PALEVEDA, Gloria Sipes – (1925-1999) Daughter of Fred and Marguerite Eichlin Sipes, she wrote a column called “A Fond Look Back” for the Delaware Valley News from 1978 into the '90s. Her recollections were compiled into three books.
She was born in a row house at the top of the T-intersection where Trenton Avenue meets Bridge Street. Around 1930 the family moved to the third floor of her father's theater on the southeast corner of Trenton Avenue and Bridge Street. (In the accompanying photo, that's the building in the background on the right. The photo on the right is Gloria on the day in 1929 when tolls were lifted from the Frenchtown bridge.)
Frenchtown was her oyster and she made full use of it – swimming in the creek, eating ice cream at Bert Trimmer's shop, dining at the Candy Kitchen, borrowing books from the library, watching movies at the Gem, sledding down Everittstown Road, petting the chickies at the train station, and just generally living it up, all the while storing the memories for her rose-tinted memoirs.
As a teenager she spent seven months at the state's Mount Kipp Sanitarium near Glen Gardner recovering from pneumonia. She missed the Frenchtown High School senior class trip to New York City in 1943.
Gloria was a telephone operator in the old Shurtz mansion on the southeast corner of Harrison and Second streets, then as assistant in the mid-1940s to Harry Ritter DDS in the old Martin mansion (where the blue mule statue is now).
Since he only practiced dentistry there three days a week, she spent much of her time sitting in the dental chair on the second floor looking out the window, writing fiction, or reading old medical books from the library of previous owner Dr. Harry Harman. She would occasionally answer the phone. When the doctor was working, she was receptionist and unskilled dental assistant. She only had the job for a few months.
In 1950 she married Bill Paleveda and moved away, eventually settling in Lansdale, Pa.
Early in my time as editor of the News, Paleveda sent me a column she'd written about her uncle Jason Sipes who'd come back from combat in World War I mentally damaged and barely able to speak. It was published in 1978 and eventually we were using her columns almost every week.
She began pressing me to make them into a book. I had my hands full with the newspaper, so she went over my head to my boss, Ed Mack, editor of the Hunterdon County Democrat. He ordered me to do it. It would be normal to be resentful, but Paleveda was a dear lady by any standard, so I got a grant from the Hunterdon County Historical and Heritage Commission and put together “A Fond Look Back.”
After I left the News in 1984, my successor, Nick DiGiovanni, produced two more books of Gloria's columns.
From "Rick's Frenchtown Encyclopedia"
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