The Bench Boys Still Loiter in Memory

BENCH BOYS – In 1961 the Frenchtown branch of the Hunterdon County National Bank put on a brick addition and erected a white post-and-rail fence along Harrison Street. Hospitably set into the fence are two benches.

The bankers may have been thinking about the frail elderly, but those benches immediately clicked with teenage boys and young men, who became known as the Bench Boys. Although the Bench Boy thing continued into the early '80s, Marlene Bristow (Hewitt) explained, “As kids graduated and went on with their new life, the next class took over with their own Bench Boys.”

The Bench Boys were more social than delinquent, at least while they were on the benches.

The benches were “where you started out the night,” one of them told me.

Their main activity, besides lounging on Harrison Street, was drinking beer beside the creek at the former site of the New Dam.

A Bench Boy game: They would sit in a parked car with windows closed and smoke cigars. The first one to seek fresh air was the loser. Seasonal activities included throwing snowballs at passing cars and smashing pumpkins.

They also enforced right-of-center societal norms at least once: A guy, who was not in the Navy, appeared in public wearing bell-bottom trousers. The Boys, whose unofficial anthem was “Okie From Muskogee,” went beyond ridicule and pantsed him. Most legal scholars would agree that the Bench Boys' right to burn those pants did not supersede the other kid's right to wear those pants. But the Bench Boys followed their hearts.

On the evening of Tuesday, Sept. 29, 1970, Mr. X, a prominent citizen, was seen driving south on Route 29 with Mrs. Y. Four Bench Boys, ranging in age from 15 to 20, followed them. At Warsaw Road, X and Y turned left and drove up into the woods, apparently intent on extramarital algebra. The Boys parked their car and followed on foot to continue their surveillance.

At about 9:30, X got out of his car, and the boys thought he was coming to get them. They fled through the dark woods, until three of them ran right off a red shale cliff, falling 30 to 40 feet into a rocky creek bed. They lay there grievously injured while Boy No. 4 returned to town to get his girlfriend to help him rescue his friends. Either the Delaware Valley News got it wrong or that was one prodigious girlfriend.

While searching the woods for them, the fourth boy went over the cliff. His girlfriend went back to town and alerted the rescue squad. Squad captain Glenn Pursell arrived first and called for the fire company, which brought its rescue truck and a truck equipped with search lights to help find the vics.

Soon all four boys were at Hunterdon Medical Center, suffering collectively from three broken pelvises, two fractured skulls, a broken knee and a broken arm.

Everyone in town soon knew exactly what had happened, but the News reported the improbable: “Apparently the four young men had been chasing a deer...”

Those boys may have been out of commission, but the undamaged Bench Boys were suspected when couple weeks later, on the night of Oct. 11-12, six cases of eggs were stolen from Kerr Hatcheries and used to deface shops on Bridge Street. A new gutter was torn off the Public Market. Pumpkins were smashed in the street, and others were stuck on the tops of parking meters. One was impaled on a telephone-pole spike 20 feet in the air. Store windows were waxed or soaped. This performance was echoed on the night of Oct. 13-14 with toilet paper and tomatoes added to the mix.

Merchants were demanding a curfew and wanting police to make evening patrols. Some, who may be forgiven for thinking the Bench Boys were the culprits, wanted the bank to remove its benches. Others argued there ought to be someplace where young people could gather. This despite the Barn Theatre, the roller rink, the bowling alley and Pastor Culton's basement.

James Slack said that the Bench Boys' revels at the creek would go on to 3 a.m. and it was complaints from neighbors that brought about their extinction in the early '80s. I'd put the extinction in the mid-'70s, but others were closer to the action.

The benches remain, but the Boys linger there in memory only, as do the girls who used to sashay past the benches more often than necessary.

From "Rick's Frenchtown Encyclopedia"