When Mary Jane Sharkey Ralph, the wife of William Ralph, gave birth to Franklin William Ralph on January 11, 1874, it was in very humble surroundings. Had the little boy been able to comprehend his world, he would have beheld a run-down, two-room, one story frame house with loft, in only slightly better condition than the falling-down cabin left by his grandfather, Israel, some 17 years before. There were holes in the walls, holes that in the winter were stuffed with empty sacks, corn husks or whatever other material came to hand. This didn't fully stop the wind and snow from entering and in the summer, flies and mosquitoes had free entry. When at age seven, little Frankie was no longer allowed to sleep in the trundle bed pulled from under his parent's, he was sent up the narrow stair at the east end of the house to the loft. He would roast there in summer and lie shivering in winter. He could see the rooms below through holes in the floor. For the last three generations Frankie's family had been as poor as it is possible to be and yet have a roof over their heads. Frankie's father was a farmer, plain and simple, yet he had very little land to farm. His grandfather, Israel, had been a shoemaker. From his earliest days Frankie wanted a better life An attitude of success seemed to have been born into him. He knew that all he had to do was persevere and he would acquire wealth no matter what. Frankie was the only child of the union of William Ralph and Mary Jane Sharkey to survive a first birthday and he went on to survive 85 more. He was a bright and willing child who worked hard to help his parents in their day-to-day living. Frankie entered school at age 6 and left at age 12 in order to work full time. He was an intelligent child who did well in school. Frankie would walk to and from the Warrenville school, a distance of over one mile. No matter the weather, he went to school. If it was particularly cold or a snowy day, his father would meet him part way on his return and they would trudge homeward in the gloom of the winter's eve. Frankie worked hard to make the most of his education. At night he would study by the light of a kerosene lamp or lie on the hearth for warmth while struggling to read by the light of the fire. At age 12 Frankie became an apprentice meat cutter. He worked long and hard and was uncomplaining. At age 17, using what little money he had together with money his parents were able to scrape up, he built a frame building on his parent's property on the road from Mt.. Bethel to Millington and opened a butcher shop. Drafty and unheated with no interior wall finish and a dirt floor sprinkled with sawdust, it was his first step toward a better life. People bought from him, but he realized there was a far greater market could be tapped if he went to the homes of the people in the surrounding countryside. Thus it was that his weekly trips to Plainfield to obtain his meats from Swift and Company became only a small part of his traveling. Leaving his father in charge of the shop four days each week, he took his meat to his customers. Traveling door to door, he cut whatever his customers wanted. Of course, he always carried with him a crock of corned beef and a supply of freshly ground beef and pork sausage prepared early each day by lantern light before starting out on his route. He covered many miles each day with his meat wagon no matter what the weather because his customers depended upon him. In the summer he carried huge cakes of ice to keep the meat cold, which had to be covered to keep flies and other insects off. It was a difficult life. Hot and dusty in the summer, Frankie would welcome a rainstorm for his own sake and for the sake of his horse. In the winter he would sit shivering in his inadequate clothing, his feet protected only by felt liners in his worn Artics. The horse would have its blanket, but it too must have suffered from the cold. It was dangerous also. In latter years he would relate how on numerous occasions, when returning home on a winter's eve in a snowstorm, he could see nothing and how, wrapped in a horse blanket himself, huddled on his seat against the cold, he would turn the reins loose and the horse, trodding along without human guidance, would bring him safely home. No wonder he loved his horses. When he arrived home, he would care for his horse first, feeding it and bedding it snugly down. Frankie's hard work began to pay off. Remembering his childhood dreams of affluence, one of the first things he did was to acquire property. It was a proud day for him and his parents indeed, when he came home and presented his father with the deed to the 14- acre lot that abutted the house property along its eastern line. It was another proud and happy day when Frankie added the "Bird Lot" to the property. This lot was over an acre in size and lay to the south of the old house. By the time Frankie was 23 he had the money to enlarge the old house at the bend in the road on Mt. Bethel Hill in preparation for his marriage. Although he had long before repaired the two-room house, it certainly was not suitable for the new wife of an up-and-coming businessman. Two rooms and a shed kitchen were added to the first floor and five bedrooms and a hall were added above. Over all of this was a fully-floored attic accessed by a regular stair. The entire added space was finished with wainscoting, walls and ceilings alike. Regrettably, the enlargement also eliminated the fireplace and beehive oven, leaving the house without heat except that generated by the cook stove. There was no water piped to the house and, of course, no bathroom. My grandfather continued to prosper. In 1906 he purchased 16 acres along the banks of the Passaic River to the east of King George Road. In 1909 he triumphantly purchased the 40 acres with farmhouse and outbuildings on the other side of the road for cash and thus was able to move his rapidly growing family into its own home. Frankie Jr. and Marie stayed behind in the old house at the bend in the road on Mt. Bethel Hill to help their grandparents and to keep them company. Frankie also acquired acreage along Mt. View Road and on both sides of Broadway Road in Warren Township and building lots in South Plainfield. A lot of Frankie's profit went into his business. He built a proper ice house into the earthen bank along the road behind the house. The lower floor was at grade level with the road and the upper floor was level with the rear driveway. This floor was built of heavy planks and it had an open well thru which ice could be lowered or raised. The ice house enabled him to store his own ice cut from the Passaic or Dead River to get him through the summer season. Also by 1905 he had built his splendid barn, once and for all housing his horses and wagons in the same location. He eventually had three meat wagons on the road. When he bought a Dodge Truck meat wagon in the Twenties it easily replaced all three horse-drawn wagons, but he never sold any of the horses. They were retired except for occasional haying, plowing or cultivating and lived the good life until their natural deaths. In the early days at the old house , my brother, Philip, and I would care for the horses in the absence of a handyman. I still remember the names Blackie and Brownie scrawled over two of the stalls. Brownie was the last survivor and it was a sad day when our tractor dragged his carcass to a newly-opened grave at the edge of the woods. Frankie had become Frank W. Ralph, Sr. upon the birth of his first child, Frank Jr. in 1898. When Little Frankie was photographed with his grandparents at about one year of age, one could see a fine well-cared-for property in the background. It was a new generation of diligence and prosperity. Frank Ralph, Sr. moved his butcher shop into a new store and apartment building he built in Millington and occupied in 1928. He was active in the Mt. Bethel Baptist Church, attending Sunday School as a boy and church services too where he sat between his parents. When he became older he taught Sunday School and even was the superintendent for a time. He also served as Deacon and Trustee. He was a pillar of his church. He was politically active, being a strong Democrat all his years. He served on the Warren Township Committee, as chairman in 1916 and treasurer in 1917. He also served on the school board but was denied reelection over the Central School issue [he advocated retention of the one room neighborhood school system.] He ran unsuccessfully for Somerset County Freeholder against Grover Kipsey. His slogan for the Freeholder campaign was "Fair play for all," which spoke volumes about him. His father and uncle Jim were founding members of the Junior Order and he later joined. Given his background, it is easy to understand why he joined the Ku Klux Klan. He had become convinced that a conspiracy existed among Roman Catholics to seize control of the federal government for the purpose of installing the Pope as the head of an American theocracy. Joining the Klan was an act of patriotism for him. The local Klan was an ardent champion of the Constitution, including support of the 18th amendment, strongly espoused Protestant Christianity and opposed the waves of southern Europeans then emigrating to the United States, most of whom were Roman Catholics. The Mountainside Klan No. 63 of the Realm of New Jersey was active in the area, and it was this group that he joined. He dropped out of the Klan after a while but never changed his views. When I first became aware of my grandfather, he was affectionately called Toppie by his family (only his mother held out with Frankie). The nickname Toppie came from his children's attempts to imitate their mother’s enunciation of Pop. He stood tall and straight and was a handsome man in his Fifties. While as a young man he had cultivated a fierce dark handlebar mustache, when I first knew him his hair had turned white, and he had subdued his mustache to full lip coverage without the points. He wore this type of mustache the rest of his life. It was a common practice during the time about which I am writing, for merchants to extend credit to their customers. Accounts were kept for the meat picked up at the shop or delivered, periodically billed and promptly paid.. It was a system that worked well – and this was the system that Toppie continued to use when he opened his new butcher shop in 1928. It was the system that had fueled his prosperity. For a while it continued to do so. No one could have predicted at the outset the extent to which the Depression would affect him personally. Actually, here in the country there was less impact than in urban areas. Most people were self-sufficient with foodstuffs and even had some vegetables left over to sell. Also, most people owned their own homes, and as long as the home was free and clear or had only a small mortgage payment, they were able to ride out periods of unemployment. We did not become homeless and could even offer shelter to others in exchange for services. Each family adjusted, took a step back in their expectations and survived. Unfortunately, some survived at the expense of others. The difference at first was subtle. Someone who had paid his bill promptly for years would take a little longer to pay and apologize for it and perhaps would again pay more pomptly the next month or two before falling behind again. As the Depression deepened many of Toppie's accounts severely delinquent. Some in embarrassment would stop trading with Toppie and pay cash when they could at the new supermarkets which took only cash. Ever so slowly Toppie began to suffer a cash flow problem, on occasion being unable to pay Swift and Co. the cash the company demanded. Toppie was mild by nature and too embarrassed to demand payment on his long term accounts; besides no one thought the Depression would last long. In the meantime things got worse and worse for Topoie. He had to borrow money and there were a series of notes that he had difficulty meeting. Also there were the payments on the mortgage he had taken on the Terrill place down by the river in order to construct hisbuilding in Millington. He began to fall behind on the mortgage and the bank was threatening. And there was all of Toppie's real estate on which taxes became due inexorably every quarter. I began to hear the words "land poor" expressed in the family, but not in Toppie's presence The inevitable happened. The bank foreclosed and took away Toppie's wonderful farm down by the river. Gone was everything: With the farm also went the South Plainfield lots which were additional collateral for the mortgage. Toppie, in his mid-Sixties, was devastated. It was as if what he had believed in since childhood, he now found to be false. He had linked prosperity with ownership of land and now he had been deprived of his proudest possession. He was ashamed before his friends and acquaintances as his failure was public knowledge. Worst of all he had failed his wife, a fact that he could not acknowledge even to himself. Toppie had struggled mightily, asked for nothing and what he had wrought on his own he now lost in dispair. It was a time that tested the mettle of the man. It was a time that showed his courage under adversity,and he was not lacking. Toppie and his remaining family members had no choice but to retreat to the old house on Mt. Bethel hill where he had been born and to where he had brought his new bride. Since his mother had died a few years before, there was space, but barely. The house became as crowded as it had been when Toppie and his family had moved out some three decades before. Toppie and Missie crowded into the small downstairs bedroom in which his mother had died. Millicent at 17 (who was a grandchild raised by Missie) occupied the middle room upstairs. My mother and father kept their southwest bedroom with my sister remaining in the bedroom behind it where I had shared early days with my brother. I remained in the bedroom at the northeast corner of the house and Uncle Les doubled up with my brother in the large bedroom at the southwest corner. Poor Missie found herself again sharing a kitchen with another woman; this time a daughter. Happily the household became less crowded rather quickly. Millicent married early, next my brother went into military service and I followed the next year. So then it was just the two couples who remained and coped with each other until the war ended. Long before he died, Toppie divested himself of all his remaining real estate, giving it to certain of his children. The property on Mt. Bethel Hill was subdivided to make the distribution more even. Toppie retired from the butcher business, but not from work, as he practiced his trade until well into his Eighties, working for others. Sometimes in these latter years when he would be returning home on a foggy or snowy night, I would drive to where he was working so he could follow me home, keeping the tail lights of my car in view. Toppie never renounced his pililosophy of "share and share alike" and often during difficult times shared with me and my family both money and foodstuffs. He was particularly pleased to present us with a freshly cut chuck steak which became the choicest of sirloin to us. I helped him whenever I could, especially during the last years of his life. During what would be his last illness I spent a lot of time with him, not realizing that he had only a little time left. He didn't go to doctors, preferring to treat his ailments himself. When he became more obviously in decline he gave my mother permission to question a doctor about his condition and the doctor recommended he go to the hospital for evaluation. Toppie asked me, the last Little Frankie, if he should go. I told him he should. I rode in the ambulance to reassure him. He lay there trusting me as we sped along. Toppie was in the hospital for only about a week and I visited him every day until one day he said, "Frankie, it is too much for you to visit me every day, stay home tomorrow." I did. When I arrived the following day (September 2, 1961) to see him he had already gone away. |