Elmer Wene and Frank Osmers

A former chicken farmer and radio station owner from Vineland, Elmer Wene was appointed to the State Board of Agriculture by Democratic Governor George Silzer in 1925 and served their for nine years. He was elected to Congress in 1936, unseating twelve-term Republican Congressman Isaac Bacharach, partly on the coattails of Franklin Roosevelt's re-election victory against Alfred Landon.

He lost his bid for re-election to a second term in 1938 to Republican Walter Jeffries, the Atlantic County Sheriff. He was elected Cumberland County Freeholder in 1939 (one of those rare situations where a former Congressman ran for countywide office) and won back his House seat in a 1940 rematch with Jeffries. In 1944, he was the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senator and only narrowly (50%-49%) lost a Special Election for the remaining two years of the late Senator Warren Barbour’s term. He was beaten by H. Alexander Smith, the Executive Secretary of Princeton University and the Republican National Committeeman from New Jersey. After that election, he served in the Roosevelt administration as the Executive Assistant to U.S. Secretary of Agriculture (and future U.S. Senator from New Mexico) Clinton Anderson.

Wene returned to politics in 1946, winning a seat as Cumberland County's State Senator. He resigned in 1948 after President Harry Truman appointed him U.S. Undersecretary of Agriculture. He returned to New Jersey in 1949 to run for Governor and lost to the incumbent, Alfred Driscoll by 75,860, 52.5%-47.1%. Wene lost, 54%-46%, a bid to regain his congressional seat in a 1950 race against four-term GOP Congressman T. Millett Hand, and the Democratic gubernatorial nomination to Meyner in 1953 by an amazingly close 1,585 votes statewide, a 50.4%-49.6% margin. He died in 1957 at age 64, his reputation having been severely tarnished by accusations of the Kefauver Commission that Wene was associated with reputed mobsters Frank Costello and Longy Zwillman.

Frank Osmers, a Republican, was just 22-years-old when he won a Borough Council seat in Haworth in 1929. He later served as Mayor and was 26 when he was elected to the New Jersey State Assembly. At age 30 he was elected to Congress; he won the open seat of Edward Kenney, a four-term Democratic Congressman who was only 53 when he passed away in early 1938.

In December 1941, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Osmers took a leave of absence from the House to join the U.S. Navy. He was serving as a Second Lieutenant when President Roosevelt recalled Members of Congress from active military duty. He declined to seek re-election in 1942 and after the expiration of his term, he went back on active duty in the South Pacific. His seat was won by another Republican, Harry Towe, and after the World War II ended, Towe returned to Bergen County to work in his family jewelry business. Towe resigned in 1951 to join the Driscoll administration as a Deputy State Attorney General and Osmers returned to Congress in a November Special Election. He was re-elected six times.

Osmers was a casualty of the LBJ Democratic landslide of 1964, losing his seat to Henry Helstoski, then the Mayor of East Rutherford. Helstoski, much like Jim Howard, was a beneficiary of a strong Democratic year: he unseated Osmers by 2,428 votes -- a margin of 50%-49%. He sought to regain his seat in 1966 but lost by 2,564 votes, a margin of 51%-49%. He served as the Bergen County Administrator from 1968 to 1970 and died in 1977 at the age of 69.