INTERVIEW WITH JUNE AND GEORGE MCKINNELL – JULY 15, 2000
June and George McKinnell, October 1947
The following interview with the McKinnells was organized and produced by Margaret (Marge) Davidson and Thomas (Tim) Timpson.
GEORGE MCKINNELL – EARLY YEARS
Marge Davidson: Tell us where and when you were born.
George McKinnell: I was born in Orange Memorial Hospital, July 11, 1924. We lived in Maplewood at the time. In 1925 my parents came up on the mountain and bought a two-room shack that was from people by the name of Mary Sykes and Florence Babbitt and James Lorke. They had squatters there, people by the name of Lock Burnetts, I think it was. He had a peg leg, and she would chase him around the place with a butcher knife, and what have you.
Of course, they started immediately to clean up the place. I understand from Mom that there were 22 wagon loads of debris and garbage and opium bottles, everything they took down to a dump behind the property which Mayo’s bought. The garbage dump was down behind their property.
Subsequently they built quite a large house in that day and age, there was like five or six bedrooms, two baths, and a half bath downstairs. And, of course, in the early years there was no electricity or telephone there when they first moved up the hill. They had a Delco generator in the garage to create electricity and then they got the telephone.
There was that Transcontinental Telephone Cable line that came across, halfway between Mount Cedar Farm and our place called Glen Carin Farm, that was the name of our place. And then, of course, the electricity came when my father bought the right-of-way from … so, they paid for the power line from Route 24 at the Well Sweep Antique Shop, there on the corner of Ironia Road and Route 24, all the way up the mountain. I think the cost was around $3,500 back in ’30, ’31. Of course, subsequently they got all their money back, I understand, because anyone that took off from that line had to pay like Backers, the Forsythes, and then there were the McCellans and, of course, J.J. Thomas and Percy Jones, and on up the mountain. Eventually they got their money back from putting in that power line.
But going back, before that, why they bought up on Ironia Road and the backwoods in 1925 was because my great uncle, who I am named after, George B. Spearin Lungren would summer in Mendham at the turn of the century. He summered in that brand new mansion, he would rent that mansion off Prospect Street [Mendham Borough] where Miss Williams lived for many years and he rented that up until 1910, 1911. And then he bought Mount Cedar Farm, The Seeing Eye place in 1912 and his sister, Alice Lungren, my grandmother, was put in charge of taking care of the farm. Of course, he bought 450 acres I think which included Buttermilk Falls and all that land that The Seeing Eye developed, way in the back for the breeding farm, and across the street where the well was.
The old farmhouse was moved down, we moved it down across the road, where that horse farm is, that was the original. Grandma Lungren sold that property to Mr. Unguliter, who was a New York City banker and bond dealer, very wealthy, in 1934. And then my grandmother built the house beyond Preston’s there, right down by the brook where Burnett bought [it] from her and she built that in ’34, ’35, in that timeframe, that house there.
I could go into the history on that if you would like me, too. There was a man by the name of Frank Burnett who helped my father build our place and also helped Grandma Lungren build her house up there. He was sort of a half crack carpenter. He would get his paycheck, and he would spend it all down at the Black Horse or Sammy’s and he’d be crawling back up the hill maybe four days later.
Tim Timpson: This is which here?
George McKinnell: Frank Burnett.
Tim Timpson: In what year?
George McKinnell: Well, that would have been back in … my mother and father started building their place – the main center and two rooms are still there, intact, they built out around it all the house.
Florence McKinnell on left with Bob on lap.
George is in kiddy-cart. Aunt Annette Preston
on right with Helen and Elyse (cousins) at
the Preston home just past Mt. Cedar Farm.
Marge Davidson: But this house is on the left side, going up there.
George McKinnell: Yes, the left side just beyond Burnett Road, the old house where Carlins live now. Mom sold to Antone Dupuis in 1955 and then I don’t know when Dupuis sold to the Carlins, but it’s only been the three owners.
Marge Davidson: Only been the three owners?
George McKinnell: Only three owners, all these years from 1925 on.
Marge Davidson: And did that Burnett, is that how we got Burnett Road?
FARMING
George McKinnell: Well, yes. There were Burnetts that lived down on the right-hand side down beyond that development road that goes in there now. There was an old farm and barn back in there. We used to farm that property there. I can remember planting corn with the old corn planter; you push it down in the ground and pull it apart and move on and push it down in the ground and pull it apart for the seed to come out.
Marge Davidson: Was corn the main thing you grew up there?
George McKinnell: Well, actually our farm was more of a chicken farm originally. We had a 150-foot-long chicken coop, one story. Then back in 1934, my dad built a two-story chicken coop that must have been 20-25 feet wide, at least, 150 feet long, and it contained all individually trapped laying hens. Of course, he sold eggs down in the city, in the Oranges, Maplewood, that area. He had quite an egg route.
In the spring of 1935, it burned down and, of course, the nearest fire department, there was no Ralston Fire Department, was Mendham. There was no water, they didn’t have tank trucks. We were very fortunate that they saved the carpenter shop and the 150-foot building, which was not more than 150 feet away, maybe 100 feet away. Two brooder coops burned up in that fire. The barn, the carpenter shop, and the one-story chicken coop, why they were burned pretty badly but it was all they could do to save it.
They had to pump water from across the street. There was a shallow well that Mom used when I built her house in 1954 where Gary Lewis lives now. Of course they would pump it dry, and then they would have to wait 15 minutes for it to fill up again in order to get enough water to pump again. That was a problem, no water.
Marge Davidson: Were the chickens in there? Did the chickens get roasted?
George McKinnell: They all got roasted. And they say, they figure that the fire was started by a kerosene brooder. I remember, you know, coming home from school that night just amazed to see it all gone. Of course, they didn’t have any insurance on that building. Back in 1935, a loss of that magnitude was very, very disastrous. We probably had insurance on the house, nothing on the outbuildings.
Tim Timpson: Can we spend a moment on your father’s egg business? He went down to the Oranges. How did he get the eggs to the Oranges?
George McKinnell: Well, he had a sort of an old pick-up truck. I remember going down with him once in a while on the egg route on a Saturday.
June McKinnell: You probably had to go at least once a week.
Marge Davidson: Did you sell these to individuals, or did you take them to a market?
George McKinnell: It was individuals and there were some stores. But he worked also. Well, basically up until that time he worked on the place because he really did most all the building of the buildings. We had that one man, Frank Burnett, who helped him build all these buildings, the house, the carpenter shop, the long chicken coop, and the two-story chicken coop. He basically was on the farm working.
And then, my mother had a slight income, a small income, and that created the money to be able to stay there and build all these buildings at that time in the depression. And then it ran out, of course, the company went bankrupt, like everything else went bankrupt.
Marge Davidson: She was an employee of that company?
George McKinnell: No, she was part-owner of that company.
Tim Timpson: What company was that?
George McKinnell: Well, this was my great-uncle’s company, Spearin, Preston and Burrows. It is still in business in New York City.
Marge Davidson: What did they do?
George McKinnell: Well, they’re a dredging and dry dock company. They also do it, now. They have a complete sole franchise in New York State and New Jersey, I think Pennsylvania also, for these broken water mains, or sewer lines. They can go down the manhole and run this special rubberized piping, tubing, through and they can get it up and heat it and form a liner in those … they do a tremendous business in that field. They also do these underground underwater installations of cables under the river, the East River, or the Hudson River, I don’t know, maybe other rivers, too, where they have to build coffer dams and the pipe has to be down 10 or 20 feet below the river bottom> They still do all that.
Tim Timpson: And this is what they were doing in 1935?
George McKinnell: I don’t know. They probably weren’t doing the sealing of the pipes in ’35 but they were doing the piers and probably the coffer dams.
Tim Timpson: The other question I had, very quickly, is how many eggs are we talking about?
George McKinnell: Too many. We also sold poultry and later on we, well back about in ’36, we hired a man by the name of Charles Baker, and he helped build this fire house right here. He was an original member of the fire company here [Ralston Engine Company No. 1].
June McKinnell: Charlie Baker.
George McKinnell: He was sort of the chicken foreman there for my father and family. And subsequently he worked at Picatinny Arsenal during the war, and he built the chicken coops up at Unguliters. The Unguliters went into the chicken business there, too, before the war.
He had all those big buildings that we converted into The Seeing Eye Dog complex there. I worked on all that with my father-in-law in 1948, when we started. Actually, The Seeing Eye bought Unguliters farm, Mount Cedar Farm, my grandmother’s place, probably in 1946. The Seeing Eye bought that farm and then, of course, Maw McKinnell [construction company with brother-in-law], we did all that work for thirty-five years or more there for The Seeing Eye and also down at Washington Valley Road and over in Whippany, too. We worked over there.
Marge Davidson: Well, this seemed to be an egg producing enclave out here.
George McKinnell: Well, the biggest one around here was Birch over on Talmage Road. They hauled eggs in by the truckloads every week from Ohio, a wholesaler, he was a wholesaler of eggs all around. He supplied New York and all around.
Tim Timpson: You were rather happier; you had your own delivery rather than sell to …
George McKinnell: After the disastrous fire, I would say as I recall now, we didn’t sell that many eggs after that. It was mostly we raised poulets, and we would dress and clean the chickens and sell them. We also, as I was coming back when I started mentioning Mr. Baker, why we raised pigs. We had quite a sausage route there in the late thirties, around the Mendhams, we sold … Mom had a special recipe for sausage.
Marge Davidson: Did she make sausage?
George McKinnell: Yes. We had cows on the farm there, too. I remember having to milk cows by hand, of course, there was no other way at that time. We never grew that much hay, we grew some, but our land was not that great up there on the mountain. It was a lot of woodland, very rocky. I can remember taking stones, rocks off the fields there in the front. We had a stone boat, and we used to take them down in the low end where the old Fordson tractors we had and just dump them down in the woods there. I have some wonderful pictures of the old place here. Back in the thirties you could look down from the front of the house and see the whole town of Mendham. You can’t even see Hilltop church steeple now.
View from rear yard of McKinnell house in 1936.
Now with trees grown, view of even the Hilltop
Church steeple is obscured.
Marge Davidson: This is the front of the house.
George McKinnell: That’s in front of our house. And now this is a picture of the front of the house.
McKinnell farmhouse (front) on Ironia Rd.
probably taken the winter of 1936 before
the bus garage was added to carpenter shop.
June McKinnell: When did they go into the turkey business?
George McKinnell: Oh, that’s right, that was Charlie’s idea. Yes, we went into the turkey business, too. The turkeys had to be up on wire cages because they had to be separated from chickens. The one contaminated the other. So, you couldn’t have …
Tim Timpson: This is the school bus, I see.
Florence McKinnell standing beside
the first school bus on the mountain.
1930
George McKinnell: Yes. I have a picture of the first school bus and the second one. This is the rear of the house. I have written on all the pictures here what we are talking about.
McKinnell house. Rear view of flower gardens
and lawn from the top of the chicken coop.
Path leads to vegetable garden.
George McKinnell: This is Buttermilk Falls back in 1920 or so. This is my mother out on a rock there when she was a young gal.
Florence McKinnell at Buttermilk Falls
about 1920
Tim Timpson: Doesn’t that Falls look smaller than it is today?
Marge Davidson: Yes, it does. I gather that Buttermilk Falls was really a pretty exciting place.
George McKinnell: Well, at one time, when Unguliters owned the place he would have all those big wigs out from New York on weekends in the summertime, in particular, not in the wintertime, so much. We would see these chauffeur driven limousines go by and here we just probably had an old Essex or Studebaker in the backyard, ten years old, or something.
But he had like I can’t think of all the people’s names, but Jimmy Walker was one of them, I remember, he would have out quite often. And of course, the Mayor of New York at that time, I don’t know, maybe he was Jimmy Walker. And he had a dance platform built over the Falls.
Marge Davidson: Oh, how exciting!
George McKinnell: He had a dance platform, they used to have a band, big shindigs up there all the time, in the summertime. He really …
Marge Davidson: Well, for the natives, this must have been …
PRIMARY SCHOOL – RALSTON (THROUGH 4TH GRADE)
George McKinnell: Now, okay, naturally I went to the Ralston School, and it was just a one-room schoolhouse. There was a lady by the name of Miss Stringer who was the first teacher, my teacher, and she married Lyle Backer, which would have been Joe Backer’s sister, up by Ironia Road, the Backer family where Fred Backer still lives on Ironia Road there. The Ralston School was just a one room schoolhouse that had a big pot belly coal stove in the rear of the room there.
School House, Ralston, N.J.
There were four grades: one row of seats for each grade. Of course, a couple of the grades, the grade before me, as I recall, there were only two students and that was Jim Backer on Roxiticus Road, and Rose DeMarco who lived over on the bend beyond Whitney’s where the Taylors lived. And then in my class, I was the only boy, and I had four girls – we had the largest class, there were five in our class. There was a Dot McAuliffe, Geraldine Nix, Hazel Blaine, and Betty Colicchio. Betty Glicko lived in the house just back of where the Fischers live in the old one room schoolhouse back up there. Her father worked for St. John the Baptist School. Dot McAuliffe, her father was the caretaker over at the Winston estate, over on Roxiticus Road, Geraldine Nix, I don’t know what her family did, but she lived in that little house right opposite Ralston Acres, that road that goes in the top of the Ralston Hill here, the house that is real close to the road, where she lived there. I don’t know where Hazel Blaine lived.
Marge Davidson: How did you get to school?
George McKinnell: Well, my mother and father had the bus route up in the mountain there. I think they contracted for the route back in 1929.
June McKinnell: I don’t find a picture of the old school bus.
Tim Timpson: He already gave it to me. Here.
June McKinnell: This is the one.
George McKinnell: No, that’s an older one there. This I think is the first school bus.
June McKinnell: Oh, I know that. Because I rode on one from Corey Lane which was run by Casey & Wallie Little where the sides rolled down in the wintertime, in the summer they rolled them up. You sat on a long board seat. That’s what I was looking for. We have a picture of it somewhere.
George McKinnell: We have albums down in Florida, that’s the problem, some of the old albums are down there.
Tim Timpson: Madeline Post was telling me, one time, in the snow that they would bring out the horse and sleigh.
George McKinnell: Well, there is a picture of a horse and sleigh in this group here, too, I brought. But I think they were the first ones to have a school bus route up on the mountain. Well, because I was the oldest, and of course they needed the school bus route to bring me to school and, subsequently, there was Elyse and Helen Preston and my brother Bob. Elyse and Helen Preston and Harry are first cousins, to me. Helen Preston Martino is a first cousin to me.
Marge Davidson: Was Harry her brother?
George McKinnell: Yes, but he was much younger. He is out in California. And then there would have been Jean Swain, eventually, and Bob Snedaker, my mother would have picked up the Fornaros on Route 24 there. There was a family down where Roessler lived where we used to have to pick them up, and …
June McKinnell: De Vores?
George McKinnell: Yes, the De Vores, that would have been after me. But yes. And there were people eventually there was oh, I can’t think of his name, he became a doctor, lived on up behind the Pine Hill Lodge, there.
Marge Davidson: Is that what we call Meadowwood? [Now owned by Mendham Township]
ELEMENTARY SCHOOL – MENDHAM BOROUGH (5TH THROUGH 8TH)
George McKinnell: Yes, beyond Meadow Wood, up on the hill. But then, of course, after the fourth grade we went to Mendham Borough School on Hilltop Road. There was just the front part of that school, they’ve added additions since. We went on a bus; we were dropped off at the center of Ralston here. We would go into the old post office, which is the historical building, and the museum now. And the lady, Miss Willet whatever her name, was the postmistress and we would wait for Babbitt to come because he had the route at that time down Roxiticus Road to Winstons, and he would pick us up in the center of Ralston here. That bus was just two boards on either side with a canvass hanging down on the side and bitter cold in the winter, no heat, nothing; and, of course, fifth grade on up through eighth grade.
And then the Mendham people had the option to go, well they stayed in Mendham [Borough] for ninth grade, but the Township residents, we went to Morristown High School from the ninth grade on. Of course, that was a long trip, and the bus only came as far as Ralston to pick us up. So, we had to walk from our place up on the mountain two miles to Ralston to catch the bus at 7:30 a.m. And then it was probably a ten- or fifteen-mile trip because we went through Tempe Wick Road to Washington Corners there across Corey Lane down into Brookside and then out through the valley and over to Sussex Turnpike and down Sussex Turnpike to the high school. It was forever before we got to the high school.
Marge Davidson: In the winter that must have been a real trip!
Mom’s school bus
purchased in 1935.
George McKinnell: Oh, yes, indeed. Well, Mom couldn’t take us down to Ralston because she had her own school bus route to take, 15 minutes after we started walking, I guess. So, we didn’t mind it. It was part of our day’s work. In the evening if we came home directly from the high school, the elementary school bus would wait for us and we had a ride home, which would have been going up Route 24, past Fornaros, and then Old Mill Road back and all the way over to South Road, which is in back over to the corner where Ironia Road comes in from South Road and back home. So, it was a long day. If I, and I did belong to a couple different clubs – the Spanish Club and the Pan American Club, and in the senior year I guess I belonged to the Physics Club – any time I did that, you know, you walked up to the corner of Washington Street and High Street there and you thumbed a ride. And as far as you got a ride would be to the Well Sweep Antique Shop, and then you had to walk the rest of the way up the hill. If you were lucky, if you had one car pass you they would stop and pick you up.
Marge Davidson: Yes. We’ve been told by other people that you stood on that corner, and you would get a ride to Mendham.
George McKinnell: Oh, yes. That was no problem. Even June used too …
June McKinnell: We were allowed to do that, too, back in those days. The girls could also stand on the corner and get picked up and brought home with people you knew.
George McKinnell: I can remember for income, my parents, particularly my mother, after my father died in 1937, we kept boarders to supplement the income. Because you were still in the depression, in the summertime, well she kept them anytime they would come out. Miss Clark would come out at around Christmas time and different holidays, and then there were three or four years back in the late thirties that we rented the whole house to people by the name of Bagleys from Montclair.
We had converted three of the brooder coops, had moved them up into the woods, and the one was a combination of two brooder coops, and they were good size, one was a bedroom and then they made a kitchen in between and the other part was a living room and then they made a bathroom out back. That was the big one, which I think is still there. The other two have been torn down – one was way up further up the hill on the back of that wooded section there and that was just a bedroom where Mr. Baker slept. There was a porch, screened-in porch there, it was quite nice up there and there was a single converted to a bedroom on over beyond the lower unit and that was where we probably slept most of the time, the boys.
Also, even when the Bagleys were there, we had a tremendous, large vegetable garden, it must have been an acre. My father put up this high chain-link fence, it must have been 10 or 12 feet high, fencing that came from Maplewood, some place from around a school or cemetery, but he brought it all up and put it around the garden. We had the most beautiful garden, and we had a lot of fruit bushes like gooseberries, raspberries, currants, naturally we had strawberries, but we also grew tremendous amount of food. Under the carpenter shop was a root cellar, a cold cellar. We would can fruit and vegetables like I can’t believe. I know for a fact we canned 150-quart jars of beans, 100 quarts of tomatoes, all stewed up sauce, they all had to be pre-cooked before you put them into jars, blanch them, and then we had delicacies like maybe a dozen pints of raspberries. But we had beets, I remember, carrots, we would put down and even tomatoes we would wrap in paper and put them down there in the dark. They would last until January and …
June McKinnell: You grew all your food.
George McKinnell: Basically, all the food and our meat.
Marge Davidson: Did you have any trouble with the deer?
George McKinnell: Not then, not really then. I don’t know why they felt they needed the high fence maybe it was just available. Also, between the house and the big vegetable garden we had a beautiful formal flower garden. There was a round circle in the center, and paths that led out … It was all rocks around it, and it was so beautiful and the long beds where iris of all different colors. Quite a few of the varieties of iris came from the Charles Q. Garrabrant house, they were good friends of the Garrabrant’s, that’s the house on the corner of Prospect Street, right opposite the Hilltop church cemetery, that one there. They would swap iris for some other kind of flowers.
June McKinnell: That’s called barter, George.
George McKinnell: And then they had a yellow primrose that I don’t find anymore. It was a beautiful large yellow primrose, and the stems were all kinds of in place of where we had the thorn every inch or something, there might have 15 or 20 thorns in that same area, they weren’t as heavy and hard as the thorns on a regular rose bush.
Marge Davidson: I think I know what bush …
George McKinnell: And then next to that we had a long grape arbor with grapes. I don’t think we ever had a large production of grapes, but I do know we did have some peach trees, we had a plum tree on the way out to the chicken coop. The chicken coop, when we had boarders in the summertime, we had converted that first third of the chicken coop into rooms, and that’s where we slept, mom and ourselves. Mr. Baker always had a room up in the house.
June McKinnell: He kept tabs on what was going on with the boarders.
George McKinnell: We had three or four rooms out there and we had a make-shift toilet room there, a basin, I guess we had a tub out there, too. We had a bathroom. It wouldn’t have passed the sewerage code nowadays, that’s for sure!
Tim Timpson: What year are we talking about now, George?
George McKinnell: I would say it was in the thirties, definitely.
June McKinnell: In the forties, when I met you.
WORLD WAR II – PACIFIC THEATER
George McKinnell: In the forties, too? See, I went into the service July 10, 1942, and I was discharged October 22, 1945.
Marge Davidson: You were out of high school just a little while?
George McKinnell: Yes. I joined the Navy, actually I joined the day before I was 18, so I was in the regular Navy until I was 21 and then I did not sign [up for the] Reserves so I was able to get out when I had the points.
Tim Timpson: Where were you stationed?
George McKinnell: In the Navy I was, well I first went to Newport, Rhode Island to boot camp. Then I went to Machinist Mate School in Wentworth Institute in Boston, three months or more. And then I went to York Refrigeration School in York, Pennsylvania and then I was shipped over first-class Pullman to San Pedro, California – near Los Angeles, Long Beach. In February of 1943 I was assigned to, I was plank owner on a ship called the USS Doyen (APA 1). We finally got to sea after all the shake down and all the finishing touches on the ship, it was an attack transport. We had shake down cruises in April and May, etc., and training of troops.
We finally left for Kiska [in the Aleutian Islands] in July of 1943 and, of course, it was more a scare of torpedo wakes that we ran into on the way than there was in the invasion because the Japs had gone off the backside of the island when we came on this side.
Then we came back to Pearl, we made a quick trip to the United States, we went back to Pearl, and then we took a trip by ourselves from Pearl all the way down to New Zealand and that’s when they were still in New Hebrides, and Guadalcanal fighting.
I can remember our commander, our ship captain, calling dress white inspection when we were probably not more than a hundred miles from New Hebrides and you could imagine the reflection of all those whites, on a sunny day, but we were down in New Zealand for ten days picking up the fourth marines and equipment and everything and came back with the admiral to the Hebrides and, of course, he got on a better ship than ours.
We were in the invasion of Tarawa, and that was a brutal invasion, there. We had LCDPs and landed troops on the island and, of course, some of them, quite a few of them got hung up on the coral. They misjudged the tides, never given it any thought, I guess, but, so we went back.
We were a hospital ship then going back to Pearl and I think we went on back to the States again because we were a faster transport than most of them. We were a twin- screw ship and we could travel up to speeds of 19 knots. By then I was a Machinist Mate Second Class and I was a throttleman abroad ship, so I was always down in the engine room on my watches. You know, you were on floor for six, back on four again, just a continuation rotation. You didn’t do much else but sleep and stand watch and eat. And then we went back to Pearl, and we had maneuvers with troops, and what have you around Maui and down the island of Hawaii. We used to come into Hilo and the pier there was only one ship on each side, it was only to take care of two ships. One street down this town of Hilo, it was not much there. But then we went to the Marshalls, then we came back after that.
We got set up again, I guess we had some ship repairs, a couple of times, but anyway we went back to Saipan and then we were in that initial invasion there, and then we came back and with a quick trip back and reloaded and went back right out again. We were in the initial invasion of Guam. It was only about three weeks, in between, and we managed to be in both of them.
And then we came back and I think we were overhauled again and then we went down and did maneuvers in New Guinea, Hollandia, the biggest town, and then we did maneuvers and exercises down there with troops, and what have you, and then we were in Leyte, and then we went back to Lusuang, then we came back. There were four of us that got off the ship down in a little island called Bougainville, near Guadalcanal and then I waited there until a merchant ship finally came through and we came back to San Francisco.
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
George McKinnell: We had a shallow well in front of the dining room of the house, right next to it. That finally must have gone dry and in the early thirties when they needed more water for the chickens, and everything, probably ’33, ’34 they drove a well and this was used up. They used the divine divider rod or whatever to find water, and where it bent, they would say that’s the place. Well, this was up in back of the first chicken coop and they built this big fancy well house there and this company, I think it was Gould, even way back then, went down some 400-some-odd feet and never struck water. And that was a lot of money back then to waste, no water. He felt so sorry for my parents that he drilled a second well right nearby, and I think he went down over 300 feet, and he gave up and charged nothing for that well.
But, low and behold, someone had told them after drilling all this, well, there used to a spring across the road, about 150 to 200 feet down in the field. And, low and behold, they went down there and sure enough there was an old stone well, they cleaned it up, and they had to dig a ditch all the way up to the road, and they put the pump house right there just before crossing the road. You had to come over, cross the road, to the house which was another 150 feet probably and had the pump house right on the low side of the road. We had all the water we wanted. All the water we needed. And that’s the well that mom tapped into and used when she built, or I built, her house in ’54 across the street where, as I said, Gary Lewis now lives.
June McKinnell: Is that still the source of water for Carlin’s house?
George McKinnell: I don’t think so. I think they found or drilled another well. That is not their source of water anymore. That had to, I don’t know what happened there, whether Mom had to drill another well for Dupuis or what that situation was.
June McKinnell: I do remember them carrying water from Percy’s at times.
CAMPING IN CANADA
George McKinnell: Then also, we took a camping trip, would you believe? Dad was Canadian, he became an American citizen back in the ’20’s before he got married. He was born north of Calgary, and that was a Kings grant. My grandfather and his three brothers all had Kings grants north of Calgary, and so we went back to … they had moved to Vancouver Island, sold out when there was no longer open range horse farming.
So, in 1929 Dad took Mom back to meet his parents on Vancouver Island. We bought the first Touring Car, a 1929 touring car that Gunther’s sold, brand new Touring Car. It had the old wickers on the side running boards and the tires were strapped on the back. There were the four of us, Mom, and Dad, myself, and Bob. Bob would have been three, four years old. I would have been six. So, you can imagine traveling all the way across the country in 1929 with no camp sites except along the road, just pitching a tent along, hooking it to the car. There is a picture in there. Right in here. These are pictures of the trip. There’s the old car, there’s the set up at the picnic table. And I know I got sick in Banff, the Lake Louise area in Canada, and they went up to the sanatorium there, that big mammoth sanatorium in Banff. I guess I was only there two days, and it was too expensive, they had to get me out of there.
Crossing a river by ferry on trip
to Banff, Canada (l-r George, Bob, Florence)
Probably 1932 or 1933.
George & Bob McKinnell on trip
to Banff, Canada about 1932 or 1933
Tim Timpson: Can you explain this one picture? We have a tent here. Is this part of the car, a tent device or something you packed?
Making camp at Pontecello en route to
Banff, Canada about 1932 or 1933.
George McKinnell: No, it was something we packed, and I guess draped over the side of the car to hold it there in place. I think that’s a rope from the tent tied to the front bumper.
Tim Timpson: And the table, that was by the side of the road, or did you take that with you, too?
George McKinnell: No, no we didn’t have the table. That must have been alongside the road. Now this looks like we’re crossing a ferry, there’s my father with the two of us on the front running board.
Marge Davidson: This must have been a real exciting venture!
George McKinnell: And that’s me and that’s my brother Robert, Robert Alfred. “Alfie” they used to call him, and he goes by the name of Bob now.
Marge Davidson: How many days were you on the road?
George McKinnell: Oh, I think that trip must have been two months, I don’t recall exactly. There’s Mom and the two of us here on the ferry. But it was a two-door sedan, it looked like it had a shade there and wickers on the running board, that’s where you kept the luggage. And the tires are all stacked on the back, probably two or three tires. But on that trip my father got run over by another car. He was changing a tire, and somebody ran over him. He got a broken back out of the deal.
BOY SCOUTS – NATIONAL TROOP 1 & GREEN BAR BILL HILLCOURT
Tim Timpson: Can we talk very quickly about the Boy Scouts?
George McKinnell: Sure. Well, I joined, I wasn’t the very first original member in the spring of 1936, but I joined in the summer of 1936, and I went for a few days. I did not go the full term to the first summer camp at Schiff Scout Reservation. Our summer camp was Camp Gilmore.
We had a special campsite there, Camp Gilmore, and of course Bill Hillcourt, our scoutmaster, who was the writer for Boys Life Magazine for 40/50 years, I don’t know how long, maybe all his life, had special privileges. He lived right there in the Sheep Cottage, right by the sheep barn on the Schiff Scout Reservation. Of course, we had special privileges of using the lake and we had a special campsite. We had all kinds of special privileges. And then, of course, Bill was a very determined, gutsy man. Anything we did, we had to do first-class and so time came around for the 1937 Jamboree, the first national jamboree in the United States in Washington, D.C. why we had to go for a whole troop. We had to go as a whole troop, or nobody went. So, we were one of three troops in the United States that went as a full troop. You know, most troops were made up of a whole council, they would select the top leaders in the different troops and go to the jamboree, but we went as a whole troop.
June McKinnell: The mothers in town made their tents.
Marge Davidson: I gather this was a really big event!
George McKinnell: And I still have parts of my old Indian costume. We did an Indian dance on the mall between the Washington Monument and the Capitol building. It was quite an experience. Bill really afforded us a lot of opportunities that we would never have had otherwise. Come time for the 1939 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows, Long Island, we were there the week before the fair opened and we were there the week that it first opened, so we were there two weeks before. And then at the end of 1940, when it closed, we were there the last two weeks it closed. So, we were there twice. There were four troops behind the federal building at the World’s Fair. We would have one site and there were three other troops there. Charlie Moeri, who was an Eagle Scout by then, was one of the two Eagle Scout Color Guard for President Delano Roosevelt when he opened the World’s Fair in 1939. And then, we went as Explorer Scouts, when we moved up to age 16, some of the older fellows like Marshall Spain and a few of the others were 18, 19, they were drivers by then, and we went to Valley Forge. We went to Philadelphia, we went up to Niagara Falls, we went on a few explorer trips around Glen Falls, all around. We did have a wonderful experience. One summer, when I was between my junior and senior year in high school,
I worked for Bill Hillcourt over in the sheep barn. He used to have a man who was a scout in our troop, Buzzy Chambers, who worked with Bill after he graduated from high school. He was in charge of making different items for his pictures to put in Boys Life Magazine like making a rowboat, making pogo sticks, how to make a fishing lure, all these different items he displayed in his articles, that he wrote about in Boys Life Magazine.
I was one merit badge away from life, swimming life saving, I was never a very good swimmer, and I was assistant scoutmaster, I was treasurer and I was considered a scout until I came back from the service, I guess. He was scoutmaster of the troop until 1950, and then he was transferred down to New Brunswick to National Headquarters there when they were making Schiff Scout a complete training center. I think by then they lost their privileged campsite Gilmore.
Marge Davidson: Were you in any of the movies he made there?
George McKinnell: Bob was in some of those movies. I guess I was, too. I don’t recall just. We had a man come out from Montclair, a Mr. Martin, who used to take movie pictures, and what have you, of us. At one time, Schiff Scout built that great big movie complex back in there that burned down, where they were having professional pictures made there.
June McKinnell: Well, it was a training center for national training center for the scouts.
George McKinnell: Yes, but they were making professional movies there, equipment was very expensive, almost like Hollywood.
Marge Davidson: Well, you were very lucky to be under his tutelage.
June McKinnell: We went down to New Brunswick once and I was really amazed, treated like royalty. A scout was assigned to carry his bags, open his doors, and he wrote when he signed things, one scout had the privilege of making the two green bars and then he would sign Bill in the middle of it, with his signature, and that was quite an honor. He really was very much revered by every scout who knew him. And any place he went they just laid down the red carpet, practically for him. I think it was so fabulous that they were able to have him for their scout leader here in the Township and in the Borough.
JUNE MCKINNELL – EARLY LIFE
Tim Timpson: Now, you [June] lived in the …
June McKinnell: I was brought up in the other end of town. I used to say that George lived on the other side of the tracks. And look at Ralston now, it was all farmland when we were kids and now it’s all your million-dollar mansions.
Marge Davidson: Well, did you ride the same school bus eventually?
June McKinnell: Oh yes. Yes, because they came down the center of Brookside and George loves to tell about him having to hold the bus while I ran down to catch it because we were late most of the time.
Tim Timpson: Tell us about growing up in Brookside.
June McKinnell: Growing up in Brookside was quite different than growing up in Ralston. We had the Brookside Community Club over there which had a tennis court. George mentioned the platform that was used for dancing. I remember a platform there I know nothing about what it was used for by the adults, but the kids used to roller skate on it.
Brookside Community Club
Tim Timpson: This was at the Community Club?
June McKinnell: At the Community Club, in back of the Community Club building there was a platform out there that we would go down there and roller skate on it. It had a railing around it, and it was up a few feet.
Tim Timpson: The Community Club was a school building.
June McKinnell: Right.
Tim Timpson: It was no longer a school building at that time?
BROOKSIDE SCHOOL
June McKinnell: No. I went to school in what is now the Municipal Building. There we had two grades in a classroom. We had four teachers and Bob Major was our principal and he taught seventh and eighth grade. We had a Miss Johnson and Mrs. Major, I think she was Ann Major. She was a single teacher, and they got married while I was in the school, and then the fifth and sixth grade was taught by Mrs. Beech and then seventh and eighth was taught by Bob.
And then we had A.C. Hutchinson who lived in Mendham, right opposite Prospect Street, opposite the school, was the superintendent of schools. Every once in a while he would come in and it was like the principal coming in to monitor your class or teacher. He would ask a few questions and then go to the next classroom. It was more of your old town, the kids didn’t have your little leagues, and what have you, just everybody they could find played baseball or football. Nothing organized in that respect, but we did a lot of fishing. We swam in a little pond. In earlier days we swam in a mud hole that went from West Main Street. There was a little stream as you come down the first hill into town from Mendham, went through there, then it went through a great big pipe, a railroad trestle went over that, and as the water dropped down below it, it made sort of a mud hole. Every spring we would dam that up and we could swim there once you got permission from your parents. And then we also swam in the center of Brookside, we swam in Alderson’s pond which is right opposite the Municipal Building now. You have to go and ask for permission.
Tim Timpson: John Muelers lived for years on Woodland Road, what you are talking about.
June McKinnell: No. I’m talking about the one on the Alderson property, right in the center of town. We could swim there on occasion if you asked for permission. And then when we moved to Woodland Road, I was probably a freshman in high school, then we swam in the Old Mill Pond which is on Woodland Road and that is no longer, just abandoned there. When the Walsh family moved in, they bypassed the mill pond and put a race around the outside of it. It didn’t work too well but that’s where we swam. And every year we kids would turn up the valve and let the water out and clean out all the mud. And one year we didn’t know any better, the first year we did it, we didn’t let the neighbors downstream know about it and that caused a lot of problems.
George McKinnell: Do you want June’s history?
June McKinnell: I didn’t come prepared to talk because I was just going to fill in with what George knew. We also used to swim at Wallach’s which is the second house up on Woodland Road on the left.
Tim Timpson: Where Gary Belton lives now.
June McKinnell: They could put boards in the brook there and you got a swimming pool out of it. You didn’t go very far but you had a good time. A lot, our sports were mostly grab a sled and go somewhere, we would sleigh ride down Bockhoven field, try skiing. I was telling the kids just the other day at one point it was very, very icy and we went up to the top of the reservoir hill and managed to make it all the way into the center of Brookside on a sled, which we only took one ride that night, that was too far to walk. Most of our activities were through the church. We had a good group.
Tim Timpson: The church …
June McKinnell: The Brookside Community Church. We had one Catholic family in town, that was the Carrolls who lived right opposite the school driveway. Now, they tore the house down on Carroll Drive, next to where Pollacks live now where Morris Franks lived.
George McKinnell: Then your sister’s house was the Forban house.
Tim Timpson: The house they tore down, as I understand it, was quite a house.
George McKinnell: Yes. In between …
Tim Timpson: Like the Collier brothers. [Homer & Langley were notorious hoarders who died in their NYC home in 1947 surrounded by 140 tons of various items.]
June McKinnell: Yes, very much so.
Marge Davidson: Was that the cat lady?
June McKinnell: Yes. The cat lady. My brother speaks of putting a new roof on that and there was nothing they could do. I mean, it was just … she was a manager of the dry cleaners in Morristown, very exclusive dry cleaners. She was one of the women I was allowed to ride home from Morristown with.
Tim Timpson: What was she like?
June McKinnell: Very quiet, as I recall, very straight lace. She had a, I don’t know what kind of car she had. I know that if you didn’t come home with Marguerite you could catch somebody later and beat her home. We probably came home at twenty miles an hour but …
George McKinnell: There was a line of cars behind her car all the way to Morristown.
BROOKSIDE SCHOOL & HIGH SCHOOL – MORRISTOWN
June McKinnell: She tied up traffic beautifully. I went to school in the old Brookside School, all through there and graduated. When I graduated we had eight kids in the graduating class. There were three boys and five girls. The night we graduated our music teacher was, what we called, “kitty kitty kitchen,” I think her name was Kit, was Miss Kitchen to us but she used to come in with this real skinny lady. And she would sit on the barely two or three inches of the stool of the piano bench and come down on the piano with a great big bang.
We did Evangeline from one end to the other with nothing but unison singing – no harmony, no nothing and halfway through we had a break at which we sat down and the audience is clapping, thought it was over. And then she immediately got herself up and they sighed. So, we did the other half hour. The most horrible rendition I think the school ever had but this was her … she came in once a week and went through all the grades and we had music. I used to tell them that they were going backwards when my kids went to school because when I went to school we had manual training and we had cooking. Cooking consisted of taking a sleigh or wagon, depending on what the weather was outside, and walking up to a place called Williams, which would be three houses beyond the present school driveway on the left, where she prepared hot lunches for us. We would get something with milk in it every day. We might have soup and cocoa, or we would have like macaroni and cheese, and this was provided. And what home economics was, we set up the tables where the library is now and cleaned up the mess afterwards and go and get the food. That was a real big deal.
Marge Davidson: And you would go up and get your lunch.
June McKinnell: We would go up and bring back a hot lunch. Yes. And then they also had manual training down in that room, where we made I guess you would call it a shoppers list thing. It was just a board, and it had a couple of little grooves on it, and you ran a spindle through it, and you could put a piece of paper on it and Mom could write her shopping list on it. I think it took all year to do. We didn’t learn much there. I learned more in high school when I went there. The first thing they taught all of us girls was how to replace the plug on the end of an electrical wire so that we wouldn’t have to wait for our husbands to come home if we pulled the vacuum cleaner out, and the end came off and we could fix it, and how to wire a lamp, which I still know how to do.
High school was a great experience for us because we had been extremely sheltered. And we went down to Morristown High School where we went to school with, I don’t know, Stirling, Cedar Knolls, Morristown, Morris Plains, some of Parsippany, Mountain Lakes, all over, came as students to Morristown High School. And we had never gone to school with black children.
Tim Timpson: Was Dr. Perry there then?
June McKinnell: Yes.
Tim Timpson: What was he like?
George McKinnell: He was about, Dr. Perry was stout, not too tall, bald, very … We didn’t run into Dr. Perry very often. He was superintendent of schools. We would run into Dr. Wilson. And he had one arm that was just a stub, and he would come up behind you, and whack! if you were in the hallway and were supposed to be in class.
You talk about teachers, we had teachers at Mendham Grammar School, Mrs. Gurrin and Amy Gunther.
Amy Gunther, she taught seventh and eighth grade and part of ninth grade, I guess, for the kids in Mendham who stayed there. If she heard some commotion in the back of the room, she would turn around and flip-fly that eraser or chalk or whatever right at them, and boy she was a good aim!
Marge Davidson: Everyone has spoken very highly of Morristown High School; they got an excellent education there. Is that your experience?
June McKinnell: My experience there was I got a good education, yes, but I think one of the failings of the Brookside Grammar School was definitely in vocabulary and grammar. Because I went down there and was introduced to Latin and I think that maybe the last two weeks of our eighth-grade education we learned how to conjugate a verb if you can learn that in two weeks. I had no idea. I felt there I was definitely at a disadvantage but other than that I think we were well trained to go into Morristown High School. But we did have to adjust to changing classes every period and different teachers and different people which we hadn’t been. We had been our little compact eight kids going through the grammar school. Classes behind us were larger. I don’t remember the class ahead of me.
Tim Timpson: Were you active in any of the clubs?
June McKinnell: In the high school, not very much in athletics. Getting home was the biggest problem. I sang in the choir, the acapella choir and that was a big honor. I was in choir most all of the way through school, did some tumbling, did some basketball but they never really learned because the classes were so big. One day a week you had a double class. You had gym three days a week so that meant that one day you had a double gym class and then all we did was exercise.
Tim Timpson: And that would have been with Jim MacIntyre?
JUNE – EARLY LIFE IN BROOKSIDE
George McKinnell: Jim MacIntyre was the male instructor, gym instructor. If I could enlarge about June’s — alright, June was born June Maw and she was born in Morristown Memorial Hospital, All Souls Hospital, June 1, 1925. Her father was head superintendent over at the Savage Estate on Corey Lane which became Fines, between Bulch and then Fines. And then, of course, in the depression like everybody else loss jobs, and what have you. They moved into town, into Brookside in that brick house on the right-hand side of the elementary school driveway in ’32, ’34. Well, it was in the early thirties.
June McKinnell: Moved into there. There was no work to be done so my father put out a sign “I fix everything” and he went door-to-door and fix a chair or a window, some body’s husband didn’t get his “honey do list” done so he started his business doing that.
George McKinnell: Even did some auto mechanics. And by 1937, in the early spring, he bought a piece of property from Joe Brown up Woodland Road and started building the house, the stone house, where we lived for quite a few years ourselves. We lived there 23 years. That first year, of course, the house wasn’t done in the summertime when you had hoped one or two rooms you could move into why they lived in a tent up back. In those days they weren’t out of order.
June McKinnell: You could pitch a tent in Brookside. I don’t think you could do it now and live in it, can’t even live in your motor home, I am sure. And we moved in there that winter with just a fireplace in the living room and a coal stove in the kitchen.
Tim Timpson: Did you have two brothers?
June McKinnell: Yes, and my sister. My sister lives in Harrisburg.
George McKinnell: Your older brother, James Maw, was killed in the service. They have that. I could elaborate on the school bus. You know, that was a long trip from Ralston through Washington Corners, over there, and into Brookside. We would have to wait, where’s June and Jim? And the bus is just about ready to pull out and here they see them coming up way up the road, pass Dot & Les’ house, and so we would have to wait until they came running down there to catch the bus.
June McKinnell: I don’t think we had an alarm clock in the house.
JUNE & GEORGE MEET & LATER MARRY
George McKinnell: June and I were married on October 11, 1947.
Tim Timpson: Did you meet on the school bus?
George McKinnell: I knew her on the school bus, yes. I used to pull her hair once in a while.
June McKinnell: Actually, we got together when you came home from the war, on the 4th of July or …
George McKinnell: No. It was a Memorial Day ceremony down at the Community Club and then there was a Memorial Day picnic for the boy scouts over at Schiff Scout Reservation that afternoon, later.
June McKinnell: Oh, that was fascinating! because they do this hocus-pocus and all of a sudden the fire would go up in the beginning of their ceremony. It was always very impressive to see what they could do.
Marge Davidson: You went over at Schiff?
June McKinnell: Yes, because my brothers, Ernie …
George McKinnell: Ernie was in scouts …
June McKinnell: Well, my sister met her husband, he was the head lifeguard over there.
DAN BEARD CABIN AND 1939 WORLD’S FAIR
Marge Davidson: Well, you know that the cabins that were erected at the World’s Fair have been moved and are now on Schiff Reservation.
George McKinnell: They moved …
Marge Davidson: The cabins you had at the Worlds Fair.
George McKinnell: Oh yes. The Dan Beard cabins.
Marge Davidson: Well, Jackson is supposed to fix them up but … it’s there, in bad condition.
June McKinnell: That’s a good job for you, go over and fix it.
Marge Davidson: That’s what we were hoping for, to get some of the old boy scouts to…
June McKinnell: Well, just get some of them, that’s what they do down in the islands all the time. George volunteers, he started out at the Conservation Foundation, now, they got so many men, that’s an elite organization to belong to now. You can’t join them now unless you can lead a crew.
George McKinnell: There’s only twelve or fourteen of us but …
June McKinnell: They go around and fix everything for free. You provide the materials and these men come in.
George McKinnell: We worked as a crew at the elementary school, historical society down there, the library, conservation foundation, and community club.
June McKinnell: I don’t see why you couldn’t round them up here. That’s a job for you, George. All they have to do is provide the material. They do like a coffee break, too.
Marge Davidson: We could use that because he was supposed to do a lot of work on that, like everything else he was supposed to do …
Tim Timpson: Is this Ernie?
Marge Davidson: No, no, Dave Jackson, the developer over there.
George McKinnell: Do you want to go into our personal life?
Marge Davidson: We haven’t listened to Ernie yet. He’s making his own tape.
Tim Timpson: He won’t talk to us. So, I would love to know how Maw-McKinnell got started.
MAW-MCKINNELL BACKGROUND
George McKinnell: Well, actually it is a spin-off of June’s father’s business.
June McKinnell: I fix everything – when we got married he changed it to …
George McKinnell: It was a few years after,
June McKinnell: Quite a few years later, then it went back to Maw and Sons.
George McKinnell: Well, I guess, maybe now. I left the business at the end of 1986 when I retired. So, I have been retired for fourteen years.
June McKinnell: My father had a few men working for him and he didn’t have any back up funds to work with, when he got paid, then the men got paid. Because I remember Elsie Bockoven calling and wanting to know if one of our employees if Dad had been able to pay him because they weren’t able to pay their milk bill, neither were we. That’s the way the business started out. When my father got paid for a job then the men got paid. We have all of the old-time books, who they worked for originally.
George McKinnell: Well, they go all the way back to when Dad started in 1934, 36, maybe the original ones, he never kept much time in them, but I kept all the time books. But I joined June’s father in the spring of 1948. I had, before that I was working Saturdays for him because I put in the stairs in the Brookside Community Church, and did some of the trimming in the sanctuary and I would do that on Saturdays. I was working for a contractor over in Bernardsville, Joe Dobbs, before that.
So, we grew when I joined, and then Ernie joined the business after he got out of high school, actually he joined probably in 1950, 1951. We had a lot of the old timers around that worked for June’s father, Ed Radtke worked for us until ‘55. We had Robert Sagarese’s father, Edgar Savage worked for us, Edgar would be Willard Savage’s father and Virginia Thebault’s father. We had some of the masons from Mendham, also.
We built a tremendous number of homes. We did as many alterations and additions as we probably did new homes. The one home I am most proud of in all the years, and I was working nearly forty years, was Bill Simon’s house in New Vernon. It was about a 10,000 square foot house, all stone, 9 bedrooms, 9/10 baths, they were the most pleasant people to work for. That’s when, I was building it when he was still working for Salomon Brothers and then he went down to Washington as energy czar and Assistant Secretary of the Treasury and then he became Treasurer of the United States before he left office down there, he left office after the Nixon …
Marge Davidson: What are some of the mansions that were in Mendham? It wasn’t a big community of big mansions, but they were already built like Washington’s house.
George McKinnell: I can remember when G. Washington’s estate was a zoo. [Reference to George Constant Louis Washington, inventor of instant coffee]
June McKinnell: He had his own private bull on that property.
George McKinnell: He had hippopotamus, giraffes and elephants and everything else in there.
Tim Timpson: Where was …
George McKinnell: Right where the Jacksons’ houses are.
June McKinnell: All the way from Route 24 over to Tempe Wick Road.
Tim Timpson: This would be … Tanya’s place [Tanya Negro].
George McKinnell: Yes. There were big barns on the back side there. And apparently for some strange reason a couple of those barns burned down Halloween night.
Marge Davidson: Nothing to do with those muffins in Brookside.
George McKinnell: All those characters in Mendham.
June McKinnell: Jewish Lightning in Mt. Freedom. [Reference to the Mount Freedom, Randolph hotels which burned down mysteriously in the 1970’s.]
George McKinnell: No, we built a lot of big houses around, two or three up Horizon Drive and a few in New Vernon. We built the church in Brookside, we did all the additions to the Sunday School, renovated St. Mark’s Church and put that big addition on in the back. We did a whole complete renovation of the Methodist church, putting the addition on the back, dug out the cellar, all kinds of things there. We did a tremendous amount of work on the Presbyterian Church. The only church we didn’t do anything on was the Catholic church.
June McKinnell: Did you do anything on the Lutheran Church?
George McKinnell: They had their own Catholic men who did that [St. Joseph Catholic Church]. But, anyway, no we didn’t work on the Lutheran church. That was the new church. We did a lot of work in the Sunday School rooms, renovated a whole great big building for St. Peter’s Church [in Morristown].
Worked for The Seeing Eye for 35 or 40 years, Ernie worked on that project. Peck School we built on six classrooms and science room, quite a bit of work down at Peck School. Built the gas station and renovated Gunther’s garage there. Built the Dairy Queen up in Chester. I am trying to think of some of them.
We built quite a few houses over in Far Hills there, Wilshire’s, Frelinghuysen’s, did a lot of work for Peter, and even his father over in New Vernon, Simons, Worthington.
There was one couple, he was president of the Formica Corporation, and he fell off a horse and broke his neck. He was an invalid, they were the nicest people to work for, built a ground level, no cellar house. We built a house special for him. All of our work was custom work, no development.
And we did a lot of work for Bill Halsey, an architect from Basking Ridge and also James Timson down in Essex Fells, he was a big-time architect. Trying to think around the area, we did a lot of work, mostly renovations, we built the house for PJ Skeffington for Miss Williams there, all those people back in there.
June McKinnell: Part of the Brookside School.
George McKinnell: Yes, we renovated both the firehouse down in Brookside [Brookside Engine Company No. 1] and the Municipal Building, we did all that renovation down there.
Marge Davidson: The firehouse was started with volunteers.
George McKinnell: Yes, this was mostly volunteers. This was started during the war, I guess, before the war.
Marge Davidson: I think it was during the war.
George McKinnell: J.J. Thomas was the designer here and worked on this building.
June McKinnell: Did he get permission to do that in the war?
Marge Davidson: I think, a fire house …
George McKinnell: I think the Backers, and the Groenewegens and the Fischers,
Marge Davidson: Bucky Kagan …
George McKinnell: Bucky Kagan.
Marge Davidson: We are not able to get Bucky Kagan. He doesn’t want … I asked him a year later, and Elsie says, no, we don’t want to.
George McKinnell: And Ed Roessler over in …
Marge Davidson: Because actually he is the only one really who was here from day one.
June McKinnell: How about Margaret Backer? What’s her name now?
George McKinnell: Otto Snedaker and Frank Swain would have all worked on this place here.
Tim Timpson: Who’s this?
June McKinnell: Margaret Backer.
Tim Timpson: Marge Pool.
June McKinnell: She is on Sanibel Island.
George McKinnell: Margaret lived across the street here.
END OF TAPE 2, SIDE A
… tape in session …
George McKinnell: Moran, isn’t it?
June McKinnell: We were trying to claim that at one time there was a stand out there and I was talking to Bob Conable who is on the Board of Adjustment, so is our son, so I said, gee, we see Marge down there, she used to be in the trailer park, but she has moved off island now, so I got her address and gave her a call and was talking to her about that. It was interesting which makes me think it wouldn’t be too hard to get a hold of her.
[END OF TAPE]