Rizzuto, Phil (b. Sept. 25, 1917). Holy cow! Although born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, legendary New York Yankee shortstop Philip Francis Rizzuto is a longtime New Jersey resident. Rizzuto was an integral part of the baseball team’s dynasty of 1941-1956. Although his career was interrupted for military duty in 1943-1945, Rizzuto helped the Yankees win seven of nine World Series championships during his thirteen years with the team and is among the all-time leaders in many World Series statistics, including steals, walks, runs, hits, at-bats, and games played. His .320 batting average in the 1951 fall classic earned him the World Series MVP award.
Nicknamed "The Scooter” for his diminutive stature (height 5 foot 6, weight 150) by teammate Billy Hitchcock, Rizzuto was a sturdy player and expert bunter who ended his career with a .273 lifetime batting average. This five-time All-Star selection was named the American League MVP in 1950 (he finished second in the 1949 voting behind Ted Williams). Rizzuto led the American League three times each in double plays and total chances per game, twice each in fielding and putouts, and once in assists.
Rizzuto moved to the Yankee broadcast booth upon his retirement in 1957 and spent forty years as one of the team’s most beloved commentators. The Yankees retired his number 10 jersey in 1985, and Rizzuto was elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, in 1994.
Roadside attractions. The oddest roadside attraction in New Jersey history was an eighteen-spired, pastel-colored castle in Vineland made of auto parts, clay, stone, and assorted junk. The Palace Depression opened on Christmas Day in 1932. It was the creation of George Daynor, an Alaskan gold miner who hoped his surreal roadside attraction would lift the spirits of people beaten down by the Depression. After Daynor’s death in 1964, the city razed the site. While the Palace may have been the most bizarre, the state has long been a haven for peculiar, weird, wonderful, and wacky roadside attractions.
Lucy the Elephant in Margate, the state’s best-loved roadside attraction, is one of dozens of giant figures looming over the Garden State landscape. There’s the eighteen-foot-tall Miss Uniroyal on Route 168 in Blackwood, who sports a tight green skirt, red fingernails, and the mother of all come-hither looks on her face; The Man, the Paul Bunyan-like figure in front of Wilson’s Carpet and Furniture in Jersey City (seen in the opening credits of The Sopranos); Mr. Bill, on Route 561 in Winslow, a jug-eared, goofily-grinning figure named after the Saturday Night Live clay man who kept getting smacked around; the horned-helmeted Viking on Route 77 in Deer-field; and the smiling cowboy who greets visitors at the entrance of Cowtown on Route 40 outside Woodstown.
There’s the Statue of Liberty in Vineland. The one Lady Liberty indisputably in New Jersey, she is a twenty-foot-high statue in the backyard of a house on Main Road (Route 555). George Arbuckel, her builder, added ornamental lions, nymph-bedecked fountains, and messages written in the walkways. The display attracted gawkers from as far as New York and Philadelphia in the 1920s and 1930s.
Several mock pirate ships once sailed the state’s commercial strips; only one remains, on Route 30 in Absecon. A giant shoe—of the old woman who lived in the shoe fame—is a landmark at Fairy Tale Forest in Oak Ridge. New Jersey may lead the nation in hubcap dealers per square mile, but there is only one Hubcap Pyramid, a roadside wonder on Route 322 in Weymouth and known as far away as Great Britain and Germany. Display World, the self-billed World’s Largest Stone Museum— part landscape business, part playground—is on Spotswood-Englishtown Road in Monroe, Middlesex County.
Monumental roadside structures and displays, like the giant ark Kea Tawana single-handedly built in a Newark church parking lot in the 1980s, no longer dot the New Jersey landscape; you just can’t go out and build a 100-foot-long ark on your front lawn anymore. But roadside wonders still abound. And they’re free to look at. There’s Josephine Stapleton of Mays Landing, who maintains the state’s oddest year-round art gallery on her front lawn. Josephine takes gallon plastic jugs, fills them with dye-colored water, and makes multihued American flags, rainbows, Santa Clauses, and other colorful creations. Who could forget John Mihalchek’s Fabulous Fifty Acres, a rambling, ramshackle display of anarchic signs and billboards spread out along Route 206?
Roberts, Needham (b. c. 1900; d. Apr.18, 1949). Soldier. Needham Roberts was the son of the Rev. Norman Roberts of Trenton. He served in Harlem’s 369th Infantry Regiment, an African American regiment attached to the French army. On the night of May 13-14, 1918, he and one other black soldier, Sgt. Henry Johnson, routed a force of over twenty Germans who attacked their post near the Aisne River in France. Johnson and Roberts became the first Americans to receive the French Croix de Guerre. Roberts committed suicide in New York City in 1949.
Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital. In 1884, New Brunswick’s Hospital Aid Association, a group of women, was formed by Grace Wells in response to the need for hospital beds in central New Jersey. Simultaneously, the New Brunswick City Hospital was incorporated by civic leaders in 1884. The two groups joined efforts to establish a hospital in a rented house in 1885. The staff of six physicians treated fifteen patients in the first year, including the victims of three railroad accidents. An "outdoor” (outpatient) department was added in 1888. Wells later funded the fifteen-bed John Wells Memorial Hospital, which opened in 1889 at the site of the present hospital. The Middlesex Pavilion, with forty beds, opened in 1916 and the name was changed to Middlesex General Hospital. The hospital continued to expand, becoming the primary teaching hospital for the University of Medicine and Dentistry-Rutgers Medical School in 1977. The hospital and medical school were renamed for Robert Wood Johnson in 1986. The Medical Education Building (1982) houses faculty, teaching, and research facilities. Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital is a major academic center of the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, offering specialized programs such as organ transplantation and advanced cancer treatment at the Cancer Institute of New Jersey. It is a state-designated trauma center. The Bristol-Myers Squibb Children’s Hospital opened there in 2001.
Robeson, Paul (b. Apr. 9, 1898; d. Jan. 23, 1976). Singer, actor, athlete, and political activist. Possessing an extraordinary capacity to excel in many fields, Paul Robeson is arguably New Jersey’s most illustrious native. He was the fifth and last child of the Rev. William Drew Robeson, pastor of Princeton’s Witherspoon Street Presbyterian Church at the time of Paul’s birth, and Louisa Bustill Robeson, a former schoolteacher. Because Robeson’s mother died in a fire in the Robe-son home when he was not yet six, he was essentially raised by his father, whom he idolized and who had the greatest influence on shaping his character. Following his father’s dismissal from his church in 1903, the Robeson family moved to Westfield in 1907 and three years later to Somerville. In both communities Robeson’s father served as the pastor of an African Methodist Episcopal Zion (AMEZ) church.
Paul Robeson in his Rutgers University football uniform.
It was at Somerville High School that Robeson first excelled both athletically and academically. This was repeated at Rutgers University, which he entered in 1915 on an academic scholarship, and where he was the only black student. He became a Phi Beta Kappa scholar and the class valedictorian and won letters in four sports, becoming Rutgers’s first All-American football player. He graduated from Columbia University Law School in 1923, but had trouble finding a position. He launched a career as a dramatic actor, one that would see him star between 1924 and i960 in a number of plays, including The Emperor Jones and Othello, his signature role. In 1924 Robeson appeared in Oscar Micheaux’s silent movie Body and Soul; he was featured in nine feature films between 1933 and 1942. Robeson’s greatest artistic mark, however, was using his rich bass-baritone voice to sing Negro spirituals, and eventually the folk songs of other ethnic and national groups and the songs of workers. While living in London during the i930s his concert singing fused with his emergence as a political activist, for it was during this period that he came to embrace three major causes: Marxist socialism, the African liberation struggle against European colonialism, and the fight against racial discrimination and bigotry in America.
Robeson returned to the United States in 1939 and dug deeper into political activism. His refusal to compromise his political beliefs led during the Cold War to his persecution by the U.S. government, a rapid decline in his popularity in the states, and, in 1950, to the revocation of his passport. With the return of his passport in 1958, after having sued the federal government, Robeson moved to London and began to travel extensively, mainly throughout Europe. By 1961, his health had begun to fail, and he spent the next several years receiving medical treatment in London and then East Berlin. He returned to New York City in 1963 very much a broken man physically and retired from public life. In late 1965, following the death of Eslanda Goode Robeson, his wife of forty-four years, he moved to the Philadelphia home of Marian, his only sister. Here he spent his last eleven years, becoming, with the exception of cherished contact with a few very close friends, essentially a recluse.
Jackie Robinson.
Robinson, Jackie (b. Jan. 31, 1919; d.Oct. 24, 1972). Baseball player. Born in Cairo, Georgia, Jack Roosevelt Robinson was reared in Pasadena, California, and excelled as a student-athlete at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). After serving in the army during World War II, Robinson joined the Negro National League’s Kansas City Monarchs. Desirous of breaking baseball’s color barrier, Branch Rickey, the Brooklyn Dodgers’ general manager, signed Robinson and assigned him to the Montreal Royals of the International League. On April i8, i946, 25,000 fans witnessed Robinson’s historic debut against the Jersey City Giants at Roosevelt Stadium. With this act, and his subsequent distinguished career with the Dodgers, Robinson helped to usher in the modern civil rights era in sports.
Robinson V. Cahill. In 1973 the New Jersey Supreme Court held that the state’s system of financing public education violated the "thorough and efficient” education clause of the state constitution. At that time funding for public schools was derived from local property taxes and state and federal aid. In the Robinson v. Cahill decision the court found that local property taxes accounted for 67 percent of the public schools’ operating expenses and state aid for only 28 percent. While the court discussed equal protection violations, it hesitated to decide the public school funding issue based upon either the federal or state equal protection clauses. The justices had difficulty in concluding that wealth is a "suspect classification" and education is a "fundamental right." Prior to this decision, the U.S. Supreme Court had decided that the funding of public schools by local property taxes did not violate the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution. Instead, the New Jersey Supreme Court relied upon a provision of the New Jersey constitution that provided "for the maintenance and support of a thorough and efficient system of free public schools for the instruction of all the children in the State between the ages of five and eighteen years.”
The court emphasized that this constitutional provision was meant to ensure equal educational opportunity for children. Although the court doubted that the thorough and efficient system of schools required by the constitution could be met by relying upon local property taxes, it did not prohibit the state from imposing this obligation upon local government—provided the result met what the constitution commanded. The court found that the quality of educational opportunity did depend upon the dollar input per pupil, but recognized that the "equality of dollar input will not assure equality in educational results."
In deference to the doctrine of separation of powers, the court decided not to intervene unless the legislature failed to act by December 31, 1974. Subsequent legislative action failed to satisfy the court, which was later forced to revisit the funding of public education in five additional Robinson v. Cahill opinions. These decisions ultimately forced the legislature to adopt a state income tax in 1976 for the full funding of the public school financing law in conformance with constitutional requirements. In 1985, the court was compelled to revisit the funding of public schools in Abbott v. Burke. Despite legislation passed in 2000, the means of funding public schools remains in dispute.
Rochelle Park. 1-square-mile borough in Bergen County. The community was originally known as New Rochelle, part of New Barbadoes Township, until the Rochelle Park name was put on the new railroad station in i870. A year later, in i87i, the community was included in the newly created Midland Township along with Oradell, River Edge, New Milford, Maywood, and Paramus. After four of these settlements became independent boroughs in i894, Midland Township contained only Paramus and Rochelle Park. In 1922, the Midland Township name disappeared completely when Paramus split off from the town and its only remnant, Rochelle Park, incorporated as Rochelle Park Township.
Rochelle Park was a semi-rural community until World War II. After the war, Rochelle Park benefited from the Garden State Parkway, Routes i7 and 80, and the Garden State Plaza shopping mall in neighboring Paramus. The community gained single-family homes, garden apartments, and residents, and increased in population from 2,5ii in i940 to a peak of 6,380 in i970. Rochelle Park remains a residential community today. In i990, 26 percent of the population was over sixty-five years old. In 2000, the population of 5,528 was 90 percent white and 6 percent Asian. The median household income in 2000 was $60,818.
Rock, John Stewart (b. Oct. 13, 1825;d. Dec. 3, 1866). Teacher, dentist, physician, lawyer, and political activist. John Stewart Rock was born in Salem and taught school there while studying dentistry and lobbying for the enfranchisement of African Americans. Moving to Camden, he practiced dentistry in Philadelphia, taught at the Apprentice High School, and graduated from the American Medical College. On August 17, i852, he marred Catharine Bowers. The couple moved to Boston, where Rock became a lawyer and eloquent orator for African American causes. He was the first black lawyer to be admitted to practice before the Supreme Court of the United States on February i, i865 and was the first to be received and introduced on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives.
Rock-a-Bye Baby Railroad. A spur of the Rockaway Valley line running between Whitehouse and Watnong (near Speedwell in Morristown), the Rock-a-Bye Baby Railroad was twenty-five miles in length, and a working line for exactly that many years starting in i888. Its mission was to connect rural Hunterdon County with Morristown in order to transport Tewksbury Township’s peach crop. The Peapack crop alone could reach 120,000 baskets, half of which was lost to bruising when carried by horse-drawn wagons. The freight and passenger train also transported the yield from lime kilns, gristmills, and lumber tracts. Commencing at Whitehouse, the line was never completed beyond Speedwell Lake in Morris Township. Early passengers provided the colorful nickname after experiencing the side-to-side rocking motion resulting from cheap construction and a crude roadbed. Cut corners also caused formidable maintenance problems and, ultimately, bankruptcy. Deemed unsafe and dangerous, the line closed in 1913.
Rockaway Borough. 2.09-square-mile borough in Morris County. Now primarily a residential and lake resort community, Rockaway was settled by the Dutch in i7i5, and in i730 mining and iron ore refining began there. Many forges operated along the Rockaway River, their works fueled by local forests. So essential was the industry to the American Revolution that the legislature exempted from military service the seventy-five men working at the Hibernia and Mount Hope mines. When the Morris Canal opened in 1830, the mines began to import anthracite coal from Easton, Pennsylvania, to fuel the forges, and to ship out the ore and finished iron by barge. By i900, railroads replaced the canal, but the discovery of the Mesabi Range in Minnesota in 1876 had already signaled the decline of New Jersey’s mining industry.
Initially part of the larger township, Rockaway Borough was incorporated in i894, and is now a wooded suburbia with steep hills, quaint village streets, and small businesses. Rockaway Townsquare Mall and the nearby Picatinny Arsenal are major employers. In 2000, the population of 6,473 was 88 percent white and 6 percent Asian. The median household income in 2000 was $6i,002.
