LACEY – When it comes to township history, John Parker knows it all because he lived it. The former long-time committeeman/mayor is the natural choice to serve as the community’s historian.
He was mayor when Lacey celebrated its 125th anniversary. This year, the township turned 150. Earlier this year, Parker was named as honorary mayor.
Among the many events that have been taking place to commemorate Lacey’s big birthday have been a series of fire pit chats held on the property of the Lacey Historical Society’s Schoolhouse Museum.
During this summer series sponsored by the LHS, Parker spoke twice before large audiences who sat near an open fire and were regaled by his stories of the past that were very personal to him because he lived through those times when Lacey was younger, the population was lower, the parkway and Oyster Creek Generating Station didn’t exist and the weather was a lot different.
Parker sat beside his cousin Virginia Schoenberg Parker during the first event. “When you talk about age, we are the last two Parkers of the old age Parkers. We have a lot of younger ones,” he said with a chuckle.
While he had help with an outline of what he was set to cover during his first talk, he added some vivid memories of his own, some jokes and he responded to a few comments made about his younger years.
“My father’s people were here in the 1700s in Forked River and other relatives were in Waretown. I want you all to put your mind to the idea that there is no Garden State Parkway and make believe there is no power plant for this little talk. I want to limit it to what was before 1965,” Parker said.
“We’re going to start off with schools and the history of the Schoolhouse building here. I went here from first to fourth grade. We had a one room school house in Lanoka Harbor and I went to school there in 5th grade and then we went to Toms River grade school from 6th to 8th grade. Then we went to Toms River High School from 9 to 12th grade and I went on to the University of Maryland,” Parker said.
Parker moved on to the subject of sports “which was everything in this town. If you were a young person, it was a great time to grow up in this town. You could do anything you wanted to do. You had all the freedom in the world. We had a lot of sports because we didn’t have television so people would actually come out and support the sports.”
“We had a tri-county baseball league here. We had the Forked River baseball team and we had an Ocean County basketball team and there is still a trophy at the firehouse when we won it one year. I was a four-letter man at Toms River High School. The Forked River Giants was a state-wide baseball league by the American Legion. We didn’t have enough ball players here so we had to go over to Waretown and they played with us.”
Parker was the captain of the Toms River football team during his high school years. He was also president of the class. He recalled that to get to some of the sporting activities to play or watch there were only two buses available and if you missed the bus, “you had to hitchhike home.”
“I spent my whole high school career hitchhiking. I was pretty good at it,” Parker added to the laughter of his audience. “You would park your bike at the Redding store and then you’d ride it home when you got back. You hitchhiked all over the place.”
Parker noted the community hall was donated by Charles Smith in 1928. “That was a very nice gift of his family. In World War II in 1942 and ‘43 we had movies once a week at the community hall. They were 10 cents. You could go upstairs and one of the ladies would sing God Bless America and then we’d have a movie and usually it would be with Gene Autry. That was kind of fun.”
“Out back where there is a parking lot is now, we had a 54-foot tower built during World War II and that was manned every day during daylight hours because the big threat back in those days was German submarines that came off this coast. They would sink ships and scared the hell out of people,” Parker said.
Parker added that “for one year we used the community hall for the 8th grade before we built the grade school on Lacey Road in 1952.”
