Herald & Lantern 7 December '83

WS-

Free Enterprise

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Close Call, Concession Hurley Promoted

Digest i From Page I > Ocean City South WILDWOOD — If he’s smiling, he must . I>e a lawyer The mayor and the citv council will square off in Superior Court Friday in their continuing battle over the administrative code\and everything else to do with local government. The feud started with the new l^ayor-council-administrator govemrHent and is approaching its six-mor^h birthday.

Bayside Break-ii

' MIDDLE TOWNSHIP - With Group W dragging its cable, Township Committee will check if another company — Cablentertainment of Ocean City — can legally serve Goshen residents. Group W and the township can’t seem to agree on a franchise extension.

Still Suing

VILLAS — Lower Township pdfc investigating a rash of burglaries ^ committed here during Thanksgiving week, Lt. Charles Thornton confirmed last week. ‘‘We had about eight of them in Bayside Village...,” he reported, noting that the break-ins were through rear doors. Police had no suspects last week, he added, and estimates of the value of property stolen were not available then. ‘‘We usually have an upswing in burglaries around Christmas,” Thornton noted.

AVALON — The union representing 19 former public works employes fired for refusing to work during a 1982 snowstorm has sued to gain them pay for vacation, sick and persbnal days lost. A previous court decision upheld the firings.

Still Waiting ATLANTIC CITY - Dr. Suketu ivati and Burdette Tomlin Memorial Hospital will have to wait until next Tuesday to find out if the hospital medical staff had the authority to dismiss the cardiologist and, if so, whether the dismissal was proper. Superior Court Judge L. Anthony Gibson was originally expected to rule on the case Nov. 23. That hearing was rescheduled here until Dec. 5 and postponed again last week until Dec. 13.

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MILLVILLE — Democratic Assembly candidate Edward H. Salmon conceded defeat to incumbent GOP Assemblyman Guy F. Muziani last week after recounts in Cape May'and Cumberland counties produced only three more votes than those tallied onJ£lection Day. The closest race in Assembly history officially ended Tuesday. 25,998-25,790.

TRENTON — State Senate Republicans named First District Sen. James R. Hurley assistant minority leader last week. Hurley, who won reelefction to his seat last month, is now the second highest ranking Senate Republican. When first elected to the upper house two years ago, Hurley of Millville, was selected minority whip, the third-ranking GOP* slot in the Senate.

Russian Refugee Envisioned Villas-

(From Page 1) Great Depression, the 1940s and ’50s until his houses filled Villas, Miami Beach, Del Haven and a portion of North Cape

May.

Millman died Aug. 22, 1958. A short obituary marked the passage of the Villas founder. Few records remalft, though, of the man who wrote his epitaph with the homes be built in Lower Township and the generosity he spread throughout Cape May County. Last Friday, his ‘ daughter, Susan Golden of Stone Harbor, presented the Lower Township Chamber of Commerce with a portrait of her father that was painted by one of the artists he patronized. The painting will preserve the memory in Villas of the man who quietly worked to help others. Alexander III reigned as Czar of all the Russias when Joseph Millman was born, 1893, to Hannah in a village outside MogiJev in the province of Belorussia. The emperor died the following year and his son, Nicholas II, took the throne as the last czar. The reigns of Alexander and Nicholas were not good years for a Jew tb be born and raised in Russia. Both enforced the nation’s antiSemitic laws and looked the other-way when their officials and subjects persecuted Jews through the infamous pogroms (devastations) that raged between 1881 and ttie Bolshevik Revolution that toppled Nicholas in 1917. “HE WAS WHAT they (Russians) called a Gold Star (high school) Stu- - dent,” Millman’s son-in-law, Stanley Rappaport, explained. “But Jews were not permitted to go to college so he came to the United States to further his education.” Millman was processed through U.S. Immigration at Ellis Island, N.Y., in 1913 and enrolled at Cornell University. He was graduated with a degree in agriculture in three years and tutored English in his final year, Rappaport, a real estate investor, noted. “Then he went back to Russia many limes to bring back his family,” his son-in-law added. On one of those trips through the war-torn Eastern Europe of 1914-1918. Millman ’met Clare Criss in the Ukrainian seaport of Odessa. He brought her back to the U.S. too. They married around 1919 and raised two daughters, Sybil (Rappaport) and Eleanor “Susan” (Golden). While attending Cornell, Millman raised the money to finance his trips and book passage for his fiance and relatives by working in a New York clothing store. Although many U.S. military intelligence records from the First World War were destroyed in a 1973 fire at a govern-

ment center in St. Louis, Mo., Elaine Everly, a researcher with the National Archives, confirmed that Millman volunteered in July, 19)8 as a translator-instructor for a U.S. Army expeditionary force dispatched to the newly-formed Soviet Union around that time. Millman was then serving as a private at Cape Hancock, Ga., Everly noted. ELERY BOWMAN, president of Bowman Builders in Villas, was only a boy when Millman moved his family ,to Del Haven and began building bungalows along New Jersey and New York avenues in Lower Township. With outdoor plumbing, the houses sold for less than $300, including lots. The bungalows were built in part on the barter system, Bowman recollected, with subcontractors often accepting payment in lots for their plumbing, painting, carpentry and paperhanging. “He took as little as $5 down on a house and financed it too,” said Bowman. During the Great Depression, the developer added, Millman “had many people who hadn’t made mortgage payments in 10 and 12 years but he never foreclosed on them.” “He never foreclosed on anyone," said Sterenberg, who served as Millman’s right-hand man during the late 1940s. Sterenberg remembered one instance when a man, who bought one of Millman’s bungalows in the late ’20s, complained two decades later that the floor boards in one of its rooms were deteriorating. He wanted the floor replaced and held Millman responsible. STERENBERG PROTESTED but Millman replied: “Look Leo, if the man could have afforded to repair it, he probably would have. Secondly, when I first started out, he patronized me at a time

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Dorij Ward FOUNDER’S PORTRAIT - Susan Golden of Stone Harbor unveils the painting of her late father. Joseph Millman. founder of Villas, which she presented to the Lower Township Chamber of Commerce during its installation dinner Friday. The portraU was painted by the late Leon Gechtoff, an artist the philanthropic Millman patronized.

when I needed it.” The floor was replaced at Millman’s expense. “He was always behind the scenes,” Sterenberg said of the philanthropist’s unannounced contributiphs of time and money for causes as varied as the local Little League and Burdette Tomlin Memorial Hospital. Seeing the need for a hospital in the county, Millman offered his Del Haven home as. a temporary facility while he and William Hunt, the late owner of Hunt’s Pier, Wildwood, and Hunt’s movie theaters, raised funds to build a local medical center. “He and Bill Hunt actually started that,” said Rappaport, adding that the two men each contributed $15,000420,000 toward the hospital. When they approached Burdette Tomlin, the contributor for whom the hospital is named, Rappaport continued, “He said, ‘Fine, I will do that (make a large donation) provided you call it Burdette Tomlin Memorial Hospital.’ ” Millman was “very heavily involved in helping students,” his son-in-law continued. “He was actually out soliciting worth/ students” to award them scholarships. When Millman died, be left a scholarship fund as a legacy. It was eventually transferred to the hospital he served as second president. He also left money to build the community center that bears his name on Bayshore Road in Miami Beach. “Just generally, he was a philanthropist who helped needy people,” said Susan Golden. His daughter remembered the times her father drove alpng Bayshore Road while they distributed food, and the residents whose only Christmas presents came from him. “He was very quiet about whatever he did,” she concluded. “So much came out after he died.”