RED BANK: EDITH BLAKE REFLECTS ON 106 YEARS

Edith Blake with her grandson, Erik Perry, and great-granddaughter, Sarah Perry. Below, the park on the former site of her family’s Fair Haven homestead. (Photos by Brian Donohue. Click to enlarge.)

By BRIAN DONOHUE

Walk to the foot of DeNormandie Avenue in Fair Haven and you’ll see Williams, Albert and Robards Park, where the grass stretches to the blue Navesink River and the branches of the biggest yew tree in the county spread wide.

Edith Blake sees something different.

You don’t know Edith Blake until you’ve heard that laugh. Video interview with Edith Blake. Below, a newspaper headline from April, 1926. (video and photos by Brian Donohue.)

“Right now, I don’t see that as a park,” she says. “All I can see is my grandmother’s house.”

It was the house, torn down decades later to create the park, where her parents lived when she was born, as Edith Antoinette Albert, on February 25, 1918. 

At 106 years old, likely the oldest person in Red Bank, Edith Blake remembers things no one else does. 

Like rolling down the hill in front of that long-gone house. Playing in the shores and shallows, digging clams and oysters.  Sitting on the porch listening to the music from the steamboats passing by on their way to New York City.

“One was the Albertina and the other was the Sea Bird,” she remembers clear as day. “I had a lot of fun in that house.”

She remembers, too, after her family moved to Mechanic Street in Red Bank, going to play the piano in the parlor of neighbor Lillian Basie, whose son had already begun playing Harlem nightclubs and taken the stage name “Count.” Yes, that guy. 

But Edith Blake remembers too, a lot of things people seem to want to forget.

Like the rule that Blacks had to sit in the last rows of the Strand Theatre on Broad Street in Red Bank. The time when she worked as a nanny for a white family and took the kids to a Shrewsbury restaurant that refused to serve her because she is black. 

And the day in 1926 when she watched from her bedroom window as her segregated black school burned to ground in a suspicious blaze. It was the second black school burned down in Fair Haven. They had to rebuild it in concrete so it didn’t happen again. 

Even so, as she catches her breath from last month’s birthday parties and tributes galore – from the borough council proclaiming “Edith Blake Day” to cake and candles at her physical therapist’s office and the Red Bank Senior Center – Blake wonders what all the fuss is about.

“I’m just little old me,’’ she says with her infectious giggle. “I don’t know why everybody loves me.”

She is seated in the living room of the Tilton Avenue home she shares with her daughter Brenda Bacon and grandson Barry Bacon, alongside another grandson, Erik Perry, and great-granddaughter Sarah Perry. 

It’s a four-generation span that likely covers a broader and deeper stretch of local history than any other.

“I think I’m pretty lucky,’’ said Sarah, a freshman at Rutgers and a 2023 Red Bank Regional High School graduate.

Partly because even more than the stories, it’s Edith Blake’s laugh and smile that light up the room and make you feel lucky to be there with her. Her secret, perhaps, to making it to 106.

“I love everybody,’’ she says. “Even those who won’t love me, I still love ’em. I just love everybody.” 

Her grandmother lived in Fair Haven near the river in what was a longstanding and thriving black community formed by free blacks before the Civil War. Blake lets out a long laugh remembering a particular nasty chicken named Benny who would chase anyone who walked to the outhouse.

“All back on Navesink Avenue it was all Black folks,’’ she said, rattling off names of families who lived there.

Her father, William Albert, was a custodian at the Rumson Country Day School. His steady wages shielded them from the pains of the Depression.

She remembers her father cutting holes in the ice to catch eels in winter, walking through endless fields that surrounded Red Bank and Fair Haven, then essentially small rural villages. 

She and her parents lived there until moving to Mechanic Street in Red Bank when she was four – across the street from the home where Red Bank’s favorite son William “Count” Basie was raised. 

“My mother was very friendly with Count Basie’s mother,’’ she said. “She wouldn’t allow kids to come into her house, but we were allowed to come in and play on his piano.”

The family moved back to Fair Haven where she enrolled in the segregated Fisk School school for Black children. 

The school had been built in the late 1880s after the previous black school burned down amid what a New York Times headline dubbed “Trouble between the races.” Fair Haven African-Americans were demanding desegregated schools in the wake of an 1881 New Jersey Supreme Court ruling, but met strong resistance from white officials.

Then, in April 1926, when Blake was eight, it happened again. The school was burned to the ground in a fire historians describe as suspicious.

“I remember seeing it burn,’ she said. “I looked out the window and I saw the school burning.”

Classes were moved to the nearby church, Fitz Chapel, while a new, fireproof concrete school (which later became the police station/community center) was built.

“I was the last one to graduate from the black school,’’ she said. 

The family moved back to Red Bank, when she was 15.  Blake went to Red Bank High School until grade 10, then worked cleaning houses, then married Charles W. Blake and had four children. During World War II she worked sewing overcoats at the Eisner factory on Bridge Avenue (now the Galleria).

When the couple’s oldest daughter was 15, she bought her first house on Pearl Street in Red Bank with a $500 downpayment loaned to her by a friend of her boss. 

“I payed them back five and ten dollars a week,’’ she says. “That’s how I paid for the house.”

“Somehow or other I managed.”

These days, she goes to the chiropractor in the same house that belonged to her Sunday school teacher, Ms. Tilly Holmes. And twice a week a senior bus pulls up on the curb and takes her to Bingo at the Senior Center.

There are photo albums of her trips to Europe and grandchildren’s birthday parties. And all those amazing memories. 

But don’t call it nostalgia. Though life’s been good, even at 106, she’s sharp enough to realize they weren’t always the good old days.

Asked whether life is better today or back then, she falls into a long pause. 

“I think,’’ she says, “things are a whole lot better than they used to be.”

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