Author Archives: NJSL Staff

Hidden Stories in the Port Authority of NY & NJ Annual Reports

October 7, 2024Research Library Spotlight No Comments

Embark on a journey through the New Jersey State Library Digital Collections, where curiosity meets exploration, and where your intuition can lead to discovery. The newly digitized collection of Annual Reports of the Port Authority of NY & NJ provides an excellent example of how even the most practical of government documents can spark curiosity and reveal fascinating stories.

Illustrated map of the ports of New York and New Jersey. Caption on page 25 reads: The illustrations on the map have been designed to highlight the principal regions of waterfront activity within the port and to suggest the type of development characteristic of each section. Indicated by the broad red band bordering the waterfront are the major steamship piers and terminals in the port of New York serving deep water shipping. The narrower red areas are utilized principally by local harbor traffic. The industries included are chiefly those which utilize the waterways of the harbor for receipt of raw materials or shipment of products. Since space limitations preclude a detailed picturization of all industries and waterfront terminals, selection has been made of those which will give some conception of the variety and scope of the port's activities. — “Port of Many Ports..”, 1940 Annual Report for the Port of New York Authority, pages 24-25.

The Port Authority of NY & NJ, originally called the Port of New York Authority, was established in 1921 to oversee the complex transportation infrastructure of the region. While the Annual Reports in this collection provide empirical data such as financial statements and performance metrics, outlining goals and operational achievements, you can also find embedded historical narratives in the photos and written reports. Many of these photos hide stories with deeper layers, offering glimpses into captivating narratives from the past.

Alice Jean May Starr

Alice Jean May of Englewood, New Jersey, a secretary at Teterboro Airport, recently won 175-mile all-women's air race at Reading, Pennsylvania. — 1950 Annual Report for The Port of New York Authority, page 79.

Consider this photo of Alice Jean May confidently occupying the pilot’s seat at Teterboro Airport. Here, she is celebrated as the victor in a 1950 all-women’s pilots’ race and also dressed for work as a secretarial employee. Although not mentioned in the photo’s caption, through a little research, we learn that Alice Jean, or AJ as she was known, was one of the pioneering Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs), who flew military aircraft in non-combat operations during World War II.

WASPs answered the call to serve and filled critical wartime needs as civil service employees trained as pilots. In the early days of aviation, they were part of a group of trailblazers in the skies, who were then tethered by society’s expectations.

In a New York Times article, using her married name Alice Jean Starr, AJ discusses the challenges she faced following the end of WWII and the disbandment of the WASPs in 1944, stating “We wanted to keep flying in the worst way, but it was not to be.” She speaks to the duality depicted in this Annual Report photo, taken when she worked for Mallard Air Service out of Teterboro Airport, saying “I flew for them, but I also got stuck doing secretarial work because it was expected of me.” This photo and its caption serve as a poignant reminder of both AJ’s triumphs as a pilot and the societal barriers she faced.

Photograph with caption: Wings Over Water. Miss Alice Jean May, of Englewood, is shown receiving her pilot's wings from Harold Lentz, instructor, as Sky Harbor was dedicated yesterday at Carlstadt. Looking on are some of the other girls training to be pilots. Miss May is the first girl seaplane pilot of the new Women Flyers of America. — “Women Dedicate New Seaplane Base at Carlstadt”, The Herald-News, July 22, 1940, pg. 9. Retrieved from ProQuest New Jersey Newspapers.

Other articles found using ProQuest New Jersey Newspapers database note AJ’s flying achievements before and after her time as a WASP. In 1940, she earned her pilot’s wings at Sky Harbor in Carlstadt, NJ as the first female seaplane pilot of the Women Flyers of America. After WWII, she became an active member of the Ninety-Nines, the International Organization of Women Pilots, and competed in and won air races.

Women Airforce Service Pilots

Alice Jean May Starr was one of over 1,000 women who served in the WASPs from 1942-1944. While at Teterboro Airport, AJ also worked with Kay Brick, another WASP, who graduated as part of the earlier “Unruly Third” (43-W-3) class. Kay was a squad commander, a president of the Ninety-Nines and went on to be inducted into the Aviation Hall of Fame and Museum of New Jersey. AJ graduated among the fourth group of WASPs, class 43-W-4, which also included Hazel Ying Lee. Hazel, a cherished member, was the last of 38 WASPs to die in service, highlighting their enduring legacy.

Shockingly, the U.S. military classified WASPs as civilians. Those who died in service, like Hazel, were not recognize and faced financial hardships even in death. The WASPs were finally granted military veteran status in 1977 (Public Law No: 95-202) and honored with the Congressional Gold Medal in 2010 (Public Law No: 111-40). In 2016, H.R. 4336 was passed, allowing WASPs the honor of being buried in Arlington National Cemetery with other military veterans.

Explore the New Jersey State Library Digital Collections

The New Jersey State Library Digital Collections provides free and easy access to NJ government publications and other NJ-related materials. We encourage you to feed your curiosity and explore our ever-growing digital library to uncover a treasure trove of historical narratives and connections.

Our collection of Port Authority of NY & NJ documents is being digitized as part of a larger project, Telling New Jersey’s Untold Stories, made possible with grant funding from NARA’s National Historical Publications and Records Commission.

Written by Jonathan Zipf, Library Associate

Learn more about New Jersey Attorney General’s Opinions

July 17, 2024Research Library Spotlight No Comments

NJSL Staff

NEW JERSEY ATTORNEY GENERAL’S OPINIONS.

Under New Jersey law, NJS 52:17A-4(e), the New Jersey Attorney General, acting through the Division of Law, is the sole legal adviser for all state agencies, boards and authorities, and is also responsible for interpreting all statutes and legal documents for those clients. One of the methods by which the Division discharges that statutory responsibility is by issuing legal opinions. The Attorney General may issue a Formal Opinion, Informal Opinion or a Memorandum of Law. Formal opinions and memoranda are published in print and electronically.

Informal opinions are not made available to the public. The agency that requested an informal opinion has a discretion to release it to the public. There exists an attorney-client relationship between the Attorney General’s Office and the state agencies to which it provides legal advice. That relationship is codified in NJS 52:17A-4. A unit of State government is a client for purposes of the attorney-client privilege, and consequently any legal opinion provided by the Attorney General to a state agency is shielded from disclosure (Paff v. Division of Law 412 NJ Super 140).

Attorney General opinions may cover a wide range of issues that affect New Jersey citizens such as the constitutionality of a property tax rebates bill (Formal Op. 2-2007) and the recognition of same sex marriages performed outside New Jersey by couples who intend to file joint tax returns in New Jersey (Formal Op.1-2007).

Attorney general Opinions are very important. On July 25, 2007, the Editorial Board of the New Jersey Law Journal in an editorial titled “Bring Back Attorney General Opinions” made a clarion call for the “revival” of Attorney general opinions.

The website of the Office of the Attorney General has a list with active links to formal opinions.

The New Jersey State Publications Digital Library has a collection titled Formal Opinions of the Attorney General, which is freely available to any researcher.

Formal opinions are also available on Westlaw, Lexis, and Heinonline. The New Jersey State Library provides onsite patron access to these law databases.

Written by Jones Addo, Law Librarian

The Advance and the New Jersey State Reform School

July 17, 2024Research Library Spotlight No Comments

NJSL Staff

As part of the New Jersey Digital Newspaper Project (a collaboration between Rutgers University Libraries, the New Jersey State Library and the New Jersey State Archives which was funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities) back issues of the Advance (1888-1905, 1921) were digitized and made available via Chronicling America, the Library of Congress’s newspaper database.

New Jersey State Reform School students operating printing presses in 1905 — From the 1905 Annual Report of the New Jersey State Reform School

The Advance was the school newspaper of the New Jersey State Reform School located in Jamesburg, N.J. It was started on March 1, 1888 and was published on the first and third Thursday of each month. The paper was four pages with four column and was sold for a subscription price of twenty-five cents a year in 1888 and fifty cents a year in 1921. There was no advertising.

John F. Babcock, formerly the editor of the New-Brunswick Daily Fredonian was the first editor and printmaking teacher though there was purposely no named editor identified with the newspaper. The paper was published for the benefit, directly and indirectly, of the boys of the school as they learned printing skills and practiced their English language and composition lessons in a real-world application.

The Jersey State Reform School was opened in October of 1867. The State Library’s collection of digitized annual reports, along with the Advance builds a picture of life in the school which used a “family” system of organization where the boys resided in different houses headed by a husband and wife with approximately fifty residents, according to age. The opening of the school represented a step forward in the care of young offenders as they had previously been housed in county jails alongside adult prisoners. The Reform School had a program of early rising (5:30am) and then work until lunchtime. Work tasks included printing, brickmaking, farming, making shoes and shirts and laundry and kitchen work. School followed lunch for three and a half hours, five days a week, fifty weeks a year.

Illustration of students and instructor in print shop — From the 1904 Annual Report of the New Jersey State Reform School

The residents of the school were boys between the age of eight and sixteen, both white and Black. Many were sent there for crimes related to larceny and incorrigibility. Newspaper content was intended to inspire, instruct and educate with an emphasis on right living and moral instruction, interspersed with poetry and stories. “Just as the Twig Is Bent the Tree’s Inclined” was the phrase on the newspaper masthead. News items about the reform school, its bands, sports teams and the activities of the staff were also featured. In later years each of the houses provided a written report of events in their house. News from around the state allowed the boys to remain connected with their home towns.

In July of 1889 the Advance moved to a weekly publication schedule. The shirt factory where many of the boys worked in the mornings closed leaving them without occupation. Some were sent to school in the morning, others were employed by a local brush factory and others were sent to work on the Advance which doubled the number of students working in the print shop.

In 1901 the school was renamed The State Home for Boys following the recommendation of the 1900 Legislative Committee on The Reform School. In 1970 it was renamed again to the “Training School for Boys”. September 20, 1921 was the last issue of the Advance as a four-page newspaper as it transitioned to a magazine format in November of that year.

Community Conversations: New Jersey’s COVID 19 Storytelling Project

July 17, 2024Research Library Spotlight No Comments

NJSL Staff

In November of 2021 scrolling through my personal photo library looking for images not worthy of long-term retention I came across some pictures I’d taken of one of the main streets running through my town. Boring, I thought. Delete. Delete. Delete. Only later did I remember that I’d taken those photographs to document one of the actions that my town had taken to make life safer during the COVID-19 pandemic; widening the sidewalk by extending it into the road so that pedestrians could social distance. How quickly we forget.

Guarding against this forgetting is the Community Conversations: New Jersey’s COVID-19 Storytelling Project. A collaboration between the New Jersey YMCA State Alliance, the New Jersey Department of Health and Healthy NJ 2030 the Project documented, and analyzed the personal accounts of more than 580 New Jersey residents during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In March 2020, the New Jersey YMCA State Alliance was preparing to hold public health forums in partnership with the state Department of Health when the pandemic hit, making in-person contact impossible.

Instead the YMCA Alliance switched gears and issued an open call for residents to send in their stories, be they artwork, videos, poems or any other artifacts of their experiences during the COVID crisis.

Once the stories had been collected they were sent to the Walter Rand Institute at Rutgers University Camden where they were analyzed and themes were added. Themes such as the digital divide, challenges with remote schooling, and housing insecurity. The social disconnect theme looks at the loss of human interaction and how isolation took its toll on everyone.

The State Library’s role relates to the long-term preservation of the digital archive and to that end the Library ensured that submissions were in archivable formats and that the appropriate permissions were received. Staff then constructed metadata using the information provided by the YMCA and the Walter Rand Institute. There are three hundred and sixty items in the State Library collection as some chose not have their interview archived and made public. Other submissions contain multiple participants.

There was a lot of incredible creativeness during the pandemic and these stories document the bewilderment, the loss, the isolation, the kindness and self-care strategies people used to survive.

Browsing the community by subject enables you to see all the different themes and the submissions that address them.

As a repository of memory this archive of individual experiences and responses to the COVID-19 pandemic will allow future researchers to examine the past in all of it’s complexity and draw lessons from it.

New Jersey State Library Public Hearing Collection

July 17, 2024Research Library Spotlight No Comments

NJSL Staff

The New Jersey State Library has almost completed a project which involved scanning and creating metadata for several hundred New Jersey legislative public hearings, a project that was undertaken jointly with the Office of Legislative Services and the New Jersey Attorney General’s office.

Public Hearing Title Page — Example of a public hearing title page

Public hearings are a way of moving the conversation forward around a particular issue or proposed piece of legislation. When a bill is introduced in the legislature it is then assigned to a committee based upon its subject, i.e. an Assembly education bill will be sent to the Assembly Education Committee and a Senate bill to allocate a portion of Green Acres funding to create inclusive playgrounds will be sent to the Senate Environment and Energy Committee. As there are hundreds of bills introduced in each session not every bill gets a hearing or “taken up” by the committee. The decision as to which bills to hear in committee is decided by the committee chair who is a member of the dominant party in the legislature.

Upcoming notices of which bills will be heard in committee are posted to the legislative calendar, posted as required by the Open Public Meetings Act or sent via email notice to individuals registered to be notified pre-selected bills. Individuals wishing to testify about a bill, either orally or by submitting a written statement, register at the outset of the hearing with the committee staff.

The committee chair begins the hearing by introducing the topic and the individuals invited to the hearing to testify. These are usually government or industry professionals with a deep knowledge of the matter under discussion. During the hearing the members of the committee are able to ask questions of the person testifying but it is not a two-way conversation.

The earliest digitized hearing is from 1938 with the Assembly investigation of alleged fraudulent and illegal conduct at the general election on November 2, 1937, etc. which is a four-volume hearing about election fraud in Hudson County. The committee found “utter and complete disregard of law by local election districts” and urged the immediate installation of voting machines. Charles F. Stoebling, the Hudson County commissioner of permanent registration refused to appear before the legislative committee, pleading illness and refusing the committee access to the voter registration lists, going to far as to have police officers guard the vault in which the records were kept.

Public hearings are one of the ways that legal researchers try to determine legislative intent and so the hearings are cited in the State Library’s popular Legislative History collection. However, not every hearing was always transcribed. With a few exceptions most of the digitized hearings are from the 1960s forward. Older hearings have not yet been digitized but are still available for loan from our paper collection, or we may be able to digitize a hearing upon request if staff time and hearing condition allows. In 1996 the Office of Legislative Services began to create and post born-digital hearings and so the State Library has all hearings both in print and digitally from that time on.

All the digitized hearings are full-text searchable. You’ll sometimes see the note “Copyrighted material removed” in the metadata. Sometimes individuals or groups submit newspaper articles or scholarly articles in support of their point-of-view. As these cannot be posted without the permission of the rights holder we remove them. However, we do have a copy of the unedited hearing which we can make available upon request.

The State Library has hundreds of hearings not yet digitized so doing a comprehensive search involves searching in the catalog, not just in the digital library, as any hearing available digitally will have a link in the catalog record.

For more information contact New Jersey State Library Reference Services.

Great Atlantic Hurricane 1944

July 17, 2024Research Library Spotlight No Comments

NJSL Staff

Beach Haven
Holgate
Ventnor
Surf City
Surf City
Surf City
Sea Isle City
Ocean Grove
Matawan
Ocean Grove
North Wildwood
Margate
Long Branch
Loch Arbor
Holgate
Holgate
Holgate
Beach Haven
Atlantic City

The Great Atlantic Hurricane of 1944 was first detected on September 8th when a pressure fall and erratic winds were noted around the Windward Islands. Named the Great Atlantic Hurricane by the Miami Weather Bureau, it barreled up the east coast reaching over a 500 mile radius.

Avalon, by New Jersey State Police — The force of the storm destroyed many homes. This house in Avalon was one of three destroyed and though no lives were lost the American Red Cross did have to rescue people from their homes when water came in high.

Before the storm hit New Jersey it pelted towns with heavy rainfall for days. Hundreds of homeowners and holiday makers left the shore towns and sought safety inland. On September 14th the storm hammered New Jersey with great force doing major damage to Long Beach Island, Ocean City, Atlantic City and Cape May. Telephone and utility poles were washed away, cars and trolleys were stranded, and bridges connecting some towns on barrier islands were destroyed.

The State Library has multiple resources to discover more about this storm. In 1944 the New Jersey State Police did a thorough (over 400 pages) town-by-town inventory of the damage the storm caused along with reports submitted by the departments of Agriculture, Institutions and Agencies, Conservation and Development, Highway and the Civilian Defense Council. Many lives were saved due to the Civilian Defense Council (who were a volunteer group set up to protect civilians in case of a war emergency) warning and evacuating residents from danger zones.

The Brigantine Bridge across Abescon Inlet was destroyed.

The Atlantic City area sustained millions of dollars’ worth of damage with all utilities and transportation disrupted. In some places whole sections of the boardwalk, with rails and benches still intact were blown four blocks inland. The Brigantine City Bridge connecting the island to the mainland was destroyed.

While news of the allied advancement in World War II figured prominently in newspapers of the time, there was still room for front page coverage of the impending storm and then its aftermath.

The State Library’s subscription to ProQuest’s Historical Newspapers offers access to the Asbury Evening Press from that time period (1905-1974) and the Plainfield Courier-News (1894-1961) along with other newspapers from the northeast. The Plainfield Courier-News reported that “Plainfield and its vicinity looked today like something a battalion of paratroopers had worked over” and that the estimated damage in total was over 20 million dollars.

Accessing these collections

A good overview of the storm can be found in Great Storms of the Jersey Shore by Larry Savadove and Margaret Thomas Buchholz which is available for in-person or interlibrary loan (call number J551.55 S263)

Many photographs can be freely viewed in our 1944 Great Atlantic Hurricane collection.

Our collection of historical newspapers can be accessed remotely by New Jersey state employees and by anyone within the State Library. Additional digitized content can be located using our guide to New Jersey Digitized Historic Newspapers.

The New Jersey State Police town-by-town inventory of storm damage is called the State of New Jersey Report of Hurricane Damage September 14, 1944 (call number 974.90 H966 1944) and can be viewed in the library.