In the News
The name's the same
MARK ROSMAN
Over the course of the 25 years that I have worked for Greater Media Newspapers, beginning with my assignment as the News Transcript's Marlboro reporter in the summer of 1982, I have enjoyed the opportunities I have had to review our papers from days gone by.

Mark Rosman is the managing editor of the News Transcript.

I have often said it would be possible to take an issue of the old Freehold Transcript from the mid-1960s, change a few names and meeting dates, and produce this week's edition of the News Transcript with nobody being the wiser.

Reading editions of the old Freehold Transcript (which merged with the Colonial News and became the News Transcript in the early 1980s) gives one the feeling that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Forty years ago, residents of western Monmouth County were complaining about school budgets, sewerage authorities, road construction projects and looming residential development - in short, the kind of news you will be reading about in the News Transcript during 2008.

I started thinking about the way history repeats itself when I learned that one of the first actions Marlboro's new mayor, Jonathan Hornik, had taken after his inauguration on Jan. 1 was to name Alayne Shepler to be the municipality's business administrator.

Shepler was Marlboro's business administrator when I began covering that community in 1982 and Jonathan Hornik's late father, Saul, was the mayor.

Shepler eventually left Marlboro and worked in several other municipalities before returning to the administrator's office at Marlboro Town Hall last week. She is now working with and for a mayor who was a teenager during her first stint as the town's business administrator.

We wish Marlboro's new administration - with some familiar names and faces - good luck as it embarks on an ambitious plan for the community.

• • •

This week marks the first anniversary of a tragic motor vehicle accident that shocked the Freehold Township and Freehold Borough community.

It was shortly after Freehold High School students were dismissed from school on Jan. 10, 2007, that police received a report about a motor vehicle collision that had occurred on Kozloski Road in Freehold Township.

In the blink of an eye, four lives were lost. Three students from Freehold High School and a grandmother from Old Bridge were killed on impact when their vehicles collided in the middle of the undivided road.

Friends and relatives of Michael Dragonetti, 17, Andrew Lundy, 16, James Warnock, 17, and Ruth Mac- Arthur, 68, have had to deal with their loss for a year, and now this week they must mark the first anniversary of the loss of their loved ones.

This story had a personal connection for me. As I read the obituaries of the accident victims, I was shocked to learn that a former classmate of mine at Manalapan High School is the mother of one of the boys who was killed.

This lovely woman is among the friends and relatives of the victims who were devastated by this tragedy. They have been left to deal with deep wounds that will probably never heal.

A commission appointed by the governor is looking into the issue of New Jersey teenagers behind the wheel.

Whatever action comes from that panel's work will, however, be too late for Dragonetti, Lundy, Warnock and Mac- Arthur.

Their friends and family members are in my prayers this week. I know they will not be forgotten.