Rockin’ with Eric Leefe in Rockleigh, NJ – July 22, 2025
I’m hoping you’re now all familiar with my friend, Eric Leefe. If not, search “Leefe” in the search box that’s down by Comments. It’s a great story.
We keep in regular touch via the telephone, but I hadn’t seen Eric in about a year-and-a-half (and not at all in his previous digs in Toms River, NJ), so it was imperative that I find a free day with nice weather (tough to do lately in the NY/NJ summer), but it finally happened on July 22 – a gorgeous day with almost no humidity.
Having never been up that way before, I DID make one wrong turn, but that only delayed me by about 10 minutes, thanks to some lovely ladies who were walking by and helped me out.
I found his abode, met his roomies and finally got to have a good, in-person talk with him.
After that, he said he wanted to go on a walk/roll with Guess Who pushing. Good – it’ll be nice to have something positive to tell my cardiologist.
There’s almost nothing to see and nowhere to go, except for a HUGE, empty field with a long road that goes around it. He had been on part of it once, but that’s it.
We’re going to do the whole better-part-of-a-mile circumference on this poorly-paved road.
There wasn’t much to shoot, so I had to come up with something good, using only the very few available things………….like this red metal marker that I thought belonged just over his head.
Mind you, I’m only using an old iPhone and none of my other equipment.
I don’t know if the sun was in his eyes or maybe he blinked, so it’s just a silly shot with a red metal thing over his head:
(like his socks?)
WAY in the distance, we saw a building that looked like it may have once been an old high school. He had never been that far on this road before, so – of course – we had to go check it out.
When we finally got there, this was the only sign around, but it really didn’t tell us much, so we just took this photo at the only angle in which the sun could illuminate one of Eric’s teeth:
That made us both smile.
Whatever this “Career Campus” was, it ain’t no mo’.
This just in: I found an old picture of what this entrance used to look like (click to enlarge):
The sign remains the same.
Quick side note: just to let you know where we are: we’re in the northeasternmost corner of New Jersey, just a couple of blocks from Rockland County, NY and close to the Hudson River:
You should also note that Eric lives very close to a famous observatory: the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory (part of Columbia University):
Here is a YouTube video about Lamont-Doherty:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3ga5n5yonw
I’m hoping that the people in charge of Eric’s residence would make good use of this facility to the benefit of their residents, since it’s so close to them.
Back to our show……….
The road we were on continued to more of the Career Campus’ campus. There appeared to be a fenced-in parking lot at the end of whatever’s left of the building.
As we got a little closer to that lot, we could see an excavator in that lot. I thought it might be fun to pose Eric with that machine.
But as we got closer, we could see that there was a man doing some drilling on the nearby wall. That must be his excavator……there was no one else around.
But his back was turned to us and his drill was noisy, so I boldly pushed Eric and his chair-iot onto the lot, rolled him around and behind the excavator and pushed him under the machine’s inverted V (the sun side). I then backed up and took the picture:
What I should have done at that point was back up a little further and shoot Eric with the whole unit and then back up even more and get the excavator, Eric and the oblivious guy who was still drilling into the wall with his back to us all in one shot, but I didn’t want to press our luck and just wheeled Eric out of the lot.
The guy never saw us! And we were right there where he and his excavator were! We laughed about this the rest of the day – a funny memory.
By now, we were about halfway around the huge field and starting to head back. But then I noticed a bunch low-hanging branches. Eric had no idea why I started to wheel him into the middle of them.
“You’re the only Leefe on ALL of these branches!”
He thought that was funny…………until his sock got caught on one of the branches. I think they wanted to keep their Leefe.
After progressing through a wide expanse of nothingness, I was getting kind of winded, so I parked myself near a large tree with yellow rocks……..
…………while Eric enforced another sign’s refusal to let anyone on the road to civilization:
But rather than take that road, we made a long, curved right turn that took us back to our starting point. But before we got there, Eric parked inappropriately and laughed about it – a fitting ending:
nice