Longtime employee bids farewell after 45 years
BY DAVE BENJAMIN Staff Writer

Mary Moore

JACKSON - After 45 years of service to Jackson, a very special employee is retiring. Mary Lee Brooks, better known as Mary Moore, the township's supervising tax clerk, will be retiring on Aug. 31.

"I can't believe I'm leaving," said Moore, who has worked in the tax collector's office for almost five decades.

Moore will be retiring to Monroe, N.C., to be near family. She said she has a granddaughter in North Carolina.

Moore is a lifelong resident of Jackson. She was born in a house on the corner of Brooks Road (named after her family) which is now the intersection of North New Prospect and Larsen roads. The house in which she was born is no longer standing.

She said her grandparents bought the property, 40 acres, which bordered both roads. There was a house, a barn, a garage and a chicken coop.

"My grandmother came down with her children in 1900," she said. "One of her children was my dad. My grandfather, her husband, worked in the city and he came out here when he got sick. When he passed away, they just stayed right there."

Moore recalled how she and her brother, North Jr., would walk along a dirt road to a two-room school on Hyson Road. They graduated from the eighth grade in Jackson and then went to Lakewood High School.

"All Jackson kids went to Lakewood High School," she said. "Kids from Howell and Lakehurst also went to Lakewood High School. It must have been sometime in the 1960s when they started a high school here in Jackson."

On Jan. 20, 1946, Brooks married Chester Moore and the couple had three children; Chester, who lives in Jackson, Wayne, who lives in Colorado, and Rosemary, who lives in Florida. Over the years the family grew and today there are seven grandchildren, four great-grandchildren and six nieces and nephews.

Moore began working for the township in 1962 when Frank B. Holman Jr. was the mayor.

"My dad told me to go over to town hall and get a job," she recalled.

Ann Danski, Jackson's assistant tax collector, said Moore began in the tax collector's office as a clerk-typist.

"I started in 1962 at $1.25 an hour," said Moore. "I learned everything about the job firsthand from the different tax collectors."

She worked in the old municipal building, which eventually became the police department, before the Jackson Justice Complex was built.

"When I started, we were in the building inspector's office," Moore said. "It was a cement building. The clerk's office and the tax collector's office were upstairs. Downstairs [you could find] the finance office, and the police had part of the downstairs.

"We only had two or three people [working in our office] - the tax collector, one other girl and me," she recalled. "When the other girl left after about six months, the tax collector and I were the only two left. The tax collector was Mrs. Helen Tomlinson."

Moore's office was later moved to the public works building.

In 1967 Moore was promoted to the position of senior clerk-typist and in 1974 the tax office was moved to the current municipal building.

Moore received another promotion in 1984 when she became the principal tax clerk-typist and in 1988 when she became the supervising tax clerk.

Danski said, "Mary was usually the first to arrive in the morning. She would open the tax collector's office to assist the early taxpayers. She was usually the last to leave in the evening."

Danski said Moore rarely ever wanted to use her vacation time and on more than one occasion donated her vacation time to fellow employees in need.

Danski said Moore has been such a familiar face in the tax collector's office that many longtime residents would ask for her personally when they came to the office or called on the phone.

"Mary would always go above and beyond to assist her fellow residents and fellow employees with whatever issues they had, [and that attitude] earned her the reputation of being the tax collector's office goodwill ambassador. Mary will be greatly missed by all," Danski said.

Moore recalled when the basic tools in the tax collector's office were a pen and a pencil.

"The taxes that day were written in the book with pen," she said. "Now you wouldn't think of writing taxes in a book with a pen."

Receipts were all handwritten, she noted.

"We also had adding machines and typewriters," she said. "A couple of years later there was another machine that printed a receipt. Today they use computers. Everything is computerized."

She also noted that taxes themselves have changed.

"They were much cheaper [when I started]," she said "Nothing like today."

When asked what happens to someone who doesn't pay their taxes, Moore replied, "I guess you never heard about our tax [lien] sale."