N.J. history 3 x 5 inches at a time Author retraces Garden State history

Staff Writer

By gloria stravelli

N.J. history 3 x 5 inches at a time
Author retraces
Garden State history


JERRY WOLKOWITZ  Helen-Chantal Pike, author of Greetings from New Jersey: A Postcard Tour of the Garden State, has created a history of the state through the lens of its tourism regions.JERRY WOLKOWITZ Helen-Chantal Pike, author of Greetings from New Jersey: A Postcard Tour of the Garden State, has created a history of the state through the lens of its tourism regions.

One of the roles New Jersey has always worn so well is that of a leisure-time getaway for its residents and neighbors who are as close as a parkway ride to the state’s mountain lakes and shoreline beaches, amusement parks and u-pick-it farms, casinos, boardwalks and ubiquitous diners.

Since the 1800s, vacationers have been memorializing these excursions by sending picture postcards bearing the insouciant sentiment "Wish you were here," and for just as long, collectors have been passionately accumulating the cards.

Some 6,000 vintage Jerseyana postcards are amassed in the collection of Eatontown author Helen-Chantal Pike, who selected 381 for inclusion in her celebration of New Jersey: Greetings from Asbury Park: A Postcard Tour of the Garden State. Pike will be at Borders Books and Music, Route 18, East Brunswick, on Sunday from 1-3 p.m. to sign her book.

Just published by Rutgers University Press, the 256-page soft-cover book is saturated with full-cover reproductions of postcards ranging from a 1900 hand-colored print of field flowers to a 1999 photo of Tillie on the facade of the Palace Amusements building in Asbury Park.

The book touches down at 204 destinations within the state’s six tourism regions, defined by Pike as the Gateway, Skylands, Delaware River, Southern Shore, Greater Atlantic City and Shore regions.

"As a travel writer, I thought the way to take the postcards and tell the story of New Jersey was through the tourism regions we have," she explained.

Pike’s avocation began when she was 6 years old, and a family friend began sending her postcards of state capitals to help her learn geography.

"It was his aim that I have all 50 states. It’s how I learned geography. It was a neat thing for a child," she said.

Greetings from Asbury Park follows three other historical books by Pike.

Her work as chairwoman of Eatontown’s 325th Anniversary Celebration in 1995 and her desire to pass the legacy of her hometown’s history on to its children led to Pike’s first book, a history of Eatontown and Fort Monmouth, written in cooperation with Glenn D. Vogel and published by Arcadia Tempus Publishing Group.

Pike said that in researching the volume, she also amassed a trove of information on neighboring West Long Branch, which she drew on for her second Arcadia volume on that town, published in 1996.

"There’s a lot of migration of people in and out of Eatontown," Pike explained. "West Long Branch was once part of Eatontown. A lot of communities were part of larger communities that got sectioned off, and that’s exactly what happened to West Long Branch."

Research for the West Long Branch volume led to another on Asbury Park in 1997.

"There was a flight of families out of Asbury Park, and some relocated to West Long Branch," she explained. "Also, I knew from my Eatontown research that in the 19th century, some merchants and members of the African-American community left Eatontown to go to Asbury Park. There was economic opportunity there."

Doing the research for the volumes came easily to Pike, who drew on reporting skills honed during a 20-year career as a journalist.

It wasn’t until she was writing a series of articles on the N.J. Coastal Heritage Trail in 1993 that she began to draw on her postcard cache.

Vogel helped her make the connection by taking her to a postcard show and helping her find postcards of sites along the maritime trail.

"I had a small cache of cards I had been accumulating," she said. "I had always bought postcards of New Jersey while living away because I would get homesick, but they didn’t have a real focus."

And pretty soon Pike had a binder full of postcards relating to the heritage trail.

Next were cards that depicted Eatontown history.

Her travel writing took on an added dimension as a result.

"Every time I did a travel story about New Jersey (she has written 42), I tried to find postcards that related to it," she said. "When I wrote stories on Atlantic City, I bought Atlantic City cards. It’s a fun thing to do, and it was sort of my reward."

About two years ago, Pike’s collection reached critical mass. She looked around and thought, "I could do a book." So she contacted Rutgers University Press at a booksellers convention in 1999. She submitted an outline and was contacted three weeks later.

Greetings from New Jersey would prove to be Pike’s return to writing. She had taken a hiatus to care for her ailing father, Dr. Robert E. Pike, an author and educator, who established the first foreign languages departments at Monmouth University in West Long Branch and Ranney School, Tinton Falls. Pike said that after his death in 1997, she lost interest in her writing career.

But a request to write a forward for a reissue of her father’s Spike Boots: Sketches of the North County revived her craft.

Originally published in 1959, the book on logging has gone through four editions and is now a collectible.

"That pulled me back into writing," she said.

While working on the reissue, Pike was up against a deadline for Greetings from New Jersey, and was searching for a theme for her postcard tome.

"I kept going back to leisure. How did people spend their leisure time in New Jersey?" she pondered. "Other topics sprung from that. The question arises: How did they get there? Then I found out that railroads built theme parks to encourage travel.

"Religion is also a form of leisure time," Pike continued, "so that led to inclusion of Ocean Grove’s summer camp. Too, New Yorkers looked at New Jersey as their back yard, and Philadelphia was included because back then, it figured prominently in New Jersey’s leisure history. I was constantly brought back to leisure time," she explained.

Once she had a theme, Pike set about choosing the postcards that best depicted each region.

"Which out of the cards best captures the personality of each region? That’s when I started finding out how diverse we are," she noted. "Also, how do you define characteristics for the subcategories for grouping the cards together?"

The narrative and captions that accompany each postcard required extensive research for which Pike resourcefully drew on sources ranging from neighbors (one, a detective, helped her track down the identity of bathers in a postcard scene) to some of the 25 photographers whose works are reproduced in the book.

"I found George Scheller, and he told me a charming story of how he took the picture of ‘Trenton Makes, the World Takes’ by leaning out the window of an airplane, and I stuck that in," she said.

Her book, like her postcard collection, is about preserving the past, she said.

"Collectors are people who are saving something because they know it’s going to be lost forever," she noted. "They have a vision of what they’re saving because either it makes a statement or they’ve put disparate pieces of history together.

"In New Jersey, we have watched an enormous amount of change take place in the last 25 years. We have lost part of our cultural heritage because of progress. That’s the way life happens," she said. "For me, the way to preserve history is by finding these pictures and putting them in a meaningful storyline."