Did you ever try to explain the Newark experience to someone, but felt you could only give a partial description? Or maybe you’ve wondered what the city was like “back in the day”.
Anyone familiar with the city knows there are many different Newarks.
No one person could possibly be familiar with all of them. But if you could speak with many Newarkers who lived and worked in the city over the course of the last hundred years, the Newark experience would become clearer.
That is what "Remembrances of Newark" does.
There are 175 Newark “remembrances” included here.
They are told by Newark firefighters appointed between 1940 and 2016. Most were “born and raised” in Newark.
They came from every section of the city and from varying ethnic and racial backgrounds. Some moved into the city as young adults. A few of the childhood memories harken back to the 1920s.
Every rank of the fire department is represented among those interviewed. Two of the interviewees served as Fire Director. Three served as Fire Chief. That being said, this is a story told by average Newarkers.
There are no politicians, no great movers of events, no celebrities, and certainly no wealthy elite included. The memories recounted are at street level recalling everyday life in New Jersey’s most populous city from the 1920s to the 2020s.
That city was their childhood home. It is the city they knew as young adults and the place they worked, where they saw the best and the worst it had to offer.
This book is an outgrowth of an oral history project of the Newark Fire Department begun in 1991.
The stories recounted here are not focused on the fire department, but are of a more general nature. Anyone interested in stories of what it was like to actually live in the City of Newark will find the remembrances of Newark’s bravest interesting.
Although parts of some of these stories appear in the book "Becoming a Firefighter", the vast majority are new to print.
Originally, I had anticipated this material would be a chapter in a separate upcoming fire department oral history book, "The Best Job in the World", but it quickly became apparent it should be a standalone book.
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