Edition: U.S. / Global

Our Towns; Defending A Basic Right: Holiday Lights

Published: November 22, 1998

THIS normally genteel township had a people's revolution the other day.

All right, the uprising did not have the epic sweep of the 1917 storming of the Czar's Winter Palace. The grievance, after all, was comparatively trivial: a proposed ordinance that would bar residents from displaying holiday lights more than 30 days before a holiday and 20 days afterward, with violators facing 15 days in jail.

But such trivial issues are big deals in small towns. In a place where lots of people are on a first-name basis with their elected leaders, people did not want the five township committeemen telling them when they could showcase their cherished Christmas lights, blinking shamrocks or incandescent menorahs, particularly because no one could remember a single fuss.

''People move out of the city and into suburban areas to get away from the everyday hassles of regulation and foolishness,'' said Bob Merriam, a 30-year resident.

Leo F. Johnson, who as the Township Committee's lone dissident became the uprising's Lenin, said the ordinance addressed ''a nonexistent problem'' while treading on freedom of speech and religion.

''When people get elected to public office, they get the feeling that they have been endowed with the wisdom of Solomon,'' he said. ''They adopt an attitude that, we know what's best for you. It's a disease of all politicians.''

It was feelings like these that explained why last week's meeting of the Township Committee -- typically a soporific affair that draws a half-dozen spectators -- was raucous and overflowing with 100 Bedminsterites. Mr. Johnson's grown children, Kathleen and Christopher, arrived with strings of Christmas lights laced over their bodies. Henry Engelbrecht, who is 73, challenged Committeeman Norman Lapidus to step outside and settle the matter.

The rhetoric was not the kind usually heard in a township known for well-bred rich families, including the Forbeses, the Dillons and the Frelinghuysens. When advocates argued that the law was really intended to allow holiday lights -- since anything not explicitly permitted was implicitly prohibited -- opponents minced no words in calling the reasoning plain silly.

''Let's say I want to pick my nose,'' Mr. Merriam said. ''Because there's no law saying I can, it's illegal? I'm going to pick my nose whenever I want to, and I'm going to put lights on my house whenever I want to.''

The crowd's hostility was so intimidating that the four committeemen who had seen some merit in the ordinance fell over one another to kill it. Residents will be able to put up Christmas lights any time they want.

Bedminster is mostly horse country, a gently rolling landscape whose families have been known to stable their horses in brass-fitted stalls more elegant than some hotel rooms. But it is also a township that has felt the heavy hand of government.

As a result of the so-called Mount Laurel court rulings intended to increase low- and moderate-income housing in New Jersey's suburbs, the township has seen its population triple to 8,400 in less than a generation -- with most of the parvenus packed cheek-by-jowl in a warren of condos and town houses known as the Hills. Overnight, residents have had to wrestle with inadequate schools and roadways.

That's partly why those regrouping after the lighting victory are bracing to pounce on even trifling examples of government overreaching, like a proposed ordinance that would restrict the height of grass on homeowners' lawns to eight inches.

Mayor Don E. Cross, a burly relative newcomer to town, favored consideration of the lighting ordinance. He calls opponents of it elitists, curmudgeons, obstructionists and ''nasties,'' flavoring his epithets with a Texas twang that no doubt helped him land the part of Richard Widmark's double in a 1961 western. He cautions that there could be disputes among neighbors over extravagant displays.

But sound reasoning, he said, was lost in the frenzy of revolt. Now, he laments, his diligent administration will ''be remembered for a stupid ordinance.''

''We make mistakes,'' he conceded. ''That's why there are erasers.''