The part the Jewish storekeeper has played as pioneer and missionary of civilization in the backwoods and on the frontiers of this country deserves to be better known than it is. Then it would be seen to constitute a chapter all by itself in the history of the settling of our continent by people from overseas. Here is one small episode from that chapter, recent and very close to home. Donald Paneth, who tells the tale, is a frequent contributor to COMMENTARY, his last appearance having been in the July 1953 issue with the description of an Irish bar in New York.
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Rockland County, in the southeastern part of New York State, is a suburban region twenty miles from New York City. It contains many small lakes and truck farms and apple orchards and villages, and is bordered on the east by the Hudson River and on the west by the Ramapo Mountains. With a population of 89,000 and an area of 178 square miles, it is divided into five townships—Stony Point, Haverstraw, Clarkstown, Orangetown, and Ramapo. The county is traditionally Republican, being populated mostly by farmers, local businessmen, and commuting executives.
Pincus Margulies of Ladentown, a little hamlet at the base of the Ramapos, was an official of the county for thirty-five years. He settled there in 1904, and after an unsteady beginning as a country storekeeper, became a prosperous local businessman and an important county official. He was a Republican, and a member of the party’s county committee—an intimate and deputy of the county leaders. In 1917 he was elected Justice of the Peace, and in 1937 he became Supervisor of the township of Ramapo; several years later he was elected chairman of the Board of Supervisors of Rockland County. At his death last year, “Pinc” was also a notary, a real estate broker, a director of two local banks, and a member of several organizations.
Pinc was a slim, gray-haired man of medium height. He had a round face and a wide mouth, and was almost blind in his right eye, having been hit by a BB shot when a child. He was married and the father of five children, lived unpretentiously over his store, didn’t smoke or drink, and drove his own car. He was the first Jewish Supervisor in the county, and he was reelected several times despite occasional, but subdued, anti-Semitic whisperings.
Pinc was a good politician who had a shrewd mind, friendly manner, and realistic outlook; he was a competent official. He was staunch in his loyalty—to the GOP— and expedient in his methods. He was at bottom quiet and gentlemanly, but like most politicians, had acquired a glib, jocular exterior. He was generous with political favors, and he liked to play pinochle, attend conventions, and dress well. “Pinc was always buying suits,” one of his friends recalls. “He dressed like a banker, more or less. Very meticulous.” He also liked to listen to classical music, read the Herald Tribune, the Saturday Evening Post, Newsweek, and occasionally a “good, clean” novel. His favorite foods were clam chowder, fish, steak, chicken, and lemon cookies.
He was born in Poland in 1878, and had come to the United States with his parents and brother when he was three. His mother, Martha, was a quiet, religious woman and his father, Abraham, a tall, slim man who had served in the Czar’s army. His father owned a butcher shop on the Lower East Side, was a Democratic precinct captain, and dabbled in real estate. Pincus’s childhood was comfortable and placid. He played baseball, went to the neighborhood settlement house and to its summer camp near Ladentown (where he was later to settle), and delivered orders for his father. He was an average student, who attended public school until the eighth grade and Hebrew school until his Bar Mitzvah without much interest in either.
He left school at the age of thirteen, and worked for two years in his father’s shop; then his mother died of a tubercular throat, and soon after he got a job as apprentice to a sign-maker in midtown. He worked for the sign-maker several years, constructing large metal signs for banks, office buildings, and stores, meanwhile advancing from apprentice to shop foreman. When he was twenty-three years old he married. Three years later he and his wife, Fannie, a big, hearty, robust girl who came from Gabriels, New York, a small town in the Adirondacks, moved to Ladentown for his health. He had developed a serious cough on the job, and it was suggested he settle in the country, which he immediately did. “He knew of the town,” his son Harold says, “and liked the idea of owning a country store. That’s how he came up here.”
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Ladentown, situated on Route 202 near the Ramapo villages of Suffern and Spring Valley, was a hamlet with a population of 150, a general store, three saloons, a Methodist church, and several old houses. Michel Laden, its first resident, had opened a tavern and trading store there in 1816. The general store was located at the roadside on two acres of land with a house and a barn. Its facade was gray with a low false front and four white posts supporting a porch roof; its interior was crowded with counters, display cases, and shelves, in the middle of which was a pot-bellied stove. A pendulum clock and a deer head were mounted on the wall opposite the door. Pinc bought the store from its retiring owner for $600, and set to work: life in the country in 1904 was isolated, homespun, and difficult. Pinc and his wife had no bathroom, telephone, electricity, or automobile. They used kerosene lamps and an outhouse, and Pinc carried water from a spring while his wife cooked over a wood fire.
Though today it hardly seems likely, Ladentown was then a tough, hard-drinking place, and Pinc wasn’t welcome. Many “Jackson Whites,” poor mountain folk, lived in the nearby Ramapos, and on Saturday night they would come down to drink and brawl in the town, and as for Pine himself, his neighbors were frankly hostile to him—he was “city folk,” a stranger and a Jew—and they threatened to burn him out if he didn’t leave.
He stayed on, nervously but stubbornly, and a feud began. “They started rows in the store,” Harold says, “and threatened to beat him up. They built fires in the fields at night to scare him. They burnt down the barn of a neighbor who traded at his store, and my parents took turns sitting up at night to watch for trespassers.” This went on fitfully and thinned his trade for several years —until 1910. Then, one summer evening, someone rolled a barrel of salt pork off the porch of the store into the road. Pinc went to the door, and was fired at twice. He ran inside, bolted the door, put out the lights, and phoned (he now had a phone) for the sheriff. “Who came out the next day,” Harold says. Fannie then asked her brother Abe to come down from the Adirondacks. Abe, who is now the chief of police of Ramapo Township, was a tall, strongly built, truculent young man. He put an end to the feud.
“I just stayed around,” he says. “Threw them out of the store, had five or six fistfights. I had a gun, but I didn’t tote it. It was a plain row, and I understood it, I had seen these guys before. They admired people who stood up to them and beat hell out of them. All you had to do was lick the bully, and they liked you and thought you were O.K. and stopped the rough stuff. As long as they couldn’t frighten you you were all right.”
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Pinc’s trade began to grow after the feud ended. Neighbors, farming families, and mountain folk became his steady customers. His store was open weekdays and Sunday from 7 A.M. to midnight, and he sold groceries, tobacco, lard, plate beef, poultry, feed, drygoods, thread, boots, lanterns, farm tools. He also had a horse, Kit, and a small open wagon (in the winter, a sleigh) in which he went about getting and filling orders; he had a circular route of twenty-five miles, down Camp Hill Road to Pomona and back on a by-road.
Pinc lived simply and frugally. He was a sober man, seldom left the county or went to New York. He liked to play pinochle, root for McGraw’s Giants, and go to the movies. Three girls and two boys, Martha, Blanche, Hazel, Harold, and Max were born. With peace brought by his brother-in-law, he began to contribute to the local Methodist church—he wasn’t religious himself and he wanted to be amiable—his children attended its Sunday school, and his wife belonged to its Ladies’ Aid Society. His store itself soon became a place at which to meet in the evening, and neighbors got around his stove to drink a beer, and “chaw” tobacco, and talk. He and his neighbors talked about crops, local events, and politics—and told country yarns. “My brother, George. He was so slow movin’ once he was choppin’ down a tree and when he got to t’other side his axe handle had rotted.”
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But in some ways Pinc became friendliest of all with the Ramapo mountain folk, the “Jackson Whites.” The Ramapo Mountains are a steep, very rocky, densely wooded range. Craggy and inhospitable, they rise to nearly 1,100 feet, and there are no roads, only trails, through them. Deer and beaver, fox and wild dogs, rattlesnakes and copperheads still abound in them. In 1910, perhaps 3,000 Jackson Whites were living in the Ramapos, a poor, clannish, illiterate group of people isolated by a curious past. They were superstitious—you can’t die in a feather bed, it’s bad luck to leave a house by a different door than the one by which you enter—and they distrusted strangers. They lived in cabins on the mountain slopes, gardening, hunting and fishing, and picking berries; they were good shots, and could walk long distances over rough trails. Their ancestors were Tuscarora Indians, prostitutes from England, Hessian deserters, Colonial highwaymen, and runaway slaves—all of whom had come together in the Ramapos in the 18th century. The Tuscaroras had lived in North Carolina until 1711, when white settlers, avenging a massacre, attacked them and captured and killed their chiefs. The tribe migrated northwards, reached New York State, and became the Sixth Nation of the Iroquois. During the Revolutionary War Claudius Smith, a highwayman, and his band hid in two great caves on Round Mountain, whence they looted the countryside, stealing horses and cattle which they sold to the British. When Smith was captured and hanged in 1779 his followers fled deeper into the Ramapos. The English prostitutes came shortly afterwards. At the beginning of the war the British had got a trader named Jackson to bring 3,500 women to New York for their troops; after they evacuated the city at the end of the war, these women were driven out into the countryside by the townspeople, and finally found refuge in the Ramapos. Later Hessian deserters and runaway slaves joined them, and of their children some were white, some had the characteristics of Indians or Negroes, and some were albinos.
The Jackson Whites traded at Pine’s store. They worked sometimes—in the brickyards at Haverstraw, in charcoal pits in the mountains—but usually they had no cash. Pinc sympathized with them, didn’t snub, cheat, or bait them, as many of the townspeople did, and he gave them groceries on credit, or in exchange for their handicrafts. They wove berry, bushel, market, and clothes baskets and carved ladles, butter paddles, scoops, and axe handles from maple and white wood, which Pinc sold to markets in New York and elsewhere. The butter paddles were bought by grocers, the baskets by farmers and housewives, the scoops by fishermen (to bail small boats). The Jackson Whites liked Pinc, discussed their family troubles, illnesses, and quarrels with him, and asked for his advice. Also, he induced many couples among them to become legally married. When they died they sometimes left him their cabins and homesteads. Today the Jackson Whites have dwindled to about 500; the automobile, world war, compulsory education, and outside jobs penetrated their isolation, and now they are dispersing into the surrounding villages and towns.
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As his trade grew, Pinc began to reach out, he was ambitious and he liked to get around. He bought a delivery truck, the first in the county, and became a notary and a fire warden; unofficially, he also distributed food to needy neighbors, for which he was paid by the Overseer of the Poor in Spring Valley. As early as 1912 he was elected a Republican county committeeman —“The party felt Pinc could deliver the Ladentown vote,” a local newspaperman says. “He was popular with his neighbors and the Jackson Whites, and they were solid Republican voters”—and the next year, he was the GOP candidate for Justice of the Peace of Ramapo Township. He lost by eighteen votes, but ran again and was elected four years later.
Pinc was Justice of the Peace twenty years. He was renominated and reelected four times, in 1921, 1925, 1929, and 1933. He was a capable and respected Justice of the Peace, a part-time office. He held court once a week, married twenty or so couples a year, and earned a small salary. He had jurisdiction in civil suits up to $200 and in misdemeanors such as disorderly conduct, but sent other cases to court in New City, the county seat, nineteen miles away. Pinc held court on Wednesday evenings around his dining room table. He called everyone by his first name, and he issued summonses or imposed fines, made judgments or reserved decision, while those next on the calendar waited in his store near the stove. Occasionally he had to arbitrate a case of wife-beating or chicken-stealing, but most of the time he judged small civil suits. Plaintiffs contended “that the defendant refuses to return a loan of $65,” or “that his cow got into my garden and trampled everything in there,” or “that his truck ran over my foot, and I couldn’t work for six days thereafter,” or “that I lost a wash which went to his laundry.”
Pine’s life and his own personality became more complicated. He rebuilt and expanded his house and put up a small garage and filling station next to his store. His store flourished—he now sold groceries in bulk to summer camps in the mountains—and he became a real estate broker. Soon he was a well-known figure in the county, a man who enjoyed chatting with people, going to church suppers, holding “yarn-telling” contests, and running for office. He was entirely uninterested in religion, and gave his children no special Jewish upbringing, contributing freely to the local church as well as a nearby synagogue. He lived in a regular, unhurried way, according to the basic rhythm of life in the country. Above all, he liked the contacts, the modicum of power, and the prestige he had as Justice of the Peace.
Then suddenly, unexpectedly, in 1937, Pinc was appointed Supervisor of the township of Ramapo. A state auditor, checking the records of the township, had found several inconsistencies, and in February James J. Brown, the Supervisor for twenty-one years, was arraigned in Supreme Court, charged with “falsifying public records and misappropriating public funds.” Brown pleaded guilty, returned the money he had stolen, and was sentenced to a light jail term; Pinc, meanwhile, resigned as Justice of the Peace, and was appointed interim Supervisor by the town board—and elected to that office in November. “I’ll tell you,” a local newspaperman says, “the powers that be looked around, and Pinc was on the doorstep, and they said, ‘Well, here is our boy.’ Pinc was popular and honest, but loyal, and they did it for the looks, following the classic pattern of machine politics. They controlled him: they wouldn’t pick a man they couldn’t control. Incidentally, Brown didn’t serve his sentence. He got sick and went to the hospital, and it was commuted by the governor.”
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Most of the total area of New York State is occupied by rural and suburban counties, like Rockland, though, of course, most of the population of the state is concentrated in a few cities—New York, Albany, Rochester, Buffalo, Syracuse. The counties are in turn subdivided into townships each of which includes several villages and hamlets. A Board of Supervisors, with one Supervisor for each township, runs the county. The board meets regularly at the county seat; it appoints officials, administers state and local laws, fixes tax rates, and lets construction and repair contracts. Throughout the state (and the country at large) the Republican and Democratic parties are organized on a county basis, and, like any of the metropolitan counties—Bronx or Kings or New York—the rural county is also an important political unit. The inner circle may be smaller, the atmosphere less intense, the machine somewhat less ruthless, but the issues are much the same, and the politics, both intra-party and inner-party, are usually as subtle and fierce as in the metropolis. The objectives are to retain, or achieve, power.
The township of which Pinc became Supervisor comprised several villages and hamlets with populations of between 150 and 5,000. It was pretty, quiet, and hilly, had large apple orchards and truck and dairy farms, and was the suburban home of many businessmen and commuters, the largest villages being Suffern and Spring Valley. The township, like the county, was governed by a board of five—the Supervisor and four councilmen; and in addition, the villages elected mayors and village boards. Similarly, the county and each of the townships had separate budgets. In 1952, for example, the county had a budget of $3,000,000, and the township of Ramapo a budget of $375,000. By a complicated, clumsy, and expensive system of administration, the county and the township each maintained separate but overlapping police forces, attorneys, welfare officers, tax assessors, treasurers, road commissioners. The office of the township was in Suffern, a busy, attractive village beneath the Ramapo Mountains. The office, in a small, low building on Main Street, where the board met and a few clerks worked, was neat and hushed.
Pinc worked about twenty hours a week as Supervisor; it was a part-time job that paid him $8,400 a year. Officially, he administered county and state laws and resolutions, and attended meetings of the town board in Suffern and of the Board of Supervisors in New City; he was chairman of the town board which considered such matters as local tax rates, street lighting, police regulations, garbage disposal, and road repair. In his official role Pinc attended many functions too—meetings, ceremonies, dinners— although he was a poor speaker and did not often make speeches. His most significant task was to confer frequently on official and political policy with the Republican leaders of the county. They would meet for lunch or dinner, cards or fishing, and discuss the issues, consider the alternatives, and make the decisions, outlining his course.
As his career as an official advanced, Pinc, with a feeling of importance, slowly spread out in new directions. He had been a Mason, and now he joined the Rotary Club of Spring Valley and the Ramapo Lodge, Knights of Pythias. And he now joined three synagogues, one in Suffern, two in Spring Valley. He became a director of the First National Bank in Spring Valley and a director of the Provident Savings and Loan Association in Haverstraw. He sold his store to his son Harold in 1944, and later sold some land in the Ramapos to the state for Palisades Interstate Park.
He became a prominent county politician, and was absorbed into the inner circle of politicians and businessmen that dominated county affairs. He became especially friendly with John Dodd, Ramapo Road Commissioner; Anthony Cucculo, truck operator and president of the West Shore Construction Company in Suffern; County (now Supreme Court) Judge Robert Doscher; and Charles W. Hawkins, president of the First National Bank in Spring Valley and chairman of the Rockland County Republican party. He, himself, became a skillful politician, who with the county leaders helped plan strategy, name candidates, get out the vote, and dispense patronage. Part of his effectiveness was owed to the fact that he retained much of his early simple and friendly manner. “Pinc was a very nice guy, a gentleman,” one local resident says, “but he was a good politician, he played the game. He talked to everybody—he was the first to congratulate or sympathize—but he talked to everybody the same way. He learned how to slap people on the back and how to push them out of the way. He was shrewd as hell, and very flexible, his eye always on the main chance. He was able to evade the issues. He made friends with his enemies, sometimes putting them on the payroll. He did many people favors, like killing a traffic ticket or getting a summer job for a kid home from school; Pinc might not do you a favor, but he would never say no.”
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With party support, Pinc was elected chairman of the Board of Supervisors in 1946 (the chief executive office in the county), and reelected Supervisor of Ramapo every other year through 1951. “Pinc liked being a leader around here,” a former colleague, a township official, says. “And he ran his office his own way, he never appointed a deputy Supervisor.” While Pinc was Supervisor the county Republican party was strong and well organized, as it remains today, and the Democratic party was small and apathetic and seldom nominated important candidates. Pinc campaigned for reelection, and won effortlessly on five occasions, frequently running without opposition. Twice, in 1947 and 1951, he was mildly challenged by the Democratic nominee, Harold A. Roose of Pomona. Roose, a middle-aged local businessman and vice-chairman of the county Democratic party, campaigned on a “reform” platform. He declared that the county government was antiquated, that the county and townships and villages didn’t require overlapping services, that the need was for a county-wide administration. He charged that the GOP refused to consider streamlining the county government because it would eliminate many jobs, much patronage. Pinc ignored these charges, decided to rely on his own popularity and his party’s strength for reelection, and was reelected each time by a clear majority—in 1947 by 4,632 votes to 1,510 and in 1951 by 4,392 votes to 1,652.
While Supervisor, Pinc continued to live quietly but comfortably. He and his wife lived in their house over the store even after he had sold it to his son. He enjoyed going to the movies and watching baseball on television; occasionally he went fishing with other township officials or, with his wife, to conventions in Rochester, Buffalo, Saranac Lake. Meanwhile his children finished school, went into business and married—two married Jews. (He had seven grandchildren, three boys and four girls, before he died.) Max was graduated from Norwich University and became an insurance broker in Hillburn, near Suffern; Martha and Blanche attended Teachers College in Oneonta, New York, and both later married and went to live in Haverstraw; Hazel was graduated from New York University and became a grade-school teacher in Spring Valley. Harold, who bought the store, was educated at the Chauncey Hall School in Boston, and in 1944 returned to live in Ladentown after working ten years in Nyack for the Rockland Light and Power Company and serving for two years in the Air Force. Today Ladentown is a green, sleepy place, and trade is usually slow in the store. Housewives chat and buy groceries, children scamper in for candy and ice cream, slamming the screen door, truck drivers stop for gas and cigarettes. A neighbor requests a paper to be notarized or a fire permit to burn some brush.
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During the election of 1951, though Pinc was reelected Supervisor, the GOP lost control of the county and of the Board of Supervisors for the first time in eighteen years. The Democratic party won contests in three of the five townships—instead of two as they usually did—and as a result Pinc, the Republican chairman of the Board, was replaced by a Democrat; soon after, he was the guest of honor at the first of several testimonial dinners at which his party and other groups eulogized him with speeches, gifts, and scrolls.
That same fall, five years after the death of his wife, Pinc remarried, wedding his wife’s sister, a widow living in Haverstraw. Then, less than a year later, on October 26, 1952, a tragedy occurred in the Ramapo Mountains which shocked and upset him deeply. Two men, Robert Nugent, town clerk of the township of Ramapo, and Charles E. Simpson, a banker of Saddle River, New Jersey, were found murdered in Sterling Forest where they had gone hunting. They had been shot to death. Pinc joined the police investigating the double murder (which still remains unsolved), suffered two heart attacks within the next ten days, and died in a local hospital on November 14. “Pinc was given a very big funeral in Spring Valley,” one township official recalls. “A thousand people attended, and it tied up traffic on Main Street for two hours.”
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