Almost five months have passed, and I've done my best to move on with my life after so many years of doing the same thing.
Ironically, moving on, and doing something else, also meant reconnecting with the past.
The first was my job, and leaving behind The Bergen Record to become the Jersey Shore regional news editor for Patch.com.
I never thought I'd ever see myself at the shore again, other than quick visits to Sandy Hook. But here I am, publishing old photographs of me standing outside the charred remains of the OB Diner in 1989 in Point Pleasant Beach, N.J., or pointing at the fallen garage doors of a landmark bar at Jenkinson's Beach and Boardwalk, also the victim of a 1989 fire.
Or there I am, standing in the front yard of our Point Pleasant house, with my arm around my brother, flashing a wide smile.
I also have a publisher, Hazelden, that has agreed to publish and distribute my book on mental illness by the end of next year. The book will explore the history of my family, and its connections to OCD and other disorders.
That, too, has led me to sift through old photographs - many of which were shot before I was around - and reconnect with my family's past, way back to when my grandfather was the personnel director at Greystone Psychiatric Hospital in North Jersey, and was a sufferer of OCD himself.
I've felt so much more inspired as a writer, because now I've been given license to talk about myself and the things that matter most to me: Family, hometown and history. At Patch.com, I've written about that history for my column, Shoreview.
Four months into this, the ideas never stop.
Shoreview: A Point Pleasant Story
Back in the 1980s, at Rutgers, I was the Jersey Shore kid. I was asked so many questions about it that I sometimes thought I was the only Jersey Shore kid.
My answers, however, were always so lame. I never had an exciting story to tell. What I had to offer was always more goofy than glamorous.
Ultimately, everybody probably thought I was the only Jersey Shore kid who was dull.
"You're from the Point Pleasant?" they'd say. "Do you surf?"
"Sure," I'd say. "Poorly."
"Wow, but, you live at the Shore," they'd say. "You must have a lot of money."
"Well, no," I said. "My father had to work as a bartender in the summer because he couldn't make enough as a principal."
"Oh...," they'd say. "I bet you're a great swimmer."
"Actually," I told them, "I took three swimming lessons at the River Avenue beach, and failed all three of them."
"Oh, OK."
"The teacher once got so frustrated with me that he picked me and threw me into the water..."
"OK, that's good...."
I'd try to spice it up. Yeah, we swam—at Sportsman Island in Brick, or in the Manasquan River at the end of River Avenue, because Jenkinson's was often just a little too crowded.
The sand was always a little too itchy. When I got older, my stomach could never handle too much booze, so I sipped Budweisers and chugged sodas while I watched everyone around me get plowed at Martell's Tiki Bar.
Yeah, I worked at the beach. Only I was running rides on the boardwalk and wearing an ugly green shirt with food and grease stains; not OP shorts with a shirt from the Brave New World surfshop.
I had a tan, yeah, but not a sexy Tony Hawk tan. My tan was a shirt tan.
Yeah, I fished. Caught some fluke once in the Point Pleasant Canal. But my mother made me throw everything back. I guess you could say we "fished for sport."
The more I talked, the more you could see the disappointment sink into their faces. Girls would hang out in my room and ask these questions, all excited to hear me speak. Then they'd slink away when they found out I was, well, no more exciting than they were.
Isn't that just like some people, though? They just don't get it. What they didn't get is that what we lacked in wealth, we gained in the richness of life.
What they didn't get was that Point Pleasant Borough—or "Point Boro," as it's known—is like many other well-preserved towns in New Jersey. Sure, it doesn't have a glamour of a place like Hawaii or Florida. It's too cold between September and May to be a destination resort.
But I'd always choose it first. It's a place that, after many years away, you could still come back and call it your own.
It always was—and still is—a close-knit community, a town that cares about its football, its small businesses and its people. Point Boro is a town that has a main street—Bridge Avenue—that is really a patchwork of small strip malls. But it's simple, and everybody knows where everything is.
We had one high school, a middle school and two elementary schools, allowing many of us to grow together from kindergarten to high school graduation, and beyond.
The class leaders are now among the town's leaders, and they've carried that "Panther Pride" with them from the Student Council and National Honor Society to the Borough Council, Planning Board and the Chamber of Commerce.
My family's Barton Avenue house (see picture) was knocked down soon after my mother's death in 2003. But I guess I qualify as one of those people, too, who resisted temptation and stuck around, or came back after getting a taste of glamour that the rest of the world supposedly provides.
After years of reporting that brought me to places as far and disparate as Afghanistan, I'm excited to be back, and to have come full circle since my buddy, Bill Borden, and I were editors of our high school newspaper, The Panther Print, 25 years ago.
I'm the regional editor for Patch's Jersey Shore news, and I'm proud to be back here, and to have the capacity to bring news back to Point Pleasant Boro and Point Pleasant Beach in a way that, many would agree, hasn't been provided in a long time.
Over the past two decades, I thrived on breaking news stories and covering political scandals involving wayward governors and brazenly corrupt public officials.
I felt the sting and the pain that thousands - even millions - felt as I watched the World Trade Center lay in ruins back in 2001, and then later, when I saw the remains of the victims as the towers' parts and pieces were transported to the Fresh Kills Landfill in Staten Island.
I appreciated the excitement of the reporting world, and I'll miss the glory of writing stories that could shake up an entire state. But I'm glad to be back here, in this understated paradise, where I hold my weekly staff meetings in Pat's Pizza on Route 88, and greet my school classmates who always, every Friday, stop by for a slice.
Growing up, we had the Boardwalk nearby. Yeah, we surfed. But much of that stuff happened in Point Beach, or "the Beach," the Point Pleasant with the ocean view.
What many didn't know, or didn't realize, is that you could have just as much fun slightly to the west, in the "Boro," just being kids.
You could have just as much fun sucking down 32-ounce "Big Gulps" of Coke at 7-Eleven on Bridge Avenue, skateboarding in the parking lots of those same strip malls and hanging out in a treehouse that was hidden in the thick patch of woods at the end of Dorsett Dock Road.
When we were young, many of our roads were dirt. Acres of land were covered with maple, cedar and pine trees, shadowing the swamps where the now-endangered "Pine Barrens Tree Frog" lived in peace, and with a buffer.
We enjoyed being with our families and reslished the idea that our town was so far removed from the troubled neighborhoods of the north.
A bunch of people wrote in our senior-year yearbooks, back in 1985, that they wanted to leave and live in Californa, Florida or someplace "cool." They wanted to get away from the place that, sure, had a beach, but was never really something they wanted, desired or dreamed for.
But many of them came back, or they never left, because they realized that the best place to live was the "Joisey" seashore town with the pizza joints, bait-and-tackle shops and the still-unpaved stretches of land that, in essence, never really changed.
My family lived in a Levittown ranch that, back in the 1970s, had a sesspool in the backyard bubbling every time the toilet flushed. That surely doesn't happen anymore, but the ranches are still there, blending in with the dwindling pine trees that once filled the area.
One of the biggest moments of my childhood, down on my Barton Avenue block, was when they brought in the sewer pipes so everybody could flush their toilet without a worry. But it was also cool for a kid to have these big, hulking cement tubes laying around, waiting to be sunk into the ground. You can do some pretty cool skateboard flips in those things.
One kid from my block would skate almost to the top, flip his board around, zip to the other side of the pipe and do it again. He zipped back and forth, like he was riding a skateboard in a swing, and attract a crowd of kids who would lay their boards on the street, sit on them and watch for hours on end
I'd tell this story to the Rutgers folks and they'd raise their eyebrows, and act like I grew up in the swamps of Mississippi.
No, I'd tell them. Sure, it wasn't Hawaii. It wasn't even Florida or California. But it was - and still is - paradise.
For more, read HERE
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Something other than Snooki
I'd tell people I was from the Jersey Shore and I always got the same look. Suddenly, they saw me with one hand on a surfboard, and the other flashing that pinky-and-thumb, Sean-Penn-inspired "gnarley" sign-thing.
"Wow...surfer...waves...RonJon..." they'd utter.
Puh-lease, I'd think. I was a ride operator and a french-fry hack at seaside snack bars. I picked up dug-into-the-sand cigarette butts with my bare, blackened hands and tossed them away for $1 an hour.
To me, standing on a surfboard was like standing on a tightrope. Krazy-glue and staples couldn't keep me on top of those things.
Yeah, I've always loved the beach. But, when I was young, I found the beachgoer image so, dare I say, ugly. Sand stuck in my bathing suit. Wet shoes. Wet, sticky hair. Sand, sand, sand...
That, and the image I had of half-naked people boozing it up at Marz, Cheers, Tradewinds or any of the local bars and clubs - the Snookis before there was even a Snooki, if you will - were enough to make me want to live the rest of my life in my bedroom, flipping baseball cards and listening to Lez Zeppelin on my Sony Walkman.
Ah, if only it was yesteryear. Saying you're from the Jersey Shore, 25 years later, means something completely different, and maybe even something worse. The responses make me want to grab a board and "surf main."
"Do you ever watch......the Jersey Shore?" they always say.
My response?
"You've got to be kidding me."
Now, let's face it: I can't blame people for following the summer-goings-on of DJ Pauly, Angelina and JWOWW (did I spell that right?) anymore than I can blame people for slowing down on the Garden State Parkway to leer at an overtuned tractor-trailer.
But what bothers me, again, is the image. The image I want of the Jersey Shore is, frankly, something closer to the laid-back, surfer-dude impression that forced me away as a kid, but I now embrace.
That's the image I want in my mind, and I hope it stays that way, long after the Jersey Shore MTV show burns out and seeps into the pop-culture landfill, just underneath "The Macarena."
That's the image I want for Patch.com, and how I want it presented in the news coming from Long Branch, and Manasquan, as well as the news from Toms River. I want the balance of trouble and tranquility, whether it's in the form of Brick Township news, Berkeley Township news, Manchester news, Wall Township news or Howell Township news.
I want the news of balance, and balance is what Jersey Shore news, and its image, is supposed to be about. It's not just about Snooki, and not just about trouble. The Jersey Shore is tranquil, serene, fun and family-oriented.
The image I prefer is the beach that can be crowded, sure. But, at dusk, or in the fall, it's a peaceful place, with water that washes in and out, and a little pond forming for kids to play in.
It's a place to party, sure. There are the bars and boardwalks in Long Branch, Asbury Park, Manasquan, Belmar and Seaside Heights, and plenty of news from those towns, too. But it's not all about the booze and the beer. It's about the volleyball, the surfing, the football-tossing and the kind of fun, family stuff that still attracts the singles as well as the family guys, just as it has for more than a century.
You see it in Brick, Toms River, South Seaside Park and Point Pleasant, where the local townfolk have kept the cottages and family restaurants that cater to those who preserve rather than destroy.
In Manasquan, there's Gee Gee's, where burgers are still broiled on a grill, not fried on a large, greasy plate of steel. The fries come with a pound of cheese dumped on them, wrapped in a healthy-sized piece of aluminum foil.
In the arcade, people can play the games that got us into video games in the first place; not the swinging cranes that tease us every time, and always fail to pick up the large, stuffed Stewie from The Family Guy.
The boardwalk has no boards; just a paved path that starts and ends in Manasquan, lined with cottages that overlook the waves that roll in and out, all day long.
It's also in Long Branch, one of the last Jersey Shore communities to be nearly free of the commerical boardwalks, booze and bad boys that have made the region a punchline.
In Long Branch, there are high-rise hotels and apartments, private beaches and parking lots. But there are few bars and even less fights that have made for quite a plot-line on the Seaside-Heights-based MTV show.
In Long Branch, there's still the "Wind Mill" - the original one, with the actual wind mill hanging from the peak of the pointed-roof, and the window seating next to a door that never stays completely closed, letting in a gush of cold air every five minutes. The fries are still crinkly and the hot dogs are bigger than my hand.
There's Max's Hot Dogs, once a 25-seat hotdog stand in 1928 that has evolved into a 200-seat full service restaurant that offers "favorite American delights for everyone," according to its wesite.
There's "Freeloaders Beach," which ain't free anymore. You used to be able to sneak on there and nobody ever bothered. But the flat, soft sand that's carved under a sand ridge is still a great place for surfers, especially during the hurricane season when most of the tourists stay away.
And many still get on for free (sshh!).
Some of the good haunts are gone. A friend of mine and I used to go to "Cheers" nearly every week. We kept hoping we'd see Bruce Springsteen - he supposedly wrote the "Thunder Road" lyrics and the "Born to Run" words and music in Long Branch - and kept wishing he'd pop in on Bobby Bandiera, a guitarist with Southside Johnny and Asbury Jukes.
He never did, at least when we weren't there. But we did get some 80-year-old guy who'd sing "Kansas City" as Bandiera strummed away.
The bar and the old guy are gone. But the beach and the boards are still here, throughout the year. Cold and rain are no reasons to stay away; that's what a wet suit is for.
Here, they take the surfers over the Snookis.
For more, read HERE.
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Shoreview: A Howell Story
I was the happiest guy to ever finish seventh place.
Fifty yards ahead of me, with about 100 yards to go, was Mike Devlin, the fastest guy on the 1983 Howell Township Cross-Country team. My fiery coach at Point Boro High, his face beet-red and his soiled eyes leering at me, pointed at Mike's backside and fired off an order.
"Go get him!" he yelled. "Beat him, and we get the shut-out."
I did.
When Mr. Seyfried barked, you bowed. When he wanted speed, you spun.
Soon, the distance was 40 yards. Then 20, and 10. With just 20 feet to go, I lunged past Mike, head and all, and stretched out a split-second advantage for myself. I probably saw too many of those photos of Jesse Owens from the 1936 Olympics, thinking I could lunge, run and win, just like Jesse. It worked.
I was always hoping I could win something. Anything. Before then, I didn't win much. I didn't get the girls. I got picked last in kickball. I got cut from the baseball team. I got cut from the basketball team.
That day, on Oct. 18, 1983, in Howell, I did. Yeah, it was seventh place. Yeah, I didn't really win. But it was a triumph, and it was my first real one. Whenever I'm tested, I think back to that day, at Howell Township High School, when a little extra effort went so far.
Whenever I'm behind, I think of Devlin's backside, and I remember how I caught up, and passed him at the end. I think of that extra "oomph" I had in my steps—the extra juice of adrenaline that made me catch up, and launch into a fully loaded sprint.
I didn't win, but I did preserve Point Boro's shutout, a 15-50 clobbering of Howell where the top seven runners were all from the same team. That team was ours, and I was seventh.
Whenever I hear of sports, and how people want to cut them, or reduce the funding so the sport is reduced to something meaningless, I wonder: If they could only feel what it's like to be 50 yards behind somebody, feeling helpless, only to conjure enough spirit in the last seconds to triumph.
When I did it, it became something so memorable, even 27 years later, with my best running days behind me.
I always wanted some taste of victory, the kind of success that others enjoyed. I was always hoping I would be faster. Sure, I did well in school. But sports were the social barometer. The better I did, the better things were.
It had little to do with making friends. It had nothing to do with school spirit. It was all about the spirit of the self. It was about finding the ability to achieve.
That spirit carried over into my journalism career. I never had the greatest connections. I didn't have the money to go to the best schools, the ones that pushed people through the doors of Columbia and into the hands of a big-time newspaper.
In my career, everything always seemed to be running behind. Despite the many successes I've had, the newspaper industry has suffered for much of the past 20 years. Many solid reporters have left. News holes have shrunk considerably.
Here, at the Howell Patch, where I'm helping to manage Howell news, I feel like I'm catching up again. With Patch demonstrating the foresight to capitalize in the market of digital journalism, I feel like I'm running ahead again.
Until that Howell meet, at age 16, I had no idea how to summon that spirit. I didn't understand the idea of coming from behind, and succeeding. I watched athletes do it and thought it was something magical. After Howell, I learned something quite different.
For more, read HERE.
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Shoreview: A Brick Story
Beyond the tree-lined roads and horse farms, and far away from the traffic that routinely packed the Laurelton Circle, my father made his living, one day at a time.
It wasn't always easy getting out of bed at 5 a.m. every day, for 20 years, and facing a few hundred chatty kids who packed the small classrooms of the aging Herbertsville Elementary School.
Stan Davis was a teacher, then principal of a school that was so crowded, there wasn't enough room for an all-purpose room. Gym class and lunch were always held in the classrooms, right at the students' desks.
But my father got up every day, anyway, for 20 years, and he didn't really ever want to let go of the old-fashioned simplicity that long defined the Herbertsville section of Brick.
"Once in a while the horses would get loose and get on school grounds," he told me recently.
Eventually, in 1983, he would leave to be principal of Drum Point, and then retire 13 years later before settling in Ocean Grove and Manchester. Eventually, we would all leave, thinking our greener pastures were much farther away.
But we never stopped thinking of the trees, the roads, the horse stables and the old school as "home."
Now, as the Jersey Shore regional editor for Patch.com, and with the introduction of this Brick Township Patch site, I'm back. We're back. Now that we're back, I want to give light to a town that - in many places - never lost it's quaint, rural feel and its pleasant, peaceful views along the muddy banks of the Manasquan River.
I want to provide Brick news, Jersey Shore news, that was once provided and defined by people who stayed for years, and who never wanted to go away, either. Don Bennett, who worked for The Ocean County Observer for decades, and Pat Miller, a veteran of The Asbury Park Press, were among those people. Now they work for Patch.
I want to give light to the community my father saw more than 50 years ago, when he chose Brick over schools up north, because there was opportunity for jobs and for raising kids safely that wasn't elsewhere.
"At the time (in 1958), there was a lot of tremendous growth. A lot of the houses were inexpensive," he said.
Yes, Brick will always be known for Routes 70 and 88, as well as Brick Boulevard and Chambers Bridge Road. It will always carry the weight of the suburban sprawl, the corked-up jughandles and cars that clog nearly every interesection, and nearly every highway heading south and west.
For 23 years, the Laurelton Circle has been gone. But the lines of traffic are, on occsasion, still there, occasionally piling back to Kmart, just as it did in the 1970s and 1980s. Drivers still pause with fear as they creep through the remodeled intersection, and get confused as they mix up their 70s with their 88s.
"But it is a lot better now," my father said. "You don't have that congestion you used to have. It used to be terrible there at 4 p.m."
There are still places that remind me of the Brick of my youth. The aging Herbertsville firehouse, where I first saw Santa Claus (and screamed), is still there, too, even though brown, box-like condominiums replaced much of the scenery that surrounded it.
"That firehouse was a meeting place - they used to have to have a lot of social activities there," my father said.
Herbertsville Elementary School is still there, too. Only now it has a remodeled facade, giving it the look of a new school, even if it still has the one-story-high classrooms where my father taught during the 1960s.
And they are still crowded.
A lot of development has come to Herbertsville in recent years. But a lot of what was there, 40 and 50 years ago, has remained. Anybody going there could see why, perhaps, we moved down there in the first place.
They could see a community where my father made his living, and nearby, raised a family who never really wanted to leave, even when our house in Point Pleasant was knocked down seven years ago.
They would get a sense that there is a place where people still live, peacefully and happily, one day at a time.
For more, read HERE.
In Barnegat, I Was No Longer Bored
Just four years into my career, I already thought reporting was boring.
I was a guy with a writing pedigree who broke big stuff while working as a top editor at the Rutgers University paper, The Daily Targum. My girlfriend liked my writing so much that she'd sit in my New Brunswick apartment and read my stories aloud.
I hated it when she did that. But I guess she saw something in the cadence and rhythm of the language that was envigorating, because I sure didn't. I was always a little too shy to accept my own attributes.
Out of college, I worked two-plus-years at a small daily in Delaware, then nearly two years at the Ocean County Observer. My cadence and rhythm and writing skills were restricted to stories on council meetings, wastewater treatment facilities and guys who got up at meetings and always had a lot to say, even if the late-night meeting was already three hours long.
I wanted to break out. I wanted to live the life, and live the dream I planned for myself when I was 7, 8, 9, 10 years old. I wanted to be a writer and a reporter, and I wanted to go beyond the confines of a meeting room and write about everybody else.
I wanted to write about their problems...not mine. I wanted to write about their accomplishments, and salute their triumphs. Not mine, and not those of the public officials.
Four days after I was hired The Press of Atlantic City, I got it. I found the Barnegat downtown, down at the east end of E. Bay Avenue. I found my voice. I found my rhythm and my cadence.
I found fun, and I found a reason to stay in this profession, the only one I've ever had.
A committeeman by the name of Kendal Klix, who died three years later of cancer, took me on a tour of the downtown soon after I started at The Press in August 1993. He offered to do it just hours before, and when he did, I laughed. "Barnegat has a downtown?" I asked him.
"It sure does," he said in that western drawl of his, which stood out among his fellow Jersey committee members.
I had worked as an intern and as a full-time reporter in the Manahawkin area for my entire career. I knew what towns were like down in southern Ocean County. I thought I had them covered. I thought they were all like Route 72, or Bay Avenue: suburban sprawl, with houses that had big yards, a Wawa or two and five gas stations, all with a convenience store that sold Beef Jerky and tobacco dip.
I went on the little tour as a get-to-know visit. My expectations were so low that I tucked my pad in my pocket, and got ready to just walk around and listen to the nice man with the drawl talk about something that just wasn't there. Or, perhaps, it wasn't there yet.
I drove up Route 9 north and, following his directions, made a right at Bay Avenue, not a left. I saw a row of old buildings, antique shops and an ice cream store.
I was stunned. I realized, geez, if I had ever made a right on Bay Avenue instead of a left before then, maybe I would have seen this. If I wasn't so hot about getting home every day, and getting to the Garden State Parkway, I could have taken a little more time and seen something new.
Kendal showed me around, and showed me the antique shops that he said would anchor the place. They sold baseball cards, pianos and guitars at these places. I almost bought a guitar with no strings, but I resisted the urge.
The last place we stopped at was the ice cream store, the Hurricane House. I saw what looked liked Gower's drug store in "It's a Wonderful Life." I saw the big silvery levers that served fountain sodas, as well as little wooden tables and drapes cut out of 1910.
"This is one of my favorite places," he said.
Suddenly, I had more than a downtown story, a story about rehabilitation. I had more than a story about a township that was tryng to survive by enhancing its history.
I had history, scenery and setting. I had place and time. I had description, and the background for a story that was lively and engaging. I had an interesting story to tell, one that went beyond something political.
What was really cool was that my paper, The Press of Atlantic City, gave me the space, and encouraged me to be a writer and not just a reporter. The paper that gave me my start as a manager a year later said they wanted more than the briefs and the burrow-pit stories that bored me in Delaware.
The Press wanted "tales," and "break-out pieces" with big pictures, and here was one of my first.
At the Hurricane House, I sat on swivel chair and spun myself around, like I used to do when I visited these kinds of places that were always well-preserved in the older towns of North Jersey, but seemed non-existent at the Jersey Shore. I stared at the wooden tables that were uneven in the legs. I saw "Hurricane House" painted in the windows, fronting the streetside view of antique shops and trees. It made me feel like a hourse-and-buggy was going to pass by at any moment.
I was hooked.
For more, read HERE.
