Maine man’s book recalls Jersey riots

At 700-plus miles, the distance between Van Buren, Maine, and Lakewood, N.J., is long, indeed. But when it comes to demographics, the distance between the two communities might best be measured in light years.

Van Buren, where newly minted author Tom LaPointe grew up in the 1940s and 1950s was, as LaPointe puts it, almost “entirely ethnically homogenous” – Caucasian of French descent, Catholic – and remains pretty much so today. Lakewood, where LaPointe served as city manager for 25 years before retiring in 1993, was the epitome of an ethnically diverse community then, and still is.

And thereby hangs a tale, as Shakespeare was fond of suggesting, although the tale that LaPointe weaves in his book, “A Time of Trouble: Speaking Out on Race and Government Policy,” (Cloonfad Press, 155 pages, soft cover, $12.95) is nowhere near as inscrutable as those told by the bard of Avon.

This is a story of urban unrest and the unraveling of the social fabric of Lakewood, a small city riven by racial and class divisions in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and how LaPointe and other community leaders identified the root causes of their problem, forged solutions and moved on.

LaPointe was town manager of Thomaston when I was chief of this newspaper’s Rockland Bureau in the early 1960s. He had just come from his first town manager’s job, at Carmel, after graduating from the University of Maine with a degree in government, and would soon move the short distance to Rockland to manage that mid-coastal city’s affairs.

This capable son of the St. John Valley served the city well, and rarely, if ever, stiffed the news media when it came to discussing sensitive municipal issues. By the time he left the comparative serenity of Rockland in 1968 to accept the chaotic New Jersey gig, he had compiled a solid track record of effective municipal management.

Yet there must have been moments when LaPointe wondered what he had gotten himself into when he packed up and moved his growing family to the suburban Jersey community 60 miles south of New York City.

Once a gathering place for the Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, Astors and other icons of high society, Lakewood had fallen on hard times. It was, LaPointe writes, a city “in the midst of a transitional period in its history,” a municipality mired in the doldrums.

Search committee members who interviewed LaPointe for the city manager’s job didn’t sugarcoat the problems he would face. He had to give them that. They “recited a litany of negative situations that were in need of immediate attention. I sensed their sincerity and concern, and appreciated their honesty,” he wrote. He couldn’t say he hadn’t been warned.

Still, when the police department’s watch commander called him at home on the sultry night of Aug. 17, 1969, to report a “situation” downtown involving a rampaging crowd of an estimated 200 black citizens, he wasn’t expecting to walk into a full-blown riot.

“I was quite unprepared for the violence which soon confronted me,” LaPointe acknowledges. “As I approached [the municipal building] I could see roving bands of young people running in all directions, hell-bent on destruction. In their mindless anger, they were attacking everything in their way, smashing store windows, streetlights and fire alarm boxes. The mournful sounds of dozens of fire and burglar alarms filled the thick air. Nothing seemed safe in their path. It was also clear to me that I was in danger.” He definitely was not in Maine anymore.

When the rebellion petered out a week later, what remained was “destruction, ruined businesses, arrests, pending criminal charges, worried parents, shattered racial harmony, damaging publicity, suspicious black and white community leaders, anger, tension, hostility and fear,” LaPointe writes. Other than that, things were going fairly well.

Like many other cities across the country in that turbulent era of civil rights demonstrations, Lakewood hadn’t properly recognized its riot potential. Twice, as it would turn out. On Aug. 18, 1971, another riot occurred, sparked by rumors of police brutality on two Hispanic youths who had been arrested earlier in the day.

Two riots in two years will get most anyone’s attention – serious medicine that, if it doesn’t kill the patient, will likely make him stronger. LaPointe describes in detail how Lakewood took its medicine, determined there had to be a better way, and went about the job of regrouping.

His leadership in the cause did not go unnoticed. In 1979 he received an award from the Human and Civil Rights Association of New Jersey for “exemplary efforts in promoting human and civil rights” in the state.

BDN columnist Kent Ward lives in Limestone. Readers may contact him via

e-mail at olddawg@bangordailynews.net.