Every Sunday since 1962 a column appeared in the magazine accompanying the New York Times Newspaper. It is written by a Pulitzer Prize winner who once lived in Belleville during the 1930's. Born in Virginia, Russell Baker became a journalist in 1947. Before working as a newspaperman for the Baltimore Sun and the New York Times, he moved to Belleville with his mother and his uncle. His father died when Baker was five years old. In his book, Growing Up, Russell Baker described his arrival: "Uncle Allen moved us out of Newark and up to Belleville in 1932. I liked Belleville, there were big grassy lawns and streets canopied with trees. We lived on the first floor of a two-family house across the street from Public School Number 8." Baker went into the third grade there.

The nation was in the grip of the Great Depression during the 1930s. Millions of people, including Baker's mother, were out of work. "Later that summer," Baker wrote of the year 1933, "after two and a half years of searching, she finally found full-time work. The A&P grocery chain ran a laundry in Belleville for cleaning and repairing their employees' work clothes. She was hired to work a sewing machine, patching worn grocer's smocks. The salary was $10 a week, and there was a piece-work bonus for workers who exceeded their daily quota; by working at top speed she could raise her weekly pay to as much as $11."

Source: Belleville: 150th-Anniversary Historical Highlights 1839-1989 by Robert B. Burnett and the Belleville 150th-Anniversary Committee Belleville, New Jersey. 1991.