I’ve been engaged for a few years now on Facebook presenting the history of Oakland to all who desired to fondly recall their roots. And I have done this as a relative stranger among the multitude who grew up here in Oakland and indeed lived, breathed and who were so enriched by the simple, wonderful joys of our Mayberry. Along the way since my wife and I moved here in 1979, I have been blessed with many friends, many of whom grew up here and shared what it was like then. I am insanely jealous.

I grew up in Bergenfield, NJ when we moved there from the Bronx as one of ten children in 1951. Then, it was a tough town composed mostly of Irish and Italian vets of WW II who with their families escaped the Bronx, Brooklyn or Queens on VA loans. A kid in Bergenfield then had to know how to fight. Our houses were small on a 50×100 lot containing perhaps more grass and trees than they could imagine. Folks joined their churches and the local VFW, proudly marched in Memorial Day parades with some limping from the wounds or missing limbs from fighting a world war as soldiers in Europe or in the Pacific. I was a son of the Greatest Generation and was/am damn proud of it.

While I didn’t fully realize it at the time, the history of Bergenfield and its roots had been completely obliterated. There were no old farms, no 19^th Century buildings or even a population that remembered the old Bergenfield ‘Back in the Day’. Bergenfield was, since the 1930s, a real estate promoters dream. It was close to NYC, had a train station with a full commuter line to NYC, a great public school system, and it also had a full bus service as well. There were large churches serving ever their growing faithful adherents. Taylor Street, where our house was located, had sewers, telephones and every residential convenience that one could think of. And my street was even named after a local real estate developer and promoter.

But Bergenfield had no sense of its history, its roots, and no one cared. It had no soul and was simply a commuter town. On with the new and better without even a wink to that which made it what it was then. And by the 1950s its historical roots were long ploughed under, obliterated, forgotten and dismissed in the name of a another housing development. Fast forward to 1963 when my family left Bergenfield to the rarified air of Ridgewood, an opportunity afforded to my Dad because IBM, his life-long employer, moved from NYC to Armonk, NY. I went to college, got married, divorced, remarried and moved to Oakland in 1979 where I have happily been since with my bride.

I recall well when I first moved here observing many odd things to my eye. Things like the Ramapo Lodge….What was a tiny motel doing in a little, semi-rural town? And there were these few 19^th Century buildings in our business district and really old houses along Ramapo Valley Road. Then I heard of rumors about beaches along the Ramapo River. What? There were to me so many clues of a wonderful old and recent glorious past partially obscured by cinder block buildings. Oakland’s past still existed if one were to merely look for it. Simultaneously, I began to trace the deed history of my property just to satisfy an intellectual curiosity and learned that both the Spear and Demarest families had owned the property upon which my house was built.

This trace of deeds to my property led me back into the mid and late 19^th Century Oakland. I was hooked. What started as a simple historical curiosity morphed into a hobby which then became a passion. But this nymph that became a most beautiful butterfly equally demanded that it be preserved and shared for both the enjoyment of both current and past residents in addition to future generations of Oaklanders. I began to realize that I am merely the caretaker of my historical record of Oakland, not the owner. I also began to realize that much of Oakland’s history was being lost as long time residents were retiring, moving away and/or dying. Something had to be done. And so, in 2002 over too many beers, John Madden, a great friend, and I hatched the idea to do a book on the pictorial history of Oakland. It was intended to be a historical stake in the ground designed to pictorially present and share our historical roots.

In the 14 years since its publication, I have learned much more about our history particularly since the advent of Facebook with all of its interactivity. Specifically, I have learned that there is the ‘historical’ history of 100+ish years ago. Additionally and very separately, there is the history of the era of our parents and grandparents and then there is the ‘near’ history which is that of when we were growing up maybe in the 1950s through the 1970s. And each epoch has its own level of interest and degree of historical touchstone all while being interrelated.

Yet, I have arrived at the soft conclusion that the causes and reality of this interrelated division of historical epochs is somewhat unique to Oakland, a God given blessing simply assumed by too many today. I’ll explain.

Because of many factors over the last century ranging from our location to land ownership voting restrictions, Oakland has always been the backwater, rural part of Bergen County to be ignored and dismissed. It even took 30 years for Rt. 208 to reach us in the early 1960s after seeming annual pleas to any governmental agency that would or might listen to us. A partial result of being ignored was that even as late as the 1950s there were once wonderful farms all along RVR and throughout Oakland that were simple fallow, empty fields. It was those empty fields in our ignored Oakland that gave rise to the opportunity for our fabulous recreational facilities that exist today.

Our downtown then also contained many wonderful Victorian homes and buildings. Life was slow, a bit lazy and wonderful. We were a living, breathing Mayberry with beaches, swimming and fishing along the Ramapo in the summer. No traffic and no traffic lights. Everybody knew your name and no one locked their doors. Our library was small but adequate and located above our firehouse on Yapow Ave along with Oakland’s municipal offices. P.S. 1 was in full swing and our police knew and took care of every kid. Oakland in the 1950s and even into the 1960s was a lower middle income, blue collar town with deep Dutch roots whose primary source of employment was the Ford plant in Mahwah. All that began to change when Rt. 208 came to Oakland in 1963.

And virtually all of this was during a time when the rest of Bergen County was drunk with expansion and ‘modernization’. Yes, while Oakland was spared for many years, the days of our Mayberry were numbered.

My point here is that alive and well today are hundreds if not thousands of current and former Oaklanders who so fondly remember those days and times particularly when the rest of the towns in Bergen County was trashing its history and quality of life. These are the people who are charter members of the ‘Recent History’ group mentioned above. And these are the people who so accurately lament the loss of their Mayberry. These same folks carry with them the memories and values that they leaned here in their Mayberry and pass them on to their children and grandchildren. While the Oakland of today is a wonderful town, it is not, cannot be and will never be again the wonderful, idyllic Mayberry of our past. And it cannot be by dint of societal, regulatory, legal and sociological changes mandated by the 21^st Century and the residents who followed Oakland’s greatest generation. And even during the latter part of the 20^th Century, they witnessed the wholesale destruction of their unique and wonderful way of life by local politicians whose vision was so short sighted as to be of biblical proportions.

The children of Oakland today will grow up with excellent memories of their childhood….All of the great sports facilities and great schools. They will remember well all the benefits that their upper middle income parents provided from handsome houses to ubiquitous iPhones and iPads and nice cars at the age of 17. Aside from the technological advances, those benefits would be absolutely foreign to Oakland’s Mayberry children as those are things, not the stuff of the heart and soul, not the stuff of the warmest memories carried forth with incredible fondness into everyday of the future.

In a certain way, for all the greatness that Oakland is now, I nonetheless somewhat feel that the children of Oakland today have been forcibly deprived of a Mayberry that sadly cannot exist anymore. To those that lived it, I can only suggest to be thankful for all your days and to modulate your just lament in the recognition that nothing can stay the same and that sadly we can never go home again.