Westfield students celebrate 'family' of famous town native Charles Addams (Addams Family)

star ledger ^ | April 6, 2010

[Coleus]

With a new “Addams Family” musical debuting on Broadway this week, the town of Westfield unveiled its own tribute to its homegrown master of the macabre Monday.

A group of students, educators and historians gathered at Westfield High School to lift the curtain on six painted wooden letters spelling the last name of Charles Addams, the legendary New Yorker cartoonist and Westfield native. Addams, who died in 1988, lived in Westfield until leaving for college in 1929. He moved to New York City in 1931 and began submitting his cartoons to the New Yorker in 1935, joining the staff full-time in 1940.

His famously ghoulish household, with a Frankenstein-like monster for a butler and a severed hand for a pet, first appeared in 1937. They were turned into a sitcom in the 1960s and a pair of movies followed 30 years later. “His dream--or some might say his nightmares--became a reality,” said Westfield High School Principal Peter Renwich of Addams, who graduated from the school in 1929.

More than 100 students from Edison Middle School, Roosevelt Middle School and Westfield High collaborated on the letters, which are covered with images of Addams’ iconic characters. The letters were the brainchild of Ron MacCloskey, founder of the Charles Addams Arts Scholarship, which gives money each year to a graduating Westfield High senior who plans to major in art. He plans to use the letters to raise money for the fund.

“I want each business to say, ‘I want that in front of my business,’ and then whatever they pay will go towards the scholarship,” he said. It took the students and their art teachers two weeks to complete the project, which involved adapting the cartoons to the larger format.

[Oratam]

I remember reading an article, probably from about the time of his death, that had a picture of a late 19th century house in Westfield that resembled the Addams's Family house slightly. Apparently, Charles Addams would've passed it on his from to school. Kinda neat.