The Jacob Garabed Administration Building

The headquarters of Hackettstown’s water and sewer authority could pass for a neighbor’s well-kept ranch house — one story of red brick, a lawn, a concrete walk to a white door. Then you read the plain metal letters over the entrance: Jacob Garabed Administration Building.

Jacob Garabed (1918–1993) was a Hackettstown businessman. With his brother George he ran Jacob Garabed & Bro., Inc., the family’s mechanical-contracting company on Warren Street — a trade of pipes and pumps by daylight. But his name is on this building for what he did after business hours.

Those were Hackettstown’s boom years. M&M/Mars had opened its plant in town in 1958, and jobs, families, houses, and new streets followed. In 1965 the Town of Hackettstown created its Municipal Utilities Authority to run the systems all of that growth depended on and rarely thought about — the wells and water mains, the sewer lines and the treatment plant. Four years later, in 1969, Jacob Garabed took a seat on the Authority’s volunteer board, and he held it for the next twenty years. He stepped away in 1989, came back in 1991, and served until his death: twenty-two years, all told, of unpaid evenings given to pipes, pumps, and budgets.

It is the kind of service that never makes headlines, and the town runs on it. The authority he helped govern grew into the one that today serves portions of five municipalities across Warren and Morris counties — six wells, more than a hundred miles of water mains, ninety-five miles of sewer.

After he died in 1993, the Authority put his name on its headquarters on Hurley Drive. The bronze plaque beside the door says why, in the words of the people who served with him: Jacob Garabed “provided many hours of selfless service to the community during his 22 years as an HMUA board member and was a shining example of the spirit of volunteerism to be emulated by others.”

His portrait is still kept at the Authority he served — a man in a navy blazer with a patient half-smile.

The family that keeps this archive knows that smile from its own albums. Jacob’s daughter, Patricia Garabed Fiedler, is Jeffery Fiedler’s mother — which makes Jacob his grandfather. One grandfather, Leonard M. Fiedler, opened a real estate office in his living room on Main Street in 1959; the other helped mind the water beneath the same town. Two kinds of groundwork, one Hackettstown.

Jacob and his wife, Catherine, rest today in Union Cemetery, alongside generations of Hackettstown families — the same ground that keeps Leonard and Helen Fiedler.