Day Two--Weirdness Around My Alma Mater

I’m coming to you live from the sleaziest Days Inn in the history of Days Inns.  It smells like fish, and there are exactly thee channels; one with a marathon infomercial about a baldness cure, one with six consecutive hours of The Mentalist, and the All-God-All-the-Time channel where a large, jowly man is howling about Jesus.  The TV can only get varying shades of red and orange, so all of the actors on all three of the channels look like unhappy Oompa Loompas

I was very optimistic this morning setting off on day two of the Odyssey.  Unlike yesterday, the sky was sort of overcast and it was significantly colder, but most of what I wanted to accomplish didn’t involve getting out of the car for very long.

My first stop was less than five miles from the hotel, and it was the home of Richie Zorzi in South Brunswick.  Richie is an interesting guy.  He’s a retired bricklayer, and about fifteen years ago he and his wife started collecting bowling balls (why?  Who knows).  They began to overflow the house (I’ve stubbed my toe on many a bowling ball—let’s just say there’s a reason they make you wear shoes), so he starting lining his driveway with them.

One of his cranky little-old-lady neighbors had a problem with this, so she called the Fire Department (I’m not sure how the balls would constitute a fire hazard), but as he wasn’t breaking any zoning laws or safety ordinances, there was nothing they could do.  The neighbor proceeded to bring a nuisance suit, and to get everyone to shut up, the town made Richie dispose of his bowling balls (he donated most of them to bowling alleys, so if you’ve bowled near the New Brunswick area, you might have handled his balls).

Not to be outdone, Richie proceeded with yet another front-yard collection, this time focusing on children’s rocking horses.  The same cantankerous old lady reported him yet again, and the cops fined him $500 and forced him to get rid of those, too.

Finally, in what I’m sure was a fit of pique, Richie decided to give him entire block the finger and became a hideous lawn ornament hoarder.  Unfortunately, the picture that I took came out hopefully out of focus, which is odd, since it looked fine on the screen.  I'm sorry, I suck.  Suffice it to say that hee seems to be particularly fond of old-time milk cans, huge garden gnomes, broken globes, and what appears to be a statue of Jesus, the Virgin Mary, or a saint of some kind.

 With that accomplished, I headed off for what is probably one of the most famous towns in New Jersey, even though nothing ever actually happened there.  I’m talking about Grovers Mill and Grovers Mill Pond, site of the War of the Worlds radio program on Mercury theatre in 1938, which caused widespread panic and caused Orson Welles to develop an even greater disdain for people than he already had.  Grovers Mill, a very small hamburg near West Windsor, was the site of the landing of the first Martian spaceship.  I was thrilled to find actual Grovers Mill right away:

It’s no longer a working mill, as it’s been converted into a suite of offices (note mailboxes).  Weirdly, even though today is a work day, I was the only car in the parking lot.

Directly across the street is Grovers Mill Pond, which looks almost exactly like the lake by the Haunted Bridge I saw yesterday:

I was kind of disappointed that there was no commemorative plaque, or memorial, or bust of Orson Welles or anything, but it’s possible that the whole town is terribly embarrassed about the whole thing.  Still, I had gotten some nice nature shots, so I packed it up and headed for the grave of Mary Ellis, which is in a parking lot of a movie theatre.

The Mary Ellis grave is pretty much the only thing in The Guidebook that I have actually seen before.  In college (and therefore having no money), my friends and I spent many evenings at the Route 1 Flea Market, which is only a few miles from the Rutgers campus.  I’m not sure what it was about cassette tapes, rings, and other tchotchkes that you could purchase for two dollars that was so mesmerizing, but we went several times a week.

One week, due to some construction in the parking lot, we were forced to park in the very back of the theatre by a small, chain-link fenced-in area.  Having no clue what it was or why it was there, we investigated it and discovered it was actually the grave of a woman named Mary Ellis who had died in 1826, apparently from tuberculosis (since that’s what everyone died of then).

The story goes that Mary and her sister moved to New Brunswick in 1790, where she met, fell in love with, and married a sea captain.  When the captain was sent back to sea and set sail on the Raritan river, he told Mary he would come back for her one day (yeah, right, I’ve heard that before) and left her his horse to care for in his absence (which sounds like a good set-up to me).  Needless to say, he never came back, and Mary died wondering where the hell he was and what she was supposed to do with his horse.

She was buried on what was then her own property, but through the years it was bought and sold several times, most recently to a Loew’s  Multiplex.  Fortunately, Mary still has descendants in the New Brunswick area, and they continue to maintain her grave.  Here it is, right in the middle of the parking lot:

  

Here’s a close up of the gravestone—the platform of the grave is actually as high as my head, so this was as good an angle as I could get without standing on the car:

  

My last stop of the day was in Edison, where I saw the world’s largest functioning light bulb.  Not surprisingly, it was built to commemorate Thomas Edison, who had a workshop on the site in 1938.  The tower is 118 feet tall, and the bulb itself (which really does light up at night) weighs 14 tons.  Damn.

 As you can see, there’s some construction going on, and the man that I met who works there told me that there had been some erosion damage over the years, so they’re resurfacing the outside of the tower; it’ll be done in about a year.

All in all, I was more than satisfied with the second day of the Odyssey, even if it has to end in this miserable hotel room.  Tomorrow, I’m pressing on to Somerset County, where I will hopefully see some weirdness in and around my home town.

Odyssey out.