Weeks before the installation of John Joseph Myers as the fifth archbishop of Newark last Tuesday, rumors were swirling like the leaves in Branch Brook Park.
Sitting before a piano at the Monmouth Conservatory of Music, the Red Bank school he founded in 1962, Felix Molzer asked a visitor, sotto voce, in a Viennese-accented lilt, ”What is your phone number?”
For a century the predominantly Italian-American faithful of St. Lucy’s Church have been celebrating the feast of St. Gerard Maiella with a religious procession through the streets of the neighborhood once known as the First Ward.
At the age of 72 and financially secure with her children on their own, Evelyn Jacobs Ortner could easily have chosen the genteel suburban life of country clubbing and shopping.