Jersey City, (NJ), NOV 19, 2023 – The Museum of Jersey City History

The Museum of Jersey City History presents Frank Hague’s Jersey City: Yesterday and Today. Join the MJCH on December 2nd from 12:00 PM – 5:00 PM for the Grand Opening. The exhibition will run from Dec. 2nd through 2024 at The Apple Tree House, 298 Academy Street, Jersey City, NJ 07306. Suggested Donation: Adults – $5, Children, Students, and Seniors are FREE.

Spanning three decades in the first half of the twentieth century, Frank Hague’s tenure as mayor saw profound and lasting changes to Jersey City’s physical landscape, political culture, transportation sector, and entertainment culture. As democratic norms were challenged, innovations in health care and education profoundly impacted the lives of thousands. Come to the Museum of Jersey City History at the Apple Tree House this holiday season and immerse yourself in Frank Hague’s Jersey City. Discover the legacy behind the Jersey City of today!

Grand Opening – Saturday, December 2, 12:00 PM – 5:00 PM

Special Holiday Hours – Saturday, December 9, 1:00 PM – 5:00 PM

After December 9th, the museum will be open on an alternating schedule:

• Saturdays and Sundays, from 1:00 PM – 5:00 PM 
• Tuesdays from 12:00 PM – 4:00 PM 
• Thursdays from 6:00 PM – 9:00 PM

Note: Hours may vary through January 1.

See updated hours, updates, and ticket info at https://www.mjchistory.com/ 

About the Museum of Jersey City History
The Museum of Jersey City History’s mission is to foster an authentic sense of community by sharing the rich and diverse history of Jersey City. To open the doors of the Apple Tree House to create a welcoming community space and locus of cultural exchange for JC’s diverse population. The Museum of Jersey City History is committed to launching a museum that is inclusive and representative of all of Jersey City, with its diverse population and many cultures.

This program is made possible by support from the City of Jersey City, the Museum of Jersey City History, and a grant from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, a division of the Department of State, and administered by the Hudson County Office of Cultural & Heritage Affairs, Thomas A. DeGise, Hudson County Executive & the Hudson County Board of County Commissioners.

The post The Museum of Jersey City History Presents Frank Hague’s Jersey City: Yesterday and Today first appeared on River View Observer.

Frank “Boss” Hague at Center of Controversy, Again!

 By Sally Deering

Some reporters seem to have ink in their veins; just the hint of a good tale propels them to find the facts, pinpoint the characters and put it in print.

That seems to be the case with Ron Semple, a 5^th Generation Jersey Cityite who walked the Jersey City beat for the Hudson Dispatch and Jersey Journal in the 1950s and 60s, Semple wrote news and features and at 27 became the Jersey Journalâ€s City Editor with a crew of 50 reporters he could send out on a momentâ€s notice to get a story. More than 50 years later, Semple finds himself once again writing copy about his hometown.

In BLACK TOM, Terror on the Hudson (Top-Hat Books, 516 pgs.; $27.95) Semple turns back the calendar to 1916 when German saboteurs destroyed a large railroad munitions depot (Black Tom) on the Jersey City waterfront. The explosion killed and injured several night watchmen and caused extensive property damage costing millions of dollars.

“What was perplexing about “Black Tom” was that everyone maintained it was an ‘accident†until the railroad sued Germany in 1924 for damages and years later collected $50 million dollars,” Semple says. “How could that have happened in a big city that was just a grouping of ethnic villages where no secrets were possible?”

Thatâ€s just a tip of the proverbial iceberg.

When the Black Tom explosion occurred, Semple wasnâ€t even around. Born in 1935, Sempleâ€s dad left Semple and his mother when he was a year-old; his mother went to work in a dime store in Hoboken and Sempleâ€s grandparents took care of him. Sempleâ€s dad had been a reporter at the Jersey Journal and he would come back to visit his son and take him along to the paperâ€s newsroom in Journal Square.

“I would sit there banging away at a typewriter with two fingers,” Semple says

Although his dad introduced him to a city newsroom, Semple says the real influence on his decision to be a journalist came from Fr. Raymond York at St. Peterâ€s Preparatory School in Jersey City. Semple was trying out for the football team because “thatâ€s how you got dates with girls” and he was lousy at punting the pigskin so Fr. York recruited him to write for the school newspaper. Semple penned a humor column and other stories for the high school reader and after graduation set off to Loyola University in New Orleans to study journalism.

He left Loyola to serve in the U.S. Marines – at the tail end of the Korean War – and after his discharge he returned to Jersey City, attended Saint Peterâ€s College and took a job as a reporter for the Hudson Dispatch, a morning newspaper headquartered in Union City and distributed throughout Hudson. He left there to be a reporter for the Jersey Journal where, at 27, he was promoted to City Editor.

“Thatâ€s the job I really loved,” Semple says. “I had all these reporters and I could cover everything I wanted. I had a list of assignments and it would run five pages long. I enjoyed the control; you could tailor what the newspaper was going to be like. In those days, as City Editor you not only did that, you put out the front page. I learned how to read type upside down and backwards.”

Sempleâ€s career path takes more twists and turns than the streets of Jersey City. He sailed to West Africa as a crewman on a freighter, traveled extensively in Scotland, Ireland and Sweden, worked as a truck driver, construction laborer, and the mate on a charter fishing boat. Semple also worked as legislative secretary to a state senator and sold nuts and bolts in a hardware store.

These days, Semple lives in Advance, North Carolina with his wife Jane. He was with FEMA for ten years working on hurricane rescues from Katrina to Superstorm Sandy. It was on a visit back to Jersey City to see former colleagues that Semple felt inspired to write about the Black Tom incident.

“I came up to Jersey City to visit friends, Bob Gallagher and Bob Waldron (former Jersey Journal reporters) and we went down to Liberty State Park where we could see the gap in the Skyline where the Twin Towers had been,” Semple says. “I saw a historical plaque on the Black Tom Explosion of 1916. Iâ€m a 5^th generation Jersey Cityite and City Editor for many years, and I never heard of Black Tom. I started reading about it and finally in 2013, I went to Warren Murphyâ€s 80^th birthday party, and he said why donâ€t you stop talking about that damn book and write it.”

Murphy, a highly-successful author and screenwriter wrote this on Sempleâ€s BLACK TOM book jacket: “… Mr. Semple has managed to combine fact and fiction along with a family saga of a time in our history when it really was all different, so the book is history and epic and exciting and sometimes laugh-aloud funny, as it tells the down-home stories of the overlapping ethnic groups who peopled those cities that long century ago…”

Being a book author is another exciting chapter in Sempleâ€s life, he says, and heâ€s already working on his next book.

“I quit newspapers at 52 and spent the next 30 years in emergency services,” Semple says. Iâ€ve had a great life.”

BLACK TOM, Terror on the Hudson, can be purchased at Barnes & Noble; and online at amazon.com, and Books-a-million.com.

On Wed, Nov. 5^th, at 7:30 pm

Ron Semple will be appearing at

WORD book store

123 Newark Ave, JC

(201) 763-6611

www.wordbookstores.com

The post FIRE & VICE IN Old JERSEY CITY first appeared on River View Observer.

With about 8 months to go until the presidential election, the raging rhetoric and political pontification threatens to leave potential voters tone-deaf, disgusted, and dubious that their vote matters. That being said, it will do us all good to remember the struggle of one group of Americans desperate to have that right to vote: the ladies of the womenâ€s suffrage movement of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries.

In the second decade of the 1900s, one Hudson newspaper carried a column titled “Womanâ€s Suffrage Forum,” a  regular feature that included information on local womenâ€s suffrage lectures, events, news and campaigns and also reported national progress as individual states voted for (or against) extending the right to vote to female residents. In 1915, New Jersey suffrage supporters succeeded in getting the question on a statewide referendum to be voted on in October of that year. In August, as the election drew near and a womanâ€s right to vote in New Jersey lay in the hands of the men of our state, the pages of local papers carried news of the upcoming arrival of the “suffrage torch” in Jersey City. The torch, symbolically unlit to represent the enlightenment that would come from granting we Jersey girls the right to vote, was to travel throughout the state to raise awareness and popular support for the upcoming suffrage amendment vote. The torchâ€s travels across the Garden State were to be accompanied by celebrations and ceremonies attended by politicians, prominent citizens and the leaders and members of the Womenâ€s Political Union (WPU). 

The handoff and return of the banner-emblazoned tug with a member of the New Jersey delegation triumphantly holding up the suffrage torch were memorialized in two photographs that speak to the happy occasion and hopes for the upcoming special election. Sadly, despite all their efforts, October did not bring the suffragettes a victory and the right to vote. Over 300,000 New Jersey men voted in the special election and while 42% of them were in favor of giving women the right to vote, the majority voted no and the amendment was defeated. Worse, that defeat meant the amendment could not be brought up for another vote in New Jersey for several years, a stinging blow to supporters of the suffrage movement.

Four years later, in October 1919, Mayor Frank Hague of Jersey City, representing New Jersey gubernatorial candidate Edward I. Edwards, addressed the executive committee of the New Jersey State Suffrage Association, a gathering that drew women from virtually every county in New Jersey. Hague advised the women to emulate the recruiting methods of menâ€s organizations and labor unions and to partner with the Democrats who had a “Votes for Women” plank in their platform, telling those present that the opportunity they had sought for years had finally come. In the end, the women of New Jersey won the right to vote when the 19^th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was approved by three-quarters of the states as of August 1920, one of those states being New Jersey.

Post-Script:  Ten days after the suffrage torch arrived in Hudson County and began its pilgrimage across New Jersey it was stolen from the backseat of an automobile in Atlantic Highlands. The NJ WPU offered a reward of $50 for its safe return. Representatives of a New Jersey anti-suffrage group offered an additional $30 reward, keen to prove that the “anti-suffs” were not involved in the theft. A week later, a Wall Street lawyer named Lynch contacted the WPU saying he found the torch on a Philadelphia streetcar. The recovered torch safely made its way back to Newark and Mr. Lynch graciously refused to accept any reward.

Maureen Wlodarczyk is a fourth-generation-born Jersey City girl and the author of three books about life in Jersey City in the 1800s and early 1900s:  Past-Forward: A Three-Decade and Three-Thousand-Mile Journey Home, Young & Wicked: The Death of a Wayward Girl and Canary in a Cage: The Smith-Bennett Murder Case.  For info: www.past-forward.com.

The post Hudson Then . . . Again – Women’s Suffrage Movement 19th and Early 20th Century first appeared on River View Observer.