Bobby Holiday retired. Sort of. (Photo by Brian Donohue. Click to enlarge.)
By BRIAN DONOHUE
At the end of February, a ten-inch pipe that carries water from the Red Bank water treatment plant on Chestnut Street broke, sending water gushing into the streets and disrupting water service for half the town.
As a dozen workers toiled with jackhammers and supervisors barked orders down into the watery hole, any keen observer of life in Red Bank over the past 40 years would have noted that something – or rather someone – was missing from the scene.
Bobby Holiday, supervisor of water and sewer with the Department of Public Utilities since 1984 and the man who lent gobsmacking levels of institutional knowledge in such emergencies, had retired Jan. 31.
He couldn’t even sneak over from his house and peek down at the broken pipe.
An obscure state pension rule, Holiday said, required him to “totally separate” from the borough for 180 days, prohibiting him from showing up at the scene or lending his expertise on any matter.
“I couldn’t talk to them. People were calling me,” Holiday said. “I knew what to do.”
But even tougher for a guy who can’t exactly sit still: He also had to separate for 30 days from the volunteer Red Bank Fire Department, where he’s in his fifth decade of service as a firefighter.
When a fire broke out in a menswear shop on East Front Street that same month, Holiday had to ignore the screeching alert from the fire department’s communications app on his phone.
“That was a hard thing to do,” he said. “Doing it for 46 years, and you listen to the tones go off and you can’t do anything?”
“Everybody asked me, ‘has your wife duct-taped you to the chair?”
Holiday, a lifelong Red Bank resident and two-term chief of the RBFD, is free of the bureaucratic duct tape and back responding to fire calls now that his “separation” is over.
Holiday is also in line for honors as one of several front-line responders and vets saluted at the Elks United Home Hometown Heroes barbecue sponsored by Red Bank’s two Elks lodges this Saturday (see flyer below).
“It’s like family,” he said of the all-volunteer department.
Bobby Holiday, easing into retirement by responding to a small fire at the Colony House apartments last month. (photo by Brian Donohue)
As Holiday retired from his borough job earlier this year, Red Bank officials seemed to wish they could download everything in his brain.
The town’s below-ground infrastructure was built so long ago and in such piecemeal fashion over the decades that that some of it is uncharted. Above ground, the landscape has been so changed by redevelopment that a new generation no longer knows what was there before.
Holiday sure does. Those who have worked with him marvel at his knowledge of what he says he knows “like the back of my hand.”
When he retired, fellow volunteer firefighters and Borough Council member David Cassidy put it this way.
“There’s just certain people in this town, you talk about replacing people from an employment perceptive, someone comes in behind them? Well, there’s no replacing him.”
Cassidy added a word of advice for Red Bankers: “If you run into him ask him a few questions because you’re going to learn something new.”
Between his three decades working on water lines and 46 years of service on the Red Bank Volunteer Fire Department, Holiday arguably knows more about this town than anyone.
He knows where the main sewers run under the street and connect to the branch sewers you can’t even find on the most ancient town maps.
He knows about the ghost of the 19th-century owner of the New York Giants baseball team that haunts the borough water facility atop Tower Hill.
And it may have been 30 years ago when the previous resident burnt their Thanksgiving turkey and set off the fire alarm, but he has, very likely, been in your home.
“It’s in my head – everything,” he told us during an early spring interview at the Red Bank First Aid and Rescue Squad on Spring Street. “I drive down the street, I could see everything underneath the road. It’s crazy.”
Given that knowledge, his advice is ignored at contractors’ and builders’ peril.
When contractors for the developer Denholtz were doing soil samples at the NJ Transit train station parking lots last summer, Holiday warned them there was a sewer main in the area and told them to steer clear. It could not be marked exactly because the map on which it was marked could not be read.
“I said this whole area is forbidden,” he said.
They dug there anyway, striking a sewer main and causing a large break that sent a torrent of sewage into the storm drain system.
“I almost had a heart attack,” Holiday said.
In his early 20’s, Holiday was working as an auto mechanic at Tubby‘s on West Street when someone offered him a job with the borough roads department. It was a big pay cut, but the position offered pension and health benefits, so he took it.
After a few years, he transferred to water and sewer. On his first day in April 1983, “They put me into the water plant to dig out all the filters in the water plant by hand.” He worked his way up to foreman and, eventually, supervisor.
“I worked with a bunch of good guys,” he said. “I loved troubleshooting with residents, water leaks, and high bills. I love helping people.”
‘People thought I was an engineer,’ he said. ” I’m not an engineer.”
At 65, he timed his departure from the borough job perfectly. His retirement coincided with his and his wife Denise becoming grandparents.
On Nov. 29, two months before his last day, his daughter Alexis, who lives in Maryland, gave birth to a baby boy. When we sat down with Holiday in March, he was between back-and-forth trips to Maryland.
“We were there when her water broke,” he said smiling.
Yup. Right on the scene when he was needed. As usual.
redbankgreen editor Brian Donohue may be reached via email at [email protected] or by calling or texting 848-331-8331 or yelling his name loudly as he walks by. Do you value the news coverage provided by redbankgreen? Please become a financial supporter if you haven’t already. Click here to set your own level of monthly or annual contribution.
