Chip Angell

My first clear memory of life on Story Book Farm was seeing my father show up one evening in his new Sailor suit. Must have been 1943 or 44. He came home safely two years later after being in the first wave onto Omaha Beach. He was a Seabee, underwater demolition and lived out his life here in Lebanon Twp as a carpenter, school teacher in Clinton, a storyteller, and sage.

My first job was milking goats for Herman Minisch on Woodglen Rd. He did mornings, I did afternoons, 3-4 goats, $.50 a day plus a popsicle and sometimes a quart of goat milk. Took me almost 50 years to be able to face a popsicle again.

Charlie Burd farmed our fields for a third of the crop. They were good times baling hay and helping Evelyn Burd milk. Picture Carolyn Burd unable to see over the steering wheel of that Diamond T hay truck driving through our 12 acre hayfield while we tossed the bales up onto it. I showed our Jersey calf at the Flemington Fair.

During high school, it was summers combining oats, and wheat with Speedy Wolverton in Annandale. That dairy farm is gone now, part of Exxon Research. I graduated from Hampton School and then North Hunterdon Regional in 1957. After a year and a half at Rutgers, Dean Curtain and I both agreed I was wasting my time. I drove an Olds 98 for those folks with a beef farm in Lebanon to Palm Beach and made it to Miami where I started as a waiter at the Blackstone Hotel. It was mainly a Jewish Retirement Hotel where my cousin Bob Angell had also worked three years earlier.

One evening I spotted a big schooner anchored off Miami’s Pier 5.  The next day I was hired as a steward cleaning heads and washing dishes. Three years later I was the Capt. and over the next several years the Capt of that company’s other schooners.  We sailed with up to 75 passengers from Miami to Nassau, Cuba, East Coast Mexico and the west Indies.

Here is where Gail and I met. She was a just graduated Reg Nurse working as a stewardess. We’ve been married now 63 years, raised 4 kids (Jennifer, Jeremy, Catherine, and Chris) and have 5 grand kids. Kendra, Matt and Jack all went through Vorhees, and Padraig from Brielle. Griffin at 11 is still growing.

Back to the journal…next I joined a company operating Research vessels. They took Navy projects to sea for testing, sailing from Newport RI to the Caribbean. After a few years running those vessels, they took me out of operations and sent Gail and me, with two kids then, to Washington DC. While there the company grew from $7m to over $24m and they brought me back to Miami to head up the vessel operations division.

While in Washington, we started building our dream home in Woodglen. Miami was a step too far, so now with 4 kids, we moved back to NJ. It was 1973. Jeremy trudged down the lane to his first day in Kindergarten and the bus driver was the daughter of my bus driver…Ann Stevenson! It was good to be home.

Seems things moved quickly then…I took over my cousins Airstream Travel Trailer dealership in Bloomsbury, grew it to top ten in the nation through the several gas crisises.  Ten years later, Airstream halted production for awhile and I gave the business to our employees.  I became a shipbroker in NY, chartering dry cargo ships handy sized to PAMAMAX.  My classmate from Regional, Rus Gilmore, had a fine wine store in Eatontown.  He invited me to help him sell wine over one Christmas holiday. It was 1985…82 Bordeaux and DuBoef Beaujolais were big!

I liked selling wine, and the commute to NY was a 3 hour hassle.  So I soon found myself with NJ as a territory for a wine importer.  After awhile, I took another job managing five liquor stores from Califon to Philipsburg and then started importing my own wine.

Meanwhile the kids were getting into College and needing a boost to my income went back to sea with Military Sealift Command in underway replenishment Tankers…Caribbean, Eastern Pacific, Mediterranean and Red Sea. Gail got tired of all that soon enough and got me a job with Moran Towing out of NY.

When she retired after 20 years at Hunterdon Med Center, we were kind’a footloose. With the kids all married and an empty house, she had the bright idea of buying a summer house in Maine. It turned out to be a restaurant instead! 60 seats, Irish pub in the basement, 5 room B&B upstairs! Lot’s of fun, but when we turned 80 it had gotten a bit much… as they say. We sold it to two young couples just before COVID…and bought a 50 year old classic sailboat.

She was named Prudence…not a word I paid much attention to…and sailed it back and forth to Brooklin Maine each summer for 5 years before selling it to a fellow in Italy. It just got there last month on the deck of a cargo ship. 

Now, after a re-plumbing of my heart and with a 20 year warranty from my surgeon in hand, it’s time to pay back what growing up and living in Lebanon Township has given me.

With management experience in the corporate world, and having owned and operated three of my own businesses successfully, with a perspective age gives all of us, I am prepared to be your servant in representing you on our Township Committee.

We will have an open government, be fiscally responsible to you and be environmentally correct. I need yours and all your friends votes to keep Lebanon Township just the way we like it. Thank-you.