N.J.'S Scottish outpost watches sovereign vote from distance

It's lunchtime at the Argyle restaurant in Kearny, New Jersey, and co-owner Jock Nisbet's to- do list, involving a custom kilt order and a bagpipes funeral gig, just grew by four plates of fish and chips.

When Nisbet left Musselburgh, Scotland, 52 years ago, it was for a shot at a good living. Now 76, he's a U.S. citizen with multiple businesses and wary of separatists pushing a Sept. 18 vote on independence from England.

"I believe in the royal family and Britain," said Nisbet, breaking from his workday on Sept. 11 for a coffee at the restaurant. "I worry about the pensions and the national health system."

From the late 1800s through the mid-20th century, Kearny imported thousands of Scottish and Irish workers to work for mills including the Clark Thread Co. and Nairn Linoleum. Today, the factories along the Passaic River are gone, the population of 41,600 is 40 percent Hispanic and the business district has a Brazilian braiding salon and Portuguese grills. The Scots who remain in the enclave about six miles (10 kilometers) from lower Manhattan are as divided as those at home.

At a table behind Nisbet, four U.S.-born members of Red Bank-based Pipes and Drums of the Atlantic Watch, their plates of fried cod cooling, invoked their roots.

"It's probably a mistake economically, but I'm in favor of Scottish independence," said Arch Laird, 67, a retired pipe fitter from Rumson. "I'm still angry with the English for crushing the Scots for hundreds of years."

Banding Together

Eddie Duffy, 64, a Glasgow native who manages the bar at Kearny's Scots-American Club, said he's weary of funerals for his buddies. By his estimate, the membership of 400, once almost exclusively Scots or Irish, has dropped in half.

"Now we just take anybody," he said. He considered the effect of manufacturing's end in Kearny and doubted that the people of Scotland would fare better without England.

"To me there's no good arguments to separate," Duffy said by telephone. "You should really stay with them."

Close Vote

This week's vote was forced by the Scottish Nationalist Party, which won the country's Parliament election in 2011. First Minister Alex Salmond, leading the fight to end 307 years of union with England, argues that Scotland's oil and gas supplies could provide a bedrock of government wealth. British Prime Minister David Cameron says Scotland's breakaway would cause economic hardship in the rest of Great Britain -- England, Wales and Northern Ireland -- with wider effects for the European Union.

Thousands of activists against independence, led by the Orange Order fraternal organization, marched at a "Proud to Be British" rally Sept. 13 in Edinburgh, the country's capital, as public-opinion polls showed the vote too close to call. Cameron is visiting Scotland today, his second trip in a week, to ask voters not to "rip" the nation from the rest of the U.K., according to prepared remarks released by his office.

Nisbet -- restaurateur, kilt importer, gift shop owner, bagpiper for hire -- said a U.K. breakup might harm a European Union battered by some member states' weak finances.

"Spain's gone, Greece is gone. Portugal," he said, referring to some of the national economies hardest hit during the global recession.

Feeling Offal

Whatever the outcome of the vote, Nisbet says he's in the U.S. to stay. Internet orders for his kilt shop are picking up as Halloween and cold-weather wedding dates approach, and demand for his bagpipes gigs never lets up.

As for the Argyle, the lunchtime lines out the door for 132 seats are long gone, and Nisbet calls it "a dying business."

The fish is still fresh, though, for visitors seeking a taste of "Little Paisley," a Kearny nickname in honor of the thread company's home city in Scotland and the number of ex-pats who followed the mill's jobs to New Jersey. And in January, as he does every year, Nisbet will preside over a two-week celebration of Robert Burns, Scotland's beloved poet whose "Address to the Haggis" became a ceremony to honor the homeland's traditional pudding made from a sheep's heart, liver and lungs.

"I wouldn't miss it for the world," said Libby Munro, a Paisley native now living in Maplewood, where she owns a hair salon. It is in Kearny, her first stop in the U.S. when she arrived in 1964, where she hopes to toast a sovereign homeland.

"These Scottish people have a lot of strength," she said in a telephone interview. "They can stand on their own two feet."