Cape May County, New Jersey Biographies

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Cape May County
New Jersey
Biographies

ALRICH, Mrs. Emma B., journalist, author and educator, born in Cape May county, N. J., 4th April, 1845. She was the first child of fond parents, and no attempt was made to guard against precocity. At the age of three years a New Testament was given her as a prize for reading its chapters, and at five years she picked blackberries to buy an arithmetic. At twelve years of age she joined the Baptist Church. At that time she began to write for the county paper. At sixteen she taught the summer school at her home. In 1862 she entered the State Normal School in Trenton, N. J., going out for six months in the middle of the course to earn the money for finishing it. She was graduated in June, 1864, as valedictorian of her class. She began to teach in a summer school on the next Monday morning after her graduation. In 1866 she was married to Levi L. Alrich, who had won laurels as one of Baker's Cavalry, or 71st Pennsylvania Regiment. Her first two years of married life they spent in Philadelphia, Pa. In 1876 the Centennial opened up new possibilities and Mr and Mrs. Alrich moved to the West and settled in Cawker City, Kans. There she again entered the school -room, was the first woman in Mitchell county to take the highest grade certificate, and the only woman who has been superintendent of the city schools. She was a warm supporter of teachers' meetings, church social gatherings, a public library and .a woman's club. In 1883 her husband's failing health compelled a change in business. He bought the "Free Press," and changed its name to the "Public Record." All the work of the office has been done by their own family, and each can do every part of it. Besides her journalistic work, she served two years on the board of teachers' examiners. She was one of the forty who organized the National Woman's Relief Corps, one of the three who founded the Woman's Hesperian Library Club, and was the founder of the Kansas Woman's Press Association. Her busy life leaves her but little time for purely literary work.
(American Women, Fifteen Hundred Biographies, Vol 1, Publ. 1897. Transcribed by Marla Snow.)

HASWIN, Mrs. Frances R., musician, composer, poet and actor, born in Ripon, Wis., 14th May, 1852. She is descended from a notable ancestry. Gen. Isaac Clark, the Indian fighter and Revolutionary officer, of Vermont, was her great grandfather. Her grandfather, Major Satterlee Clark, was graduated in the first West Point class in 1807. Her father. Col. Temple Clark, was a gallant officer in the Civil War. Her mother, now Mrs. Annie Starr, born Strong, was descended from noted New England Puritans. Mrs. Haswin's education was directed by her mother, a woman of marked characteristics in many ways, and from whom she inherits sterling traits of character as well as her love of the ideal. She was a proud spirited, sensitive girl, and showed her strong talent in music and histrionics at a very early age. She has composed and published music of a superior order, both vocal and instrumental. She has written many poems, both tender and heroic, all possessing a strong virility of touch, that have been widely copied and admired. She is the wife of Carl A. Haswin, a man of broad culture, and a gifted and well-known actor. With him she has appeared in most of the prominent theaters of the United States, playing successfully leading roles in his support. With all her talent and versatility, Mrs. Haswin is a woman of domestic tastes, which find full play in her ideal married life. Her home is in Holly Beach, N. J.
(Source: "American Women", by Frances Elizabeth Willard, Mary Ashton Rice Livermore, Vol 1, 1897. Transcribed by Marla Snow)

Meg O'Brien

Contributed by Katherine O'Brien-Ketner

Katherine writes: "Here is my mother's bio. Please note that she is the daughter of Irvin Fisher. Irvin was born and raised in PA. My mother loved Wildwood and spoke of it often. I have to come visit sometime in the future.

Born in Wildwood, NJ 1932, Meg O'Brien (Granddaughter of Irvin Fisher, Pastor of First Baptist Church Wildwood), was the mother of five children. She passed away on December 6, 2008 in Houston, TX surrounded and loved by all five of her children. She worked at innumerable jobs ranging from secretarial positions to housecleaning and freelance editing, before writing her first 'Jessica James' mystery novel which started her on the road to publishing success.

[Meg's autobiography on the MIRA website is as follows:]

Remember that old Michael Landon flick, I was a Teenage Werewolf? Well, I was a Teenage Nun. At the age of 14 I fled the Wildwood, New Jersey, Baptist church I'd been reared in, became a Catholic, and entered a convent to "give my life to God." My grandfather was a Baptist minister, and he had already left for his heavenly reward. My flight into Romanism didn't go over well with my long-suffering grandmother, however. If I'd done this today, I'm sure she would have had the cult deprogrammers after me. I was at Nazareth Mother House in Rochester, NY, for a year and a half. During that time an old retired nun tutored me, putting me through three years of high school in one year, so I could go to college and become a teacher. I was pretty naive in those days. I didn't even know, when I entered, that the Sisters of St. Joseph was a teaching order. I thought it was more like the Carmelites, where I could hoe the gardens, sing the hymns, and pretty much just pray every day. (Even the Carmelites didn't have it that easy, but I was naive about that, as well.) I was fresh out of eighth grade at this time, and going to school as a nun—just when I thought I'd escaped readin', writin' and 'rithmetic—was not what I had in mind.

I spent a year and a half butting up against every authority figure that convent life had to offer, and then I leapt over the wall. I finished up high school in six months and went to work behind the soda fountain at a Woolworth's. My second job, two months later, was as a telephone operator for Ma Bell. I was 16, lied about my age to get hired, and thought that having a job would give me the freedom I'd always longed for. Instead, it just gave me more authority figures!

All my life I've been butting up against anyone who wants to tell me what to do. So it was natural enough that when I sat down to write my first book, it was about a female reporter, Jessica (Jesse) James, who also railed against authority figures. She even took on a Mafia lover instead of a cop, just—in part—to be different. In my heart of hearts, I also thought that if one had a Mafia kingpin as a lover, one wouldn't have to worry about bosses—they could, if one chose, just be killed! Since the Jesse books, I've been writing suspense novels. There's always a strong woman in them, someone who has to go out and right wrongs, not to mention save her own life. She usually has a strong man somewhere in the picture, and he may come in at the last moment to help save the day, but not before she's proven herself to be capable in that regard and has already done everything possible for herself. In my own life, I've usually had to go it alone, and my fictional heroines are much the same—except that they nearly always are involved romantically with someone who may or may not be a hero, and who may or may not be leading them down the primrose path. As a full-time writer, I don't have much time for romance, and when I do, it's usually full of so many tensions—like who gets to control the remote (me!)—there couldn't possibly be a happy ending.

I settle for happy endings in my books, and I put romance in them even though they aren't romantic suspense, but dark, psychological thrillers. I want my readers to feel satisfied on as many levels as possible when they put down one of my books, and romance is, after all, a part of life—or at least a part that many dream of having.

I've told on another page how I began writing, at a time when I was on welfare and still had my fifth child to support. Even though I'd always had a vague dream of "being a writer some day," I didn't have the courage to really do it until I was desperate—desperate for some way to get off welfare, and desperate for a way to make a decent living. We were broke and my daughter—who was a talented skater—needed new skates. I became a writer to earn enough money to buy them. It was that simple. (Of course, the large majority of writers would argue that the craft of writing is no way to make a "decent living"!). As these things go, of course, it was years before I made enough from my writing to buy my daughter new skates, and she was able to buy her own by that time. But for everyone there comes that moment, I think, when we know what we have to do. Something pushes us into it despite our fears and insecurities, and we plow willy-nilly into that new career, that new dream, that new hope.

Over the years, I've taught writing, and I've edited books for beginning writers. I always tell them the same thing: The major difference between the published writer and the unpublished writer is that the published one kept trying. I honestly believe this. I believe that what we focus on manifests, and it's all a matter of not giving up, of putting our hearts into it, and doing everything we possibly can to make it happen. I'm working on my 16th book in 14 years right now, and as I look back, I am grateful for the people who helped me reach this point—the friends and relatives who supported me in the difficult times, the agents and editors who helped to further my career. As someone has said, we meet angels along the way...and I've met more than my share of them.