George Williams, Window Washer, Gets Send-Off

To the grassy blanket of souls buried Thursday at the Camden County potter’s field, George Williams lent some panache.

A friend in life, death - Window washer, others buried in potter's field: To the grassy blanket of souls buried Thursday at the Camden County potter’s field, George Williams lent some panache. The singing window washer who was found dead March 11 was laid to rest by the county along with six other indigents at Lakewood Memorial Park in Gloucester Township. But while the other graves were mostly devoid of color or sentiment, No. 2044 was graced with a floral tribute to Williams containing an inset photo of the 69-year-old from a Courier-Post story earlier this month reporting his death. It shows Williams in front of a colorful Haddon Township wall mural with the tools of his trade: a bike with a black bag slung over its handlebars and a white bucket of soapy water. See initial story here.

But along with county workers and representatives of the medical examiner’s office, there were also guests in attendance at Williams’ grave, including musician friend Bill Roccia of Mount Ephraim and Audubon florist Renee Mettinger. The latter has overseen unsolicited donations from businesses and residents that followed publication of the Courier-Post story. The funds will buy a grave plaque for Williams expected to be placed in the next two months. “No human being should be a number,” Mettinger said. “And I’m very thankful that the county has done this.” Williams was known by business owners along White and Black Horse pikes from Pennsauken to Deptford. According to the story, he supported himself with window washing but lived in an abandoned Audubon house. According to Roccia, he died of natural causes.

Friends and acquaintances said Williams claimed to be a long-ago member of the singing group “The Tymes,” whose major hit was 1963’s “So Much in Love.” But the newspaper reported in its April 6 story that the only George Williams known to have been a member of the group died in 2004. At graveside Thursday, Roccia carried an iPad loaded with songs, including one he wrote called “Don’t Know Why.” The sparkling harmony on the song, Roccia says, is George’s. “I met him a few years ago when I was riding my motorcycle and I saw him working,” recalls Roccia, 57. “He would come over my house and we’d grab the guitars and make up songs.” The Rev. Vincent McDonald of Immanuel Baptist Church of Maple Shade donated his time to conduct Thursday’s service at the site, behind a complex of athletic fields. Seven mounds of brown dirt were piled in neat formation. In front of six of them was a plain, blue-gray casket; the other casket was covered with a flower print. All of them were donated by P&J Cooper Funeral Supplies in Barrington.

 The potter’s field contains the remains of about 2,600 people from Camden and Gloucester counties whose bodies were never claimed. McDonald quoted Matthew 10:42 and evoked the essence of Williams’ life when he said, “And if you give even a cup of cold water to one of the least of my followers, you will surely be rewarded.” Because of the friends he made, Williams’ cup was fuller than the others who went to their graves Thursday at a cost to the county of about $250, according to spokesman Dan Keashen. But Williams also had Roccia and Mettinger. To the latter, the sound of two geese squawking overheard was a fitting backdrop for George Williams’ burial. “It just reminded me of what a free spirit he was,” Mettinger said.

The Gloucester-Camden-Salem Medical Examiner's Office buries the bodies of seven people who remained unclaimed by family members on April 26, 2012. Pictured here is a photo of George Williams next to his casket. A small ceremony, performed by Rev. Vincent McDonald of Immanuel Baptist Church of Maple Shade, was held at Potter's Field for Stephen Cohen, Arthur B. Doughty, John Gaughan Jr., Michael McGovern, Charles Rudder, Colista Saleh and Williams.

Regional medical examiner's office buries seven unclaimed bodies: Rev. Vincent McDonald’s heart broke Thursday as he walked toward the seven open graves at Potter’s Field in Camden County, where he would officiate the mass funeral service for Gloucester, Camden and Salem County indigents whose remains were claimed by next of kin. McDonald, pastor of Maple Shade’s Immanuel Baptist Church, realized quickly that his morning funeral service for seven would be before more caskets than there were mourners. “As a pastor, it’s usually such a time to give care to the family. To not have any family around is shocking,” said McDonald, whose Potter’s Field burial service was the first he has ever officiated.

The regional medical examiner’s office holds two burials a year in which about a half-dozen indigents are buried at Potter’s Field, a graveyard behind the Gloucester Township Lions Football Fields. Children who play there don’t notice the grave markers under their feet during pick-up soccer, Frisbee and football games. The seven unclaimed bodies of Michael McGovern, Charles Rudder, Colista Saleh, Arthur Dougherty, John Gaughan Jr., Stephen Cohen, and George Williams — a well-known Camden County window washer — were laid to rest among the more than 2,000 other recorded individuals buried there. The bodies, which have gone unclaimed by next of kin for several months, were strangers to each other, all being buried alone.

Each person interred in the open field behind the Gloucester Township Lions Football Field had a favorite food, a history and someone who recognized their lives as precious, McDonald told those who gathered. “I don’t know all of the days of these lives here,” McDonald said in his 10-minute service, before praying over each casket. “Every one of these lives is one that had days of laughter, had someone in their life who knew their laugh and could pick out it. Each one of these individuals all had personal aspects that were cherished by others ... these are personal lives here that we stand here to remember.”

Only workers with the Gloucester-Camden-Salem Medical Examiner’s Office and Camden County’s public works department, plus a few of Williams’ friends, showed for the short service. “I do truly believe — even though my heart breaks that they don’t have family around them — that what we did in this moment was real,” McDonald said. Of the seven plots, only Williams’ site will have a plaque that marks his grave. The others will get military gravesite markers, flat white stone with a number carved in it. “I always saw him as a just another street person washing windows,” said Bill Roccia, of Mt. Ephraim, who stood beside his daughter Kate looks at Williams’ casket. “Then, I saw him one day, and decided this man had a story, and I wanted to know what it was.”

The Roccias, and a handful of others, were the only attendees not affiliated with the medical examiner’s office. While the small crowd of friends stood around Williams’ casket, the other six caskets sat alone beside the designated graves and the mounds of dirt that would cover them over. “For a minute, I wished I knew all of them,” said Roccia, who played a song on his iPad that he and Williams had recorded together. “They weren’t as lucky as George to have touched so many lives.”

Call For Administrator As Free-spirited Window Washer Mourned

George Williams, seen in Westmont in 2005, washed the storefront windows of businesses in South Jersey for over 20 years and was friends with many of the business owners. He had a passion for music and often sang as he worked. Click to enlarge.

Free-spirited mystery man mourned: Audubon — For more than 20 years, George Williams made his living by washing windows — riding his bicycle from wherever he was living to shopping centers and homes stretching from Pennsauken to Deptford. He was a free spirit whose life was pretty much a mystery to the people he met, providing them with clean windows, songs that came from the heart and conversation that revealed a simple yet deep outlook on life. And when Williams died last month, he left a void in the lives of those he touched.

Williams, who would have turned 70 this July according to one of his longtime customers, Renee Mettinger of Deptford, was found dead March 11 in the abandoned Audubon house where he’d been living. He had been ill for some time and died of natural causes, said his friend Bill Roccia of Mount Ephraim. It is unclear whether Williams had permission to live in the abandoned home. But although he appeared to have no family, he was proud of the fact that he supported himself with his window-washing and never had to beg or live on the streets.

The cycling entrepreneur’s body is at the Camden County Coroner’s Office waiting to be claimed. If no family members step forward by 30 days after his death, Williams will most likely be buried in a Potter’s Field area of Lakewood Memorial Park, a county-owned site in the Lakeland complex in Blackwood, county spokesman Dan Keashen said. Williams would be buried with a headstone that is numbered, but would bear no name — unless someone steps in to become administrator for the window-washer, Keashen said. “It wouldn’t be unprecedented,” Keashen noted.

Local shopkeepers and others who befriended the longtime fixture along the White and Black Horse pikes may want to do just that. “I just can’t accept having him disappear as an ‘indigent person,’ ” said Mettinger, who owns and operates Flowers by Renee on Merchant Street in Audubon. Mettinger used to read the Bible with Williams when he’d come to wash her windows. She knows he was a Jehovah’s Witness and thinks maybe there could be a memorial service conducted by someone representing that faith.

In the meantime, she misses the man who washed her store windows and serenaded her for at least five years. “We don’t truly know who George was, or where he came from. But he was a special person,” Mettinger said. “He was simple, joyful and had the voice of an angel.” Williams claimed to be a member of The Tymes, part of the Delaware Valley music phenomenon that came to be known as the Philadelphia Sound in the late 1950s, 1960s and even into the 1970s. The Tymes had one major chart-topper in 1963, “So Much In Love,” and also scored that year with a cover of “Wonderful, Wonderful,” made famous by Johnny Mathis.

But the only George Williams known for certain to have been a member of the group was its lead singer, who was living in Maple Shade when he died of cancer in 2004. There was a George Hilliard in the group, who disappeared from the music scene and was not a part of The Tymes when it reorganized in the 1970s.

Roccia, a computer technician for the Camden City School District, believes there were two George Williams with The Tymes. He first spotted the bicyclist about 15 years ago when Williams was washing windows in his neighborhood. “One day, I passed him as I was riding my motorcycle. He was going in the other direction and it hit me like a ton of bricks that this guy had a story,” Roccia said. Roccia gave Williams a ride to Camden one day when the window-washer needed to get his bicycle repaired. The two bonded over music — Roccia is a drummer and guitarist who has recorded a few songs, and Williams also played guitar.

“One day when I was videotaping a history of Philadelphia music, I suggested we get George over to talk about his memories. He came to my house in a red velvet tuxedo,” Roccia recalled. “The guy was deep,” Roccia added. “When he was asked what Philadelphia was like in the ’50s, he said, ‘The rain tasted different back then.’ ” Roccia said the video about the Philly Sound was never completed.

Roccia said Williams knew “everything about everything.” He believes his buddy once sang backup for Chubby Checker on his Twist recordings, and also wrote the first song that Nancy Sinatra recorded long before her boots started walkin’. But he remained reticent about that time in his life, saying he was a window-washer now, Roccia said.

When Williams took ill last fall, Mettinger took him to Our Lady of Lourdes Medical Center in Camden. At his request, she brought him a Bible and some sugar when he complained he had none to put in his tea. Later, he was moved to a nursing home on the Cooper River in Pennsauken, where he was clearly unhappy. “In his mind, he was in a prison,” Roccia said. Williams left the nursing home in late fall. “He wanted to get back to work. He wanted to get on his bike and be out in the world and free, washing windows,” Mettinger said. “He’d say to me, ‘Renee, there are a lot of people that are sick and they need to be laying in this bed.’ He was amazing, so selfless. I hold a deep respect for him.”

It was Roccia who went to Williams’ home and found his body after no one had seen the window-washer for a few days. It appeared that Williams, who was in bed, died in his sleep. Roccia thinks Williams may have a sister in Philadelphia, but no one can confirm it. Mettinger can’t bear the thought of her friend ending up in a numbered grave. “In my mind and in my heart, nobody should be a number. My desire is to try to put something together, including a stone that would have his name on it,” she said.

Keashen said that if the body remains unclaimed, anyone can apply at the county surrogate’s office to be administrator for Williams. Any number of people could chip in to have the stone engraved and schedule a service at the Lakeland cemetery, which is open to the public. They could also arrange to have him buried elsewhere if they’d like, Keashen said. “His life is, to a large degree, shrouded in mystery. But anyone can step in. It doesn’t have to be next of kin,” he said.

Mettinger hopes others who cared about Williams will join in giving him the farewell he deserves. “George was a rich person — not the way most of us think about being rich, but George was rich,” she said. “To me, George isn’t gone. He’s still alive within all of us. I am thankful that I had the opportunity to meet and know George,” Mettinger said.