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Health & Fitness

Please Allow Me to Introduce Myself - PART I

My original small town was Manalapan Township - Taylors Mills Road. Not Monmouth Heights, but the old section of that road.

John Couger Mellencamp wrote in his song ("Small Town") "Well I was born in a small town. I live in a small town. Probably die in a small town. Oh those small communities." This song describes my life my life pretty well.

My original "small town" was Manalapan Township. The family and I lived on rural and sleepy Taylors Mills Road. Not the Monmouth Heights development section, but rather the honest to goodness "original" part of that road. The part where Englishtown Auction Sales owner Jimmy Sobecko built a number of small ranch homes that sold for about $9000 a piece back in the 1950's.

Escaping from Brooklyn, NY to the country with my two year old sister, Desly, was my parent's dream. Sally and Ed LeVine were struggling and hard-working people, who wanted an affordable and wholesome community to raise a family in. They were also hoping to run a small business from their to supplement the various factory jobs my father held during those years. They met, as children and married after the war, hoping to buy a home in the New Jersey suburbs. Growing up, they discovered and fell in love with rural Western Monmouth County, while spending special summers with their own parents at the nearby Bergerville Bungalow Colony on Bergerville Road in Howell Township (behind Howell Lanes)NJ. That was where they met as teens way back in the the 1930's. It was a bungalow resort - much like those in the NY State Catskills - to where many New York City City Jews came each summer to avoid the boiling heat of Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx and to share some good times with family and friends in small rough and tumble summer bungalows; hidden in the woods of Howell. There for about $500 a summer, families had none of the comforts of home, but sure had just about everything else to make for great summer fun.

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Bergerville was not the only quaint and primitive place my parents discovered in this "Green Acres"part of the garden state. They also found and embraced the Englishtown Auction Sales (EAS), a farmers market that brought dozens of local farmers and hundreds of local townsfolk to its buildings and fields to buy fresh eggs, home grown produce and steel toe work boots nearly every Saturday of the year. EAS was the Freehold Raceway Mall of its day. In fact, there weren't many other places to shop in the area back then. It was also a main livelihood for many area residents, who sold their wares and shaped their lives as part of its merchant ranks. For a buck you could rent an outdoor table; spread your goods out and make a modest living from the local clientele.

My grandfather, Benjamin Shapiro, had been in the rug business for decades, before my parents made their move to Manalapan. The area was not so unfamiliar to him. Growing up in nearby Jamesburg, grandpa quickly discovered that floor covering was his niche and he went to New York City to learn the trade and to buy the merchandise he would eventually peddle to the "hicks" of Central New Jersey. He bought and peddled used carpeting remnants from the old Pullman railroad cars of New York to the people of the Freehold area. In fact, he sold much of carpeting that at one time covered Radio City Music Hall. He bought it for a song and sold it to local farmers for a killing.

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Back in the day, my grandfather and my parents stood back and watched in amazement as the area locals engaged in tug of wars over a single floor runner or carpet remnant they wished to buy to decorate their old farm houses. Selling rugs at Englishtown Auction made for a good living and members of my family continued selling there for over sixty years - including me. My mother eventually became known to many as "the rug lady at Englishtown".

Selling at Englishtown Auction was rather easy during the summer season, since mom and dad headed there from Bergerville every Saturday morning - less than 10 miles away. The winter months, however, were a much different story. Loading up their broken down old station wagon, that no one in Brooklyn wanted parked in front of their Brooklyn (NY) homes was difficult and - at times - perilous. Driving to Englishtown with doors that needed to be tied shut with rope and with rugs tied to the roof wasn't much fun. Standing out in the cold to sell these rugs and then facing the long, cold trip home on the Staten Island Ferry wasn't a pleasure either. They longed for a hot meal and a warm bath to shake the cold from their bones on Saturday nights throughout the brutal days of winter exposure.

When EAS owner Jimmy Sobecko pitched an inexpensive home he was building on Taylors Mills Road, they were immediately interested. But, $9000 was alot of money in 1952 and they had to apply for a mortgage through the Veteran's Administration. Fortunately, my dad was a WWII navy veteran and they were able to qualify.

For months, mom and dad made the trip from Brooklyn to Manalapan just to park in the driveway and watch their new home being build. Imagine their joy.

During the summer of 1952, they packed their belongings and my two year old sister in that old, broken down Ford and left the city for the very last time to - at last - become rural residents. My grandparents, Ben and Pearl soon followed and the Shapiros and LeVines became Western Monmouth County residents.

I was born in September of 1956 at Fitkin Hospital in Neptune and joined the family on Taylors Mills Road.

To be continued...

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