COUNT BASIE
Jazz pianist and conductor (William) Count Basie was born in Red Bank in 1904. His mother was a music teacher, and at a young age he became her pupil. But, it was in Harlem that he learned the rudiments of ragtime piano, principally from his sometime organ teacher, the great Fats Waller. Basie made his professional debut as an accompanist for vaudeville acts. In 1929, he was hired by Bennie Moten’s Band and played piano with them. Moten’s death in 1935 altered Basie’s career dramatically. He took over the remnants of the band, expanded it and formed the first Count Basie Orchestra.

The name "Count" was a 1935 promotional gimmick, paralleling "Duke" Ellington and "Earl" Hines. Within a year or so the band had developed its own variation of the basic Kansas City Swing style. By 1937 Basie's band was with the possible exception of Ellington's, the most highly acclaimed African-American band in America.
Basie received an honorary doctoral degree from MSU in 1982. He died in 1984.

 

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MILLICENT HAMMOND FENWICK
Millicent Hammond Fenwick was born in New York City in 1910 but was raised in a 52-room mansion in Bernardsville. Fenwick, who attended Foxcroft School, Columbia University and the New School for Social Research, faced tragedy at an early age when her mother was lost in the sinking of the Lusitania. Following her upper-class childhood and a failed marriage, she began a 14-year career at Vogue magazine.

In the 1960s, Fenwick became involved in the civil rights movement and took part in state and local politics in New Jersey. Blessed with striking good looks and a sharp wit, she rose rapidly through the ranks of the state Republican Party at a time when most of her peers were retiring. When this colorful, outspoken figure–one of only five New Jersey women ever elected to Congress–went to Washington as a freshman representative in 1975 at age 64, her
victory was hailed by the media as a "geriatric triumph."

Affectionately remembered as the pipe-smoking grandmother who many believe served as the model for cartoonist Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury character Lacey Davenport, she transcended that stereotype to become, in the words of Walter Cronkite, "the conscience of Congress."

Fenwick served in Congress from 1975 to 1983. The Bernardsville resident died in 1992.

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ALICE PAUL
Social reformer and lawyer Alice Paul was born in Mt. Laurel in 1885. She graduated from Swarthmore College in 1905 and went on to do graduate work in New York City and England. She took her Ph.D from the University of Pennsylvania in 1912, the same year she became chairperson of the Congressional Committee of the National American Suffrage Association. Impatient with its policies, in 1913 she helped to found the more militant Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage, which merged in 1917 to form the National Woman’s Party; she would become this party’s chairperson in 1942.

After women won the right to vote with the 19th Amendment (1920), she devoted herself to gaining equal rights for women and in 1923 introduced the first equal rights amendment to the U.S. Constitution, she did get an equal rights affirmation in the preamble to the United Nations charter.

She died in 1977.

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WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS
William Carlos Williams was born in Rutherford in 1883. His father was a businessman and his mother was an artist from Puerto Rico, and he spoke Spanish and French. Following schooling in Switzerland, in 1902 he began at the dental school of the University of Pennsylvania, but soon transferred to the medical school and received a degree in 1906.

After studying in Germany, Williams opened a private pediatric practice in Rutherford in 1910. In 1912 he married Florence “Flossie” Herman. In addition to his medical practice, he was a serious and committed writer. His circle of friends included Ezra Pound, Hilda Doolittle, Charles Demuth, Amy Lowell, James Joyce, Constantin Brancusi and Gertrude Stein. He wrote the introduction for Allen Ginsberg’s first book of poetry in 1955.

World War II and his busy practice with civilian patients nearly brought his writing career to a halt. But in 1946, Paterson I, the first book of the epic poem he had been struggling to write for nearly 20 years, was published.
He won the National Book Award for Selected Poems and Paterson III (1950), and the Pulitzer Prize for poetry for Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems (1963, posthumously). He was made a fellow of the Library of Congress.

Williams died in Rutherford in 1963.