George Silzer

March 6, 2008 - 11:38am

Elmer Wene and Frank Osmers

A former chicken farmer and radio station owner from Vineland, Elmer Wene was appointed to the State Board of Agriculture by Democratic Governor George Silzer in 1925 and served their for nine years. He was elected to Congress in 1936, unseating twelve-term Republican Congressman Isaac Bacharach, partly on the coattails of Franklin Roosevelt's re-election victory against Alfred Landon.

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August 15, 2007 - 7:51am

Before she was a philanthropist, Brooke Astor was married to a New Jersey Assemblyman

Calvin Coolidge was the President and George Silzer was in his final days as the Governor eighty-one years ago when a woman went to Trenton to watch her husband take the oath of office as a newly-elected Assemblyman.

Well known today as Brooke Astor, the socialite and philanthropist who died this week at age 105, she was, in 1925, married to John Dryden Kuser, a member of an influential New Jersey family. She married him in 1919 -- just after her seventeenth birthday -- and left him ten years later following accusations of physical abuse, alcoholism and adultery.

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