Frank Herbert

State Senate candidate Frank Herbert doesn’t want to condemn Assemblyman Gordon Johnson for donating to Lyndon LaRouche’s political action committee. 

Herbert, who was ousted from the state Senate by Gerald Cardinale in 1981, did the Democratic Party a favor in 1994 by stepping in and running a successful write-in campaign for the party’s Congressional nomination so that its nominee would not be the white supremacist candidate John Kucek.

When Frank X. Herbert was asked to run for the 25th district state Senate seat, he knew it was just to fill the Democratic slot on the ticket. Still, the former state Senator from Bergen County said he was excited at the prospect of running for office again.

But three weeks after being asked, Herbert, 76, was diagnosed with benign hypertrophy in his prostate.

“I spent the whole month of April with hoses up my yinyang,” said Herbert. Then his wife started having health problems, and then he fell in his garage, injuring his right thumb. Just today he went to the dentist for a root amputation of one of his teeth, coming back with a mouthful of sponges.

At 76-years-old, and thirty years since he last won a general election, Frank X. Herbert is seeking a political comeback in a race for the State Senate, where he served from 1978 to 1982. The former Bergen County Democrat, now a resident of Rockaway, filed today to run against Republican State Senator Anthony Bucco in the 25th district.

Herbert, a retired teacher, first won public office in 1969 when he was elected Waldwick Councilman. He won a race for Bergen County Freeholder in 1973 -- the Watergate landslide year -- defeating future Congressman Harold Hollenbeck. (Hollenbeck, elected to the State Senate in 1971, opted to run for Freeholder instead of re-election.)

Joseph Ariyan, a 41-year-old lawyer from Saddle River, has begun raising money for a challenge to veteran Republican State Senator Gerald Cardinale in the 39th district. Ariyan has been active in Bergen County Democratic politics, and is the county's Public Advocate for Land Use. The 72-year-old Cardinale was first elected to the State Assembly in 1979 and moved up to the Senate in 1981, defeating incumbent Frank Herbert. He was re-elected to an eighth term in 2003 with 62% of the vote against Ramsey Mayor Richard Muti.