My great-grandfather (Frederick C.J. Wiss) hired a chauffeur at the end of 1909, or early 1910, for his wife and himself. In those days most women did not drive. The driver needed to crank start the car, change flat tires and keep the car running.

The car bought for Allen to drive was a 1910 Peerless Limousine. It would have been among of the most expensive cars in Newark.

Most interesting is how I know what I know. Allen lived until the Fall of 1952 [obituary]. He was around to teach my father how to drive. My father went fishing with him. (The grandchildren stayed with their grandmother in the Summer, as during the depression the generation below had to eventually sell their Summer houses.) Allen and his wife helped my parents at parties. And his younger wife (Emily Theresa Brown Jenkins) cleaned for my parents into the 1960s. It would have ended at that, if it weren't for a small trunk.

Before being hired by my great-grandfather, Allen Jenkins was a hostler (employed in a stable to take care of horses) for Dr. George Foster, a wealthy doctor in Rockaway, NJ, a wealthy town. He was also moonlighting as a chauffeur for Edward Ehlers, president of The Rockaway Rolling Mill, which was located behind Dr. Foster's backyard. Mr. Ehlers owned a Corbin car. Allen drove Ehlers's car to the Corbin factory in Connecticut in 1908, for repairs and new fittings. See letter from Ehlers. Allen wanted to become a chauffeur full time. He was collecting catalogs on chauffeur schools and chauffeur uniforms. But the doctor wasn't interested in getting a car.

Rockaway is on the Morris Canal, and the steel mill was alongside the canal. In 1887, when my great-grandfather moved the factory into its own building, he built it outside the town, up on the hill near the Morris Canal. At a place where the steel could almost be rolled from the canal to the factory. And before the time consuming and expensive inclined planes to get down into Newark. The section was known as the West Ward. It became the German part of Newark.

Specialty bar steel was the mill's main product. All forged scissors and straight razors start as high carbon bar steel. The owner of the steel mill learned FCJ was looking for a chauffeur for his wife. FCJ would have already had a car. He was active in the New Jersey Automobile and Motor Club, and his younger brother had a car from 1902 (a Knox). Allen got hired.

When the widow of the doctor died in 1938 she left the mansion to the town to be used as a library and museum. It included all the furnishings.

In 2011, Joyce Kanigel, the town historian, found a trunk. It was filled with letters, pictures, receipts, a catalog for chauffeur outfits, a catalog for chauffeur school, and the letter instructing Allen what to get fixed at the Corbin factory. The dates ended at the end of 1909.

She did research. She found Allen's WWII draft registration online. It lists as his employer Charlotte Wiss, my great-grandmother. She then found Charlotte's obituary, which led to J. Wiss & Sons and this website and me.

When Allen moved to Newark he first lived in a rooming house on Academy Street (as shown in the 1910 census). He left the trunk behind in Rockaway. He was well liked by the doctor. Mrs. Foster even left him $200 in her will. But Allen never went back to retrieve the trunk. Getting married to Theresa in 1914 may have had something to do with it. Then their daughter Olga was born in 1916, and their son Cortland was born in 1918.

Allen was also well liked by my great-grandparents. His granddaughter still has the set of Lenox bone china that was given to Allen when he got married. (Lenox bone china was also given to all the grandchildren when they got married. The Wiss and Lenox families were friends.) They helped Allen buy a triple-decker house at 767 Hunterdon St, South Ward, Newark in 1918. It was then primarily a middle class Jewish neighborhood. He was the first Black on the block. He had a car (Pontiac) when most of the Whites on the block didn't. And my great-grandparents also helped him buy a house at the shore. Avon-by-the-Sea, where my family summered at the time, did not allow "coloreds" to spend the night in town. Not even domestics. My great-grandparents didn't want Allen to have to drive back to Newark. So they helped him buy a house on 15th Ave in Belmar (the town just below Avon). In the later years the Christmas gift to him was a $100 bill.

My great-grandfather died in 1931. Allen Jenkins died in 1952. For 21 years Allen was indispensable to my great-grandmother, who never learned to drive. After Allen died, within months my great-grandmother moved in with her daughter.

At a job some 35 years ago I met Harold Blades, a fellow that grew up behind my great-grandmother's Avon-by-the-Sea house. He is 10 years older than I. He knew my great-grandmother. In the 1950s she took him to the club for lunch. He remembers Allen. He wrote his recollections. His ancestors were also Newark industrialists. Some writings of his great-grandmother were found. She wrote about how my great-grandmother was having them and other friends driven around in the car. Read the excerpt covering the Wiss family.

My father also wrote about his recollections of Allen.

Here is the historian and trunk in The Star-Ledger: Black History Month: Unexpected portrait

The Rockaway library has put their pictures in their Historic Image Collections [not currently available].

I am now in touch with Allen's grandchildren. I have gotten together with two of them: Carol Jenkins and T. Martin Jenkins. Carol has supplied me with pictures of Allen Jenkins (some are from our collection).