Nine-year-old Kira Cudjoe watches the thirteenth annual Martin Luther King Jr. Community Celebration hosted by the Metuchen-Edison Area Interfaith Clergy Association at the New Hope Baptist Church in Metuchen.

Parishioners celebrate the legacy of Dr. King.

Reverend Tamara Rene Davis, of the Stelton Baptist Church in Edison, delivers the invocation.

Cheryl Owens claps along with a musical selection.

Edison, NJ – Frank Pearce of Edison, aka “The Mayor of Roosevelt Park” feeds bread to pigeons while enjoying unseasonably warm weather in Roosevelt Park. Pearce has been feeding the birds by hand nearly every day since 1996.  During the winter he brings a snow shovel to clear a spot for his chair.

Police officers from throughout central New Jersey gather at the Cathedral of St. Francis of Assisi for the Diocese of Metuchen’s Blue Mass.  The annual Mass pays tribute to active and retired officers as well as those killed in the line of duty.

Sunflowers in full bloom at Duke Gardens in Hillsborough, NJ

The Nubble Light on Cape Neddick, Maine.

I spent a few hours goofing around with a new camera in East Brunswick’s Bicentennial Park recently. The finished product ended up being this montage of stones under water, moss and tree bark.

Fireworks – Mercer County Park.

If you have ever watched high school baseball, you know there is plenty of down time during a seven inning game. Between pitches at a Monroe High School game last week, I grabbed this image of a U.S. Airways flight in the Newark Airport landing pattern.

When Metuchen resident Howard Krive died in 2008 following a nearly year-long battle with cancer, he left quite a surprise for his surviving family members. His family and friends knew Krive as an avid guitar player and collector. But no one realized the extent of that collection.
Because Krive’s family had very limited musical knowledge, they called on his friend and fellow musician Christopher Wylde to help them sort through the collection. As they began opening guitar cases, they uncovered a rare Koontz jazz guitar. And then another. And another. Thirty-one in all, each valued between twenty and fifty-thousand dollars. Sam Koontz, a Linden jazz guitar maker, only made approximately 200 hand-crafted guitars in his career, and 31 of them belonged to Howard Krive. The fine Koontz guitars are prized by discriminating jazz players, and because of extremely limited availability, command a hefty pricetag.

Master guitarist Jerry Topinka, below, plays one of the Koontz guitars.