Ailing Freeholder John Bartlett drops campaign, prepares to say goodbye to Ocean County

Erik Larsen | Asbury Park Press

Show Caption Hide Caption Ocean County Freeholder John C. Bartlett Jr. To Step Down The longest-serving freeholder in New Jersey, who is in failing health, has decided to end his campaign for re-election this November. John Bartlett will retire from public life when his 13th term expires on Dec. 31, 2018.

TOMS RIVER - John C. Bartlett Jr., the longest-serving freeholder in New Jersey, will end his campaign for a 14th term and step down from his office at the end of the year, he announced Wednesday.

Bartlett, 71, a former Pine Beach mayor and councilman, who has served on the Ocean County Board of Freeholders since 1980, said his health began rapidly deteriorating this month and he is now in considerable pain. Going forward, Bartlett said he must devote all his remaining might to what he concedes might be a final campaign he cannot win — the one to halt the spread of his cancer.

“Most of the time in this month of August I have spent in bed,” a frail-looking Bartlett said as he chaired his last meeting of the freeholder board. “My wife and I talked about this, and it doesn’t make any sense for me to continue as a candidate for re-election. ... I don’t feel I can give it my fullest as I have done in the past.”

The freeholder made a formal statement to his colleagues on the five-member board during a planned caucus session of the panel Wednesday in the Ocean County Administration Building — which was filled with county employees ranging from department heads to assistants for the somber occasion.

Freeholder Director Gerry P. Little, Bartlett’s running mate who has been on a solo cross-country drive through the American West these past couple weeks, listened to the meeting on a speaker phone.

“You have become the face of the Board of Freeholders,” said Freeholder Jack Kelly. “You are our spokesman — both officially and unofficially. And whenever the toughest issues come up, it is John Bartlett that we look to.”

“It’s going to be very difficult for me to get through this,” cried Freeholder Virginia E. Haines. “I’ve known John since since I worked for him when he was first elected in 1979. I worked for him for six years. ... He is the epitome of what a freeholder should be and what a person should be.”

Bartlett’s decision to withdraw as one of two Republican nominees for freeholder — who were chosen in the June GOP primary — will trigger a special convention of the Ocean County Republican Committee before Sept. 13. That’s the deadline to replace a political party’s nominee on the ballot ahead of the Nov. 6 general election. The committee must vote to select a new running mate for Little.

Almost three years ago, Bartlett was diagnosed with colorectal cancer and treated at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. In recent months, Bartlett said he learned that the cancer had metastasized — spread to other organs in the body.

Arguably no elected official in Ocean County has had more of a role in shaping its quality of life over the past 40 years than Bartlett, who has had a hand in every major public policy decision since that time.

Bartlett has presided over unprecedented growth since his first countywide election in 1979. Back then, the county’s full-time population was about 346,000. Today, it’s more than 588,700 — a growth of 70 percent.

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During his tenure, Bartlett has overseen the creation of 27 county parks, including two golf courses. Meanwhile, his hallmark frugalness about money management has resulted in a sustained AAA bond rating for the county’s finances. Additionally, his support for Ocean County College helped to make possible its partnership with Kean University, which provides local residents with access to a four-year degree for the cost of a new car.

Bartlett and his colleagues on the freeholder board exchange emotional goodbyes in the video above.

A Teacher And A Politician

Born in Lakewood to parents who had been raised during the Great Depression, Bartlett’s own childhood was instilled with the ethos that one should use their money to buy only what they need and save the rest. That philosophy, along with Ocean County’s rural values, would form his early political views.

While still in high school in 1964, Bartlett rode a bus to Asbury Park to attend a campaign rally for his then-hero, Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater. As the counterculture movement shaped the late 1960s, a time when Bartlett was in college, his conservatism hardened as his generation grew bitterly divided over the Vietnam War.

Bartlett was in the first class to graduate from Ocean County College in 1968. He went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in political science from Western Maryland College in Westminster, Maryland, and a master’s degree in political science from the Graduate School of Public Affairs at the State University of New York at Albany.

He would return home in the early 1970s, marry his girlfriend, Peg, and go to work in the family business owned by his father, John “Doc” Bartlett — Bartlett & Brown Television Service on Atlantic City Boulevard — a business that he would soon discover he had absolutely no interest in.

Instead, Bartlett would find his life’s passion as a teacher of American history at Toms River High School North and in politics, when he was first appointed to a seat on his hometown’s Borough Council in January 1974 and elected to the same the following November.

In August 1976, Bartlett’s reputation as a figure of frugality would be solidified when — as a young father by this time — he accidentally threw out, with his household trash, a tackle box in which he had earlier hid $600 inside.

For two days, Bartlett and now-Ocean County Surrogate Jeffrey W. Moran went digging through mounds of fresh garbage at the Southern Ocean Landfill in Waretown in a fruitless effort to find the buried treasure. He got close, he would say, when he found a neighbor’s rubbish — but not his own.

“Whenever I come to this site, I always remember that I have a cash investment here,” Bartlett said in a speech he delivered at the landfill in an October 2004 ceremony to mark its official closing.

On April 20, 1978, Bartlett, then 31, was appointed the mayor of Pine Beach by his fellow council members after longtime Mayor Benjamin H. Mabie resigned the post.

A year later, county Republican leaders — looking for a new generation of up-and-coming young conservatives to lead an increasingly suburban Ocean County of baby boomers and their young families — tapped Bartlett to run for a seat on the Board of Freeholders. He was 32 at the time.

“Everything ends,” Bartlett remarked to an Asbury Park Press reporter Tuesday. “There were freeholders who came before me and there will be freeholders who will come after. Nothing lasts forever.”

Erik Larsen: 732-682-9359 or elarsen@gannettnj.com