Evans
From Page AA1
Belmar resident runs a Web site devoted to the history of the place,
and is a member of the Wall Township Evans Area Restoration Board, a group
that functions as a liaison between the Army and the community as the land
is handed over.
Carl can speak about the significance of the
215-acre site, and its place in history, from the days when Guglielmo Marconi
constructed "a world-encircling girdle of radar stations designed to send
messages around the world through the ether," to its role in developing
technology used in the Gulf War.
He's actively involved in a project that would
turn some of the 55 acres that Brookdale will receive into a science center.
The world-altering advances in radar and radio
technology going on around her did not register with Mary Palmer in her
five years in Building 2, Apartment 14, on Watson Avenue in Camp Evans.
What did register was how small the apartment
was, even through a little girl's eyes.
"You could reach out and touch everything
in the kitchen," from, the icebox to the wringer washer, she said.
She and her brothers slept in the single bedroom;
there was no room for anything but the beds,
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" I don't trust my memories. I remember bits
and pieces, like my mother hanging the wash out to dry, and me sucking
on a piece of ce covered with straw from the iceman's truck."
Mary Palmer
Recounting Life At Camp Evans
and a closet her father built for the children. Her Parents slept in
the living room.
The children in the old barracks used to play
in the broad hallways upstairs and downstairs.
"I remember one day, the air was charged before
a thunderstorm, and we kids raced up and down the hallway past the open
doors of the apartments on the first floor," she said.
Palmer is looking for playmates and neighbors
from her childhood to fill in the blanks of her memory.
"I don't trust my memories. I remember bits
and pieces, like my mother hanging the wash out to dry, and me sucking
on a piece of ice covered with straw from the iceman's truck," Palmer said.
She has done her homework. She knows that
the apartments were administered by the Asbury Park Veteran's Housing Authority,
and the rent was $45 a month, including utilities. Only veterans and their
families were allowed to sign leases. She knows that a city bus drove into
the camp
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every hour to take people shopping or to and from work.
Palmer has found a couple of people who lived
in Building 2 at the same time.
"We were as poor as church mice, but we were
very happy," Palmer says one of them told her. "Building 2 was a closeknit
group. The women used to congregate in each other's kitchens and leave
the front doors open during the day so that they could call to each other
and keep an eye on the kids."
Palmer's family left the old barracks in 1954.
A year later, the apartments were closed down.
She moved for a little while to her grandmother's
house and then to an old farm house in the Glendola section of Wall. It
was there she found some real space to call her own.
"I put a KEEP OUT on my door," she said.
The sounds of children playing in the fields of Camp Evans have been
silent for a long time.
But Wall Township Mayor Michael Fitzgerald
hears those voices coming to life again in the not too distant future.
If the transfer of land is completed on schedule,
he sees ballparks and playgrounds on the Camp Evans property by spring
of the year 2000.
"I fully expect to throw out the first pitch
of the season for the North Wall Little League on open-ing day at a brand
new fleld," Fitzgerald said.
Michael Riley: (732) 922-6000,
Ext. 4585 |
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