Veronica Heinze, Lyndhurst Area Native, Inspired With Endless Optimism

TUCKERTON, NJ – Veronica Hinchcliffe Heinze, a woman of spectacular grace, patience, and humility who lit up the world with her empathy and love, has died. She was 94.

She was born in Newark, New Jersey on Feb. 21, 1924, and spent the first 60 years of her life in Middletown, Lyndhurst, and eventually Kearny. She moved to Little Egg Harbor later in life and her final years were spent at her family's vacation home in Skowhegan, Maine, where she passed away on March 22, 2020.

Veronica's soft smile, gentleness, and immemorial optimism throughout life never betrayed that she was raised in the crucible of the Great Depression. Endurance and survival defined her early years in Middletown's Ideal Beach, where her father Frank, a muscular and tattooed Navy vet known forever in family lore as a "real life Popeye," built his family a house from scratch and spare parts.

While Frank commuted to Lyndhurst for work as a mill foreman, his wife, Veronica's mother Rose, set to the work of homesteading. Along with her brothers Frank, Joe, and Richie, and her sisters Marion and Muriel, Veronica helped build a thriving garden to feed her family, and worked as a caretaker for pigs on a neighbor's farm in exchange for apples and peaches. She also relished in hunter-gatherer trips to Pews Creek off dusty Port Monmouth Road, where she and Muriel would pick wild beach plums and then join her brothers and parents in catching blue claw crabs, clams, and mussels.

Veronica's mother Rose, who would remain sharp and active past her 100th birthday, was the "maestro of this symphony of living off nature's bounty," as her grandson and Veronica's son Wayne described her decades later. Driftwood fires were all the heat they had at home and their Pews Creek excursions involved hours of exhaustive labor, but Rose conducted it all with joy. It was a giddy smile in the face of strife and long odds that she gifted on to her daughter, whose optimism through her 94 years was something like invincibility.

The family sold their little homestead when Veronica was still a child, though the bungalows Frank and his brother built from scratch remain standing in 2025. They moved some 75 miles north to Harrison, Kearny, and finally Lyndhurst, where Veronica attended St. Cecelia's through 8th grade and graduated from Lyndhurst High School. She was a curious Renaissance girl from the start, and loved playing guitar, riding horses on nearby trails, swimming and playing through long summer days at West Hudson park and pool, and listening to Elvis and country western music. She made weekly trips to the Kearny Public Library, and was fascinated from a young age with natural history, marine biology, and especially Amelia Earhart, who went missing when Veronica was 13.

While quiet, bookish, and outdoorsy, she was also endlessly adventurous, and as a teenager she spent one New Year's Eve in Times Square, the only member of her family to ever do so. One day soon after, at the local Marshall Mills store in Kearny, she met an Army staff sergeant who had just returned from a brutal combat tour through the Pacific theater in World War II. Their first date together was ice skating. She would marry that man, Walter Heinze, in 1947, and they were together for nearly 40 years until his death.

Veronica and Walter had two children, Wayne and Rick. While economic circumstances had improved, they remained extremely challenging. The small family lived in the government housing projects in Kearny for years, before moving to longtime homes on Schuyler Avenue, Elm Street, and then Devon Terrace. Their children were naturalists by nature and they nurtured in them a love of fishing, camping, animals, and conservation. The family embarked on memorable voyages to Bear Mountain in New York and the Poconos, but day trips to the beach, Asbury Park, and Sandy Hook were in their blood. Their yearly summer vacations to Long Beach Island, which they spent fishing, beachcombing, and exploring with field guides in hand, shaped their children into adulthood.

As her children grew into successful athletes, she was their biggest fan, and loved watching them compete at Kearny High School: Wayne, as a star running back and track sprinter, and Rick as a tennis player. Veronica was always active in bake sales at schools, and in her free time built up gardens in her yard and went to the movies with her sister Marion. She loved cooking, and her speciality, passed down and still cooked decades later, was "schwievel sauce": ground beef sautéed with onions and garlic and served over mashed potatoes.

After Walter died in 1985, Veronica settled in a cozy bungalow near Little Egg Harbor Bay in Ocean County. The wild spirit sown on 1920s foraging trips with her mom carried on into later life, and she loved accompanying her children and eventually her two grandchildren, Justin and Vicki, on every kind of adventure. Hiking, camping, fishing, and crabbing trips to the Green Street docks, Bass River, LBI again, Batsto, and points farther inland defined her golden years, as well as very long walks around Tuckerton with her sister Muriel. She was thrilled at the end of her life to meet and spend a few years with her grand-granddaughter and namesake, Veronica Rose.

Of many beloved family pets through the years, she had a special connection in the 1980s and 90s with cats Mittens, Diablo, and Tinker, and dogs Champ, Cricket, and Mickey. She also nurtured and deeply cared for the animals of her children and grandchildren into the 2000s, including cats Queequeg, Tashtego, Angel, and Moose.

She loved the beach, the bay, the rivers and the sounds. She liked to watch seagulls and to listen to the sound of the surf. She liked to look at seashells and leave them in the sand. She loved all animals, of all kinds, from squirrels, birds, and dogs to stray cats and housecats, and the very tabbycolored gray line between them. She was fiercely proud of her family. She bore a straightforward kindness and sweetness and sometimes-nervous care that can only be called magic. Without exception her greatest joy was to see those she loved happy.

She was predeceased by her parents Frank and Rose Hinchcliffe, her husband Walter, her brothers Richard and Frank, her sister Marion, and her sister Muriel and her husband Bill. Her older son Wayne died shortly after her in 2022. She is survived by her brother Joe and his wife Sandra, her younger son Rick and his wife Wally, Wayne's wife Rosemary, her nephew and niece Bill and Pat Burroughs, her two grandchildren Justin Heinze and Vicki Straka, Vicki's husband Keith, and her great-granddaughter Veronica Rose Straka.

A celebration of her life was held on the banks of the Mullica River. She was buried beside Richard and Walter at Ocean County Memorial Park in Waretown, where the deer she loved to watch sometimes come to browse on the flowers.