By Rose Bennett Gilbert
In this hyper-PC era, about the only things you can still make fun of and not get into trouble are mothers-in-law and New Jersey. Mothers-in-law are still fair game for stand-ups and send-ups, and so, alas, is poor New Jersey.
It has been called the Rodney Dangerfield of states — between the "What Exit?" cliche, "The Real Housewives of New Jersey" and "The Sopranos," it don't get no respect. But if you believe the Guidos and Guidettes of "Jersey Shore" were a reality check, fuggedaboutit!
Yes, New Jersey has its realities: It loves diners; there 563 of them. It loves Taylor ham, too. Don't ask. But it also has 1,800 miles of shoreline with 11 gorgeous lighthouses, plus a few magnificent swamps (Dismal covers 1,240 acres) and its own homeboy — Yeti, the fabled Jersey Devil that's been haunting the primal Pine Barrens since l740 and lent its name to the Jersey Devils hockey team. New Jersey may also be the only state that has a law against frowning in public, slurping soup, eating pickles on Sunday and men knitting while fishing. You could look it up.
Listen, there are 49 less colorful states in this union, so why pick on New Jersey? I've wondered this since I moved here more than four decades ago — moved here rather sheepishly, I confess, because I, too, had made unflattering comments about the, what? "Garden State? You're kidding!" as I passed through en route from my lovely, verdant home state of Virginia to weekend in magical New York City.
You could always tell by the smell when we hit the upper New Jersey Turnpike. Racing past the phalanx of oil refineries that fume and flame for miles along the highway, I quipped to my car mates, "One place I know I'll never live, New Jersey."
Two years later, I was unpacking guess where? In Princeton, New Jersey, a two-hour train ride to a new magazine job in magical New York City. Shady, preppy, elegant Princeton easily shattered my own prejudices, converting me into a zealous Jerseyophile, determined to bat back the derisive snorts and lame jokes everyone seemed to lob at my new home state.
A dull lull in a sit-com or even on a Broadway stage? Brace yourself. Here comes some smug swipe at New Jersey, sure to gin up a round of guffaws. Typical:
Q: Why is New Jersey called the Garden State?
A: Because Oil, Petroleum, Nuclear Land Fill and Toxic Waste State didn't fit on a license plate!
LOL I'm not. But New Jersey gets the last laugh. Those smelly oil refineries give us the cheapest gas in the United States. And we don't have to pump it ourselves (only Oregon is equally enlightened).
New Jersey may be small — 7,354-plus square miles — but it's rich, third-richest median household income in the United States ($67,500, just behind Maryland and Alaska).
It's geographically rich, too: "Down The Shore" we own a great swath of the Atlantic Ocean. In mid-New Jersey, rich, rolling farmlands grow everything from thoroughbred horses to some of the world's best tomatoes — hence, "The Garden State" on our license plates.
Then come lakes and mountains, including the mysterious Ramapos up near the New York border, home to a reclusive clan some say descended from Indians, runaway slaves and Hessian mercenary soldiers who skedaddled after Washington crossed the Delaware and routed them out of Trenton on Christmas Day 1776.
And that's just New Jersey's past history. Check out "Who's Who From New Jersey" in recent years: Frank Sinatra, of course, born in Hoboken. Bruce Springsteen, "Born in the USA" (read Long Branch, New Jersey). Jon Bon Jovi, Jon Stewart and Martha Stewart, Queen Latifa, Count Basie, Meryl Streep, Jack Nicholson, Jerry Lewis, Kevin Spacy, John Travolta and Whitney Houston.
Plus heavyweight thinkers, shakers and movers such as Alfred Kinsey, researcher; Buzz Aldrin, astronaut; Samuel Alito and Antonin Scalia, Supreme Court justices; Grover Cleveland, U.S. president, no less; writers Stephen Crane, James Fenimore Cooper, Phillip Roth, Dorothy Parker and William Carlos Williams; and at least one, one-off genius, Albert Einstein, who was born in Germany but lived and worked in Princeton (where novelist Joyce Carol Oates still does).
New Jersey can also claim Malcolm and Steve Forbes, capitalists; Charles Addams, cartoonist; Alice Waters, the mega-foodie; basketball giant Shaquille O'Neal; and the three brothers who founded Johnson and Johnson in 1886 and gifted the rest of the world with Band-Aids and baby powder.
With such world-class stars, why all the raspberries for the Garden State? Cliches die hard. Ask Cleveland, Ohio, whose reputation is still singed by the 1969 fire that broke out on the polluted Cuyahoga River. Even Washington, D.C., is plagued by a 200-year-old rumor that it was built on top of a swamp. It wasn't — it just feels that way in the summertime.
Maybe we all have a little bully in us and think it's fun to feel superior to something, even if it's a hunk of real estate. Naive me to think I could rebut the Jersey-knockers with a convert's zeal and a few actual facts.
"I'm from New Jersey, never mind the Southern accent," I'd insist when New Yorkers asked whence I came (they always ask because almost all New Yorkers are from someplace else).
Their eyes would slide off mine and look over my shoulder to see who else would be more interesting than someone from New Jersey.
"Wait!" I'd say. "When was the last time you were in New Jersey?" The answer, almost always: never. But said with pride, as if they had cleverly escaped a great pestilence. Sometime later, I almost married a terrific guy, an artist, a writer, a charmer. But he lived in Connecticut and didn't want to visit me in New Jersey for fear he'd "get an upper respiratory infection."
I elected to stay put on my side of the Hudson River and the Meadowlands, which, by the way, lie behind another black eye for New Jersey. The little town of Secaucus (the name's Indian, like so many New Jersey towns, including Hoboken, Hopatcong, Hackensack and my fave, Ho-Ho-Kus) teemed with pig farms well into the 20th century. Those pigs, some 75,000 strong, ate well on leftovers shipped across the Hudson from New York restaurants, which, in turn, could offer excellent pork to their diners.
But there was a price: When the wind blew east from Secaucus, it smelled even worse than the refineries over by the turnpike. The pigs are gone now. In their stead come herds of New York shoppers, intent on hogging bargains in the Secaucus shopping mecca, where some 60 stores discount luxury brands, such as Eileen Fisher, Escada and Calvin Klein.
The Meadowlands itself, once rumored to be the Mafia's dumping grounds for people they'd unfriended, now caters to the more sportsmanlike. Top racehorses compete at the Meadowlands track — trotters' penultimate event, the Hamiltonian, runs there every August. And the Giants play their NFL games in the Meadowlands stadium. That's the New York Giants, BTW.
Neither seems to care that they're actually in New Jersey.
WHEN YOU GO
Getting to New Jersey is a snap: Newark Liberty International Airport handles nearly 36 million passengers a year, and there's a super-easy, inexpensive ($12.50) Air Train from all terminals to Newark Penn Station, Secaucus Terminal and New York's Penn Station for whatever connection you need to make: www.njtransit.com.
The New Jersey Division of Travel and Tourism has an info-packed site that details the state's attractions from A — Asbury Park, as in Stone Pony and Bruce Springsteen — to Z, as in zebras at the terrific Turtleback Zoo in West Orange: www.visitnj.org.
New Jersey put its money on culture when it built the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in then-dicey downtown Newark 22 years ago. Since then it has drawn world-class artists and some 9 million patrons, including the Dalai Lama: www.njpac.org.
Another jewel is the Newark Museum of Art. See the largest collection of Tibetan art in the United States, marvel at the Zeiss Planetarium and browse the ethnic-rich gift shop: www.newarkmuseum.org.
Rose Bennett Gilbert is a freelance writer. To read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.
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