Belmar Post Office

You are at the Belmar Post Office, stop #25 on our Treasure Trail. The post office received even greater distinction after it was dedicated in 2019 in honor of former Belmar resident Dr. Walter S. McAfee, a pioneering scientist who helped launch the Space Age. Dr. McAfee was a mathematical physicist who worked many decades at Fort Monmouth in the US Army Communications-Electronics Command, known as CECOM, and lectured in atomic and nuclear physics and solid-state electronics at Monmouth College, now Monmouth University. After becoming one of the very few African Americans of his time to earn an advanced degree in physics, Dr. McAfee gained recognition with a program known as “Project Diana,” which bounced a radio signal from the moon’s surface back to an antenna at the Evans Signal Laboratory in nearby Wall Township on January 10, 1946. It was his mathematical calculations that determined the feasibility of this first radar moon bounce, which is regarded as the beginning of the Space Age. Dr. McAfee went on to receive many awards and much recognition for his numerous achievements, including having President Dwight D. Eisenhower present him with one of the first Secretary of the Army Research and Study Fellowships, enabling him to study radio astronomy at Harvard University. In 2015 he was the first African American to be inducted into the Army Materiel Command’s Hall of Fame.