100-year-old N.J. mayor won’t seek re-election

The 100-year-old mayor of Tinton Falls will not seek re-election to a third term in 2025.

Vito Perillo became a centenarian on September 22 and is the oldest mayor in the U.S.  He’s decided to retire and will leave office at the end of next year at age 101.  If he had sought re-election, he would have remained in office until age 105.

He was born in 1924, 43 days before Calvin Coolidge was elected president, and served in World War II.

When he was elected mayor in 2017, Perillo was a 93-year-old retired civil engineer. In a nonpartisan municipal election, he ousted incumbent Gerald Turning by 197 votes, 53%-37%.

At age 97, voters re-elected Perillo to a second four-year term; he won 38% of the vote in a four-candidate field, outpolling his nearest opponent by four points and 289 votes.

He has outlived Council President John Manginelli, who died in November at age 85.

Likely candidates to replace Perillo are Council President Risa Clay and former Police Chief “Big John” Scrivanic.

New Jersey now has the oldest living former U.S. Senator, 94-year-old Nicholas Brady, and the oldest living former congressman, Frank Guarini, who turned 100 in August.  Brady left the Senate in 1982, and Guarini ended his fourteen-year stint in the House in 1993.

For Perillo’s first six years in office, he was the second-oldest elected official in New Jersey.

Millie Sheppard, who won an Ocean Gate Borough Council seat in 2020 at age 96, served one three-year term. She left office on January 1 of this year and died on July 1, three days after she turned 100.

After Perillo leaves office, 92-year-old Surf City Mayor Francis Hodgdon, Sr. will become New Jersey’s oldest mayor.

Hodgson was first elected to the borough council in 1969 and became mayor in 2016 after Leonard Connors retired after 50 years in office.   He is now in his 54th year in public office.

He was re-elected without opposition in 2023 and is not up for re-election until 2027, when he’ll be 95.  His running mate in the last election was his 61-year-old son, who has been a councilman for the last 26 years.  Another son is the Ocean County Assignment Judge.

Hodgson won his first term in 1969, defeating former Democratic Councilman Donald Cummings by over 200 votes.  Cummings, who served in the early 1960s, is believed to be the last Democratic officeholder in Surf City.