“Never let the truth get in the way of a good story ,” is a saying falsely attributed to Mark Twain that I’ve often jokingly quoted in my work as a reporter and editor.
The advice Twain didn’t offer came to mind as I considered what to write about today’s #stampoftheday, a 1-cent stamp issued in 1904 picturing Robert Livingston, who was born on November 27, 1746, the son of a wealthy Hudson River Valley family.
Livingston is a lesser-known founding father who was part of the Committee of Five that drafted the Declaration of Independence. As Thomas Jefferson’s envoy to France, he was charged in 1801 with negotiating for either a port at the mouth of the Mississippi river or for permanent trading rights in New Orleans. But in early 1803, Napoleon Bonaparte realized that war with Britain was unavoidable and that his plans to build an empire in the New World Empire would have to wait. To raise needed funds, he sold the entire Louisiana Territory – a total of 828,800 square miles – to the US for $15 million dollars, which worked out to about 3 cents an acre.
Working from the assumption that Livingston was the namesake Livingston, NJ, a town close to Summit where I grew up, I decided to write a piece ruminating (perhaps even bloviating) on the fact that even though he was important, I didn’t learn about Livingston when I was growing up. This, I was going to argue, was another case of the state’s longstanding inferiority complex , which stems from the fact that, as Ben Franklin supposedly said, New Jersey is “a beer barrel, tapped at both ends, with all the live beer running into Philadelphia and New York.”
As a 1992 NY Times article headlined “Ye Olde Inferiority Complex,” explained: “There are times when thoughts of New Jersey bring a tear to the eye-times when trash fires spew forth enough airborne contaminants to cause widespread weeping on both sides of the Hudson. Or when mayors of various communities are under investigation for various forms of corruption….A rich compost of negative images applied over three centuries has given rise to one of the state’s hardiest crops, the collective inferiority complex. Radio, television and movies have contributed to the problem by coming up with thousands of throwaway lines, but New Jerseyans themselves seem strangely compelled to assist in the process.”
Because of that complex, about half of my contemporaries left New Jersey when they graduated from high school and never returned. I was one of those who left, ultimately moving to Massachusetts, which, if anything, has an overblown sense self-importance best summed up by Oliver Wendall Holmes who famously wrote in the 1850s that for many Bostonians, the State House in downtown Boston “is the hub of the solar system.”
Put another way, the difference between Massachusetts and New Jersey is summarized in the lyrics to two iconic songs from my adolescence. In “Sweet Baby James,” James Taylor lovingly sings “Now the first of December was covered with snow and so was the Turnpike from Stockbridge to Boston. The Berkshires seemed dreamlike on account of that frosting.” In “America” Simon and Garfunkel neurotically lament, “‘Kathy, I’m lost,’ I said, though I knew she was sleeping. I’m empty and aching and I don’t know why. Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike, they’ve all come to look for America.”
Still, I did – and still do – retain an odd affection for the Garden State. I used to delight in taking friends to my parents’ cottage on a lake in northwest New Jersey, which is surprisingly bucolic and bucolic. (That is NW New Jersey and the lake were bucolic, not the cottage, which was generously known as “the shack.”) And, in the late 1980s, I was somewhat amazed to learn about the unique landscape and cultural history of the Pine Barrens in southern New Jersey as well as the innovative policies created to preserve that special region.
The “facts,” however, got in the way of my planned narrative because Livingston, NJ is not named after Robert Livingston, who was a life-long New Yorker. Rather, it’s named after William Livingston, the first governor of New Jersey, who also signed the US Constitution.
When I learned this unfortunate truth, I wondered if the two were related. I discovered a family tree indicating that they were cousins because William’s grandfather was Robert’s great-grandfather. I also learned the other Livingston descendants include George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, Eleanor Roosevelt, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Montgomery Clift, and “the eccentric Collyer brothers.”
I wanted to know more about Homer Collyer and Langley Collyer, who were born in 1881 and 1885, respectively, and, in 1909 moved with their parents into a brownstone on the corner of 5th Avenue and 128th Street in Harlem, which they began filling with trash and various items, particularly after their parents died in the 1920s. After going blind in 1933, Homer rarely (if ever) left the house. Langley took care of him, only leaving the house after midnight to buy and forage for food. By the late 1930s, because they had stopped paying utility bills, they were living without a phone, electricity, or heat. Because they were concerned about intruders, Langley built booby traps and tunnels among the items and trash that filled the house. In March 1947, both were found dead in their home. Langley apparently had inadvertently tripped one of his booby traps and was crushed under a pile of debris. With no one to feed him, Homer probably died several days later.
More than 140 tons of debris was removed from the building, detritus that included carriages, bicycles, guns, bowling balls, the folding top of a horse-drawn carriage, photos of pin-up girls from the early 1900s, their mother’s hope chest, rusty bed springs, a kerosene stove, more than 25,000 books, eight live cats, the chassis of a Model T, hundreds of yards of unused fabric, 14 pianos, a clavichord, two organs, countless bundles of newspapers and magazines, and thousands of bottles and tin cans. The house was torn down and the site is now a pocket park.
So while Livingston, New Jersey isn’t named after Robert Livington, it turned out to be a stop on a true journey to a bizarre, tragic, and true story.
Be well, stay safe, fight for justice, don’t hoard too much junk, and work for peace.