My cover blown, it is time to come out of the closet. Despite appearing, for more than half a century, to be a loyal son of Toms River South, I have recently harbored feelings of joy at the prospect of our dreaded, sworn, enemies, succeeding. Yes, a traitor in the land of the Indians, hoping for a return to football glory of the Lakewood Piners. Unthinkable. Unforgivable. But there I was, Friday night, sitting in the visitors’ stands as Lakewood took on Monsignor Donovan. No disguise, no attempt to deceive anybody, I was there prepared to root for Lakewood. Not against Mon Don, for Lakewood. …

Seaweed problems, such as the debacle that has unfolded over the past couple of weeks in Brick Township's Seawood Harbor development, are nothing new in Ocean County. Complaints of too much fertilizer flowing into Barnegat Bay are nothing new, either. Experts have said too much food flowing into the bay from lawn fertilizers is taking a toll on aquatic plants. It was those plants that were in the crosshairs of upper bay officials in the summer of 1968. There were too many of them. Brick Township was hiring 15 men during the summer to try to rid its beaches of what were branded “weeds.” Former…

There was no wrinkled trench coat, no chewed and smoking stogie this time for Lt. Columbo. But actor Peter Falk, who died at 83 on Thursday, was involved in a real life drama in Ocean County in the fall of 1982 when he got a bit part in the trial of a college friend accused of a bizarre plot to bribe a young state trooper to forget the details of his arrest of wise guy’s kid at the Surf Club in Ortley Beach. Falk was delivered by a limo that stopped on Hooper Avenue before he got out and went to Superior Court Judge William H. Huber’s second floor courtroom. The celebrity brought lots of …

To Ocean County’s political folklore, add the cannoli moment. Joe Vicari, proud of his Italian and Jersey City heritage, must be feeling the heat in his bid for yet another three-year term on Ocean County’s all-Republican freeholder board. Sponges used to be his campaign mainstay. “The guy with the most sponges wins,’’ he likes to joke. Only this year there’s no guy trying to unseat him. Instead it’s Michele Rosen of Waretown, who once served on the old Dover Township Committee before Vicari, the late Tom Renkin, and political sniper Robert Haelig put the Grand Old Party back in control of …

The massacre of Toms River’s reputation in October 1972 was bloodier than the British attack on the village and its defenders during the waning days of the Revolutionary War. And it's impact reverberated throughout Ocean County. The despoilers did not arrive by longboat through Cranberry Inlet. Loyalist William Dillon of Island Heights did not lead the murderous pack to the village. Instead they came overland, from Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love, led by Maury Levy, a writer in search of a story, even if he had to make one up. “Death at Toms River,’’ screamed the headline over the …

The Allen Road beach on the bay in Berkeley Shores is getting a makeover – again. It’s a place that once looked like the meadows north and south of that bayside community. But when the growth genie jumped out of the bottle in Ocean County with the opening of the Garden State Parkway, it soon became apparent that there was not enough waterfront property to fill the needs of the masses suddenly within driving distance of paradise. So out came the big timber mats and the clamshell dredges. The big shovels moved the mats out onto the meadows and drove up on them, operators secure that the heavy …

There are trials you don’t forget, especially if they have sex, violence, organized gangsters and great lawyers. The trial of a North Jersey wiseguy reputed to be Joe Pesci’s model for his role in “Goodfellas,’’ was one of them. I didn’t know it then, but Robert “Cabert’’ Bisaccia, was a mobster on the rise when he was hanging out “down the shore’’ in 1974, moving from motel to motel and looking for prey. He found it when a Seaside Park doctor went looking for somebody to collect money from a contractor he loaned money. The contractor owed the doctor money. So Dr. Gerald F. Wolfe asked …

Economic waves swept across Pinewald like Sherman marching to the sea, wiping out grandiose development plans. Recessions and a depression left standing the gem of what was to be a new city in the Berkeley woods, the Royal Pines Hotel, now a health care facility called Crystal Lake Healthcare and Rehabilitation. It was billed as the centerpiece of a massive development in the roaring 20’s, complete with fine rooms, expensive furnishings, gambling, a prohibition era bar, and a lakefront setting. Uncle Sam would provide the last push to get the long-promised hotel built. Benjamin W. Sangor, who…

It was billed as “a major inducement to the economy of Ocean County,’’ by the freeholder who got it built and died a year after it opened from injuries he received in a plane crash at the new airpark off Pinewald-Keswick Road in western Berkeley Township. Like so many government enterprises in Berkeley Township, it was built in the middle of nowhere, with the hope that development would follow. It didn’t follow the airpark, the Berkeley municipal building, and is still trying to envelop the Central Regional schools. Taxpayers have poured tens of millions of dollars into the airpark to make it…

Few issues have shattered the political tranquility of Ocean County and Toms River the way the controversial plan to build a new $315 million toll road from South Brunswick to the Garden State Parkway did in the early 1970s. Plans for the Driscoll Expressway, named for the former governor and father of the New Jersey Turnpike, seemed like a runaway train that could not be stopped. But stopped it was. The so called Parkway Spur was authorized by New Jersey lawmakers in 1965, but the New Jersey Highway Authority, which operated the Garden State Parkway, did not have the money to build it. …

Ocean County needs a place to remember those who color outside the lines: a Citizen Activist Hall of Fame. There are dozens of nominees, mostly now forgotten, who battled the status quo against abuses real and imagined, and in some cases made huge differences for others who heard and adopted their cries for reform. I got introduced to the species early, on Long Beach Island, where the likes of Capt. George Clover, Joseph Transue, and Wesley Kenneth Bell railed against some of the policies of the Long Beach Township Board of Commissioners. Transue was a frequent critic of the amount of money …

  It seemed to me for years that Berkeley's town center was at Korman's Corner. Town centers weren't in vogue then. Everybody knew where Bayville was, and Ocean Gate, Pine Beach, and Beachwood. To get from one to the other on Route 9, you had to pass through Korman's Corner. Life was so much simpler then. Berkeley's Town Hall was where it belonged, in Bayville, right there on Route 9. Progress came to Berkeley and somebody got the bright idea of moving the municipal building and the police headquarters out in the middle of the woods, west of Pinewald and Double Trouble, about as far from …

Wouldn't it be great if the redeveloped Beachwood Plaza Shopping Center did become the focus of a new town center for Berkeley Township?  Will 2011 be the year that dream finally clears the bureaucratic and regulatory hurdles? We'll see. For me, nothing can replace the shopping center as I knew it, working for one of the most colorful men ever to adopt Ocean County as his home, the late James E. "Jimmy'' Johnson, who owned the place – sometimes. I say that cautiously, because no one could be sure, from day to day, which limited partnership or other family entity actually owned which part of …

What a week! First the Big Oyster announces it will close the nation's oldest nuclear plant in Forked River 10 years before its extended license expires. Then the governor unveils his $110 million Barnegat Bay bailout. It's hard not to be optimistic with so much good news coming our way. The impact could be as important to the northern part of the bay as it is to the region around Oyster Creek. That's because more than 60 percent of the nitrogen pollution flowing into the bay comes from the Metedeconk and Toms River watersheds. Those watersheds stretch far into the western fringes of Ocean …