Original Spartans

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Dr. John Baker and Dr. Fred Dalzell worked the sidelines of Holy Spirit High School football games for parts of five decades. The prominent South Jersey orthopedic surgeon John Baker likes to talk about the time he met the eminent South Jersey high school football coach Ed Byrnes to talk about becoming the team doctor for the Holy Spirit Spartans. In New Jersey, state law requires high school football teams to have medical staff on-hand in case of injury. At most schools, this is a paid position, but Holy Spirit in the late 1970s was running its program on a shoestring, and Coach Byrnes was looking for volunteers. Baker was a young doctor, recently transplanted to South Jersey from St.

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A Trump Museum, Earth Shakes, Tax Deals and Narcan – Friday’s Roundup

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A Trump Museum
A Stockton University professor and a tour operator are collecting Trump artifacts and hoping to open a museum in Atlantic City all about the soon-to-be President Trump. On the one hand, it’s something that would potentially draw visitors, provide employment and it’s not a casino… On the other hand, it’s a museum to someone who prompts mixed – but usually strong – emotions around here. What do you think? The Press of Atlantic City has the story.

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Atlantic City’s Debt, The Opioid Crisis and Award-Winning South Jersey Vodka – Thursday’s Eclectic Roundup

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There’s a long look at Atlantic City’s finances on Bloomberg today that basically concludes that the future is likely to be a double whammy of tax hikes and spending cuts, which I guess everyone already knew is the way to dig yourself out of a debt hole, but there’s something about the graphics on the page – they depict the drop in tax take – that is so stark it’s hard not to feel sympathy pains for the taxpayers in the city. The blink-and-you’d-miss-it takeaway from the Bloomberg piece is that the city workers’ union is considering legal action to thwart any move by the city’s overseer to change workers’ contract. If anyone wants to be cheered up, they can take a look at our take on how the city’s crisis is actually a problem for the whole county, although that gets less attention. In even more depressing local news (it’s one of those days, apparently), there was another shooting in Hamilton Township last night – Lynda Cohen at Breaking AC has the details here. In wider New Jersey news, there have been some developments around tackling the opioid crisis that are worth paying attention to. A group of hospitals a long way north of Atlantic County, but connected to networks down here, have agreed to provide Union County police with free Narcan, the drug used to counteract opioid overdoses.

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