FREEHOLDER MARCUS DALY

A Man Ahead of His Time.

Monmouth County Freeholder Marcus Daly (1908 - 1969), of the Lincroft section of Middletown, served on the Board from 1963 until his untimely death at 61 of cancer in 1969.
Freeholder Daly can truly be said to have been one of the giants of the Board.
On January 2, 1963, Marcus Daly was appointed to the one-year unexpired term of Freeholder Earl L. Woolley, who had resigned for health reasons.
Freeholder Daly's too-short life was one of accomplishment and service to his fellow man. He was a graduate of Georgetown University and received his Master's Degree in political science from Columbia University. He attended three law schools, including The Hague Academy of International Law, in The Netherlands.
During the Eisenhower Administration, Marcus Daly served as Director of the Inter-Governmental Committee for European Migrations in Geneva, Switzerland.
Freeholder Daly served on the Monmouth College (Now University) Board of Trustees, and held honorary degrees from that institution as well as St. Peter's College in Jersey City.
A devout Catholic, Marcus Daly had the honor of being appointed to Papal Knighthood.
He owned an investment insurance business, and was president of the Skelly Brewing Co.
In 1964, Freeholder Daly was nominated to run for the seat of Rep. James C. Auchincloss (R -3rd), who was retiring. In the ensuing Democratic landslide that year, in which President Lyndon Baines Johnson defeated Sen. Barry Morris Goldwater, Marcus Daly was defeated by his Democratic opponent James J. Howard by less than 2,000 votes.
Freeholder Daly continued his work on the Board of Chosen Freeholders, where he was Freeholder in Charge of Public Welfare (Now Human Services). A conservative, Marcus Daly held the highly controversial position that welfare benefits should be denied to unwed mothers. Although the Freeholder was forced to back down from that policy, elements of his views have since become enacted in welfare reform laws. At the dawn of the "War on Poverty", the humanitarian Freeholder Daly foresaw the future problem of the welfare system rewarding out-of-wedlock births, and he wished to nip that in the bud.
In 1968, Freeholder Daly was diagnosed with cancer. After a long stay in the hospital, Marcus Daly passed away on July 25, 1969.
His successor on the Board, another Middletown native, was Ernest G. Kavalek, who would serve until January 1, 1979.