My Official Apology to the Salem County Historical Society

I got blackballed from the society after unfortunate exchanges with your desk manager and Harlan Busby. I was told “The name of Laird would never be mentioned again at the Salem County Historical Society.” Harold Schmidt, Sr., was convinced by your account and never spoke to me again.

Problem is, you leave a huge hole in your own history by amputating my family’s contribution. I’m asking you to restore my family to SCHS history even if you leave me out of it forever. What my family contributed over 50 years:

My grandfather, Leon W. Miesse, authored one of the most significant military diaries of World War I as an infantry captain in the illustrious Rainbow Division under Douglas MacArthur during the offensive that won the war. Published under his and my name in 2018, the 100th anniversary of Allied victory. I was summarily refused an opportunity to place a few copies in the front desk to let Salem people buy them. 

I lost my temper, broke nothing, but was unpleasant, because…Leon Miesse was a well known, unpaid contributor for many years to the Society. Year after year, even into his late eighties, society members brought him pieces of the Salem Oak, which he transformed with his router into candlesticks and other finely turned mementoes to be sold by the Society. For no pay. Now the Oak is gone. Leon Miesse is gone. And he is to have no memory at the Society because of me? Because I got mad when a newcomer to Salem told me, “Lots of people made knickknacks out of the Salem Oak.”

No, they didn’t. My grandpa did. The official ones.

Okay. I apologize for getting irate.

My sister, Susan Laird was editor of a Society publication called “The Way It Used to Be,” a bimonthly magazine (sponsored by the Sunbeam) in the Bicentennial years covering Salem County’s contribution during the Revolutionary era and its after-affects. She was an early feminist and wrote much about the Underground Railroad and women like Harriet Tubman. I succeeded her as editor during an off-year after college and was on hand to reorganize “The Reenactment of the Skirmish at Quinton’s Bridge,” a full-blown military operation involving colonial and Queen’s Rangers troops, as well as a restating on a floating bridge of Andrew Bacon saving the day for Mad Anthony Wayne on Lower Alloways Creek. Your historian responded reluctantly and incompletely when I asked, politely, for ‘Sunbeam’ page copies of the multiple newspaper columns and pages I wrote and photographed for that event.to this day, the road signs I wrote along the British path are still standing and legible. My “partner in crime” for “The Reenactment” was Stony Harris, who led the way.

My father was for many years the president of the Society (as was my mother, also now deceased). In his old age it was my dad’s quiet way of atoning for the sin of having killed the enemy face to face in his P-47 fighter plane. He didn’t want to be remembered for his 88 combat missions over North Africa and Italy. He was content to look back into his own birthplace of Salem and find the parts to be proud of. Pretty sure he was the one who dug John Rock out of oblivion and made him not an artifact or statistic of history but a story. Here’s the Reference section from Wiki. My dad died in 1999. Note how many story-type references are dated AFTER 1999 and how few before. 

Thing my dad did also in his later days. Two septuagenarians, him and John Hassler, rebuilt the colonial kitchen fireplace in the Alexander Grant House. On their hands and knees. With trowel and concrete. Betting there’s no plaque there honoring either one of them. They wouldn’t have asked for one. They just did it. 

As I was trying to renegotiate the placement of my grandfather’s book at the desk, I got an angry call from Harlan Busby. How dare I? So I looked him up and discovered he had published a John Rock book that closely resembled what my dad had written for a society newsletters. I accused Harlan Busby of plagiarism and he never responded or got another book review.

When Smick Senior got involved and banned me forever, without ever hearing my side of what transpired. Who had always pretended to be my grandfather’s admiring friend.

Then I find that my whole family has been blackballed, none of whom have been here in Salem as long and faithfully as we have.

What is left to me? Bend my knee. Apologize to you all. I do. All I ask is fairness. Forgive and retrieve my family’s history of contributions to the Society, whatever you think of me.