You may find it hard to believe, but late in 1977, a bill was being prepared to be offered to the Assembly of the New Jersey Legislature, that would require men dating women to declare their intentions, in writing, early on in the romantic process. So if a young man saw a nice looking young lady, and if he invited her to share a hamburger and a coke with him, he would be obliged, under the proposed bill, to give her a statement of his intentions. If it was marriage, that would be one intention. If he just wanted to see how many hamburgers she could eat, that would be a different intention. If on the first date, he planned to take her to the back seat of his car or to a highway motel, that, of course, would be a different intention. And remember that all these intentions were to be properly presented IN WRITING.
For all the years I worked in New York, I read the New York Times and the Herald Tribune in the morning and the World Telegram and Sun on the return trip to New Jersey after work. If time permitted, I read the Newark Star Ledger after dinner.
Somewhere along the line, the Tribune folded and about the time the AT&T Company moved its main base of operations from New York City to New Jersey, the World Telegram and Sun quit publishing.
With moving to New Jersey and with the diminished number of newspapers available, I began to pay more attention to the Star Ledger. It covered all kinds of local news and it had a big bureau in Trenton, the state capital. So now residing in New Jersey and working in New Jersey, I paid more attention to what the Star Ledger had to say.
The story about requiring men to state their intentions in writing appeared for no more than two days. Then it disappeared and politicians were reluctant to acknowledge that the story ever existed.
As I say, all of this flap was reported in the pages of The Star Ledger. I was used to bizarre antics coming from the Assembly and often from the Senate in the New Jersey Legislature, but this proposed bill sort of staggered me. I was long past the age where it might be applied to me, but I worried about its effects on romance in the Garden State.
Curiously, all of this comes to mind at this late date because of the aborted candidacy of Essex County Executive James Treffinger in his quest to unseat Senator Robert Torricelli. Treffinger was doing quite well in his U. S. Senate bid during the first four months of 2002. He had endorsements from nearly all the County Chairman of the Republican Party and he had a large war chest he could rely on as he went to battle Torricelli.
But April was his cruelest month. There were allegations that a sewer contractor, the Gunite Corporation, was kicking back some of its income from the Treffinger-awarded sewer repair and installation contracts. It is alleged that Gunite was kicking back a large portion of its fees to the Treffinger political organization.
If that wasn’t bad enough, a caterer who supplied Treffinger’s political organization with booze and food, was accused of not billing for its services to Treffinger’s political organization. Allegedly, the caterer came out ahead by being awarded contracts for feeding people at institutions in Essex County.
The heat on Treffinger grew so hot that even the Bush administration sent in the Feds to search Treffinger’s house and offices and to seize everything that might prove useful in any future prosecution.
So the Republican County Chairmen started to bail out until they were all gone. Worse, they began to call for Treffinger to drop his bid to be the next Republican Senator from New Jersey. At the time of the abandonment by the County Chairman, Treffinger was light years ahead of the three other contenders. With the handwriting on the wall, on the sidewalk, on the front door of his house and offices, Treffinger said that in the interest of “party unity,” he would withdraw from the Republican primary to unseat Torricelli.
Well, now you see that all of this is subject to connection, as the lawyers say. The leading candidate to succeed Treffinger as Essex County Executive had been a woman named Marion Crecco. To make the race for the County Executive post, Ms. Crecco says she was encouraged by Republican bigwigs. And so she dropped out of any race for her seat in the New Jersey Assembly.
This is hard to believe, but as soon as Treffinger gave up the ghost, Marion Crecco announced that she was no longer interested in the County Executive’s job and backed out of the race leaving it to two Democrats, Tom Giblin and Joe DiVencenzo, to contest for it.
As far as anyone knows, Crecco was not involved in awarding contracts to the sewer contractor or to the caterer who never billed for his booze and food. But nonetheless, she backed out of the race and has remained silent for about three weeks. This is absolutely unlike Madame Crecco. In all her career, Crecco has never been so silent as she has since abandoning her run to be the next Essex County Executive.
While she was running for the Essex County job, she loudly proclaimed her support for total abstinence in sexual affairs. That, of course, is one of King George W’s mainstays in his assault on welfare programs. What the Essex County Executive has to do with total abstinence is a mystery to everyone. But as a fervent Catholic, Marion Crecco wanted to add total abstinence on to sewer and catering contract work in the County Executive’s office.
Can you imagine a young man, all white, in a button down shirt and a three piece suit, carrying a briefcase going to the streets of Newark or East Orange for the purpose of convincing young, black New Jersey citizens, men and women, that total abstinence is the only way to go? Can you imagine that? Marion Crecco can and I suppose Bush and Ashcroft can. But not many people in the real world can imagine such a thing.
This penchant for permitting her religious views to intrude on her political duties led someone, whom I strongly believe to be Marion Crecco, to propose her bill in 1977 to have men of all ages state their intentions as they invited women to go out with them. It was entirely like Crecco to consider such a cockamamie piece of legislation. Unfortunately, I lost the clipping as it circulated around the office, so I have to rely on my memory. It must have been Crecco or someone just like her, because no one else would propose such a silly law.
As soon as it was proposed, Republican legislators killed this bizarre idea to have men of all ages state their intentions in writing before engaging in romantic endeavors. The embarrassment was sufficiently great so that Republican moguls said it didn’t really happen. But I’m here to tell you that it did – in 1977 – and I saw it in disbelief with my own eyes – in The Star Ledger.
I have tried to imagine how Crecco’s bill would have applied to me. As a late teenager, I drove a 1931 Chevrolet coupe. It had a little trunk in back instead of a rumble seat. At best it could hold three people with the driver having to maneuver the gear shift lever around the middle person. Crecco’s law was not aimed at people who drove 1931 Chevy coupes. Before long however, I sold the coupe and bought a 1937 Chevy coach. A coach looked like a sedan but it had only two wide doors instead of the four doors found on sedans.
Now with a commodious back seat, I suppose the proposed New Jersey law would gather me in. At the time in the 1937 – 1941 era, there were two ballrooms in St. Louis, Tune Town and the Cherokee Ballroom, where famous bands played. I suppose that if I were required to state my intentions toward young women in writing, perhaps it could be written that I intended to take them dancing at the Cherokee Ballroom. But everyone knows that I was a lousy dancer, so my statement of intentions would be immediately suspect. Particularly since I now had the 1937 Chevy with the commodious back seat.
Carrying a pad of paper and a pen would pose other major problems. Before the war, there were no ball point pens. The only writing instruments were pencils which had to be sharpened. I didn’t have a pencil sharpener in the 1937 Chevy. Alternatively, men particularly would carry fountain pens which would write for a while until the ink gave out. In that event, the fountain pen would have to be filled from an ink bottle. My Chevy had no provision for an ink bottle or an ink well. Fountain pens would also often leak after they were placed in a shirt or suit pocket so a young swain would be embarrassed to call for his girl with a large blue stain on his shirt or suit.
Now these are not excuses to get around giving these fair maidens a statement of intentions. Then there is the issue as to whether the man should have a copy of his statement to the girl. At the time I was a man about town, the only way to achieve a copy was through the use of carbon paper which is messy and hard to store. And carrying a pad of paper into which the carbon paper could be inserted, was expensive. In older cars, there were no such things as map pockets in the doors, so carrying the paper would become a large burden. I suppose she would have to carry these supplies in her lap.
Again, I’m not offering excuses but any objective observer can see that carrying an ink bottle or ink well, together with a pencil sharpener, erasers and a pad of paper and carbon paper would probably kill any chance of romance right out of the gate.
I suppose the Crecco bill was well-intentioned. Perhaps nervous and untrusting mothers might endorse it with some enthusiasm. On the other hand, the proposed bill never disclosed the ultimate goal it had in mind. Simply getting young men to state their intentions in writing would accomplish very little. If, for example, the proposed bill was aimed at unwanted pregnancies, its sponsor should know that drug stores, taverns and even filling stations sold products that would accomplish those aims. (Or maybe Ms. Crecco doesn’t know.)
Never stated in the abandoned piece of legislation was the thought that the intentions of the men should be stated once or hundreds of times. Suppose before the first date, I declare my intention to marry my date. Can she sue me for breach of promise if I eventually marry someone else? Suppose my intentions at the outset are entirely honorable. And let us suppose that as the man gets to know the prospective lovely a little better, that she turns out to smack her lips when eating, chews gum and rides motorcycles. Can he then take back his earlier statement of intentions or is he stuck with them forever?
Now all this effort to legislate romance occurred before women were equal in the eyes of the law. In retrospect, it seems to me that fair maidens should also declare their intentions as they departed for a night of hamburgers and dancing. I am sure my mother and perhaps my father would have liked to know if a young heiress had designs upon the last of the Carr boys. It would have eased their minds and my mind as well.
As I have said repeatedly in this essay, as a young man the farthest thing from my mind would be to make excuses for not fully supporting the intent of the Crecco bill. If this bill had been proposed in 1937 instead of 1977, and if Hitler, Mussolini and Emperor Hirohito had been aware of it, they may have been reluctant to take on the Americans who had such superior moral fiber.
Well, in the end, I’m sorry that James Treffinger got his foot caught in the sewer and caterer contracting mess, but on the other hand, it brought Marion Crecco back to mind. If her bill had applied to me, I would be the first one to equip my 1937 Chevy with a strong reading lamp. And I would have my ink well or ink bottle together with my pad of paper and the carbon paper so that I could reel off a copy of my intentions in long hand. No mimeographed forms for me; long hand with a carbon copy for me and for her mother. Boys – that is the American way to do things. Long live Marion Crecco.

E.E. Carr
May 14, 2002
~~~
“Before the war, there were no ball point pens” what? Really? Wikipedia seems to agree, but I had no idea that they were so rare before then. I, too, wonder about the execution of this bill. If this is a legal stipulation, I wonder what the consequences would be of breaking the law here? And if the consequences were severe enough, surely the male in this equation would want some recourse against a female who had a bad date, and happened to “lose” the sheet where the man declared his intentions so as to get him in trouble. Who knows, maybe she used it for her gum wrapper. But if the man was to have recourse, of course the intention slip would need to be collected by a third party, which would have been very troublesome back then. With the advent of email, though, I could just see a BCC to the Department of Justice be appropriate, as you emailed you intentions to your date. Or hell, the NSA has a copy anyway. Maybe it’s time to bring the bill back now that technology can support such an endeavor.