The Pulis House and Pond

Sometime In the early to mid 50s, my wife Elaine’s father John Oldenburg rented a house on Ramapo Valley Road and opened Bergen – Passaic Engineering and Surveying. Soon after, he accepted a position as Borough of Oakland Engineer and became close friends with Milt and Aggie Pulis. Before moving to Oakland in 1957, Elaine recalls frequent trips to the Pulis home with her brother John and mother Betty, who would later become the Valley School Nurse. .

One of Elaine’s special recollections is of the top of a massive concrete piling that came up from the basement and ended flush with Pulis’s living room floor. It was on this vibrationless platform that an early camera attached to a microscope was used to capture the first photographic image of particularly small specie of microbe. While she is unsure of who made this historic breakthrough, she believes it was Aggie’s father who was also a college professor. And although she is unable to remember any specifics associated with the microbe, she was told the exposure time for the photo was approximately one hour.

Another of her memories was of Aggie Pulis, who was a pioneering woman and entrepreneur; publishing a magazine she named “Controversy”. For content, she identified contentious topics of the day and printed the opposing sides of each debate. Regrettably, it was a valiant effort that failed, possibly because it was well before its time. For many years, copies of “Controversy” were stacked on Pulis’s basement floor

Another interesting fact is decades after the house was demolished, Milt’s formidable concrete column (which had apparently repelled the bulldozer) stood as a monument to the historic event that occurred so long before in such an unlikely place. As a photographer with significant darkroom experience, each time I saw the sentinel column, I imagined the photographer’s excitement as he watched the image slowly appear as he gently moved the paper back and forth in the developer tray. I also smiled with the knowledge that none of the thousands of people who saw this chunk of concrete, could possibly have imagined its incredibly strange and significant history.

My fond recollections of this area include a beautiful Osage orange tree that grew along side the brook opposite Ahler’s gas station. I often parked my bike under this tree and walked downstream to the pond located between Pulis’s driveway and the Hanson House. Here I pushed my way through the cattails and caught beautifully colored wild brown trout that were undoubtedly descendants of those stocked by Milt and the Hansons’.

Years later, I had the privilege of fishing the impressive raceway along side the house with Dennis Morgan, who had permission to fish there. We then drifted our baits from the bottom of Milt’s spillway downstream to the screened pipe that fed the swimming pool at Muller’s Park. These were unquestionable some of Historic Oakland’s “Good Ol’ Days”.

EZ 4/15/18