MLH Mini-Series: The Basking Ridge Rushmore 5 of the Modern Era
Meet John Packo, Bill Hine, Irwin Richardt, John Placko, Nick Sant Foster, and Bobby Thomson.
Okay, so I live in Basking Ridge, which is part of Bernards Township, but we all refer to it as Basking Ridge, right? Now, I believe that history has to be over a hundred years old to be interesting. I love writing about recent events that will become or have become historic over the decades. These stories bring in the social aspects of history in the community and love to capture it when I can which is why I’m so grateful to the Mr. Local History Project for allowing me to write about almost anything I want (yes I have been blocked a few times too, which is a much healthier environment then a bunch of controlling social elites that tend to operate local historical societies…… but that’s another story.)
What better way to preserve social history than by writing about people who have made Basking Ridge an interesting place to live? So I’ve created a mini-series of what I call the Mr. Local History Basking Ridge Rushmore 5: people I’ve met or learned about over my twenty or so years living in the area. And I can honestly tell you, all of these people have or had character. Some people disagreed with them, and others hated them. But overall, they were undoubtedly worth writing about.
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Irb Richardt was my neighbor, as I lived just a couple of hundred yards away on Somerville Rd. A kind man. When his blind father was still alive and Allen Rd was unpaved/gravel, they had a mean dog that chased me on my bike and almost caught me every time, always scaring me. He had an old school bus, painted light blue, that he drove up to his place in upstate NY, by the name of, as I recall, Little Russia, which amused us both. I once wrote his forest management plan, so he wouldn’t have to harvest trees, only maple syrup. Many, many memories…