National Affairs: Crempas

When Public Service Electric & Gas Co. undertook to run its Roseland-to-Metuchen high-tension line through Scotch Plains, N. J. eight years ago, it found its way blocked by a colony of prosperous, high-spirited Poles. To John Crempa, 46, thin, hot-tempered U. S. Army veteran and journeyman tailor, the company offered $800 for the necessary strip of land through his property. Crempa demanded $100,000, and even after the company had the Crempa land condemned and posted the awarded $800 with the court, Crempa refused to take it, raised his price to $150,000. He began a one-man revolution, enthusiastically aided by all his neighbors (TIME, Feb. 11). For eight years it remained a joke on Public Service. Last week the joke twisted into tragedy.

Crempa’s device to annoy Public Service was to tie a long string to a stone, throw it over the high-tension wires that crossed his property, pull a metal object across the wires, short-circuiting the line and putting out the lights in three neighboring towns. He did this some 21 times. Public Service fought back by charging him with malicious mischief, making him serve a six-month jail sentence in 1931. After that the company got an injunction to keep Crempa from tampering its wires. When he continued his short-circuiting pranks, the court cited him for contempt, ordered seizure of the body of John Crempa.

The sheriff found himself unable to make the arrest. The entire Polish community of Scotch Plains joined the conspiracy to warn Crempa of the approach of the sheriff’s officers. The sheriff disguised his men as a surveying party. The ruse worked but the neighbors, armed with brooms, rakes and stones, tore Crempa out of the hands of the deputy sheriffs. Crempa sat alertly at a second-floor window of his neat, brown-shingled house, watching the approaches and doing home piecework for another tailor. His son took a job in a riding academy. Crempa’s plump, brisk Wife Sophie and his pretty 19-year-old Daughter Carmelia tended a six-acre truck farm behind the house, sold the produce to passing motorists. Now & then Crempa from his window nourished a gun at brash deputy sheriffs. Scotch Plains looked on Crempa as a hero, the impotent sheriff as a buffoon. Last week Sheriff C. Wesley Collins was ready for strong measures.

In addition to his contempt order he had two new warrants, one calling for the arrest of John Crempa for malicious mischief, another for Mrs. Crempa’s arrest on charges of assaulting sheriff’s officers (during the surveying party ruckus). It was easy to pick up John Crempa’s son on a contempt charge last week at the riding academy. The next afternoon the sheriff sent eight deputies to seize the bodies of John and Sophie Crempa. As usual the Crempa grounds were deserted, the house looked vacant, the blinds were down. The posse’s commander was a non-Pole, Deputy Sheriff Edward Carolan. Its armament: six .32 and .38 revolvers, one shotgun, two tear-gas guns. Mr. Carolan deployed his men around the house, broke a window with a stick and had his men fire tear-gas shells into the house.

What happened in the next ten minutes was described by three schools of testimony. The deputy sheriffs said the Crempa family all came out firing. The Crempas said only John Crempa had a gun, which jammed without firing a shot. The neighbors said that Crempa was armed. Afterwards the sheriff’s men could not find a Crempa gun on the premises, claimed that the neighbors had whisked away all such evidence.

Everybody agreed that Mrs. Crempa ran out on the porch, her husband and daughter behind her. Two of Deputy Carolan’s men raised their revolvers and opened fire, another deputy blasted away three times with a shotgun. Mrs. Crempa muttered something, her knees bent and she fell slowly to the porch floor, rolled over on her side and lay still. John Crempa waved his arms, threw down his gun, shouted through the noise of the firing, limped down the porch steps and fell over. His daughter picked up his gun, shot wildly about and ran in a crazy rage toward the posse. The sheriff’s men grabbed her, loaded her and her father into their cars. Mrs. Crempa was left where she had fallen. She was dead.

A fever of buck-passing promptly swept New Jersey officialdom. As Polish-American societies in New Jersey organized mass meetings, Union County’s Prosecutor Abe J. David arrested the deputy who had fired the shotgun, one Charles Remley, on a charge of manslaughter.

Said Carmelia Crempa: “She was a wonderful mother. It seems whenever there is a happy family nowadays something has to break it up. … It happened in broad daylight.”