On the morning of July 7 in the war year of 1945, Esther Milnes was called to the front door of her Fair Lawn Avenue house to receive an extraordinary delivery: a fresh orchid, flown direct from Hollywood.
She knew what it meant. The previous morning, to her surprise, a letter had been read on the national radio show, Breakfast in Hollywood, praising the good works of Esther and her husband Henry. As a result, she’d been chosen to receive the show’s daily Good Neighbor Award – always signified by an orchid.
The letter had been signed by 688 of the Milnes’ Fair Lawn neighbors. It told how Henry and Esther had founded the Fair Lawn Boys Club six years earlier and ran it in their home while raising their own six children.
Early the next year, the Milnes’ evening dinner was interrupted by a phone call from Hollywood: Esther had won the radio show’s annual National Good Neighbor Award, including a $1,000 prize.
The Milnes were flown to Chicago; put up at the Blackstone Hotel, famous for hosting celebrities; and honored at the Breakfast in Hollywood movie premiere, featuring stars like Nat King Cole.
This was the Golden Age of Radio – years before TV – and with a daily audience of 10 million, Breakfast in Hollywood was one of the most popular shows. Its recognition of the Milnes made the couple the pride of North Jersey.
Which may explain why, when they moved around that time to another old farmhouse on Fair Lawn Avenue, this one in the Radburn section, it became known as “Good Neighbor Hall.’’
Good Neighbor Hall did not stay put for long. In 1948, to make way for an apartment complex, a developer moved the historic house (and the Milnes family) to Warren Road – where it sits unnoticed today amid houses half its age.
For those who know the house’s story, however, it’s a reminder of possibly the most remarkable couple in Fair Lawn’s 100-year history.
Beginnings
Henry and Esther Milnes were born in Paterson; Henry in 1904, Esther two years later. Henry’s father died when he was 18 months old; the boy had no paternal figure until he was 13, when his mother married a man who the boy remembered as an alcoholic disinterested in children.
Henry and Esther met in church – St. Mark’s Episcopal in Paterson – in 1924. In a memoir, Esther recalled Henry as having “fair, slightly wavy hair, blue eyes, and a well-groomed, reddish-blonde moustache.’’
During their long engagement, the couple saved for the future. Henry first worked as a photoengineer for a dye and printing company, then bought a truck and used it to sell eggs and butter. After that, he sold industrial real estate for a Paterson firm before starting his own agency. Esther worked at a bank in Ridgewood.
In June 1930, they married in the church where they met. Over the next three years they had two children, and Esther quit her job to stay home with them.
But by then the Great Depression had rocked their lives. Henry lost his business. The family was forced to move three times in as many years, and took in Esther’s mother, aunt and sister. They sold any possession they could; Esther even pawned her wedding ring.
For Henry, the economic crisis precipitated a personal crisis. “In his despair, Henry lost his nerve, suffering from a lost sense of security,’’ Esther later wrote. He felt that now, there was nothing to live for.
A personal search
Yet somehow the crisis brought the couple closer. As they wept together and shared thoughts and feelings, Esther wrote, “they began to realize that their extremity could well be their opportunity.’’
Henry, meanwhile, was told by a minister friend “to search within himself.’’ As he did, Esther recalled, he found that “real security is not based on outside fortitude (or) material possessions, but on a set of human values and standards that gives priority to the worth of every living being…’’
As he searched, “Henry’s own values and standards took new form. Out of the extremity of desperation came new insight. … leading ultimately to the discovery of the ‘I Am.’ … Henry began to reshape his life.’’
He started at the bottom. He delivered phone books door to door. He picked strawberries, for which he was paid in kind. He started a small sporting goods and fishing supply shop on a consignment basis. He did any odd job that came his way. Finally, he got a regular job with a New Deal program to combat the Dutch Elm tree blight.
Around this time Henry was asked to teach a boys’ Sunday School class at the Van Riper Ellis Baptist Church. He enjoyed the classes, but quickly concluded that an hour a week was not enough time to make an impression on his 12 pupils. So he began to host the group one evening a week in the house the family was renting at 188 River Road in Fair Lawn.
Finances forced the family to move again in the winter of 1935-36 to even smaller lodgings on Fourth Street. But the meetings continued, this time in the basement. Soon, meetings were opened to the boys’ friends; membership, Esther recalled, “grew like milkweed.’’
By 1937, 50 to 60 boys of various races, backgrounds and communities gathered at the Milnes’ home six days a week—younger boys in the afternoon, older ones in the evening—to play billiards, ping pong, and other games, to eat Esther’s snacks, and to listen to Henry read stories.
Henry began calling the group “the Fair Lawn Boys Club." The group’s members came up with a name for Henry: Pop.
Outside of Radburn, with its expensive facilities, there were almost no organized youth recreational activities in town. But the Milnes’ setup was hardly ideal – space was tight and some neighbors were annoyed.
One day in early 1938, walking along Fair Lawn Avenue, Henry came upon the former Adam Hopper homestead (what is today No. 11-16, east and across the avenue from the library). It was a big, run-down, long-vacant farmhouse set back from the road, with a tumbledown barn in back.
He climbed in the basement window, and what he saw over the next few minutes fired his imagination: The cellar could house a woodworking shop and maybe a used printing press. The upstairs rooms were big enough for ping pong and billiards tables. There were fireplaces for hot dog roasts and story hours, and plenty of wall space for bookshelves. With work, the barn outside could be turned into a gym and a theater.
The house had heat and electricity, but no indoor plumbing or running water, just a pump in the kitchen connected to a cistern. It was, not surprisingly, for sale.
Henry rushed home to tell Esther. The house had eight big rooms, so the club could use the basement and first floor and the family could live on the second. The attic had room for boys who found themselves temporarily homeless. As they talked into the night, the possibilities seemed endless. They’d begun dreaming again.
Pop convinced the sales agent to rent it for $35 a month, with an option to buy for $3,800 after a year. The family moved in on a wet windy day in March, 1938, along with their three sons, the last of whom had been born in October. After the first rent payment, they had $5 to spare.
Roughing it
To Esther, the place felt like a Smithsonian exhibit on 19th Century rural life. The ancient furnace required 35 pails of water daily, pumped from the well and carried by hand. Water for household use had to be boiled. The sole bathroom was an outhouse.
When the option to buy came up, the Milnes tried to raise funds publicly. But, according to a Paterson News story in 1946, “their friends hesitated because of the expense and all the work (necessary). So Pop Milnes said, ‘Well, Esther and I have thought it over and we’re going to take a chance.’’’ They bought the house themselves.
With help from club members, Pop installed a new furnace, piped in running water, laid a cement basement floor, and plastered, painted, and papered the walls. He also hung a big sign on the front porch: Fair Lawn Boys Club.
The Milnes’ dreams were coming true. There were games on the first floor and printing and woodworking in the basement. Volunteers taught classes in furniture repair, copper work, and radio operation. There was archery and boxing out back, and camping trips to the woods and the shore. Henry organized a football team.
Esther supervised a used clothes exchange and an “employment bureau’’ through which boys could get jobs cutting grass or shoveling snow. A Girls Club met one night a week.
The club had only three rules: “No smoking, no swearing and no fist fights indoors.” Some members were suspended; none were expelled.
Henry got a horse and wagon so the boys could gather and sell wood to raise money for the club. They also sold Christmas trees and wreaths. It was in keeping with one of the Milnes’ adages: “Nothing without labor.’’
Within a few years the club had almost 500 members, including kids from neighboring communities such as Paterson.
The Milnes’ own finances remained tenuous; each Christmas, they’d wait until the last moment to shop for gifts, hoping for bargains.
After the U.S. entered World War II, the club’s members dove enthusiastically into home front scrap drives, collecting 248,000 pounds of paper, 36,000 pounds of tin, and 11,000 pounds of rags. Almost 150 club members or alumni went off to war; six did not come back.
In 1945, Esther gave birth to twins, giving the Milnes six kids and one foster child. They moved from the cramped second floor of the Boys Club to another old farmhouse on Fair Lawn Avenue, the Bogert homestead, near the Radburn footbridge.
It was one of the last surviving early frame houses in Fair Lawn, made with hand-hewn beams in the early 1800s in the Greek Revival style. It originally had one and a half stories, with a main block and two smaller wings.
By this time, Pop had a major patron. Carl “Stan’’ Carlson, was already on his way to becoming one of North Jersey’s premiere real estate developers. He became president of the Boys Club board and in 1944 arranged for the club to acquire 89 acres in Kinnelon for a camp designed to give less affluent kids some time in the country.
In 1948, Carlson moved the Milnes house – now dubbed “Good Neighbor Hall,” after the award – from Fair Lawn Avenue to Warren Road to make way for the apartment complex he was developing.
A small but telling sign of the esteem in which the Milnes were held: Radburn, a homeowners association that zealously limited outsiders’ use of its swimming pools, extended pool privileges to the family, even though Good Neighbor Hall was just outside the association boundary.
‘We had to do it’
Through it all, the Milnes were modesty personified. The Ridgewood News reported that, when asked about the Good Neighbor awards, Esther said that “she only merits it because she is her husband’s wife. She maintains stoutly that he has done the work, and she has only gone along with him.’’
Esther told the newspaper that, through all the hardships and obstacles, “the work stemmed from our Christian beliefs. We felt we had to do it. You can’t see the results in figures, but there is something intangible that is definitely compensatory. For one thing, there is practically no youth problem in Fair Lawn now.’’
But Pop, who struggled so valiantly through the Great Depression, did not seem comfortable with the increasingly affluent society that emerged from it.
In his message to the club’s directors in 1949, Pop, according to the Paterson Morning Call, “decried the failure of many families to provide a background to offset the outside attractions which tend to make members of the home go their individualistic way.’’ He also cited “the high rate of divorces, plus a breaking down of common decency toward adultery and perversions, causing a widening crack in the social structure.’’ He compared the decline in American morals with that of ancient Rome.
Then he was gone. On Dec. 13, 1950, Henry B. Milnes died after a brief kidney illness. He was only 46. A newspaper headline the next day called him “Boys’ Friend.’’ It was as fitting an epithet as any.
Soon the Fair Lawn Boys Club was gone, too. The club had outgrown the Hopper place (which would soon be torn down) and needed a new home. And when the directors looked for a successor to Pop, they could not find one.
To some, he seemed irreplaceable. A member of the School Board, Maurice Pine, said he didn’t think he would ever meet another person like him. Mayor John Pollitt called Pop “a person who devoted his entire life unselfishly to make other lives better. … I never met another character who comes up to him.’’
The town, which had planned to name the new school on Philip Street for those lost in the war, instead named it for Henry B. Milnes.
Esther died a quarter century later, at age 68. Her obituary in the Paterson News bore no mention of the Good Neighbor Award, or Good Neighbor Hall.
This old house
Today, the house – one of the oldest in Fair Lawn – is camouflaged as a split level. The original columns have been replaced, and the fireplace chimneys and some building sections removed.
The curved roof and low windows, however, give it away—a reminder of a remarkable couple who, when the Depression crushed their Dream, found a new one—and in it, found themselves.
Note: Boys Club photos courtesy of Cindy Milnes Tanzer and Dennis Milnes, two of Henry and Esther’s grandchildren.
Wow! What a great story. Thank you Rick, Stephen and Cindy.
In today's world, that is a hard to believe story! Thank you for presenting it!