The Book of New Jersey: A Lot of This, A Lot of That

Stuart Mitchner

Other states may be worthy of encyclopedias, but with the exception of high-profile states like California and cities like New York, it's unlikely they could generate a work as vast and weighty as the 927-page tome Rutgers University Press is bringing out this month. Nearly a decade in the making, and edited by Maxine N. Lurie and Marc Mappen, the Encyclopedia of New Jersey (Rutgers, $49.95) comes with 585 illustrations, almost 3,000 entries, and 130 maps. Thirty pages are needed simply for brief profiles of the multitude of contributors.

Having lived here for three decades, I've kidded about "darkest New Jersey" as much as anyone else, but always with the understanding that if you think of states as characters, New Jersey is a major player, not a glamorous matinee idol, but a star with a black coffee voice and a five o'clock shadow, like Humphrey Bogart. We have the best of all possible locales. To those who claim being situated between two great cities has robbed us of our identity, what other state has both New York and Philadelphia at its disposal (no pun intended)? Ah, but there it is. The negative reflex. Even though I come to praise New Jersey, it's hard to resist going for the grit. New Jersey and garbage go together like love and marriage. George Bush's father talked about the vision thing. We've got the image thing.

In fact, among the longest and strongest entries in the book is one simply titled "Image." How many other state's encyclopedias would feel compelled to include a lengthy entry on its image? I didn't expect one. I happened on it by accident. Such is the vastness of this volume, you could hop around in it for years and never land on this excellent entry. But that's the fun of encyclopedias.

The two pages on "Image" are by Michael Aaron Rockland, co-author of Looking for America on the New Jersey Turnpike, also published by Rutgers. Mr. Rockland amusingly surveys all the ways in which New Jersey has been mocked and stereotyped. But the state comes up roses, thanks to, among others, Newark Airport, Bruce Springsteen, the high-tech boom, and the Sopranos, "which has made New Jersey life, even at its rawest, fashionable around the nation" (and the world: more than half the people on the popular, four-hour-long Sopranos tour are foreigners).

According to a source quoted in the "Image" entry, "Jersey is the only state that so overpowers its namesake, you can drop the "New" when referring to it. Try that with Hampshire, York, or Mexico."

The Encyclopedia should please stat freaks as well as random explorers like myself. It gives you nine-plus pages listing the U.S. Census and Ethnicity numbers for every town in New Jersey. It gives you a breakdown of the state's presidential voting preferences from 1789 to 2000 and includes the numbers for the nation at large. If you want to know the 23 major soils of New Jersey from Wallpack (a.k.a Wooster) to Tidal Marsh, they're here. You've got maps showing where all the prisons are, and maps in color showing water resources, land use, and the abovementioned major soils. It's no exaggeration to say that the maps in color are a pleasure to look at, whether or not you know what they mean. The same is true of the colorful satellite imagery that illustrates the dust jacket. There are 16 handsome pages of color illustrations.

As a random explorer, I was not tempted to read about the 556 municipalities, except for a perfunctory check on the Princeton listings, which offered no surprises. I was more interested in the map showing where each of the state's Cold War missile sites was located. The map makes it clear that strategic placement of the missiles was for the protection of the cities New Jersey supposedly feels overshadowed by: New York and Philadelphia. Considering how humble and disdained our state was in those days (if no longer), it's interesting to think that we were the designated protector of our betters.

Here are a few favorites among the entries that turned up during my random explorations. Place names that have disappeared from maps. The book gives you a sample, including Good Intent, Mount Misery, and Skunktown.

The Hercules Powder Company, where the creation of TNT was perfected.

The Jersey Blues, which could have doubled for a subhead in the Image category. It includes the lyrics for a song about the infantry troops so named.

The Karagheusian Rug Mill in Freehold, which provided the rugs for the Radio City Music Hall.

Lionel Corporation, the maker of electric trains (a picture of the 1924 Lionel Train catalog is included).

Levi Disbrow, who bored the first successful artesian well in the United States.

Abbott and Costello, both born in New Jersey. Here you find out that Time magazine named their "Who's On First?" routine the best comedy routine of the twentieth century.

Or Snow's Clam Cannery. Or the Switlik parachute Company.

Or John Paradise and his son John Wesley Paradise, both painters from Hunterdon County.

So it goes. But a review of an encyclopedia would be incomplete without some questions about who's in and who's not. The editors had an advisory board of about 30 experts to help with the selection process. According to the Jersey section of the Times, Ms. Lurie and Mr. Mappen were advised to avoid including living persons "since their lives could change abruptly and make their entries look foolish. On the other hand, it would be hard to avoid some of the living."

True enough. Bruce Springsteen is a given (he rates more space than his home town, Freehold). But do we really need Los Angeles Dodger ace pitcher Oral Leonard Hershisher IV, who, as the entry admits, had exactly one brilliant year pitching in the major leagues? Because he grew up in Cherry Hill, he's in here with a separate entry, and so is Giants coach Bill Parcells, but not Missouri-born Bill Bradley, a basketball legend at Princeton and on the New York Knicks, and a U.S. senator from New Jersey (Bradley does get a mention under "Basketball"). Connie Francis and the Four Seasons (Frankie Valli rates a separate listing) are here but why Joe Piscopo and not Eugene O'Neill or Scott Fitzgerald? Princeton weeps. Thanks to Hollywood, John Nash is here but not George Kennan, who is mentioned in passing in the Institute for Advanced Study entry.

Not to worry. This is truly an embarrassment of riches, herons and egrets, munchmobiles and wampum, or, as onetime Princeton resident Fletcher Knebel once put it, as quoted in the Image entry: "a little of this, a little of that." Actually, in this book, it's a lot of this and a lot of that. The Times says it weighs six and a half pounds. It feels more like ten. And if you really want to see how big it can be, look for billboards along the New Jersey Turnpike between exits 9 and 16. From May through June, it will be out there, thanks to the Rutgers University Press marketing department. Drivers looking for America will be seeing the Encyclopedia of New Jersey.