Political History

Sep 10, 2024

Don’t you hate it when you wake up in the morning and realize the pleasant afternoon you were just having was only a dream? No, none of the dead is coming to visit today. Time to roll out of bed and brew a cup of tea. Speaking of the dead, I recently found myself thinking that of the elected officials for whom I worked the first two, pardon me, three, are now dead.

My legal career largely began in 1981 working in the Essex County Counsel’s Office in the administration of County Executive, Peter Shapiro. Peter was a young reformer hailed as an agent of change in the Democratic Party. He went on to be the party nominee for Governor against the wildly popular Tom Kean. You know how that went. The old guard was so glad to be rid of a pesky upstart, and I got fired when Peter’s successor, who later went to jail, took office. (The jailing of Essex County Executives became a bit of a pattern until Joe DiVincenzo, the 30 plus year incumbent, took office.) Peter gave up politics for finance and died this year after a long illness.

And I’d been thinking somebody should write a book about this stuff. Not me, I max out at about 2,000 words, but somebody who can tell good stories and add some context beyond the dry political and policy day to day stuff or the criminal and salacious stuff. Somebody who can make this New Jersey business sound less like inside baseball, but I am just going to write about me.

To prove it I will note that I did argue a locally famous case before the New Jersey Supreme Court when I worked in the County Counsel’s office. I represented the then County Clerk, Nick Caputo, whose job it was to randomly select the ballot position in elections. For 40 out of the prior 41 elections, he had randomly selected the Democrats for line “A,” the favored spot, and the Republicans for line “B.” This result tested the credulity of the Republicans who engaged Mahlon Fast to file suit. I kind of won the case. The Clerk did not get his wrist slapped, but the court enunciated rules for how to draw ballot positions. Fast went on to become a judge. I went on to publish several collections of poetry and think I got the better deal.

Anyway, if one must get fired, being fired while still young is a better experience than in middle age or older. It was an object lesson that in politics, jobs come and go. Be prepared. I got a job with the City of Paterson Law Department. Mayor Frank X Graves, also a State Senator (those were the days), hired me. Graves was a wildly colorful political boss type character who kept a police radio by his bed, sent the police around to collect back taxes and was an ardent gun control advocate. If you’re not familiar with Graves, listen to Bob Dylan’s, “The Ballad of Hurricane Carter,”

where he’s referenced. Once, in conversation, Graves told me that he preferred women lawyers to men because women were smarter, worked harder and were more loyal. I worked in the disparate areas of school budgets and historic preservation. Graves, whom we’d all assumed would live to be a nonagenarian like his father, suffered a fatal heart attack at age 66 in1990.

Bill Pascrell, a popular member of the State Assembly, was elected mayor later that same year. I stayed in the law department until 1995, and I also got elected to the Montclair Township Council in 1992. Street smart, stubborn and sharp as a tack, Pascrell was born and raised in Paterson, lived there his whole life. Like Shapiro he too had a reputation as a reformer. Bill was also a union advocate. One of the ways Pascrell had gained local prominence was as part of a group that successfully fought the extension of Route 80 through the middle of a Paterson neighborhood. The Route 80 connector was relocated.

While mayor, Pascrell remained in the Assembly. Though dual office holding is no longer permitted for many good reasons. Service in the legislature did enable mayors of large cities to advocate more effectively on behalf of their constituents. State legislatures are often stacked in favor of suburban and rural areas.

In 1992 the City of Paterson celebrated its 200^th birthday. ( It’s not too late to see “Hamilton” if you haven’t. Alexander Hamilton figures largely in the founding of the city. I expected to be underwhelmed by the musical, but discovered all the hype was accurate). And, since this is the “me” version of local history, I will return to Paterson in 1992 and add that I took my son, then seven, to the 200^th birthday celebration. Repeating a performance that apparently occurred in 1974, the bicentennial included a high wire act across the Great Falls of the Passaic. If you have not been to the Great Falls, it is worth the trip. Seriously. And there are a lot of good Middle Eastern restaurants.

I had at least as much contact with Bill Pascrell after I left the law department as I did before, because I was still on the Montclair council. In 1996 Bill was elected to Congress. Montclair was in Pascrell’s district. Busloads of constituents went to D.C. for his first swearing in. I took my kids. We all remember the day in detail, going from one event to another, seeing Al Gore. I’ll admit it, it was pretty thrilling.

Pascrell was great at retail politics. He called me every year on Rosh Hashanah to wish me Shanah Tovah. Corny, but sweet. Always there for his constituents, for firefighters, for everyone. And he read poetry. He did not pretend to read it. It interested him. Around 2000, the Paterson Poetry Center, in the person of the indefatigable Maria Gillan, published an anthology of Paterson related poetry. There was a reading in Paterson, at the museum or the Hamilton Club, I no longer recall, and Pascrell showed up. She was honored, I think. I was nervous, because the poem of mine that’s included in the collection is about Bill Pascrell and the Paterson Bicentennial I mentioned above. Of course, he would not have known that beforehand. Following the reading he did agree that what I wrote in the poem was true, and he didn’t hate me afterwards. I’ve never met any other elected official at a poetry reading. Here’s my poem, slightly revised, because I can’t help myself.