Thanks SuperFurry,

Speaking of Healy, I must say that overall I really still like him. Here is a nice article from today's " Chatham Courier" about their town's mayor and ours....
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The lives of two mayors converge where the concrete leads down to the docks
By MAX PIZARRO Editor -- 05/31/2006

The two men's Irish immigrant families came of age in Jersey City, daunted by the tall towers on the other side of the water, emboldened by the knowledge that the Statue of Liberty stands on the Jersey side of the harbor. Both of their fathers died when they were boys and they had to shoulder the man's jobs in between the stickball games, balance what they learned from the priests with what they received from the streets.

Whether it was a memory of the father who was a chemist in the case of one of them or the father who was a cop in County Kerry turned tavern owner a mile north of the city, coupled with the living exhortations of their mothers and their own ruminations on bar stool, at desk and in the confessional, they ultimately came to the same conclusion: education was the way forward.
One became an engineer, the other a lawyer.
One stayed in the city, the other eventually moved to the suburbs.
One married a woman named Maureen. The other married Eileen.
One belongs to the Democratic Party and ran for office after serving as the chief judge of Jersey City Municipal Court. The other holds membership in the GOP, and ran after serving on the School District of the Chathams. They came up with politics in their blood, denizens of a port town where in the first part of the 20th Century Mayor Frank Hague built Jersey City Medical Center as a fortress of socialized medicine, the nucleus of government programs that would become a model for Roosevelt's New Deal. Forged by the same city's culture, born in the glow of taverns where people talked about politics as much as sports, they would both - not inevitably but certainly understandably - become mayors.
They would become Mayor William "Bill" O'Connor of Chatham Township, and Mayor Jerramiah Healy of Jersey City.
Though they have never met each other and the towns they govern are, by any reckoning, polar opposites, O'Connor and Healy remain tempered by the same city, their political instincts shaped by the same toughness.
"My old man was a tavern owner," said Healy, sitting at a table in the mayor's chambers on Grove Street in Jersey City last Thursday afternoon. "He owned a place called Healy's Bar at 2603 Paterson Plank Road."
Healy's been living with this memory his whole life, since 1956, and so when he speaks of how his father died he doesn't choke up. He speaks through a half smile of resignation and admiration.
"He brought this one guy in out of the gutter," said Healy. "He was trying to help the guy and the irony is one night the guy hit my father over the head with a baseball bat and killed him.
"He didn't die that night," the mayor said. "He came home. He had diabetes. The cut became infected. He died a couple of days later."
The mayor's director of communications, Maria Pignataro, brought out a framed picture of the tavern keeper, the older Healy, who would have been 107 years old last month. "Both of my parents were part of the immigrant movement in the 1930s," Healy said. "They came from separate counties in Ireland."
For Healy, mayor of a city of 260,000, blocked into neighborhoods made up of everyone from Coptics to Mexicans, African-Americans to Puerto Ricans, Irish to Italians, all of Jersey's disparate tatters compressed into one Hudson County city, the tavern provided an Iceman Cometh beginning for the Jersey City characters he encountered in a law career and judgeship and now - as mayor.
"I don't know if you could have a better education about human nature than in that place (the tavern)," he said. "Inside and out, upside down."
He was raised by his mother, Catherine.
The early trajectory straight into the social rumble came similarly for O'Connor, now mayor of a town of 10,000, who was also raised by his mother. His chemist father died when he was 8 years old. His grandfather, County Mayo born and bred, ran a bar on Edge Avenue in Jersey City. When the future township mayor's grandmother tried to get a job at Colgate-Palmolive, they gave her the same line they gave every immigrant nursing a brogue: no Irish need apply.
Born in Jersey City Medical Center, O'Connor grew up on Garfield and Wegman avenues, where the clothes stretched across lines tethered from one house to another, in a world of the 1950s and 1960s in which the women stayed home while the men worked and the children walked everywhere.
"The car was simply not important," O'Connor said. "You walked to the baseball field. You played stickball in the street. You played until nightfall and then you played hide and go seek. I'm partial to porches, always have been, because while we were playing, our parents talked to each other on the porches. Porches create neighborhoods.
"Nobody took vacations at that time," the mayor added. "You went to Keansburg. This was right after they built the Garden State Parkway so even then it was starting to get a little faded, but Jackie Gleason still liked it. I remember seeing him there when I was a kid."
That closeness provided by neighborhoods with people on porches and essentials like the grocery store, church, schools and baseball diamond just blocks away kept Healy and his family in Jersey City.
Born in Bergen, Healy met his future wife in the city where his own parents settled, at Journal Square. They stayed in the city because it was convenient.
"The rent was cheaper in Jersey City," Healy said. "Later (as their family grew) we bought a house here."
By 1980, a lot of the old Irish immigrant offspring had moved to Monmouth, Ocean and Bergen. But for the Healys, staying in Jersey City made sense. Maureen Healy is a nurse, and she worked at Jersey City Medical Center. The mayor also worked in the city when he went into law practice, and he could walk 10-12 blocks to his job.
"All of our kids walked down the front steps into St. Nicholas' Grammar School," the mayor recalled. "The fact that we all walked to work or to school gave us the added incentive to stay here."
When he was in his teens, O'Connor and his family moved out of his grandparents' house to Bayonne. Then he went to college. He never returned to live in Jersey City, but he met his future wife Eileen on the steps of Twombley Hall at Fairleigh Dickinson University in Florham Park. She was raised on the same block in Jersey City, though they never met until that day in Morris County.
They stayed here.
Politics
Healy said he never grew up dreaming of going into politics. But as it turns out he couldn't escape it.
He entered the fray relatively late in life when he left his private practice and became chief judge of Jersey City Municipal Court. He said he thought the mayor at the time - Bret Schundler - was abusing his executive power during the blizzard of 1996 by teaming with the parking authority to issue snow removal tickets. Healy said it was the city's way around not issue parking tickets because there were two and a half feet of snow on the ground.
When Healy threw the snow removal cases out, the mayor's office and the parking authority resisted and re-instated the tickets the judge had already torn up.
"I chased them out of the courtroom," he recalled. ""If you parked at a meter and the meter was broken, they were giving you a ticket anyway. I told the parking authority that there is no city ordinance to permit you to do such a thing. I was viewed as an impediment."
He decided if that were the case he'd try to personally block Schundler's re-election.
So he ran for mayor, nearly knocking the knuckles off his hands when he ran up and down streets in neighborhoods where he said a lot of residents feared to tread. Schundler ultimately beat Healy - "he sent out 12 or 13 mailings in the final week against our one" - but the Irish American came back as an at-large candidate, won handily, and then assumed the mayor's post in 2004 after the sudden death of Mayor Glenn Cunningham.
Last year, Healy won election to his first four-year term. With his background as a judge it surprised no one when he emerged as a law and order mayor.
"The biggest thing we face is crime, specifically gun violence, gang activity and drugs," said Healy. "We hired 200 new cops in 17 months; of course, we also lost 125 to retirement. We expanded the use of TV crime cameras and instituted a business curfew. We instituted the most successful gun buyback program in the State of New Jersey, collecting 897 guns out of households.
"Our streets were in terrible condition when we came into office," Healy said. "You'd have a flat tire or break an axel going over them. We've paved a lot of potholes. These were the issues when I ran ten years ago. These were the issues 20 years ago in Jersey City."
For O'Connor, now in his second, one-year term as mayor of Chatham Township, high crime is not the issue. But the influx of housing development - the knock down and rebuild projects ongoing in some of Chatham Township's most affluent neighborhoods - is not dissimilar from the private facelifts Jersey City is undergoing on its waterfront.
"Twenty-five years ago," said Healy, "that waterfront was made up of nothing but abandoned docks and abandoned railroad yards. It looked like a vast wasteland. There was nothing here, despite the tremendous assets that we have."
The work goes on, the glass and steel rises, and some of the old timers grumble about the loss of the old look. They say the waterfront was rundown but it had character.
Though much of the old Jersey City is gone, its tradition of politics in some form, whether embodied by Healy in the city itself, or O'Connor in the suburbs, endures.
"The thing about Jersey City was that politics was interwoven in the fabric of life," said O'Connor. "My uncle worked for the parks department. My father-in-law worked for the sewage department. The candidate got you the job, you supported the candidate and it was all part of the machine. There was never any sense that this was corrupt. It was all viewed very positively. It was part of life. Jobs. Politics. Life."
O'Connor said he learned two valuable political lessons from Jersey City.
"The first is I developed a tolerance for the foibles of human nature," he said. "I developed a sense of the human condition, and how important it is to work for the betterment of everyone. The other important lesson is the lesson of disenfranchisement; the memory of people who were not brought into the political stream."
"Frank was pure politics," said Healy as he considered the impact of Frank Hague. "He ran the world's greatest, most successful political machine. He got elected and he got his people elected. He wielded power over who got elected in presidential elections. He found ways to get food and coal to the people, and this was very good. He also stood up to the railroads.
"But," and Healy was clear in his rejection of Hague-style strong arm tactics, "the downside to Frank was that he didn't permit any freedom of expression. What he ran here was not a democracy.
"We have a much more enlightened constituency now," Healy added. "The stuff he got away with would never happen now with newspapers and television media and the Internet."
O'Connor agreed.
"I think we had a much better educated and better informed populace now," O'Connor said. "What Hague perpetuated was a huge, closed system, and you either got in or you were disenfranchised."
Both chief executives speak about their constant efforts at consensus building. "As a mayor there are some things where you have to compromise," said O'Connor. "then there are those things where there is no comprise, and you have to recognize which is which."
Chatham Township and Jersey City.
They are a half an hour apart, yet with the exception of O'Connor the ties to the waterfront daily die as Flynn's Tavern on River Road, owned by Catherine Flynn of Jersey, closed this year; as did Volume One Books on Green Village Road, which was owned by Jersey City native John Flynn.
"The Irish guys come out to the suburbs and they get fat and complacent, same as everybody else, end up playing golf and disengaged from politics until they are indistinguishable from everyone else," someone ribbed the mayor of Chatham Township recently on the eve of a committee meeting, and the laugh came into O'Connor's voice but only very briefly and then the denial was unmistakable.
"Not me," he said.
Back in Jersey City, the light rail runs along the waterfront, where the broken down docks have turned into prime real estate, where the likes of Terry Malloy in a windbreaker are lost in the crowds of the latte sipping financial set.
But Healy isn't worried. He refuses to sentimentalize.
"As far as I'm concerned," he said, "then rising tide lifts all boats that are marooned to that dock. Some neighborhoods that were in bad shape have become the hottest properties in Jersey City. We have four Path stops and three ferry stops in Jersey City. These neighborhoods are attractive to real estate and investment."
The character of the city isn't going to change. He has two sons on the city fire department, and is still singing Sinatra songs to his own guitar accompaniment.
"We have enough characters left in the old neighborhoods," Healy. "We have characters being bred here everyday in the schools, churches, and," he added with a grin, "I have to say, taverns."

GrovePath, please continue to post news articles, I just ask that you be judicious about it. Newsboy doesn?t want ANY article posted, since many of them are critical of Chief Troy and the Mayor.

Quote:

It's more like an accident than an assault. If that is what happened. Remember, it's only one side of the story.

If he works at the range he teaches people how to use guns, he doesn't have access to any other guns beside of his own.

Why don't you wait for the final outcome before you send people to anger management classes.

There's nothing to see here, move on.

P.S.
Please stop posting the news, we know where to get it.

Yeah there seems to be an anger management problem here -- maybe guns are a bad thing for him to have access to.

from the charges: "Mathus allegedly refused to wait and, ignoring the worker's instructions, drove around him and continued through the work area, hitting another DOT employee"

This is a minor driving event that is being dealt with. What relevance is his status as a gun instructor?

He was indicted. If Troy was trying to cover it up -- or get him off the hook I'd be more interested. Let's see what action, if any, Troy will take.

I hope your are kidding -- he works for the Jersey City Police Department as a "Gun Instructor" and he is also a retired Jersey City Cop and he did this here in Jersey City.

Oh I guess you are right..... who cares about stuff like this ....lets get back to trash on the streets and dog runs!


Quote:

GP, does this story really need to be posted? Does it merit discussion?

Retired cop indicted in car 'assault'
Thursday, June 01, 2006
By MICHAELANGELO CONTE
JOURNAL STAFF WRITER

A retired Jersey City police sergeant, now a civilian employee of the Police Department, has been indicted on charges of assault by auto for allegedly running down a road worker in April 2005, officials said.

According to the indictment, handed down Tuesday, Peter Mathus was driving north on Route 1&9 near Communipaw Avenue, where state prisoners were doing a clean-up detail with workers from the state Department of Transportation.

A DOT flagman stopped Mathus to allow some heavy machinery to be moved. But Mathus allegedly refused to wait and, ignoring the worker's instructions, drove around him and continued through the work area, hitting another DOT employee, according to the indictment.

The worker was taken to the Jersey City Medical Center for treatment and later had to undergo surgery on his injured right knee, Hudson County Assistant Prosecutor Peter Stoma.

Mathus retired about 10 years ago after 25 years with the department, and is now employed as a civilian firearms instructor at the department's shooting range, officials said.

Mathus's attorney, Sam DeLuca of Jersey City, said he has not yet seen the indictment and did not want to comment until he has a chance to review it.

Police Chief Robert Troy said he will review the indictment and speak to the prosecutor before deciding what action, if any, he will take regarding Mathus's continued employment at the department.

If convicted, Mathus could face up to 18 months in jail.

He will be arraigned on the charges in about three weeks, Stoma said.