Senior Citizens Leave their Legacy in Essay Contest

Many aspiring writers have to overcome a big obstacle right off the bat: just what should they write about? 

For the winners of Essex County's Senior Citizens Legacies essay contest, however, a lack of material is hardly a problem. 

The winners and other entrants drew from decades of life experience in crafting their pieces, writing with wit, feeling and sometimes a little salty language to recreate on the page events and characters from bygone eras. 

A luncheon was held Friday, May 27 at the Essex County Hospital Center in Cedar Grove in honor of the four contest winners and other entrants from throughout the county. The contest, held annually since 1998 and first supervised by Leah Barhash, a now-retired county program development specialist, gives seniors the chance to recount important events from their lives. 

The essays capture worlds and events that have long since receded into memory — times when tenements in Manhattan had outhouses, when poor families in the rural South brewed their own liquor to make ends meet, or a trip to Atlanta — a few days after Martin Luther King Jr. was shot 43 years ago. 

"You got to tell us your stories. We really are so proud," Jaklyn De Vore, the director of the county's division of senior services, said to the large crowd gathered last Friday. 

Essex County Executive Joseph DiVincenzo Jr. said hearing the stories was especially touching for him, having lost both his parents in quick succession in the late 1980s. 

"It means so much to me. It makes me reminisce about the days growing up with my mother and father," DiVincenzo said. 

Three of the four winners read their essays last Friday (a fourth winner, Leah Johnston-Rowbatham of Montcair, was unable to attend). 

Lester Bornstein of West Orange, in his essay "Mother's Day 1944," wrote about his mother, a Jewish immigrant from Poland who raised her family on her own after being widowed at a young age. When Lester Bornstein returned from military service in World War II, his mother traveled to Grand Central Station in New York City to meet him — despite not knowing her son's exact whereabouts or having any direct communication with him beforehand. After "something drew" him to the cavernous train terminal, miraculously, Bornstein found her sitting on a bench. 

Millburn's Kal Wagenheim wrote "Purple Heart," a poignant essay partly set in the gritty tenements of Newark and New York City. Wagenheim's Uncle Murray, a World War I veteran who later became a bartender in Newark, described to Wagenheim some of his wartime experiences, including a heart-wrenching story of watching a German soldier die right in front of him. 

Robert L. Petrus wrote about his experiences in yet another generation, as a young man traveling to Atlanta to attend the funeral of Martin Luther King Jr. Family members tried to talk him out of it, saying it would be unsafe, but Petrus found the city to be the gathering place for thousands of people from across America who had been drawn, like him, by the "inexorable magnetic pull to mourn the death of a man whose life preached love and justice, peace and harmony, non-violence and courage."

The following writers won honorable mention in the contest: Carole Bailey, Montclair, "Corn Liquor and Maple Syrup,"; Stanley Paluba, Bloomfield, "A Senior’s Tribute to Dr. Keenan,"; Sharon Sandusky, Montclair, "Life Delivered by the Big Brown Van"; and Douglas Stivison, Upper Montclair, "When I was a Stranger, You Welcomed Me."

Other essayists included Joan Adams, Regina Lutchman, Harriet Halpern, Marie Newberry and Adele Vick of Montclair; Willie Mae Bell, Enid Cave, Lois Darden and Marie Carmel Baazile-Parait of Newark; Abraham Bunis, Jacob Koltun and Rose Tells of West Orange; Irving Charles of Verona; Bruce Conley of Maplewood; David Siegfried and Jill F. Hanover of Short Hills; B. Ruth Kerman-Soffen of South Orange; Betty Levine and Martin Livenstein of Millburn; Ruth Watson of Cedar Grove and Lillian Wellington of Bloomfield.