Stephen B. Wiley, who raised millions for Greater Morristown’s bedrock institutions, learned the art of knocking on doors as a young man.
At Princeton, he showed up on Albert Einstein’s doorstep and convinced the famed physicist to address a student group. Wiley closed the deal by promising to drive Einstein to the talk.
“Steve later told me that he had no driver’s license. And he was trying to figure out what it would have been like to explain to the insurance company that the passenger who died was Albert Einstein!” Stuart Sendell said on Saturday.
The story got a hearty laugh from a crowd gathered to dedicate a statue of Wiley on the Morristown & Morris Township Library’s sun-drenched lawn.
Channeling his late mentor, Sendell led a Community Foundation of New Jersey campaign that raised $140,000 for the life-sized bronze likeness of Wiley, a lawyer, businessman, politician, philanthropist and poet who died in 2015 at age 86.
The statue now welcomes visitors to the library wing Wiley helped build. Across the street is the Mayo Performing Arts Center, which he helped rescue from ruin when it was the Community Theatre. It’s a short walk from the historic Morristown Green. Wiley raised nearly $5 million to preserve that, too.
“When you know this community, you know Steve Wiley, because he’s everywhere,” said Mackey Pendergrast, superintendent of the Morris School District.
Fifty years ago, Wiley, won a landmark state Supreme Court case that merged Morristown and Morris Township schools. The case aimed to avert white flight and spare Morristown the civil unrest that plagued other urban centers in the 1960s and ’70s.
A “transformative leader,” Wiley knew that integrated schools are “critical for a student’s education, critical for strong schools, and critical for a strong community,” Pendergrast said.
Slideshow photos by Kevin Coughlin. Click/hover on images for captions:
“What would Morristown and Morris Township be like…if we didn’t have that merger?” said Morristown Mayor Tim Dougherty. “We’re one community.”
As a fledgling councilman, circa 2001, Dougherty experienced Wiley’s powers of persuasion first-hand. Wiley phoned him out of the blue.
“‘Okay, you’ve got a vote coming up on the council for the library. You’re going to give ’em the money. Are we good?'” Dougherty remembered Wiley saying.
Thea Lintern came to Saturday’s ceremony to pay homage to Wiley. She moved here from Queens decades ago for the integrated schools. Praised today, the Morris School District merger was highly controversial back then.
“There was huge animosity, more so on the part of the Township, and it took years and years for that to settle down,” Lintern said. “People didn’t speak to each other.”
Colleagues painted Wiley as a brilliant tactician and tireless worker who loved winning, from courtrooms to tennis courts. Friends and relatives said he also displayed a winning, courtly demeanor.
Granddaughter Rhiannon Wiley related Wiley’s earnest attempts to learn Mandarin, to make her Taiwanese mom feel at home.
Matt Laud was an adolescent when he finally learned, from others, of his grandfather’s achievements. As a little boy, his first lessons in civic duty came from his “Baba” — who drove him to Morristown parking lots to pick up cigarette butts.
That “didn’t totally click when I was 5,” Laud said. But his grandfather soon impressed him the same way he affected others.
“He gave people a sense of purpose, and a sense that good things were worth doing. You wanted to do the right thing alongside him,” he said.
‘HE REALLY LOVED WINNING’
Township Mayor Jeff Grayzel; Assemblywoman Aura Dunn (R-25th Dist.); and Alice Cutler, president of the Trustees of the Morristown Green, also said a few words Saturday.
The audience included local civil rights activist Felicia Jamison, a key figure in the merger case; and Dick Deskovick, who founded the First Morris Bank (now Provident Bank) with Wiley, and erected the Patriots Farewell fountain on the Green. School board members and municipal officials from Morristown and Morris Township also attended.
Wiley, the son of a Morristown schools superintendent, was a founder of the Morris Educational Foundation, Morris County’s United Way chapter and the County College of Morris, and a supporter of the Morris Museum and what is now Morristown Medical Center, according to his law firm.
Additionally, he served in the state Senate, was an early investor in cable television, and chaired the former New Jersey Board of Higher Education and the former University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey.
“If any of us could contribute five or 10 percent of what Steve contributed, the world would be blessed, and we would be as well,” said Rick Sirota, a partner in Wiley, Sirota, Malehorn and Raynes.
“He was a very humble man, a genius. But he really loved winning,” added Jim McCreedy, another partner at the firm.
“And he always won, because he was so smart. And nobody worked harder.”
Well… he won most of the time. Wiley, a Democrat in Republican Morris County, was denied a second Senate term after helping establish the unpopular state income tax, meant as a way to fund public education.
Wiley could not save the state Board of Higher Education. A technicality kept him off the state Supreme Court. And he finished fourth in a six-way gubernatorial primary.
But associates envied his performance in the courtroom.
As a young attorney, McCreedy was tasked with driving Wiley to courts in Wiley’s Lincoln Continental, a challenge to park at “almost 19 feet long.” (McCreedy measured it.)
During those rides, McCreedy suggested ideas for legal arguments. Wiley applied the polish.
“I’d feed him a script, and he would turn it into gold. It was sort of like being a scriptwriter for somebody like Marlon Brando or Meryl Streep,” McCreedy said.
Wiley also had a flair for theatrics. McCreedy recounted a case where his boss directed him to lug 27 cardboard boxes of legal papers into a Philadelphia courtroom. On cue, McCreedy removed the lid from each box as Wiley delivered his opening argument:
“Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury, we’re here and we have nothing to hide…You can see that we brought our entire file for this matter. So if any question that you may have is not answered by the end of this trial, I’m here to do it for you.”
McCreedy still is awestruck by the memory.
“That’s the kind of thing that Steve would do, things that the rest of us would never think of,” he said.
Wiley represented Felicia Jamison in a discrimination case years ago. When asked on Saturday how her lawyer did, Jamison summed it up in two words.
“He won.”
MORE ABOUT STEVE WILEY:
The Statue Talks: In his own words: Steve Wiley on The Morristown Green Podcast
A proud day in Morristown history. If we all followed Wiley’s example in some small way, whether its picking up cigarette butts, remembering our history or donating to a worthy causes, what a wonderful community Morristown would continue to be for generations to come.