Charlotte Wakeman, 

The First Superintendent

As of 2019, Ridgefield has had 19 school superintendents. Only three were women, but among those was the very first superintendent: Charlotte Wakeman. After she left in 1921, it was 85 years before Ridgefield hired another woman for the job.

An impressive person who was said to be close to six feet tall, “Biddy” Wakeman was remembered not only as a leader in bringing modern education to Ridgefield, but also as a disciplinarian and one who had a fondness for huge hats.

A native of  Copake, N.Y., Charlotte J. Wakeman was born in 1877 and grew up in Danbury. She came to Ridgefield in 1906 to be principal of and a teacher at the Center School on Bailey Avenue. 

In 1915, Ridgefield’s school system was considerably modernized with the addition of the Benjamin Franklin Grammar School, to which her classes were moved, and the opening of Alexander Hamilton High School at what had been the Center School. A year later, the district modernized even further with the creation of the job of school superintendent to oversee all the teachers and other staff. Wakeman held the position and at the same time continued to serve as a teacher. 

Wakeman was one of a number of Ridgefielders — educators, parents and “summer people” — who were leaders in modernizing the schools and moving the curriculum into the 20th Century. When she arrived here, the town had no high school. After Hamilton High opened, Wakeman then focused efforts on making it better. Even students chipped in: The girls in the home economics class under a Mrs. Myer created a “for a better high school” fund to raise money for the school.  

“I bought three hundred-pound bags of raw peanuts,” Wakeman recalled in 1968 when she was 90 years old. “After school the girls under the supervision of Mrs. Myer shelled those peanuts and salted them. Then they sold them at entertainments in the town hall and took orders for them. When they were finished with that, they gave the money made from sales to the Board of Education ‘for a better high school.’”

The girls also encouraged their mothers “to make cakes for several cake sales. They did many other things and gave the profits to the fund.”

Wakeman was known for keeping her classes orderly. Tabby Carboni, who had her as a teacher in 1912 and 1913, recalled that “she gave me the ruler many times!” Carboni added, however, “I wasn’t bad — there were others who got it a lot more than I did.”

She was also known for her hats. During her career in Ridgefield, Wakeman was photographed several times wearing enormous hats — in one picture, the hat appears four times the width of her head, and nearly twice as high. They were no doubt a style of the day, but she would don them indoors, too, even for group photographs where everyone else was hatless.

After World War I, the town was going through a protracted and sometimes bitter dispute about the modernization of  schools. Leading the support for a conservative approach was school

board Chairman Richard Osborn, owner of the Ridgefield Supply Company. As chairman, “he tangled repeatedly” with  Wakeman, and with Dr. William H. Allee, “her sponsor and supporter,” The Ridgefield Press later reported. (Dr. Allee, covered in a separate Who Was Who profile, was perhaps the most active worker for better education in Ridgefield early in the 20th Century.)

By 1921, Wakeman had had enough fighting and resigned. She took a job teaching English at the high school in Mount Vernon, N.Y., remaining there until her retirement in 1937. 

However, she continued to live in a small house on Main Street for some years,   commuting to Mount Vernon, and maintained contact with her former staff members over the years. In 1937, Ridgefield teachers and friends honored Wakeman on her Mount Vernon retirement, holding a tea for her at the Book Barn on Wilton Road. The attendees included a who’s who of 20th Century Ridgefield educators: Mary Regan, Mary Moylan, Marie Kilcoyne, Mary and Elizabeth Boland, Ruth Wills, Eleanor Burdick, Josephine and Alice Hearst, Margaret and Agnes Carroll, Catherine O’Hearn, Grace White, Isabel O’Shea, Linda Davies, Francis J. Bassett, Charles D. Crouchley, Levio Zandri, and Clifford Holleran.

Although she held no academic degrees, Wakeman had studied at Columbia, Yale, Dartmouth, and New York University. She was also a founder of the American Woman’s Association, a once active suffragist organization. She died in 1969 at the age of 91. 

One of the few Ridgefielders alive by the turn of the 21st Century to remember Biddy Wakeman was Mary Creagh, who recalled her as her school’s principal in 1918. “I remember I thought she was very tall and imposing, like a ship in full sail,” said Miss Creagh. “When I met her years later, she didn’t seem that tall at all.”

Perhaps she had taken off her hat.

Judge George Scott: 

A Good Paperhanger

George Scott was the ultimate home-town boy. Descended from the earliest settlers of Ridgefield and a son of perhaps the most influential community leader of the 19th Century, Scott lived a civic-minded life, running several local businesses and holding several major town offices for many years. 

But after World War II broke out, he did something rather unusual: He volunteered to serve — at the age of 71.

George Gorham Scott was born in Ridgefield in 1871, a son of Col. and Mrs. Hiram Keeler Scott. His influential father was a major leader of the community. A Main Street merchant, Col. Scott founded in the 1850s what is today’s Bissell Pharmacy — the oldest locally owned business in town today. As a boy George worked for his dad at the store. 

As a young man George Scott sought adventure and headed west. He established a painting and decorating business in San Francisco for a few years and, in 1893, joined in the gold rush at Cripple Creek, Colo. But soon he headed back home to Ridgefield, where he continued his painting and decorating business. However, the arrival of that new fangled machine, the automobile, prompted him to go into the car business. He had a dealership on Main Street where, until recently, Cheers and, previously, Liberta’s liquor store was. He also had an insurance business.

Community service was in his blood. He was a longtime member of the Board of Education, was town assessor, a registrar of voters and a member of building committees that expanded the East Ridge School (“old high school”) in 1925 and in 1939.

In 1924, he was elected Ridgefield’s town clerk, a post that his father had held for 46 years. Son George lasted 44 years, retiring in 1948.

Also in 1924 he was elected judge of probate, another job his dad had held, and he remained in that office until the mandatory retirement age of 70, reached in 1942.

“In all of his activities, Judge Scott has been impelled by high ideals and a keen sense of duty and honor,” The Ridgefield Press said in a 1932 profile of him. “Ridgefield has every right to be proud of such a valuable citizen.”

Perhaps it should be of no surprise then that, in 1942, the year he retired as probate judge, Scott wrote a rather remarkable letter to the War Department in Washington, D.C.

“I am 71 years of age, but I feel like 30 and want to do anything that I can to help in this war effort,” Scott wrote.

“I have been Judge of Probate in Ridgefield, Connecticut for the past 40 years and am now Town Clerk of the Town of Ridgefield, Connecticut, but I feel that almost anyone can take my places as such and I want to do anything that I can to crush that damned paperhanger in Berlin.

“Speaking of paper hangers, I was once one myself, the only difference is that I was a good one.

“I don’t think that I would fit in the front line trenches, but I do feel that I could be of use in some other capacity.

“At present I make about $7,000 a year, but I would be more than glad to make $21 a month from Uncle Sam.”

The War Department turned down his offer. Presumably, they did so politely and with a great appreciation.

George Scott died in 1957 at the age of 85. 

Scott may have had the look of a prim and proper bureaucrat, but he was hardly stodgy. Each day in the 1930s he would walk to the office, accompanied by his dog, Tippy, a poodle mix.

Scott had a special platform affixed to the sill of a front window in the town clerk’s office, allowing Tippy to rest and watch the passing scene outside. When people walked into the town hall, Tippy would invariably jump down and greet them, giving any offered hand a friendly lick.

Karl S. Nash, 

The Country Editor

While most people thought of him as a newspaperman,  Karl Nash was really a teacher. His subject was Ridgefield and his students were its residents. As a country newspaper editor and publisher for more than 60 years, he spent his life telling townspeople about themselves, their neighbors and their institutions.

Nash not only taught Ridgefield, he also served it in many official capacities – including  20 years on the Board of Education. 

 Karl Seymour Nash was born in 1908, descended from several of the founding families of the town including not only the Nashes, but the Seymours, Smiths, Olmsteds, and Keelers. His homestead on Main Street had been in his family since the town’s first settlement.

His father, Howard Patterson Nash, died when Karl was 13, and his mother, Christie Law Jones Nash, was left with little money and five children to support. She worked as a librarian at the Ridgefield Library almost next door to their home  — now an apartment building at 486 Main Street — and hooked rugs to sell. 

As the oldest child, Karl became a head of the household, helping care for the children and doing many of the chores. As he grew older, he also worked at his grandfather’s Walnut Grove Farm in Farmingville, including delivering the dairy’s milk in the village.

He was a top student at Hamilton High School (later called Ridgefield High School) on Bailey Avenue, where he graduated in 1926. He went off to Harvard, planning to become a minister.

However, after getting a Harvard degree in government in 1930, he turned to journalism instead. 

As a teenager he had already developed a nose for news, covering local events for The Ridgefield Press and area dailies, and even starting his own, short-lived “Ridgefield Record.” Back home from college, he became a Danbury Evening News reporter and in 1935, married Dorothy C. Baxter, granddaughter of D. Crosby Baxter who had founded The Ridgefield Press in 1875. (While the Baxter family was no longer associated with the newspaper, they were prominent in the community.) Karl and Dorothy later divorced; however, Dorothy’s brother Frank was married to Karl’s sister, Elizabeth, who became the longtime treasurer of the Acorn Press, parent company of the Ridgefield Press.

In 1937, Karl and his brother, John, bought The Press for just under $2,500. It was a struggle. “I had been married in 1935 and had an eight-month-old daughter, so I didn’t have any money to invest,” Nash recalled years later. “John had $92 and he and I borrowed $250 from my mother. With this and $2,000 we borrowed from the town’s jeweler, now the town’s banker  (Francis D. Martin), we bought the Press.”

The business included a small print shop that produced stationery products for local customers. 

“How John and I thought we could both ever make a living from this run-down $12,000-a-year-gross business, I don’t know,” he said. “But we went to work at it and worked hard. We put ourselves on the payroll at $25 a week and for months on end didn’t collect it.”

A year later, they established The Wilton Bulletin and moved  their operations from the Masonic Hall, just south of town hall, into an old garage on Bailey Avenue. Over the years the parent company, Acorn Press, grew into a multi-million dollar group of eight weekly newspapers, which merged in 1997 with the Hersam family’s weeklies based in New Canaan to become Hersam Acorn Newspapers. In the early 2000s, Hersam Acorn was publishing nearly 20 newspapers in southern Connecticut, Westchester, N.Y., and Vermont. The papers remained in the hands of the Nash and Hersam families until October 2018 when they were purchased by Hearst.

John left the business in 1948 to own and operate other weekly and daily newspapers in Connecticut and Massachusetts. He died in 2013 at the age of 101.

In 1951 Karl married Elizabeth Grace Boyd, daughter of novelists Thomas Boyd and Margaret Woodward Smith. She had been hired as an intern on a 75th anniversary issue project, and the two co-edited the newspaper for many years. Under their leadership in the last half of the 20th Century, the Press’s paid circulation reached nearly 90% of the homes in Ridgefield.

Always active in town, Nash was chairman of the school board for 17 years and a member from 1942 until 1962, “devoting my efforts to raising the standard of a somewhat backward school system,” he said years later.

He served on several school building committees, belonged to the Parks and Recreation Commission, and moderated countless Town Meetings. 

A Republican much of his life, he was kicked out of the party in 1963 when he helped people

who were forming the Good Government Party in reaction to what they saw as anti-education efforts by both established parties. The GGP ran candidates for the school board in 1963 and 1965, and though none was elected, one collected nearly 1,300 votes. The GGP itself never had more than 75 members and was disbanded in 1981 after many years of inactivity.

Always curious about the town’s past, Nash wrote many pieces about Ridgefield history and as chairman of the town’s huge 250th anniversary celebration in 1958, arranged to have Silvio Bedini write the town history, “Ridgefield in Review.” 

He also organized, wrote for, and led substantial projects to compile histories of all aspects of Ridgefield life for special 75th and 100th anniversary editions of The Press in 1950 and 1975. The result was hundred of thousands of words of history of the community, illustrated with scores of pictures.

In 1983, the year he turned 75, Nash was named the Rotary Club Citizen of the Year.

He was 84 when he died at his retirement home in Cocoa Beach, Fla. in 1992.

Many who knew him considered Karl Nash the epitome of the country journalist. “He was a gifted and tough editor who taught dozens of young men and women how to write — and appreciate the beauty of — a simple, declarative sentence,” said his son Thomas B. Nash in his father’s obituary. “He was a serious newsman who sought to treat people fairly and in a consistent manner.”

“Karl had a love and sensitivity for his home town that came from being not only a  native son, but also a descendant of the founders and earliest settlers of the community,” said an editor who worked under him for many years. “Generations of Ridgefield were in his blood.”

Karl Nash himself was less effusive about his contributions. “Our papers might be called progressively independent,” he wrote in 1960. “They are said by some to be a force for good in their communities, by others a menace to the inhabitants.”

 “They continue to grow and prosper, however,” he added, perhaps with a twinkle in his eye.

Joseph Roach: 

The Wounds of War

Some people are killed in war. Others can die of war injuries long after combat has ended. 

The latter may have been the case with Joe Roach, who was wounded in World War I but lived with his injuries and contributed considerably to his community until 1948 when he finally succumbed to war wounds at the age of 53.

Joseph Aloysius Roach was born in New York in 1896, and came to town as a child,  attending local schools and graduating from Ridgefield High School. He went to work for his father’s stone-cutting business, but when the United State entered World War I, he joined the Army’s Yankee Division. 

After instruction in intelligence work with the French Army, he wound up in combat in France. At Seicheprey, “he was knocked unconscious in an enemy raid, sustaining four bullet wounds and eight shrapnel wounds,” The Ridgefield Press reported. 

Still unconscious, Roach was taken prisoner by the Germans and sent to Darmstadt prison camp, where he was treated for his injuries. From there he was transferred to a prison camp in the Westphalia region of Germany, from which he escaped to the border of Holland 43 miles away. He crossed the channel to England, was returned to the United States, and was discharged from the Army. 

Back home, he became of the a founder of the American Legion Post and its first commander, served on the Board of Education, was a grand knight of the Knights of Columbus, was active in the Republican party, and operated the stone-cutting and gravestone business of his father. He was also active in Boy Scouting and was considered an excellent boxer, back in the days when boxing was a popular sport in Ridgefield.

The Press described his last days in 1948. “Mr. Roach died unexpectedly Sunday afternoon at the Veterans Hospital at Rocky Hill whence he had been transferred two days earlier from the Veterans Administration Hospital in Newington. For several months he had been under treatment for a lung condition directly traced to the bullet and shrapnel wounds in the 1914-1918 war. At Newington, one lung had been removed and he had shown sufficient improvement to be moved to Rocky Hill, although his condition remained serious.”

Town Historian Richard E. Venus knew Roach well and suggested that his death at a relatively young age may have been exacerbated by inherited problems and by his job.

“Joe came from a large family, most of whom were plagued by what was commonly called consumption,” he wrote in a 1982 column. “Today we refer to it as tuberculosis of the lungs.

“As I was aware of the history of this family problem, I always felt a twinge of sadness when I saw Joe inhaling the dust as he made the engravings on the pieces of granite. Later, a mask was developed as protection against the dust.”

Joseph Dunworth: 

Theater and the Elderly 

A half century ago, Joe Dunworth was as well known in Ridgefield as any non-native was. Today, while few people in town may recognize his name, many benefit from two of the causes he championed: local theater and tax relief for the elderly.

Dunworth, who served in several capacities as a volunteer town official, was among the first to propose that Ridgefield help its elderly by providing a flat-out tax cut. His idea was eventually adopted and has provided millions of dollars in tax breaks for over-65 Ridgefielders.

He was also among the three people who founded what is today the Ridgefield Theater Barn, the first successful theatrical group in town.

Joseph Michael Dunworth, born in 1923 in New York City, had an early interest in the sea.

He was valedictorian of his class at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy at Kings Point, N.Y., and soon joined the U.S. Navy, serving at the end of World War II and during the Korean War. He remained in the Naval Reserve until 1967, retiring  as a commander. 

After working for McGraw-Hill and the Burnham Corporation, and earning a master’s degree at Columbia, he formed his own company in 1975. Panatech Engineering sold furnaces and other home heating equipment for such companies as Thermo Pride Industries.

He and his wife, Flo, moved to Ridgefield in 1956, buying a West Lane home that had once housed workers on Frederic E. Lewis’s estate, Upagenstit.

By the early 1960s he began to become active in the community. He eventually served on the Big Three town agencies:  the Board of Education for six years — including time as chairman, the Board of Selectmen for four years, and another eight years on the Board of Finance. He ran unsuccessfully for first selectman in 1969. 

For all those offices, Dunworth was a Democrat, but frequently he openly supported Republicans, finally switching parties in 1989. “My enrollment in the Republican Party approximately one year ago was about 40 years overdue,” Dunworth said in 1990 as he was running for state representative (he lost to Democrat Barbara Ireland, the incumbent).

In 1965, Dunworth, along with Evelyn Foley and Patricia DiMuzio,  formed the Ridgefield Workshop for the Performing Arts for not only staging shows but also “fostering and developing creative talent.”  Its first production, one-act performances of “Sorry, Wrong Number,” and the second act from “Auntie Mame,” took place that November. He went on to direct many subsequent

productions including “Bye-Bye Birdie,” “South Pacific,” and “The Pajama Game.” The  workshop grew into today’s Ridgefield Theater Barn, which  has its own venue on Halpin Lane.

He was also active at St. Mary’s Parish, where he was a director of the Catholic Youth Organization.

After the 1990 election, he retired from public life. He moved  to Danbury in 2002 and died there in 2011 at the age of 88.

In 1972, when he was a selectman, Dunworth became perhaps the first local official to actively fight for significant tax relief for the elderly. In July that year he proposed and actually wrote the draft of a proposed state bill that would allow towns to provide tax breaks to homeowners 65 or older.

“Many elderly citizens are finding it difficult and, in some cases impossible, to pay their real property taxes,” he said.  “Many of the elderly are living lives of quiet desperation. Many of them have lived, worked and paid taxes to the community for 40 to 50 years.

“I believe that towns should honor their golden-age citizens, most of whom have ceased benefiting from their tax dollars, and provide them with certain real property tax concessions, thereby endowing them with some dignity and security in their old age.”

Under Dunworth’s proposal, a town could cut a senior citizen’s tax bill in half at age 70 and eliminate property taxes altogether at 75.

That plan did not go over well, probably because of the large amount of money that under-70 taxpayers might have to make up. But a couple years later, Ridgefield adopted Dunworth’s basic concept, creating a set tax cut for those 65 or older.

When the full program began in 1977, senior taxpayers got a $450 annual reduction in their taxes. That $450 was roughly equivalent to $1,850 in today’s dollars. While the dollar amount of the tax break has gradually increased over the years to $1,048 today, thanks to inflation that’s effectively $800 less than what the town granted in 1977.

Joe Dunworth would not be pleased.

Robert S. Haight:

Church Historian

Robert Haight readily admitted he was a novice at writing history.  Yet, he was a meticulous researcher who spent several years poring over the records of St. Stephen's Church to produce his 1975 book, “St. Stephen's Church: Its History for 250 Years.” 

The 220-page volume documented, in the words of Ridgefield Press publisher Karl S. Nash, “the struggles of the small band of parishioners against unbelievable financial difficulties,” and the two and a half centuries of “devotion and hard work” that followed. It remains the most detailed and extensive history of any Ridgefield church, and one of the best church histories in the area. 

Robert S. Haight Sr. was born in 1914 in Brooklyn, N.Y. He graduated from New York University and served in Europe in the U.S. Army during World War II.

Haight spent 42 years with the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, retiring as a marketing executive at the New York City headquarters in 1976. He and his family came to Ridgefield in 1955, living on Memory Lane. 

He began working on the church's history in the early 1970s, examining records and interviewing dozens of people.

“In this labor of love for his church, Robert S. Haight adds significantly to the history of Ridgefield,” Nash wrote in his foreword to the book, “for St. Stephen's Church was established only 17 years after the town's first settlers came here from Norwalk…”

Dirk Bollenback, the longtime Ridgefield High School history department chairman, called the book a “scholarly, well-documented, and thorough account of our first 250 years.”  Bollenback wrote a sequel covering the congregation’s history from 1975 to 2000.

In 1967,  Haight, a Republican, was elected to the Board of Education and two years later, was selected its chairman. It was during a period when the town was in the throes of rapid growth, and building new schools occupied much of the board’s time.

In 1968, besides serving on the school board, he was named chairman of the town’s Elementary Schools Building Committee, which oversaw the construction of Barlow Mountain School.

He resigned from the school board in 1970, both because of business commitments and disagreements with fellow board members over the future direction of the school system.

Haight belonged to the Ridgefield Lions Club, and was elected its president in 1965. He had also served on the Flood and Erosion Control Board, the Republican Town Committee, and as a director of the Community Center.

Active in boy scouting, he served as a director of the Mauwehu Council of the Boy Scouts of America. At St. Stephen’s, he had been a junior warden, a vestryman, and a chairman of the Nutmeg Festival, was active in the Men's Club and a delegate to various conventions.

In 1972, he and his wife, Georgina, sold their home here and bought a vintage house in Walpole, N.H. They continued to live in Ridgefield, at Casagmo, until his retirement in 1976, when they left town for New Hampshire.

He died in 2006 at the age of 91.   

Leo F. Carroll: 
An Astonishing Leader

Few public servants stand larger in 20^th Century Ridgefield than Leo F. Carroll,  who spent 56 years of his life in public service on five fronts including 34 years in the state police, four years as chairman of the State Liquor Commission, 10 years as first selectman, and six years as a school board member. 

All through those years, he was a flamboyant, colorful character. And as first selectman he was one of the most accomplished leaders of the town.

Born in 1900 in Bethel, Leo Francis Carroll was one of 13 children raised on a Bethel farm. He was introduced to Ridgefield while in high school, frequently playing the Hamilton High School squads as captain of the Bethel basketball and baseball teams. “I fell in love with the town at first sight,” he once said.

He served in the U.S. Army at the end of World War I and in 1920, became a state Motor Vehicles Department inspector, assigned to the “flying squad” of motorcycle men who spot-checked for defective autos and trucks on the growing network of state highways. Because he was only 20 years old — not yet an adult, “I could catch you, but I couldn’t pinch you,” he recalled in an interview with Marilyn Vencel in 1975. “So I would catch the cars and pull them over for the old men, who were old enough to make the arrests in case of speeding and drunken driving.”

In 1921, he joined the Connecticut State Police, and Trooper Carroll was assigned to the new Ridgefield barracks in what was later the Boland house at 65 West Lane. He eventually bought a house on Wilton Road West and Ridgefield became his home for the rest of his life. 

He was promoted to sergeant in 1927 and two years later became  a lieutenant in command of Troop G in Westport. He continued to rise through the ranks until 1947 when Major Carroll became the executive officer of the entire Connecticut State Police — the highest rank one could reach in civil service.

“I’ve had a tremendous career, a very successful career and if I may tell you this, I never injured one hair on any criminal’s head,” he told interviewer Vencel. During his policing years, he investigated dozens of murders, bank robberies, arsons, and other major crimes. “May I boast a little bit now,” he said.l “You probably never met a boy or a man who has had so many good, big cases to his credit.” (Several of those cases are described in “Wicked Ridgefield,” a new History Press book due out in October 2016.)

In 1953, he was named chairman of the State Liquor Control Commission for four years. 

A Republican, he was not reappointed by Democratic Governor Abraham Ribicoff, and that ended his hope of one day being appointed commander of the state police – a job that had been held by his next-door neighbor on Wilton Road West, John C. Kelly. 

Instead  Carroll ran for first selectman of his hometown. At the 1957 GOP caucus that nominated him, he quoted Mark Twain: “Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.” It was typical Carroll. 

Always a colorful personality, he proceeded through a lively 10 years as first selectman for a period when the town doubled in population. During his administration, Ridgebury, Farmingville, Scotland and East Ridge Middle Schools were built and Branchville was started. The Planning (and later Planning and Zoning) Commission, Conservation Commission and Historic District Commission were created; and many hundreds of acres of open space were acquired, including the 570-acre Hemlock Hills and Pine Mountain Preserves in Ridgebury. 

Under Carroll, the number of miles of paved road went from 60 to 120 — Ridgefield, even in the 1950s, had many miles of dirt roads. What’s more, Carroll himself sometimes maintained the town’s roads — he said he thought nothing of grabbing a free highway department truck and plowing the town’s roads “when we had a big, heavy snow storm.”  

Much about town government was modernized during his years in office — at his retirement,  Carroll himself listed 50 major accomplishments of his administration. 

He was famous for his oratory and for the scores of colorful letters and columns he wrote in The Ridgefield Press. 

After he retired as first selectman in 1967, The Press recalled the Twain quotation and observed that “Leo Carroll is a great showman, a sensitive man, a hard worker with an uncanny sense of people, individually and collectively. He is indeed an astonishing man.” 

But his retirement was short-lived; in 1969 he was appointed to a school board vacancy and was later elected to a six-year term that ended in 1975. It was no breeze, either, for Carroll was in the middle of the famous “book burning” controversy in 1973 — he objected to the schools’ use of Eldridge Cleaver’s anti-establishment book, “Soul on Ice,” in a high school elective course on politics. The board was also involved in many school budget and school construction battles during his tenure.

In 1979,  Carroll was named Rotary Citizen of the Year. 

Leo Carroll was a man who always seemed satisfied with his life and his accomplishments. “The only one thing that I should be criticized for is that I don’t like to go away from home,” he told Vencel. “I’ve always loved my home.”

“I like to sleep and I take naps,” he added. “I like good food. I like good people. I have a burning desire to be with decent people.”

He also had a good sense of humor.

Years ago Routes 7 and 35 intersected with a 90-degree junction at which many accidents occurred. Around 1940, Lt. Carroll, who was commanding Troop A in Ridgefield, asked the state highway department to improve the intersection, resulting in a semi-rotary arrangement that lasted until around 1984 when the state returned the T, but this time with traffic lights.  Carroll claimed that the old rotary was “the safest intersection in New England. There hasn’t been a single (serious) accident out there.”

However, the seeming complexity of the traffic circle gave rise to some complaints, most of them half teasing, and the intersection became known as “Carroll’s Folly.”

One day soon after the intersection was completed, the Rev. Hugh Shields, pastor of the First Congregational Church, called  Carroll at the barracks and said: “Lieutenant, I’m up here at 35 and 7, and I don't know which way to go to get to Danbury.”

Carroll, knowing the minister never touched a drop of liquor, replied: “Listen, you sober up and you’ll find your way,” and promptly hung up.

He died in 1985 at the age of 84.