NEW JERSEY: Crempas (Cont’d)

By far the biggest business in New Jersey, and one of the biggest & best-run in the world, is Public Service Corp. of New Jersey. Built by famed Thomas Nesbitt McCarter, this $700,000,000 utilities holding company, whose wires, pipes and transit lines blanket the nation’s sixth richest manufacturing State, has small trouble with its legislators and public utilities commissioners. It bumped into trouble eight years ago, however, when it set out to run a high-tension line through a colony of Poles at Scotch Plains. Some Poles squeezed fancy prices from P. S. C. for their land or permission to string wires across it. But one of them, a small truck gardener and U. S. Army veteran named John Crempa, was against the wires at any price. One crisp morning last week some 2,000 of his neighbors and their fellow Poles from nearby cities swarmed to John Crempa’s house for the funeral of his wife, Sophie, who had been shot by a deputy sheriff (TIME, Oct. 7). For a mile in either direction the road was black with their automobiles. There was little sobbing in the crowd, much angry muttering. Posted in the yard was a sign which read: THIS IS WHERE PUBLIC SERVICE SENT THEIR COLD-BLOODED KILLERS TO SHOOT INNOCENT CITIZENS WHO SOUGHT TO DEFEND THEIR HOME. In the drab parlor, where John Crempa and his young son and daughter, all arrested last fortnight, sat fiercely brooding, a Roman Catholic priest intoned the service for the dead. Then Sophie Crempa’s corpse was lifted in its coffin through a window, lowered to the yard for the crowd’s inspection. John Crempa, wounded in hand and leg by deputies’ bullets, was carried out on the porch in the arms of a husky friend. The thin, overwrought widower stopped crying long enough to lift his bandaged left hand, quaver: “My friends, I want to thank you for the sympathy you have shown for us and for all you have done for us. I hope the blood which my wife shed will do something to help human rights and justice.” Then the long funeral procession wound up the road to a Roman Catholic cemetery where Sophie Crempa was buried. . . . New Jersey’s Governor Hoffman stepped in last week to demand quick action in the Crempa case. The county prosecutor promised a thoroughgoing investigation by a grand jury to be convened this week. It was up to that body to choose between the Crempas’ story that the deputies had attacked them without warning, the deputies’ story that they had fired in self-defense when the Crempas rushed out of their house with guns banging. But John Crempa & friends seemed curiously apathetic toward the men who had done the actual shooting. Their hate was turned on P. S. C. Moaned Farmer Crempa: “Thomas McCarter, president of the P. S. C., used the courts against me. If the P. S. C. didn’t come around and string wires on my land my wife would be alive.” For Big Business-haters it was enough that a poor man had lost his wife in a dispute with a rich corporation. But, in the roar of public indignation against P. S. C. which went up last week, mention of just where the corporation had gone wrong was notably lacking. Fact was, John Crempa had set himself up not against P. S. C. but against the Law. On grounds of public convenience .& necessity, P. S. C. in 1927 secured from New Jersey’s Board of Public Utilities Commissioners permission to exercise the right of eminent domain in running a high-tension line from Roseland to Metuchen. Of John Crempa it asked only permission to string wires 40 ft. in the air over a narrow strip in the rear of his farm, no poles to be on his property. A condemnation commission appointed by the State Supreme Court set $800 as a fair price for that privilege. P. S. C. had already offered Crempa more than that amount, even offered to buy the farm (worth about $16,000) outright. But John Crempa had a bulldog conception of his property rights, bore a grudge against P. S. C. because of a dispute with some of its employes who had crossed his land. He refused offers and court award, demanded $150,000. P. S. C. posted $800 with the Court, proceeded to string its wires over his land. John Crempa proceeded to make a public nuisance of himself by repeatedly cutting or short-circuiting the wires, throwing three neighboring towns into darkness. Arrested, he refused to promise to let the wires alone, was sentenced to six months in jail. Time & again thereafter he defied a chancery court injunction ordering him to stop tampering with the wires, defied deputy sheriffs sent to arrest him for contempt of court. Once when the deputies captured him, Mrs. Crempa & friends set upon them with sticks & stones, tore him from their arms. It was a determined effort to arrest Crempa for contempt and malicious mischief and Mrs. Crempa for assault on officers which ended last fortnight in blundering tragedy.