I’m Richard Lenk, Professor Emeritus, at Bergen Community College. Today, I gather, we are going to talk about Paramus, Paramus Road, and the college.

I think the first thing that I’d like to ask you: If we could be put into a time capsule, and we were to look out the window here, and, let’s say it’s the 1600s, what would we see out here?

You would see probably a trail used by the Indians going up and down, parallel to the river, because the road itself was so old it doesn’t have what they call the official centerline. When they did a survey in 1818, the road had already been there for centuries or more, so they didn’t try to re-align it or anything, just record what was there. So it was an Indian pathway three hundred years ago. Then, of course, you had your first settlers there, the Zabriskis and the like, who came in in the late 1680s and settled along the road. Some of those families still lived here into the last couple of years, right on the same road.

Back to the Indians. What tribes were in this area?

They were called the Lenape Indians, who resided in most of northern New Jersey and parts of southern New York state. Later on, most of those Indians wound up in Oklahoma, a couple centuries later, and they had gradually disappeared from this region by the 18th century. They sold land to the Zabriskis in 1682 and I think also the Bantas around the same time. You also had slaves here in the 18th century, a limited number in some of the larger estates. Some of them were later given land of their own in different parts of the county by the local owners. So you had a few houses here. The nearest church was the one that is now in Ridgewood called the Old Paramus Church. The other churches came along later.
During the Revolution, this was very busy because it was a very busy street of troops going back and forth to Washington’s headquarters, which were near the church in Ridgewood, and stretched all the way up to Hohokus and down along Paramus Road, possibly as far as Rochelle Park. So there were soldiers coming in and coming out in encampments here. Battles were not fought exactly in Paramus until about 1780, when the British ripped through Hackensack and then up what is now Passaic Street, then known as Paramus Road, and met the outer pickets up around the area below where is now Route 4.

Interestingly enough, in 1825, the Marquis de Lafayette, in his visit to the United States, he spent a year visiting, traveled some of the same road, almost up to the college. He left in the morning, from Jersey City, where he talked to Colonel Richard Varrick, went by coach to Hackensack, where the flower girls pelted him with flowers, and he saw the gravestone of one of his generals, where he said, “He was one of my generals.” What else could he say? Then he went north to Paramus Road, went along there, and he went as far as just beyond Route 4, where there was a woolen mill, which remained in use until 1905, when the workers came out and waved their flags, their handkerchiefs, at him, and he waved back. He went up to Dunkerhook Road, where there was a spring with a tin bucket, if you wanted fresh water, and then made the turn down Dunkerhook Road to go to Paterson for the evening. So it was a rather busy day.

Now, during the ’30s and ’40s, Paramus Road was known for these places where you had little beaches, Old Mill Stream, and further north, all the way up to Midland Avenue, where a series of bathing places where people from, especially Jersey City, would take a bus on the weekend and go bathing along three or four beaches that were around Paramus Road on the west side of the road. Mrs. Scoskie, who owned the florist shop across the street from this college, told the Bergen Monitor in 1979, confirmed by her nephew when I talked to him last year just in passing, that her two favorite clients in the florist shop were Legs Diamond and Dutch Schultz because they always bought flowers and, you know, were good tippers. Fortunately, they didn’t come at the same time; they shot each other.
People were always looking for a two-year college, somewhere, in the county. The only one that they had was Bergen Junior, which was absorbed by Fairleigh Dickinson in 1954, and that was over in Riveredge and later became the Teaneck campus of Fairleigh Dickinson. In 1957, a man named Moss, from Fairlawn, formed a committee to get a two-year college. He never saw it to fruition; he died around 1963. But by 1965, they acquired a charter, an organization, and President Silverman was hired. But the big question was where to locate. Now, the county wanted us to locate in the area around Ridgefield Park, where they had an old abandoned schoolhouse but no area to park cars. You can imagine how much fun that would be. Eventually, in late ’65, the college decided to buy this particular golf club, of course, eminent domain. As one of the trustees told me, they thought they were going to be lynched by the people who were losing their favorite golf course because this was a public golf course. The private ones didn’t go, you see.
So the course was taken over, there’s a limited course for people to use; that’s the last remainder of the old course, and the buildings on the grounds were taken over, including the Scoskie Mansion. Another farmhouse that was used for years to record your grades is now bulldozed. A garage I think started out as a barn. And the little golf club place, where they sold things like the bookstore, was right at the corner there. It took three years to get the place organized, to be ready to open in 1968.

At that point, they had a couple of little problems. One was that the road was gravel, the road to the college. Only one part of the building was ready for them in ’68, what we call the E Building. They hired a crew of sixty full-time people at that time. Nobody who was associated with the college as a worker or teacher in its first year had reached their sixtieth birthday. Everybody was pretty young in those days. Now, the campus doubled in size in 1969. That meant they put an addition on. But they were some little snags. They had to open a little later in September because the building wasn’t quite ready, and there were several things left out. For instance, the new addition lacked electricity. Oh, well, you could always go to the other end. I had a class in the new addition of the E Building, and when I couldn’t see the back row, I said, “That’s it for the day.” In two weeks we got electricity. We didn’t get heat until late November; it was cool in that end of the building. The water for the bathrooms didn’t come on until the Spring. I was told that in ’68 for a while they had a portable john, which was always in a different location every time you wanted it, which must have been interesting.
Our first graduation was in 1970, and there wasn’t a great deluge, that was 1971. In 1970, we had John W. Davis, a member of the Board of Trustees, a very fiery speaker, as our speaker. It was a miserably dull, rainy, drizzly day, but we had platforms where we could sit. Only the students didn’t have platforms; they had chairs and took some of the rain. We were in a tent. Somebody liked tents in those days. The thing went rather well. The next year was the great deluge. What happened? It got darker and darker. As we’re going into the tent, and there was no platform for us; we’d sit on the bare stone, I said to Dean Charen, “It’s going to rain.” He says, “It won’t rain; we decree it won’t rain!” Boy, did it rain! In 1972, President Silverman asked me to compile the history of the college, and I was given carte blanche to talk to anybody. So I talked to a lot of the Trustees. The reason he was interested: one of the former trustees, Mr. Labov, had just died, and he realized, “Time passes; we need their memories.” Now, all but one let me interview them. The one handed me his scrapbook, that was Jacobsen, and he said, “Here, you can have that”, which the Library now has. So the transcripts of those are with the Library.

We also had wild turkeys visiting this campus, I’m not talking about the students or staff or faculty, but actually they lived next door in the Ridgewood Country Club, and then we’d come across, I guess they were pheasants really, every Fall. I don’t know how long it lasted; I haven’t seen them lately. Now we have the geese, we should enroll them as students; they’re here so often, and make them all major in Waste Management, and if they graduate, you give them a diaper rather than a diploma. You know, that’s what we should do to end that little problem.
The new building, of course, took a long time to get used to because it was so big, and we’ve added so many additions since then. It’s very impressive: you can almost walk from one building to the other, from one end of the campus to the other, which you couldn’t do in the old days.

Have students changed? Has the classroom changed? Obviously, the technology is different, but what about the students?

A bit but not by much. They didn’t change much in the way they are and the answers you get. I had one student who took off after he graduated, and from work, for seven months to walk across South America, and then came back and took another three months off to go through Central America. That’s initiative.
Well, on that story, we’re just about running out of tape here, and I want to thank you very much, for taking the time to come and talk to our future audience here.

Great!

You’re welcome. Any time.

Thanks a lot!