| Can confirm. That was the life. (My Dad worked at Holmdel until the divestiture.) I still remember visiting on the Christmas Eve open house they would hold every year, with a brass band playing carols in the big atrium and all kinds of tech goodies to check out. Regarding GP's point, New Jersey actually has a pretty strong heritage in engineering. There was Edison of course, and RCA (including their research lab near Princeton that did a lot of defense work in WWII) and lots of smaller radio companies--don't forget that especially pre-WWII the economic geography of the US was a lot different and the radio "startups" of the day would design and manufacture right in urban areas of the East Coast. Marconi set up shop in NJ in the early days -- in fact my Dad does a lot of work these days with a museum of early communications technology, located at an old Marconi transmitter site not too far from Holmdel (infoage.org). Other parts of the Bell System were in New Jersey too, with offices, labs, and facilities spread all over the state (including the famous Long Lines NOC where they monitored the health of the long distance system in real time.) There were (and still are) plenty of chemical and pharmaceutical companies that hired scientists and engineers. But I'd say that in the postwar era until about 2000 most scientists and engineers didn't particularly aspire to live in or commute to NYC. The suburban life was the dream. I remember in the late 90s/early 2000s it felt like all the technical work going on there was backend stuff for banks or dot-com startups with a media/marketing focus. |