"There," Grandpa Eddie Kemp says, waving his cane over the October stubble of soybean fields. "They landed over there. . . . "
In another town, Grandpa Kemp's meandering Martian chronicles might inspire gossip, or a serious family talk, but folks in this farming crossroads near Princeton honor the Old Ones who survived The War of the Worlds 50 years ago Sunday. Why, tonight at 7:30 the elders will be paraded onto the local high school stage to remember in a talk, "We Were There," the wave of mass hysteria.
And that's only the start of a four-day, 50th-anniversary celebration that is in itself a historic occasion here, symbol of a new view of the past in Grover's Mill. It's the hamlet's first large-scale recognition of Orson Welles' historic Halloween broadcast. Grover's Mill is no longer the poor backwater "doomed to an embarrassing niche in history," as generations of locals and the reporters who interviewed them often saw it, but the proud host of a historic event that launched Welles to worldwide fame, demonstrated the power of the electronic media and fascinated psychologists and even Adolf Hitler with its lessons in mass hysteria and control.
Grover's Mill - a turn in the road, an old mill, a pond and only one business, Grandpa Kemp's lawnmower company, based in a barn - once wished that the world would forget that Orson Welles terrified more than a million Americans, including a couple of hundred hereabouts, with his 1938 account of Martians invading the United States right here on Wilson's Farm.
Now Grover's Mill is happy to talk about the Martians' poison gas and death-ray guns that incinerated 40 Earthlings at Wilson's, the Martians who slaughtered the New Jersey State Police but were stopped by common bacteria, ''the humblest creature God in his wisdom put on this Earth," as the original script put it.
