small clearing around each farmhouse supplied a space for a garden, and many a pioneer family lived and ate very well from nature’s bounty,” according to the old article.
“de la Tours” was anglicized into “Turse.” The family was known for being hard workers, and by the time Charles Edward’s father John M. was born, the family had moved to what was known as the Van Zile homestead near the present-day Interstate 287 interchange.
When the Civil War broke out, John M. Turse walked from his home in Riverdale all the way to Paterson to enlist in the Union Army in April 1861.
The old article says, “He was assigned to the 25th regiment, New York Volunteers, and fought in many historic engagements until taken prisoner in 1863 and sent to Libby Prison. After six months, John was included in a prisoner exchange and returned to the battlefront, only to suffer a serious wound in his right arm, which necessitated a battlefield amputation and an honorary discharge from the Army. A hand-written commendatory letter, written by the Commanding Officer of the Regiment, is one of the Turse family’s prize possessions.”
John M. Turse then married a woman named Clara from the Pancake Hollow section of Wayne.
Clara’s mother, Caroline, was said to be a sister of Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormon Church. John reportedly got touchy when Smith’s supposed discovery of the religion’s foundational golden plates was treated as anything but absolute fact.
Charles Edward Turse was born on July 7, 1877.
“As a youth he fished, trapped and hunted the streams and woodlands of the Pompton Township area until every glacial rock, every fallen tree, every woods path was as familiar to him as his own bed in the family home,” it was reported.
In 1902, he married Nora O. Miller of Kinnelon. Charles and his wife were celebrating the 61st anniversary of their marriage when this article was written. Nora was in a nursing home at the time, but according to the old article, “devotion for his wife shines out of Mr. Turse’s eyes whenever he speaks of her.”
They had two sons, John and William, and the family lived in a house that Charles built in 1914-1915. He had one grandson who was in the Air Force and stationed in Indiana when the source article was written.
The origin of today’s toxic plume
Charles worked at the DuPont plant in Pompton Lakes making nitroglycerin during World War I and afterwards.
We asked him if working there made him nervous. He just smiled and said, “You just have to be very sure you don’t trust any explosive.”
The worst part about working there, according to Charles, was the dizzying headaches caused by the gaseous fumes.
We asked him if he was at the plant in 1918 when there was a massive explosion.
“No, I was sick at home that day,” he said, “but the house shook as though it was in a big earthquake, and the windows slivered in millions of pieces.”
Sharing more memories, he remembered when Wanaque Avenue was a dirt road and Roame’s Hotel stood at the corner of Colfax Avenue; when the only shop in town got washed away in a flood in 1903; when a young Albert Payson Terhune (the famous writer of dog stories) played hooky to skip school and fish in the Pompton River; and “a joke played on Harry Hershfield when Hershfield was looking for publicity angles to lure people into moving to Pompton Lakes.”
There are a lot of the things mentioned in this old article that the writer takes for granted that readers would know about.
It was reported that “some local wag” started a rumor that there was a lost “London Bridge” on “Rotten Pond Mountain” behind the DuPont plant, and Hershfield “nearly drove everyone crazy trying to locate it.” (Rotten Pond was apparently the name of Ramapo Lake.)
“The funny part of the story is that an old charcoal burner had cut a road through the woods and at one spot, heavy rains had washed it out. So, the old man laid some timbers on boulders across the dip in the road, and that was Hershfield’s ‘Lost London Bridge,’” said Turse.
Local mysteries
Turse also shared his memories of three unsolved murders.
The most vivid one, as he told it: “This Harris girl and a young man had been canoeing and the fellow, only a little bit wet, reported that they had gone over the Pompton Falls dam and he had managed to save himself but the girl was in the river. Oh, what a search went on! No trace of her or her body was found though. Four days after it happened, I was out in a boat with a 10-year-old boy, and we found her floating face-down, way downriver around the bend from the dam. She wasn’t bruised or scraped up the way you’d think if she’d gone over the dam, and the only clothing she had on was a slip – not another stitch…”
This part of the old article has deteriorated and is hard to make out, but Turse appears to be saying that he suspected foul play, but that no one was ever arrested in relation to the girl’s death.
Turse’s memory was apparently sharp because he kept a daily journal of his life since 1909. He said he wished he had started it earlier.
A photograph showed the old man on his bicycle that he reportedly clocked over 1,800 miles on in one year. He hoped to lead a scheduled parade through town in late-September of that year if it was determined that he was the citizen with the longest continuous residence in Pompton Lakes.
Aug. 27, 1978 – Macho men
The top photograph on the front page of the Aug. 27, 1978 Suburban Trends depicts an Indian, a construction worker, a cop, and cowboy, dancing with wild abandon. Of course, it was the Village People. They were in a Wayne discotheque that was packed with fans.
“Is disco a fad or forever?” asked the caption beneath the photograph.
In the Lifestyle section, an article with no byline, but written in the first person, seriously tries to answer that question.
The writer, whoever it was, said that the line of people waiting to get inside the Strawberry Patch discotheque in Wayne was a block long.
In the crowded lobby, the writer asked the doorman what would happen in the event of a fire. He looked at the writer for a second, then grinned and quipped, “Disco Inferno.” That song was playing during the exchange.
The Strawberry Patch was apparently so popular that even New York City residents deigned to come to New Jersey to shake their groove things.
The writer asked around if disco was a fad. The DJ told the reporter that disco had already been around five years, so if it was a fad, it was a long one.
The 1977 movie “Saturday Night Fever” was responsible for the wide appeal of disco culture, according to the reporter.
The writer apparently overheard two teenage boys in a Pompton Lakes diner have this exchange:
“You know that dance place in Wayne, the one that gives hustle lessons?”
“Yeah, you mean like that guy in ‘Saturday Night Fever’ dances?”
“Uh-huh. Well, my mother said she’d pay if I want to go there. I’m starting next week. He’s really a cool dancer.”
This old article also talks about how disco fans apparently had to go to discotheques if they wanted to hear the real thing, because consumer copies of disco albums were different than the ones that DJs played.
The reporter also observed that discotheques had changed from being relaxed clubs where you could listen to disco, chat with friends, drink and dance, to places where you could only drink and dance. The music never stopped and was too booming for much conversation, in the reporter’s estimation.
Apparently the writer was also a Star Wars nerd, because he/she said, “Like The Force, the disco energy flow is the lifeblood that binds fans together.
“Disc jockey manipulation of dancers borders on the coldly mathematical,” said the reporter.
The DJ reportedly told him/her, “It relates to liquor sales. By changing the rhythm but not stopping it, you avoid breaking the energy flow you’re trying to create from beginning to end.”
“Like the carousel riders in poet-singer Jacques Brel song about an unending, merry-go-round-like frenzy, the experienced DJ keeps his patrons rotating hourly round the dance floor. The movement is achieved subtly by programming the beats per minute with slower paced songs and more exciting numbers,” observed the reporter.
“I work the crowd into a frenzy — or a peak — and when they can’t take any more, you have to work down or start over,” said the DJ, adding, “A person can only stay out there so long.”
“When a DJ and a live band share the audience, they cue each other when each quits to make sure there is no cessation in the constantly pounding music. The band leader smiles or whoops a few cries with the dancers until the DJ, impregnable in his glass box, takes over without so much as a word or other signal of his presence,” states the old article.
The old article also mentions other dance spots in Wayne.
“Mothers’ Pub caters to rock revelers, hustle hounds and fifties fans by splitting the groups between two separate entertainment rooms on different nights. Gaspare, a swank bar-restaurant at the Ratzer Road-Route 23 circle in Wayne, also boasts a sophisticated disco dance floor, complete with flashing colored squares beneath your feet and rotating spherical glass prisms,” it was reported.
But the Strawberry Patch was apparently the best discotheque around.
Getting back to the point of the old article, the reporter returns to the question about if disco really was forever. The DJ said he didn’t predict any discotheques opening in Butler or Ringwood.
“I’m not sure I understand why it would fail, but I don’t foresee the popularity of discos in rural areas unless there is a real urbanization,” said the DJ.
The manager of the Strawberry Patch apparently didn’t really care if disco lasted much longer.
“If it lasts two years, I’ll be a wealthy, wealthy man,” explained manager Jaime Speciale, 23. His dad owned the discotheque.
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