Clare Boothe Luce: 

A Most Admired Woman

Clare Boothe Luce “had those sought-after qualities – good looks, style, a sharp tongue, and great boldness – that made her one of the most popular and admired women of her day,” The Ridgefield Press said in her obituary in 1987. 

She was a famous writer, a congresswoman,  an ambassador,  and the wife of one of the most powerful men in the country, yet Luce was born into near poverty in 1903.  Her musician father soon abandoned her chorus girl mother, who worked hard to see that her daughter was well-educated. 

And Clare Boothe Luce worked hard to use that education. By 1930, she was a $20-a-week writer for Vogue and wrote pieces for the New Yorker; three years later she was managing editor of Vanity Fair. 

She wrote plays, movies and novels, including a 1940 best seller, “Europe in Spring.” Several of her plays were on Broadway, including the smash hit, “The Women,”  which also became a popular movie.

She was nominated for an Academy Award for  “Come to the Stable,” a 1949 film that tells the story of two French nuns who come to a small New England town and involve the townsfolk in helping them to build a children's hospital.

As a Greenwich resident she served as Fourth District congressman from 1943 until 1946. 

She was only the 29th woman to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives, but most of her predecessors took office after the death of a husband or father. Luce was only the 13th to be elected on her own merits.

After she retired from Congress in 1946, she and her husband, Time-Life magazine publisher Henry Luce,  bought the 100-acre former estate of Wadsworth R. Lewis  on Great Hill Road.  She began participating in the Ridgefield community, and was active in St. Mary’s Parish.

At a PTA meeting here in 1950, she urged more federal support of schools, particularly “Negro” schools in the South. 

A devout Catholic, she also favored public support of non-public schools. “To deny aid to private and parochial schools seems to me to be class legislation,” she told the PTA.

Mrs. Luce also followed local politics and among other events, attended a famous 1950s GOP caucus in town in which six people — four of them women — sought the party endorsement to run for state representative (Nancy Carroll Draper won).

During the Eisenhower administration, Mrs. Luce, a staunch Republican, was appointed U.S. ambassador to Italy. In 1962, she was a rumored U.S. Senate candidate from Connecticut, but the Luces both changed their voting address to New York and she ran unsuccessfully for the Senate there on the Conservative ticket. 

In 1966 the Luces sold their 22-room mansion; Henry Luce died a year later. Clare Luce eventually moved to Hawaii and late in life still held such stature in the party that when George H.W. Bush was first running for president, he visited her in Honolulu  to get her support. 

She died in 1987 at the age of 84.

Clare Boothe Luce was very quotable, and among the most famous – and pointed – observations was, “A man’s home may seem to be his castle on the outside; inside is more often his nursery.”

Harold Goldsmith: 

Prince of the Pulps

To Ridgefielders in the 1950s, he was a developer and owner of some of the town’s largest pieces of property. To the magazine world, however, he was the “Prince of the Pulps.”

Harold Goldsmith, the man who developed Lakeland Hills and created Lake Windwing, published dozens of “pulp” magazines with titles like Dime Detective, The Pecos Kid, Horror Stories, and The Spider that were read by millions of Americans.

Harold Stern Goldsmith was born in 1903 in Manhattan where his father, who started out a clerk in a wholesale clothing business, was a partner in a skirt manufacturing company. He studied at Horace Mann, an elite prep school in the Bronx, and then entered Columbia University, eventually majoring in engineering but leaving after his junior year.

By 1924, he had started the H. Sanford Goldsmith Advertising Company (he changed his middle name from Stern to Sanford) and four years later, he was advertising director of the Magazine Publishers Group, a rapidly growing company that was acquiring many popular magazines. A year after that, he was managing editor of the group

In the fall of 1929 Goldsmith and two prep school classmates laid the framework for a new company that, by 1930, was called Popular Publications. Only 27 years old, he was publisher. That fall, Popular began publishing pulp magazines, starting out with  Battle Aces, Detective Action

Stories, Gang World, and Western Rangers. (They were “pulps” because they were printed on cheap, pulpwood paper that soon yellowed, as opposed to the classier, more expensive magazines that used glossy, or at least bright-white, paper.)

Around 1935, he and a partner also formed The Hartley Press to publish romance, mystery and Western novels.

By the late 1930s, Popular Publications was churning out more than 40 magazines a month, with such titles as Ace-High, Adventure, All-Story Love, Battle Birds,  Black Mask, DareDevil Aces, Detective Tales, Dime Adventure, Dime Detective, Dime Mystery, Dime Sports, Dime Western, Doctor Yen Sin, Dusty Ayres and His Battle Birds,  G-8 and His Battle Aces, Horror Stories, Knockout, Love Short Stories, New Detective, New Sports, New Western, The Octopus, The Pecos Kid, Rangeland Love Stories, The Scorpion, The Spider, and Terror Tales.

Probably his most famous — and longest-lived — was Argosy, founded in 1882, which has been called the first American pulp magazine. Goldsmith acquired it in the early 1930s and it lasted until 1978.

 Popular Publications helped start the careers of many writers. Probably the most famous was Erle Stanley Gardner, creator of Perry Mason mysteries. Goldsmith persuaded Gardner, an amateur writer, to give up his job as an assistant district attorney and devote himself full-time to writing mystery stories. 

Another Popular writer was longtime Ridgefielder Frederick Nebel, who created the MacBride and Kennedy series of mysteries about a police detective and a hard-drinking newspaper reporter.

Goldsmith was also involved in some censorship battles. In January of 1941, Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia ordered all “offensive” pulps be taken off the newsstands in New York City, including two of Popular’s magazines — Horror Stories and Terror Tales.  Goldsmith and his partner, Henry Steeger, “expressed the belief it would cost too much in time and money to fight in court, so they ceased production of those two titles,” said pulp historian David Saunders.   

However, Goldsmith did not always give up easily. Because some of his publications were on the racy side — covers sometimes showed half-naked women — the U.S. Post Office in 1943 ruled five of them “obscene” and denied second-class mailing privileges normally given to magazines and newspapers. Goldsmith sued the post office to restore the cheap-rate mailing permit, and won.

In the late 1940s, pulps were beginning to fade from the scene. “Public tastes had changed after World War II and sales of pulp magazines decreased,” said historian Saunders. 

By the early 1940s, Goldsmith’s own focus seemed to be changing. In 1940 he bought an estate in Wilton, the hometown of  his third and final wife, Yvonne Clementine Boisseau, a public relations executive. A year later, they were married and in 1943, they bought Taghkanick, the late Wadsworth R. Lewis’s estate on Limestone and Great Hill Roads, as well as portions of  the Todd and Hecht farms farther to the northwest along Bennett’s Farm Road in Ridgebury. He began practicing something he really enjoyed and that seemed totally at odds with  his New York City upbringing and career: He became a dairy farmer.

In 1946, he sold Taghkanick to another magazine publisher, Henry Luce of Time-Life and his wife, recently retired Congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce. (Four years later Luce’s Life Magazine profiled Goldsmith’s wife, who was prominent in the dog world as popularizer of the Weimaraner breed in the United States and a crusader against cruelty to dogs.)

The Goldsmiths moved to another estate on Old Branchville Road. In 1950, he sold his interests in Popular Publications and devoted most of his energy to his two new farms,  located upstate in Litchfield and Morris. He became an expert, prize-winning breeder of Holstein cattle and his stock won awards in fairs throughout the United States and Canada.

 Goldsmith also noticed that Ridgefield was becoming a desirable destination for young homeowners wanting to live in the “country.” He decided much of his local farmland could  make more money raising houses than cows.  In 1954, he converted about 30 acres into one of the town’s earliest sizable subdivisions. Lakeland Hills consists of 27 lots  on the north side of Bennett’s Farm Road, opposite the Ridgebury School site and includes Skytop Road, Douglas Lane, and North Shore Drive. It also included Lake Windwing, which  Goldsmith created on the east side of the subdivision and which, for a while, was informally called Goldsmith’s Pond. 

According to The Press, “in 1946, zoning had been adopted and Mr. Goldsmith had to make his lots at least one acre in size. He accomplished this in part by drawing some boundary lines under the waters of his lake.” (The Planning and Zoning Commission later outlawed that practice.)

In the mid-1950s the Goldsmiths moved to Westport where Harold died in 1969 at the age of 65.

Their departure from Ridgefield came not long after a 1954 incident that created a bit of a

national controversy: Yvonne Goldsmith got into a rather bizarre battle with TV celebrity Arthur Godfrey — back then, both she and Godfrey were both vice presidents of the Weimaraner Club of America.

Godfrey had mentioned on the air that  Splash, his Weimaraner, had a “liaison” with Draga, his German shepherd. Yvonne Goldsmith publicly criticized Godfrey’s allowing the canine get-together, and pointed out that Weimaraner Club members sign a pledge to destroy any puppies that result from accidental cross-breeding. 

Godfrey’s response on his TV show: “Fiddle de dee.” He said he never heard of such a pledge and was not about to “drown” any offspring between Splash and Draga.

Immediately, Mrs. Goldsmith was inundated with hundreds of letters, some of them threatening, from people believing she had recommended killing puppies. She was called a “heartless woman” and “a would-be murderer.” A number of letters suggested she stick to doing something more worthwhile for a woman: Being a housewife.

Mrs. Goldsmith said she never suggested killing Godfrey’s puppies, only that Godfrey should have taken precautions to prevent the cross-bred puppy possibility.

As a result of the mail, she said, she was afraid to leave her Old Branchville Road home, or to allow her children, aged six and four, to leave the house.

The State Police, which investigated the threats, attributed the letters to “crackpot dog fanciers.” Nonetheless, for a while, a state police trooper provided a “protective watch” over the Goldsmith’s six-year-old daughter when she went to school each day.

Hans P. Kraus: 

Dachau Survivor Who Cherished Books

 When Hans P. Kraus came to this country as a refugee escaping the Nazis, he had only $500 and a handful of books. By his death in 1988,  Kraus was one of the world’s most renowned rare-book dealers — a man who had owned one of the three Gutenberg Bibles still in private hands and whose collection included a copy of the Declaration of Independence and a first printing of the U.S. Constitution. 

He was also a major benefactor of the Library of Congress. In 1969, he donated 162 historical documents spanning 300 years of colonial Spanish America, including a narrative by Amerigo Vespucci of his four voyages to America between 1497 and 1502. The gift made the front page of The New York Times, accompanied by pictures of both Kraus and Vespucci. 

“This is a modest token of my gratitude and sincere thanks to the United States, a great nation whose hospitality and spirit of freedom and equality have made it possible for me, once a poor refugee, to attain a decent place in free human society,” Kraus said at the time.

The son of a professor who was also a bibliophile and noted stamp collector, Hans Peter Kraus was born in Austria in 1907. As a young teenager, he began collecting — and selling — books. “He frequently picked up an honest krone by buying an old book at one antiquarian shop and selling it at a modest profit to a dealer a block or two away,” said   John T. Winterich in a 1960 profile in Publishers’ Weekly. 

 After working for a couple of antiquarian book dealers, Kraus established a rare-book business in Vienna in 1932. Six years later, after the Germans annexed Austria, he was arrested as a Jew and interned at the concentration camps in Dachau and Buchenwald for more than a year before friends were able to obtain his release, provided he abandon his homeland. He had to leave behind a collection of 100,000 books.

He arrived in New York on Columbus Day, 1939. That happened to be also his birthday, “which he felt was a very good omen,” said his daughter, Mary Ann Kraus Folter. 

With the help of friends and family in this country, he started a new dealership, H.P. Kraus, in a two-room flat in Manhattan. His business grew to the point where, in 1960, he had 16 employees and was world-famous for his vast inventory of rare publications. 

Over the years he acquired some of the most famous books and manuscripts in the world, and helped raise the nature of the business to a more sophisticated level. 

“Dealers are scholars,” he said in 1967. “We are not tradesmen.” 

One biographer called him “without doubt the most successful and dominant rare-book dealer in the world in the second half of the 20th Century.”

He set a world record for the highest price ever paid for a book when, in 1959, he spent $182,000 ($1.5 million in today’s dollars) for a 13th century St. Albans Apocalypse, a very early movable type edition of the last book for the Bible.

Kraus’s Gutenberg Bible, acquired in the early 1970s, was sold in 1978 to the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz, Germany, for $1.8 million ($6.7 million today).

Kraus wrote many books and pamphlets, including “Sir Francis Drake: A Pictorial Biography.” His autobiography, “A Rare Book Saga,” has been called “a rare-books version of the memoirs of Casanova.” 

In 1966, he and his wife, Hanni Zucker Kraus, bought the former home of Henry and Clare Boothe Luce on Great Hill Road. Kraus died at the age of 81 and Hanni Kraus soon moved away, but kept the rare book business on operation until her death in 2003.

The Krauses made a number of significant contributions to libraries. Among their gifts to the Library of Congress is the Hans and Hanni Kraus Sir Francis Drake Collection, which contains early books, manuscripts, maps, and memorabilia related to Drake's explorations.  

Kraus was once asked by The Washington Post whether he ever read the rare books he owned.  “Read them?” he replied. “Books are to be admired. To be studied. To be cherished — not to be read. The worst thing you can do to a book is to read it. That’s what paperbacks are for.”

Henry R. Luce: 

The Man of Time

Ridgefield has been a home to many leaders but few could match Henry Luce for power and influence. Luce founded and built Time Inc. into a top corporation, producing some of the most popular magazines of their era.

Born in China in 1897, a son of missionary parents, Henry R. Luce was a graduate of Yale who studied at Oxford. Like so many others in the field, he began his career as a newspaper reporter, working on papers in Chicago and Baltimore. In 1923, seeing a need for a magazine that covered the week’s news with relative brevity, he co-founded Time magazine with Briton Hadden. When Hadden died a few years later,  Luce was in sole control. 

He later started Fortune, Life, and Sports Illustrated, which became highly successful periodicals, and he was long considered the most influential magazine publisher and among the most influential people in the United States. Luce served as  editor-in-chief of all of his magazines until 1964. He died three years later at the age of 68.

In 1936, he established the Henry Luce Foundation which, by the end of the century, had $900 million in assets used to help higher education, scholarship in American art, opportunities for women in science, and other causes. 

In 1946 the Luces bought the former Wadsworth R. Lewis estate, consisting of a 22-room Georgian brick house on 100 acres between Limestone and Great Hill Roads. It had been created a few years earlier by Wadsworth R. Lewis.

In Ridgefield Luce did little except rest and vote, though his wife, Clare Boothe Luce (also profiled here), was more active locally. He was a conservative and because he and Time supported the Vietnam War, the Luce estate became the target of protesters back in the 1960s. In November 1965, three young men opposed to the war were arrested for breach of the peace for putting up threatening signs on the Luce property. The signs said, “Kill Luce,” “We’re Going to Get Him,” and “Our Country Is Wrong, Wrong, Wrong, Wrong, Wrong.” The charges against two 17-year-old twins from Tennessee and a 22-year-old student from Canada were later nolled (not prosecuted) in court after the three wrote a letter of apology to Luce. (The signs had been discovered by the son and daughter of Victor Ribeiro, the longtime superintendent of the estate.) 

By 1961, the Luces were living mostly in New York City — possibly because Clare was considering running for the U.S. Senate from New York (she had been a Connecticut congresswoman in the early 1940s; she wound up not running). That year, they were taken off the voting list in Ridgefield — at Henry Luce’s request.

Luce did socialize occasionally in town, and was not one to mince words. At a local dinner party in the 1950s, a woman, knowing Mrs. Luce was a devout Catholic, asked him if he’d ever considered converting to Catholicism.

“My parents were once Presbyterian missionaries in China,” he replied. “Certainly not.” 

Luce is one of several Ridgefielders to have been pictured on a U.S. postage stamp, a 32-cent issue in the Great Americans series that came out in 1998.

In 1989, Time Inc. became part of the Time Warner conglomerate. In 2014, Time Warner, focusing on more “modern” forms of media, spun off its magazines to a separate company, called like the original, Time Inc. It publishes Time, Sports Illustrated, Fortune, People, Entertainment Weekly, and many other periodicals here and abroad. Time magazine’s circulation in 2016 is more than 3 million in the U.S., making it the top news magazine — a position it held during Luce’s long reign.