OCTOBER 30, 2019 • WWW.THEOBSERVER.COM • VOL. CXXXII, NO. 25
October
BREAST CANCER AWARENESS MONTH
COVERING: BELLEVILLE • BLOOMFIELD • EAST NEWARK • HARRISON • KEARNY • LYNDHURST • NORTH ARLINGTON • NUTLEY
OH BUCK! THAT’S A DEER IN KEARNY!
Photo by Kevin Canessa
N
o, you aren’t seeing things. That’s a buck who somehow got misplaced in an alleyway on Kearny Avenue last week. He spent most of the day there, eyewitness Donald Sullivan told us. And fortunately, he didn’t appear to be injured, despite his laying down much of the day.
Kearny’s Norman Rutan is town’s Veteran of Year
Spent time in Germany during Korean War By Kevin Canessa kc@theobserver.com
W
hen Norman Rutan walks into a room, the people in it can’t help but stop. Maybe it’s his stature — he’s a tall man. Maybe it’s the way he speaks — he greets everyone he knows by name. Whatever it is, no doubt, you can just feel you’re in the presence of someone special. And the man who already has so many accolades on his CV now has something new to add — he’s Kearny’s Veteran of the Year for 2019 and he and other veterans from other Hudson municipalities will be feted next month at a special ceremony in Secaucus. Rutan’s veteran status dates back to the Korean War.
(He calls it the Korean Conflict.) It was then that he was a member of the United States Air Force, where he served for several years in Germany as an airplane mechanic. Though there was a draft at the time, he signed up on his own. He wanted to be of service to his country. “On leave, I got to travel to France among other places,” he says. Later in life, as he researched his family history — he does this, now, for other people via ancestry.com — he’d learn he’d visited a country his family left during the time of the Mayflower voyage to the New World in the 1620s. He was fascinated by that
See RUTAN,
PAGE
Kearny’s model (cat) Trap, Neuter, Return program turns 5 By Kevin Canessa kc@theobserver.com
L
en Twist loves cats. And he loves his town. And so five years ago, when a local resident got in trouble for feeding a colony of feral cats, he sprang into action quicker than a kitty pouncing on a piece of turkey. He would be starting a crusade to create an ordi-
nance in Kearny that would allow him, and others, including Kathy DeRay, to feed colonies of feral cats, all while first trapping them, getting them neutered and returning them to where they were found. “At first, it wasn’t easy,” Twist said. “We had opposition, including from the board of health, where we were told this would never happen.” Yet five years ago, after doing impeccable re-
search on the need for such an ordinance, and having convinced Mayor Alberto G. Santos and the Kearny Town Council it was the right thing to do, Twist, DeRay, et al., have TNR’d thousands of cats — and in the process, they’ve saved the cat population on Kearny’s streets from booming to unthinkable levels.
See CATS,
page 23
T
HIGHLIGHTS
T’was a perfect day for pups and PAWRading
4
761 Ridge Rd., Lyndhurst, NJ 201-460-8000
Semiao & Associates 531 Kearny Ave., Kearny, NJ 201-991-1300
217 Ferry St., Newark, NJ 973-344-2100
19
Take part in pumpkin contest
#1 LISTING AND SELLING OFFICE IN 2018!
www.Century21Semiao.com
2
CENTURY 21 Semiao and Associates - Hudson Count...
http://www.century21semiao.com
SCAN HERE! http://kaywa.me/aBR3I
257 Blvd., Hasbrouck Heights, NJ 201-288-5533 Download the Kaywa QR Code Reader (App Store &Android Market) and scan your code!
BASED ON NJMLS, KEARNY, NORTH ARLINGTON, LYNDHURST, HARRISON, EAST NEWARK