Historical Society Seeks Fort Lee Stories for Oral Histories Project

Did you or your relatives work in the film industry in Fort Lee? Perhaps you worked at the Palisade Interstate Park or Palisades Amusement Park. Do you remember the castle on River Road and Old Palisade Road? Or maybe you have stories to share about Fort Lee’s colorful past or its even more colorful residents.

If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, the Fort Lee Historical Society wants to hear from you.

The Fort Lee Film Commission and the Fort Lee Coalition for the Arts is joining forces with the historical society for an “oral histories” project that organizers hope will result in a valuable resource for present and future generations of Fort Lee residents to learn more about the history of their town.

Fort Lee Historical Society president Donna Brennan, who’s also a professional photographer, videographer and journalist, said she’s actually been working on the project in bits and pieces over the past few years, but that the historical society is now “stepping it up a notch.”

The idea to do so came about a couple of years ago when Brennan was listening to a special program on NPR radio called StoryCorps, an independent nonprofit organization whose mission, it says, is “to provide Americans of all backgrounds and beliefs with the opportunity to record, share and preserve the stories of our lives.”

“When I was listening to some of these audio histories, I said to myself, ‘My God. We should be doing this; the historical society should be doing this because there’s such a wealth of history in this town,” Brennan said. “There are people who were involved in so many things—whether it’s the film industry, building the George Washington Bridge, 9/11 and how they may have been involved in it or just people who work in the city every single day and do the commute. We have a lot of writers in Fort Lee, theatre people—just a real pool of talent. And I was thinking, this is something that really shouldn’t escape us.”

She said the audio or possibly video recordings—if the subject is comfortable being on camera—will be archived in the historical society’s collection, “and who knows? A hundred years from now, maybe people will want to hear it, and they’ll really get something out of it.”

It may also take the form of a page on the historical society’s website, where visitors could click on a picture and bring up that particular person’s story.

Brennan said that she and some of the historical society’s board members like Paula Colbath and Paul Umrichin would “be thrilled” to be able to involve media students from Fort Lee High School in the project at some point. She said the potential learning experience for the students would be multi-layered in that they would learn not only about journalism and technology, but also about the history of their hometown—something Brennan said “they’re not really teaching in school.”

With the project in its early stages and the historical society essentially looking for people to tell their stories, Brennan said she’s casting a wide net “because to me everybody has an interesting story … to me, whatever they want to share, I’m willing to listen because you never know. There’s always going to be something of value.”

Brennan already has some stories in the can, having videotaped many events over the past several years. Some those recordings that form the core of the current archive of oral histories include the following people:

• Former Mayor of Fort Lee Burt Ross, whose story was also told in the book The Bribe, by Philip Ross.

• The late Paul Ortlip, the renowned Fort Lee artist whom Brennan recorded at an unveiling at the a few years back of a painting Ortlip did of astronaut Eugene Cernan, the last man to walk on the moon.

“They really knew how to capture your imagination,” Brennan said of Ortlip and Cernan, who turned up for the event in Fort Lee and whom Brennan also captured with her camera, ultimately producing a video called “Art Meets Science,” which can be found in the historical society’s archives.

“There wasn’t one person in that room that wasn’t listening to every single word that Paul Ortlip was saying or Eugene Cernan,” Brennan said. “When Eugene Cernan talked about what it was like to walk on the moon, you would get chills. You could hear a pin drop in the room. It was riveting.”

• Four Fort Lee women, who are the oldest known graduates of School No. 4 still living in Fort Lee, and who recently took part in the school’s centennial celebrations.

• Fort Lee Veteran and Commander of the Fort Lee V.F.W. James Viola.

Anyone who has a Fort Lee story to tell or wants to recommend someone for the oral histories project is urged to contact the Fort Lee Historical Society at 201-592-3580 or visit them online.  

“What we’re doing is upping it several notches so that this way, we’re starting to build a really solid foundation of a more modern way of capturing history,” Brennan said.