What do I “want” to say about New Jersey? And what “should” I say about the “Garden State.”

I ask, in part, because on December 18, 1787 New Jersey became the third state to ratify the U.S. Constitution, which I mark with today’s #stampoftheday, a 5-cent stamp, issued in Jun 1964 to commemorate the 300th anniversary of the year that James, the Duke of York (who had been given the land by his brother, the king) gave the land to two friends: Lord John Berkeley and Sir George Carteret, (who had been the governor of the isle of Jersey).

Deciding what to say about New Jersey is tricky because I have strong ties to the state. In 1963, when I was seven, we moved from Monsey, NY, which wasn’t yet a Hasidic enclave, to Summit, a town about 35 miles west of Manhattan. I attended Summit’s public schools for 12 years. But I left for college in 1975 and, except for the summer when I had mono, I never lived there again.

I could recount classic New Jersey images, like the refineries near Newark Airport. Or I could write about all the time I spent at Lake Owassa, a surprisingly peaceful small lake in northwest Jersey, where my parents bought a cottage (ok, a glorified shack) in the early 1970s. My parents loved that house and my mother kept it for over a decade after my father died, only selling it in 2014 when she was no longer able to be there alone and none of her children or grandchildren lived close enough to make much use of it.

I also came to appreciate the state when one of my first assignments when I started working for a new center for state and local government at Harvard was to write a case study about state land-use planning in New Jersey. To many people (including me), this sounded like a bad joke given the state’s well-deserved reputation for suburban sprawl. Indeed, the first subdivision in America may have occurred there in the 1674, when Berkeley and Carteret decided to split the colony in half so that Berkeley could sell his share to a group of Quakers. (England reunited the two separate entities in 1702).

When I began working on that project, I was familiar with, but learned much more about, the state Supreme Court’s unique rulings in a series of “Mt. Laurel “cases about affordable housing. But I didn’t know anything about the state’s unique efforts to preserve the Pinelands, an important and ecologically fragile area in southern New Jersey. I read John McPhee’s wonderful book about the area. And I learned that McPhee supposedly helped preserve the area by cancelling his weekly tennis game with then Governor Brendan Byrne and instead took the governor to see the Pinelands. Learning about this was particularly special, because my great-grandparents had been among the founders of Vineland, a Jewish agricultural community that was the first of several such communities located in and near the Pinelands.

As I ruminated on what else I might say about New Jersey, I remembered that Jake Levine, my best friend in high school (who I haven’t heard from in at least a decade) once told me that the official state song started: “New Jersey our state. All the best of the rest to you.” Wondering about the other lyrics, I instead discovered that either he was wrong or my memory is bad. It’s not the state song. In fact, New Jersey is the only state in the nation that doesn’t have a state song.

In contrast, Massachusetts, where I’ve lived since 1980, has a state anthem, a state folk song (“Massachusetts” not “”Alice’s Restaurant,” or “Sweet Baby James”) a state ceremonial march, a state patriotic song, a state glee club song, a state polka (“Say hello to someone from Massachusetts”) and a state ode. (And for many years, Joyce Linehan, a one-time record producer who is now Boston Mayor Marty Walsh’s chief policy advisor, has lobbied to make “Roadrunner” the state’s official rock song.)

There have been several efforts to designate a state song for New Jersey. Notably, a man named Red Mascara spent over five decades lobbying for “I’m From New Jersey,” which he wrote in 1960 after he heard that then-Governor Robert Meyner wanted an official state song that could be played at state functions. Composed in a week, the song’s lyrics included:

I’m from New Jersey
and I’m proud about it.
I love the Garden State.
I’m from New Jersey and I want to shout it,

According to his 2015 New York Times obituary, Mascara “volunteered to work nights…so that he could spend his days working the halls of the State House in Trenton…He was known for doling out candy from a bag, buttonholing legislators and breaking into song” and once hired a band to play his song from the gallery in the state assembly.

In 1972, the legislature passed a bill making “I’m From New Jersey” the official state song. But, according to the obituary, then-Governor William Cahill vetoed it, “telling reporters that the only thing worse than that song was hearing Mr. Mascara sing it.” In a 1988 profile, the Times reported that Mascara, who continued to lobby for his song, “recalls that legislative session as aging Confederate Veterans must have once recalled Gettysburg, a shining moment when victory seemed within grasp, despite overwhelming odds.”

Seven years later, Carol Miller, a DJ at a leading New York area rock station tried, unsuccessfully, to get the legislature to make Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run” the official state rock song. “Over half of our listeners live in New Jersey,” she told UPI at the time. “We got so many requests for it that I started referring to it as the state song of New Jersey. It was kind of a joke.”

Robert Visotcky, one of the station’s account executives, told his father, Assemblyman Richard Visotcky, about the proposal. Springsteen “often talks about how much he loves the state,” Visotcky was quoted as saying. “…it would make young people in the state believe in politics again [and] shed a better light on the political situation in New Jersey.”

Assemblyman Visotcky drafted a resolution stating, in part, that since “‘Born to Run .., has achieved anthem-like status throughout the world and has been adopted as their song by the teenagers of New Jersey” the legislature “declares Bruce Springsteen to be the New Jersey Pop Music Ambassador to America, and calls upon the young people of all ages throughout New Jersey to adopt [‘Born to Run’] as the unofficial rock theme of our State’s youth.”

The resolution passed the Assembly by voice vote in June 1980. But, according to an article on the VCR website, “it never made it through the state Senate, presumably because the senators listened to the lyrics and realized that the song is about a desire to get out of New Jersey.”

And so New Jersey still doesn’t have a state song, which somehow seems fitting.

Be well, stay safe, fight for justice (and a good state song), and work for peace.