Recently in southjersey Category

Julie's been busy this weekend following up on the rally she attended Friday, hooking up with all of the organizing that's happening to save St. Mary's Church in Malaga NJ. She's taken lots of pictures of St. Mary's and yesterday made up t-shirts for the cause!

One positive element to come of the Bishop's decision to close down St. Mary's and half the Catholic churches in South Jersey is how parishioners are coming together for their churches. Julie's already typed in half of a 1997 history of St. Mary's onto the internet, and there are plans to interview elderly members, the oldest of whom remember the church being built.

The story of a little church in a sleepy rural town is the really the story of the Italian Catholic experience in America. There's a certificate in the back of the church that lists all of the donations that were collected to build the church, some from dirt poor farmers who couldn't even afford a dollar but still put all they could to build a house of worship.

To my Quaker readers: don't worry, I'm not going Catholic on you all. It's just that even I can tell there's something special about St. Mary's and the devotion and the newfound-feistiness of it's community (how did they makes the Times?! And two pictures!). The bishop wants to sell all these little rural churches and replace them with impersonal mega-churches. The struggle for authenticity, humanity and the remembrance of the experience of those who struggled before us transcends religious denominations. We'd all lose something if churches like St. Mary's were all torn down to make way for more Super Wawa's.

Tags: southjersey, catholic, st mary's, malaga, nj, diocese of camden, bishop galiante, farmers, italian, authenticity

Julie and Theo took a bus into Camden NJ this morning to attend a rally in support of St Mary's. It's one of dozens of churches that the Diocese of Camden has slated for closure. St. Mary's Father Romanowski was scheduled to meet Bishop Galante today but the Bishop canceled at the last minute. Channel Six Action News profiled St Mary's a few days ago and the video gives you a little idea why it's a special little church. More pictures of the St Mary's rally here.

Near Atsion NJ. Today's pictures | Atsion Flickr Map

I visited Woodstown NJ this morning for a client visit and brought my camera. Salem County is full of rolling hills and farms stretching to the horizion and the back roads always remind me of Lancaster County PA. Locations available via map.

We suspect this might have been the one room schoolhouse where Julie's maternal grandmother taught.

The Batsto Village Halloween party wasn't quite so much fun this year: their website didn't mention that most activities ended part-way through the afternoon so that the organizers could sit in front of the old houses giving out candy. We arrived on the late side so no face painting or pony rides for the boys butterflies. We still had fun in the first really autumn day of the season and Batsto was looking more bucolic than ever. More pictures (including some of the cool gearing in the old Batsto gristmill) over on yesterday's Flickr page.

Right: rare video footage of a Genus Franciscus Butterfly in migration.

Warning: Geek to follow: Thanks to readers for their patience these past few days as I've transferred QuakerRanter to a new web host. My old account had multiple sites on the same server, including QuakerQuaker.org and MartinKelley.com and every time there was a problem on QR it would take everything down. After probably a year of troubleshooting and never quite fixing the problem QR is off on its own (on Bluehost.com, I wanted to see what CPanel was like).

I'm also rebuilding the site to be more compliant with the new Movable Type template structure, which motivates this new look. I still like the old minimalist design ripped off of Kottke and might bring it back or might experiment with something else that fits the new stream-of-life direction the blog has been taken with its Twitter integration.

I can't really blog about the most interesting financial development of the day, which has to do with the end of a certain witness of fifteen years but if any F/friends want to know feel free to drop me an email.

Off now to see if the town Halloween parade has been washed out by rain again (today is the rain date and it's pretty soggy if not actively raining). Expect pictures of cute boys in matching butterfly outfits...

Yesterday the kids and I took a road trip to Apple Pie Hill, a summit of loose gravel that towers over the South Jersey pinelands from a dizzying height of 209 feet above sea level. A fire watch tower on the summit adds another few dozen feet, enough to get a visitor over the treetops. On a clear day it's said you can see the skylines of Atlantic City and Philadelphia. Fortunately for me it was an quintessentially beautifully fall day--clear and crisp. It was easy to spot the cities, both thirty-two miles away (mostly to the south and mostly to the east respectively) and here's blowups of the two resultant photos:


More pictures, from left: Sand road to the hill, the fire tower, the view down through the steps of the tower (the kids were left in the car), two year old Francis eager but thwarted attempt to repeat Papa's climb up tower. Click individual photos for enlarged and geotagged versions. More photos of this and out stopover at Atsion later in the day on yesterday's Flickr page.

For those interested in repeating our journey, here's a map showing our route up and back. I was mostly winging it, depending on these directions from NJPineslandsandDownJersey.com starting from nearby Chatsworth NJ, self-styled "Capital of the Pine Barrens."



Other map views: View Larger Map | Satellite with Route Map

A few days ago my two-year old Theo and I took a meandering bike trip that brought us to the charmingly-named Piney Hollow Road (alas, not quite as rustic as it sounds). We stopped on the unassuming bridge over the Great Egg Harbor River and I looked for a trail into the woods. We found one about a hundred feet north of the river, hiked in another hundred feet and picnicked along the river. When I got back home I started Googling around and discovered that our sand trail was the Blue Anchor Fireline Road and that we were on one of the main paths in to the famed Blue Hole.

Your retroactive prayers are in order. Julie, “Theo”:www.nonviolence.org/theo and my mother just came to visit me in the fgc office on our way to see the Philadelphia Flower Show. When they were walking out of the “PATCO”:http://www.drpa.org/patco/ train, the doors closed on Theo’s stroller, pinning his arms.

I was almost assaulted by a Philly cab driver on my way home this afternoon. He was rolling through a crosswalk I was trying to use to get to the train station (he had a solid red light, I had a solid green one). Once safely across, I politely pointed out the crosswalk and he took it as some sort of challenge to his manhood, getting out of his cab, coming right up to my face, threatening to beat me up, run me down, etc. He also called me a choice name (one whose use “polite company”:http://rapdirt.com/article2085.html limits to female canines). Ah, life in the big city. I spent my train ride composing the complaint letter going to the cab company and the PUC.

Useful sites for locals: “Pennsylvania Public Utilities Commission”:http://puc.paonline.com/ (they have an online form for Taxi complaints). “PhillyWalks”:http://www.cleanair.org/Transportation/phillywalks.html, a group that educates about pedestrian issues.

I cross that intersection twice a day and it’s right by one of the city’s main cab stops. If this is the last blog entry you’ll know he didn’t like my letter.

Today, news of the end of WSNJ-FM, “the Cumberland County”:/cgi-bin/axs/ax.pl?http://www.fybush.com/NERW/2004/040202/nerw.html radio station that really was an alternative to the corporatized mediocrity of Clear Channel and its clones:

bq. It was bound to happen, but inevitability doesn’t make today’s sign-off of WSNJ-FM (107.7 Bridgeton) any less bittersweet. One of NEW JERSEY’s oldest FM stations, WSNJ remained a bastion of old-time radio in a voicetracked, consolidated world right up to the end, super-serving Cumberland County and surrounding portions of South Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware with everything from farm news to a swap shop program to lots and lots of local news and information.

I’ve spent many a car drive to Vineland listening to WSNJ. Julie’s heartbroken: “i knew it was over the other day…and i just wanted to cry. i kept checking back and checking back to see if it was just a technical problem.”

A nine year old in Buena went joyriding in a bright yellow-school bus. Strange enough as that is, what’s even stranger is that the New York Times covered it as a “local” story.