Sea Bright Characters:

My physician-father had his share of “famous patients.” Including one reputed New Jersey mobster boss, who when asked by dad what would happen if he owed him a lot of money and couldn’t repay, replied, “Well doc, we wouldn’t hurt you, but we know where you family is.”

Another person my father treated was the famous Sea Bright resident, Jim Bishop. The celebrated writer-author was dad’s patient for about 15 years in the 1950s and 1960s. For a deeper dive on the man, his 1981 memoir A Bishop’s Confession, is an utterly fascinating read. The guy had a magic touch with words.

James Alonzo Bishop

Bishop liked to delve into history with his writing. He authored the first best-seller (other than The Bible) on the death of Jesus Christ. His 1957 bestseller, The Day Christ Died, is a quick reading, 272-page story. It’s a historic — not a religious — account of that fateful, 24-hour time period culminating on April 7, 30 AD. Bishop’s “hour-by-hour, you-are-there” delivery style was then unique in publishing. Other Bishop bestsellers included The Day Christ Was Born, The Birth of the United States, The Day Kennedy Was Shot, The Days of Martin Luther King, Jr, and The Day Lincoln Was Shot.

The book on President Lincoln’s assassination, published in 1955 after 25 years of research, was the one that made him rich and famous (and paid for his Sea Bright house). While Bishop grew to be a wealthy author (penning 21 books in total) it still doesn’t match the fortune that Bill O’Reilly has made with his “Killing” series of books on Lincoln, Kennedy, Christ, Patton and others. The O’Reilly books — combining historical research with dramatic storytelling — are popular with casual readers and history enthusiasts too.

Bishop, the son of an Irish cop, would go on to dine with and write about three American Presidents and call John Wayne, Jimmy Cagney, Jackie Gleason, and Jimmy Hoffa his good friends. Actor Bert Lahr was a frequent visitor to Bishop’s borough home at 766 Ocean Avenue (its been a condo development since 1981).

Bishop’s parents had been Sea Bright summer renters since the mid-1920s; he bought his own riverfront home in 1956 (the same year he was made and honorary member of the Sea Bright Chamber of Commerce). He called Sea Bright “the last — and the truest — of all small seaside villages.”

“The natural beauty of Sea Bright will always be attractive.”
—Jim Bishop, 1959

For over a decade Bishop feuded with borough elected officials (especially Mayor Thomas Farrell) over his sometimes caustic columns on the Sea Bright way of life. His December 1969 column in the Red Bank Register (see below) is a real doozy. It caps the ’60s decade and seals Bishop’s fate in Sea Bright. Tom Farrell was a force in Sea Bright politics for a quarter-century. First winning a council seat as a Democrat in 1938, he was elected mayor of Sea Bright in 1943 and held that top office all the way to 1963 (excepting 1951-53).

The two men shared a Jersey City heritage and little else. Proud and hardworking, Farrell was a cargo longshoreman and racetrack mutual clerk. He died in December 1984 (his grandson is John Farrell, who managed the Boston Red Sox to a World Series championship in 2013). An admitted ill-mannered fellow, Bishop was also a fabulously successful national newspaper columnist. He wrote for Hearst (King Features Syndicate) for 27 years until retiring in 1983.

At its peak the “Jim Bishop: Reporter” column was syndicated three times a week in over 200 newspapers nationwide. Granted the journalistic authority to “go anywhere, write anything,” one June 1960 column covered his visit to my father’s medical office in Red Bank, NJ. The column “Doctors Snare an Artful Dodger” was a witty day-in-the-life account of his visit with three healthcare professionals — an internist, radiologist, and dentist.

Referring to my dad and his then medical partner, Dr. George Sheehan, Bishop wrote, “When they heard that I was coming they flipped a coin. Kelly lost. So he probed, punched, listened, weighted, regarded, opened, closed, hefted and said wearily: You ought to lose 26 pounds. Otherwise okay.” Exhaustive as that examination may have been, Bishop recounts, the other two healers he saw that day were not nearly as accommodating of him as was my dad.

Bishop also kept homes in Teaneck, NJ and Hallandale, FL. He and his wife, Kelly, had four daughters: Virginia, Gayle, Karen and Kathleen. He died in July 1987 at age 79. My father, who received free copies of Bishop’s books, said that despite all his celebrity, Bishop was a “regular guy” who sought to help others. “He was a self-made man, so fame never really changed him,” dad explained.

Get Out! — Jim Bishop writing in Sea Bright, 1950s. Equipped with saber wit and acid pen, his opinions brought trouble for him too. In 1964, a unanimous Sea Bright Bough Council passed a resolution asking Bishop to leave town after one of his national columns punctured some egos.

“If you want to live in shorts and sneakers” — Jim Bishop column that ruined him in Sea Bright, Red Bank Daily Register, December 1969.