Looking back: Little League football

Youth sports have been important throughout the years for people who grew up in West Milford, including some senior citizens now nearing 100^th birthdays. Some have memories before organized programs with adult supervision began in the 1950s. In the 1930s and 40s both boys and girls played softball and volleyball, skated and swam in lakes and ponds, played with objects such as marbles (boys) and jacks (girls) and played Hide and Seek, Red Light and other motion games. Without adult supervision available, they needed to solve any disputes without adult guidance.

Flash back 60 years ago to 1966. Little League Football and other sports groups were organized at the township level with adult supervision for the players. Mayor Wilbur Fredericks and Township Committeewoman Mollie McFarland were at a 1966 game and available for the photo pictured with this article. The young game players, some of them pictured, are Mike Fioravanti, Greg McDavit, Ray Bossard, Gorden Potter, Ronnie Sierns, Steve Malmberg, Mike McKern, Dennius White, Larry Phillips, Matthew Lynch, Paul Reilly, Tom Gilroy, Mark Wiggins, Alan Quackenbush, Paul Houlis John Beri, Georghe Knebel, Peter Brayda, Dan Davenport, Bob Mahala, Doug Gasalberti, Paul Cardinale, Jim White, James Oroho, Matthew Pirog, Randy Junchiewicz, Walter Yaworsky, Wally Cornelius, Ken McGill, Ed Wiggins, Kevin Mahala, Tom Bigger, Andrew Lowely, John Bonitz, Tim Cavalieri, Steve Butsavage, Bill Zigenbalg, Kelly Blair, Tom Keating, Mike Sierns, Peter Bovrischew, Peter Emanuelli, Dan Rodgers, Mark Harlow, Dan Kelly and Tom Okrinsky. The PAL building was built in the 1990s and West Milford now has a Department of Community Services and Recreation to manages athletic and recreation programs.

Robert B. Nicholson II, celebrating age 98 next month, remembers the days of the rural schoolhouses. He was a student at the one-room Oak Ridge school before a second room was added. He worked at his dad’s business on Oak Ridge after school, then afterward and on weekends played touch football on Levi Chamberlain’s field. Alfred Coursen, Bill Holliday and Russ McNeir were among his friends there. In winter kids skated on Wallace’s Pond and swam there in summer. Bob enjoyed skating with Wilbur Fredericks on Greenwood’s Pond too. Bob and his friends also went swimming at that location. He recalled that boys changed into their swimsuits in a brush covered area, reached by a long path. The girls had a separate changing area in woods a distance away. Asked if there was ever any inappropriate behavior between the boys and girls, Bob emphatically responded, “Never! Absolutely Not!”, insulted even at the thought that there would be anything but proper respect for the girls. The Wallace Pond property eventually became part of the City of Newark Watershed, and their security guards sometimes chased kids off the property.

Echo Lake two-room school kids also spent a great deal of their free time out of doors playing softball on John Matthews’s field on Macopin Road, with Rudy Sloboda, Echo Lake School upper grade teacher, and Hillcrest teachers Tom McCartney and Norine Flogel Hall, who all lived in the area, sometimes joining in. The kids hiked in Mathews’s forested lands and skated on and went swimming in the pond he built alongside Macopin Road, south of the Germantown Road intersection. Later it became White Birch Park. Walter “Lou” Mathews entertained the other kids by skating full speed across the lake and successfully jumping over piles of beach sand. Sloboda had a pick-up truck and sometimes transported kids to Newfoundland and other schools for competition softball games. It was a time when people did their own thing.