Fifteen minutes of fame

Running late for my part-time weekend job at the local Shop-Rite, I sped down C Street to my parents’ home. I needed to retrieve something from the house, but the details escape me more than 45 years later. This was in May 1978.

When I pulled up, mom was talking to another woman on the front porch. I got out of the car, making a dash for the house, not intending to engage in lengthy conversation.

“Dave, this is Mrs. McCreary,” mom said beaming. “I told her all about you.”

The woman was Marion McCreary, the columnist from The Middlesex Chronicle, our local weekly newspaper. For each edition, she authored a homespun piece with bits of newsy gossip. Typically, it relayed which couples just added kids or grandkids, historical items, and who was moving away. Occasionally, she also relayed comments she’d received about a prior column.

It’s still a mystery how Marion ended up on the porch chatting with my mother. After a quick hello, I deftly squeezed into and out of the house, and made my way to work. Later, I realized.

“Oh no, what did mom tell her?”

The ensuing angst-filled days, were spent nervously awaiting The Chronicle’s next edition. Was every embarrassing fact of my life about to be laid out in print for the whole community?

The next Thursday finally came. That edition of “Middlesex Day by Day” briefly chronicled the Florida home purchase by my brother and sister-in-law. My goings-on were just a footnote to that bigger story.

I got a two-and-a-half line mention as the “younger son” of my parents, who was attending college and “is interested in journalism.” All benign. All true. Crisis avoided.

The experience was relived recently, thanks to the Middlesex Library Local History Collection’s online data base. I found Marion’s original column that gave me 15 minutes of fame. While I was at it, I took the time to dig through several of her other works.

She was a local institution to be sure, but definitely from decades past. These days, no one awaits the local paper each week to read a column about who’s going where or doing what.

In the year 2025, we are each our own Marion McCreary, thanks to social media. We don’t need a local columnist to let everyone know there’s been an addition to the family or our kid got an award. We can do it ourselves in minutes through Facebook or Instagram – complete with photos.

That’s not better or worse than awaiting the local paper. It’s just the passage of time. Things change, a fact that was one of the reasons the Local History Collection has been amassed as a community resource. It documents the evolution of Middlesex Borough.

Marion wrote her column for nearly 40 years. Over that run, how many people got mentioned in it? By extension, how many people got enjoyment from reading it?

While her columns typically landed in the realm of hometown Americana, Marion wasn’t above stirring things up from time to time. One occasion was in August 1980 when rent control was a hot topic for the mayor and Borough Council.

Marion wrote that rent control wasn’t needed locally and that it would limit the rate of return for property investors. “I do not know of any greedy landlords. Do you?” she wrote.

Perhaps her day job as a Realtor shaped that viewpoint. Subsequent Chronicle editions contained Letters to the Editor criticizing the stance she took.

“Unfortunately, Middlesex does have its share of greedy landlords,” answered the Middlesex Borough Civic Tenants Committee, in rebutting her column from the prior week.

McCreary passed away in 1995. The next Middlesex Chronicle included a front page story with former colleagues paying her tribute. One referred to Marion as “an authority about Middlesex.”

“She knew everyone in Middlesex,” one former co-worker said. “If you wanted to know anything about Middlesex history you could ask her, and if she didn’t know the answer, she’d find out and get back to you.”

If you lived in Middlesex from the 1960s through the 1980s and regularly read Marion’s column, it might seem like it was only yesterday. The calendar now says otherwise. Time marches on.

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