Local color, signpost: What’s left of the story, and how easy

[Edits 10/9/13. Edits 10/15/13. Edit 10/26/13.]

If Part 5 struck you as a long drink, the rest of this story will go down more smoothly.

Part 6, to come before long [actually, here], will be fairly short by comparison to Part 5, and it will include a humorous episode on our making the radio ads and how they seemed to affect the race, with a particular look at WSUS’s co-owner and DJ/impresario Jay Edwards. I will also make passing remarks on the issue of “pay to play,” as it related to our campaign OR NOT.

Lastly, I will provide some summary info on the 1996 Vernon TC race, including election results (of the six candidates—of which only two could win—Ginny, running for the one-year slot, came in fourth, getting more votes [!] than John Kraus, her mate who was running for the three-year slot, and [less surprisingly] more than her “Independent” opponent Dennis Miranda, who in a more typical two-group race would have run as a Republican).

Part 7 I will wait longer on to post. Not really focusing on Vernon Township politics, it will look at what became of the Dems (Vernon-level and otherwise) as I interacted with them, particularly on the county level, from about late 1997 to about 2005 (and of course, I will only be able to report on what I personally encountered, as I certainly was less extensively involved with the county Dems after ~1997 than with the Vernon Dems in 1994-96). Part 7 will look at, among other organizing themes, Howard Burrell as he figured in different community business I was involved in (and, again, my story will be limited because my involvement was limited). Among other things, you may be intrigued to find how my Vernon/county Dems activity overlapped with my involvement with health-related support group activity, centered in the Newton, N.J., area, by about 2002. And Part 7 will be posted on my “Jersey Mountain Bear” blog.

Among other things to be considered, as to whether to include them, are facts about the involvement (respectable enough) of Mark Hartman with the county Dems in 1999-2000, with a different phase in 2001. This is important because he was working as the political reporter of The New Jersey Herald at the time, and there were some rather novel ways he handled his role, which I think helped Howard Burrell in his freeholder race. But there were other, more unfortunate developments in Mr. Hartman’s life a little later, along with what he told me of some facts about his endorsing Howard when I spoke with Mr. Hartman in ~2002. So, some interesting stuff, but deliberations are necessary. And anyway, a lot of this isn’t so much a Vernon Dems story.

The subsections of this entry (Part 7) tentatively will comprise:

[a set of remarks on Burrell's 1997 race, which will appear within entry 7, subpart A, on my "Jersey Mountain Bear" blog]

[The rest of this outline is quite tentative; entry 7, subpart A, will have more details]
My own last involvement in being appointed to township boards, 1997-98

Burrell’s political life after Vernon; Mark Hartmann enters the picture

A novel development: Mark Hartmann’s personal travails

A way the political realm and the support-group milieu intersected in my travels

Summary notes

A missing piece of the 1996 story: building the campaign signs

For the 1996 story, I forgot this part: putting together the campaign signs. The SCDC did indeed have our Kraus & Crotty signs manufactured for us (and it paid for them), and they were ready to pick up at an office in Newton. But in those days, the signs were just professionally printed pieces of cardboard; we local campaign workers had to affix them to wooden posts. (I think it was by the 1999 campaign that Howard Burrell ran for county freeholder that the signs came with their own thin metal posts already attached.)

So this was another task for the person inclined to be an “endlessly” laboring artisan to do. It actually wasn’t as bad as stuffing the thousands (literally or seeming-like) envelopes we stuffed. Per completed sign, we took two pieces of the cardboard signs—about two-and-and-half feet by one-and-a-half feet in size—and used a heavy-duty staple gun to attach them to either side of a wooden stake. (The stake was made out of 1 x 2 [I think was the designation] pine lumber, rough-hewn; each sign stake was about three feet long, with the bottom cut at one angle [as I recall] so that it could be pounded into the ground. I seem to recall doing some of the sawing on those, but I don’t remember who all did that task; the sawing might have been done at Dick Conklin’s garage. Assembly of the signs happened mostly, or entirely, elsewhere.)

I seem to recall driving to John’s house with a large number of the pre-cut 1 x 2 pieces of wood, maybe six feet long each, to drop off at his house. I also seem to recall—since the road leading up to his house in PVL was very steep—finding it a bit of a weird ill-balanced-load situation climbing the hill with all that wood sticking out of the back of the Dodge Shadow I had at the time. (It’s funny how I don’t remember all the details of this; and this hill-climbing account may be off-base in some way.)

Anyway, I mention all this because, not only did I manufacture signs in my own cellar at home (which has carpentry-related workshop facilities that my father built in the 1960s), but John Kraus himself worked on a lot of these signs at his house. I think maybe he had his children work on some of them.

There were hundreds of signs in total. As I said, this task, while laborious, wasn’t as crazy as the envelope-stuffing task.

One pain-in-the-tail feature of the signs (a point of some controversy between some of us) became stapling the edges of the signs (one piece of cardboard on each side of the 1 x 2) together along the edges with a stapler, so the whole sign would hold together well. As it would turn out, when, after being placed on roadsides, the signs had been rained on, the edges of some of the signs would come undone where they were stapled.