April 13, their day to shut down, is my birthday. It feels sort of ironic as somewhere in a box I've the editorial they published thanking my Dad --also Frank Dufay-- for leaving town as he loudly abandoned corrupt NJ politics for the suburbs of Long Island some 55 plus years ago, in a letter to the editor.

New Jersey, where the "Meadowlands" is built on trash dumps that used to smell oh so awful on our visits back to visit Uncle Vito and Aunt Lillian...

Say it isn't so!

I am very saddened to hear this about the JJ. For those of us who grew up there (and still have relatives there) this was the ONLY newspaper we read. It may not have been a literary masterpiece or the epitomy of news reporting but it was ours. Our hometown paper, the place where you got info on what was going on in the town, where you got the local movie times, what stores were having sales and found who passed away. And, every once in a while, someone you knew got their picture in the paper for being in a club or getting an award. I regularly looked at the political cartoons and sports drawings as I personally knew the artist, long gone, now. This was also the paper you were able to buy down the shore as so many Jersey City-ites spent their summers there.

Last year my high school closed. A couple of years before that, my grammar school. Now this in addition to a line of others. I long for the old days as nothing seems stable anymore. I hope they can reverse this decision as, although it may not seem so, it is a monument to the city. And how can Journal Square be the same without it's namesake?