Spotswood Library Trustees

Meet your Library Trustees:

Emma Jane Decker

What's for dinner? If it's Thursday…then Emma Jane Decker, educator, mother, grandmother, volunteer, and library trustee, is also cook, as 10 or 12 family members assemble at her house for a weekly dinner.

The menu may be pot roast, meatloaf, or similar homey favorites, but the recipes aren't the point. The family gathering is. And the family gathers because of EJ.

Born in South River, where she lived until moving to Spotswood in 1961, Emma Jane is a proud practitioner of old-fashioned virtues and values. Family and education are important to her, as they were important to her parents before her. So that house that she was born in? It's the same house her mother was also born in. And the fact that she's a library trustee now? Not surprising since both her mother and her Aunt Emma were librarians at the South River Library.

It runs in the family.

Her mother, as well as her aunt, a 1930 college graduate, instilled the importance of education in both Emma Jane and her sister Joan. Emma Jane graduated from Trenton State Teachers College and spent 25 years teaching at Schoenly School, but even before she was on the payroll she was active in the classroom, whether as a volunteer or a sub. And her appreciation for education continues today, as, not only a library trustee, but also as a volunteer at Schoenly and at Frost School in East Brunswick, which her grands attend.

Other volunteer activities? Old Bridge Hospital, St. Peter's Thrift Shop, Wednesday Night Suppers at St. Peter's. Obviously, retirement, for Emma Jane, is not the same as idleness!

Nor does a love of traditional values equate with provincialism, as she has spanned the hemisphere from Guatemala to Halifax, from Hawaii to the Caribbean. Not to mention that cross-country car trip to Oklahoma in 1957…. Still, one of her favorite spots is a small, probably cramped, but much-loved bungalow in Normandy Beach, purchased with her husband, Lawrence in 1967. But surely that's just another excuse for getting together with family and friends!

After marriage to Lawrence in 1960, the couple settled down to life in Spotswood, raising three children, who still make their homes in a 5-mile radius of Spotswood. And although none of her children have made a career of education, all have made good use of quality educations: Larry works for the Central Park Conservancy; David heads an insurance underwriting company in Philadelphia; and Lynn is a familiar face to anyone who has ever paid taxes in Spotswood. [shout-out to Lynn!]

Lawrence, a manager for a framing steel company, was disabled by a stroke in 1996, and died shortly after. Emma Jane stayed closed to her children and grandchildren via those family dinners and that beach house in Normandy Beach.

These days, she smiles easily and radiates warmth. She wears her long hair in a grey, braided coronet, and favors worn denim skirts and dresses. She is wise and kind. Emma Jane is much more than mother, educator, trustee, volunteer. She is a role model for us all.