Integrity in New Jersey

 

The former New Jersey State Senator, Paul Contillo, died aged 94 on 6 February. He was a politician of a school that believed in using public office for the public good, rather than simply to achieve power or for personal enrichment. I had the pleasure of meeting him several times and wish that more of our contemporary politicians were of Paul’s kind. This does not mean that he was averse to slugging it out with his opponents, but his politics were rooted in personal integrity and a stubborn insistence on doing what he considered to be the right thing.

 

Senator Paul Contillo

Shortly after we married in 1979, Jan and I moved into a two-bedroom rented apartment on Flower Avenue in Takoma Park, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, DC. Our neighbours in the apartment below ours were a young lawyer working as a clerk for a DC judge and a nurse. Bob and Chris Contillo became lifelong friends.

 

Bob was born and raised in Paramus, New Jersey, and after his stint clerking for Judge George Goodrich in DC he returned to work as a lawyer and later as a Judge in Bergen County. I knew from conversations with Bob that his father, Paul, had been a prominent figure in Jersey politics who stood out as (to quote an obituary written by a Republican) “an impeccably honest and stubborn Bergen County Democrat,” in a state not notable for the honesty of its politics.

 

My publishing travels enabled me to be a quite frequent visitor to Bob and Chris’ home in Haworth and during those visits to be introduced to many parts of northern Jersey. Occasionally, I would be welcomed into Paul’s home in Paramus or his beach home on Long Beach Island, sometimes for large and lively gatherings of the Contillo family. Paul was ever a generous and genial host, welcoming a wandering Englishman into family occasions and putting him at his ease. On one occasion he and Bob took me out in his boat on the calm waters sheltered from the Atlantic by Long Beach’s narrow strip of land so that I could try my hand at water-skiing. After multiple failures to get up on my skis, we returned home to a family dinner where Paul’s son-in-law Jimmy showed me how to open a clam by smashing the shell with his fist – Jimmy was a large powerful character. I failed at clam smashing also.

 

Paul was an accomplished water-skier

Unfortunately, I never had time to talk to Paul about New Jersey politics. As is often the case, I now know more about him from his obituaries than I learned from our meetings. It is clear from the tributes paid to him that Paul was, to quote a current state Senator, a titan of Bergen County politics. Paul was born in Brooklyn in 1929 into a large family of Italian American and German American heritage. At school he met his future wife Kathleen McConville – they were married for 69 years. He was an accomplished footballer (American, of course) at James Madison High School in Brooklyn. Most of the students at James Madison were Jewish and some went on to prominent national careers: Ruth Bader Ginsburg became a Supreme Court Justice, Bernie Sanders and Chuck Schumer US Senators. Paul would prove that those who make their mark at more local and state levels could also make contributions to the common good. He began by founding a successful business. He and a friend established a printing company, Allied Reproductions, in New York City. They developed the firm into a substantial enterprise serving Wall Street financial businesses.

 

Paul and Kathleen made their home in Paramus, where his public service career began as chair of the Paramus Zoning Board (in British terms the planning committee). He was a Paramus Councilman from 1971-1973. Then he was elected to be a New Jersey General Assemblyman in 1974, serving until he was defeated in 1980. From 1984-1991 he was a State Senator. He was also Chairman of Common Cause (1986-1988), a non-party-political organization that that works to support democratic principles in the USA, and Vice Chairman of the New Jersey Parole Board (2004-2009).

 

New Jersey politics is a rough-tough business. Paul’s acknowledged integrity must have appealed to voters, but he could wage a tough fight when he needed to. He accused a Republican opponent, John Paolella, of using his position in the Jersey Senate to promote his law firm, of being immature and a flip-flopper, and of not being a serious politician. He described another Paramus Republican and arch-rival, John Kosco, Chairman of the Assembly Banking Committee of being a pawn of the banking industry. Politics is, in the end, a game that nearly always ends in defeat – it was his bitter rival Kosco who defeated Paul in his last campaign in 1991.

 

Paul’s accomplishments as a legislator were notable. He sponsored America’s first mandatory recycling law, and the Local Ethics Law, which compelled all public servants to disclose their sources of income, including local bodies such as planning and zoning boards which provide many opportunities for corruption. Another of Paul’s initiatives prohibited building on land owned by the Hackensack Water Company, a law which still protects Bergen County’s water supply from pollution. He also campaigned to allocate state funds to cleaning up hazardous waste sites. He was an advocate of Bergen County’s “blue laws” which prohibit shops, including the county’s several large shopping malls, from opening on Sundays. He argued quite simply that retail workers should have a day off with their families, an opinion which I suspect was rooted in his Catholic faith. Paul and Kathleen were, Bob told me politically liberal, but socially conservative. Not all his initiatives were successful, however. One of Paramus’ most intractable problems was the intersection of route 4 and route 17, a source of many a traffic jam. A Mexican traffic engineer somehow heard of this problem and headed to Paramus to offer a solution: an intersection design he had successfully implemented in Mexico. Alas, on examination the economics of his proposal were based on Mexican labour rates, which New Jersey unions would never accept. However, Bob tells me that the intersection problem was eventually fixed with a solution based roughly on the Mexican’s design, although his contribution is probably lost to history.

 

I have a great affection for America, where I lived for four years and worked for four decades. I admired a political system that allowed for vigorous debate, protected the right of free speech, and had a can-do mentality, but I find the current political scene appalling. Too many are in thrall to demagogues for whom the art of politics is fear and the demonization of others. If only there were more Paul Contillos for whom the purpose of politics was to improve life for all in their community.