Service Station A La 1920s

What was perhaps Ridgefield’s first full-service gasoline station was located at 31 Danbury Road where Ridgefield Mobil is today.

These photos from the 1920s show the Socony station when it was owned by John M. Moser, whose house was at 55 Danbury Road, still standing across from where Dunkin Donuts is today. That’s probably Moser in the doorway of the garage office, with a cigar in his mouth.

The picture of the office has a couple of interesting features: A sign in the window at the left says “Cigarettes and Cigars” are for sale and another sign just to the left of the building reports,  “Rest Rooms Inside.” It’s hard to imagine how restrooms could fit into that little (albeit elegant) shack. 

One entertaining feature of the office picture: If you look at the extreme right, you will see an arm and a hand, and just a tiny bit of the face of a man who was obviously waving at the camera, but didn’t quite fit into the picture.

The second photo focuses on the service area, with the office at the very left edge of the

image. Back in the 1920s, automobiles were not serviced in indoor bays but outdoors, over pits. The chains, pipe-fencing and boards shown here were designed to keep people from accidentally falling into the pit.

In that same picture, you’ll notice at the left a wooden case of what look like quart bottles of soda or beer. That was Mobiloil Arctic motor oil, a product then packaged in bottles instead of cans.  

A hardly visible sign on the pump indicates that fuel was 20 cents a gallon back then.

Socony (Standard Oil Company of New York) eventually became today’s Mobil, so Ridgefield Mobil can make the rare claim of selling the same company’s gasoline in the same location for nearly a century. 

Other product brands seen on signs here like Fisk Tires, United States Tires, and Weed Chains have long gone.

In 1931, Moser sold the operation  to Warner Keeler, Charles Elliott and Francis Brown, whose initials formed the new business’s name, KEB. They built a larger building on the site.

Keeler had worked for Moser. He left KEB in 1945. Brown died in 1955, leaving Charlie Elliott the sole owner of KEB until 1971 when he sold the station (but continued to operate his refuse-collection business). From 1971 on, it’s been Ridgefield Mobil.

The Shapleys of the School 

Of the many private schools that operated in Ridgefield during the 20th Century, none was quite like the Shapley School. It was a place where wealthy families sent gifted but sometimes undirected children to a estate-like environment that featured tiny classes, sophisticated courses and nightly dinners by candlelight.

Founded by Carl and Virginia Shapley, the sixth-through-12th grade school operated from 1962 until 1967 on the 26-acre grounds of the old Outpost Inn  — now Fox Hill condominiums.

However, its small size and large overhead doomed the operation. And the news that  undercover police found students using drugs did not help efforts to rescue the school.

Carl Betz Shapley was born in 1927 in Cambridge, Mass., a son of the famous Harvard astronomer, Harlow Shapley (who became a member of Shapley School’s board of directors). Carl’s

brother was 2012 Nobel Prize-winning economist Lloyd Shapley. 

Shapley grew up in the intellectual atmosphere of Cambridge where his family’s friends included the likes of Albert Einstein. 

He attended private schools in Cambridge and in Litchfield, Conn., and studied at Harvard and at Principia, a Christian Science college near St. Louis. Considered a gifted musician, he studied in Paris and Vienna before the war for a career as a conductor. However, he wound up after the war working with the National Gallery of Art on identifying and cataloguing rescued works of art that had been stolen by the Nazis. 

After more studies in Europe, including at the Louvre, he turned to teaching, and was an instructor at private schools in Connecticut before establishing The Shapley School with help of wife, Virginia Thayer Shapley, who had been a big-band singer in the 1940s. Mrs. Shapley’s grandmother was one of the founders of Sweet Briar College in Virginia and her mother was the very first student there.

The Shapleys began operating a school in 1962 in New Canaan, where their administrative

offices were. In 1963 they leased and soon purchased the recently closed Outpost Inn on Danbury Road in Ridgefield to establish their campus.

It was no ordinary private school. Shapley featured:

• A student to teacher ratio of 4 to 1.
  
• Availability of instruction in Greek, Latin, French, Chinese, Italian, Russian, Spanish, and German from seventh grade on.
  
• Courses in space biology,  Greek philosophy and drama, geology, Far Eastern history, classical ballet, play production, piano composition, and many other subjects ordinarily found at college level. Students also took Bible classes.
  
• Dinner each night by candlelight in what was once the dining room of an inn where celebrities like Eleanor Roosevelt were served.
  
• A manor in England, ski lodge in Vermont, and a campus in Florence where students could spend vacations or summers in special learning and/or recreation programs. Shapley field trips included two weeks in Greece.
  

 “A 12-year-old can think real thoughts and the point is to create an atmosphere in which he

will produce,” Shapley said in a 1965 interview with the Ridgefield Press. 

He told the Danbury News-Times: “The talent is here in America, but it is wasted and neglected in the mass majority system of education.”

Shapley felt that teaching the Bible along with the many academic and arts-related courses would help establish a “nonsectarian self-discovery of those qualities and principles of respect and love underlying a constructive and dynamic environment.”

A  promotional brochure included among school’s many objectives: 

• “To establish in the hearts and minds of the young people of today a recognition and appreciation of the basic values inherent in a liberal education;
  
• “to re-establish the primacy of deep spiritual thinking;
  
• “to bring fresh insight into new realms for discovery;
  
• “to establish throughout the world a concept of education based upon the acknowledgement of man’s spiritual heritage and unlimited perfectibility.”
  

With a total enrollment that never exceeded 52 students spread over six grades, Shapley School had to charge a relatively high $3,000-a-year tuition — equivalent to about $27,000 today. By 1966, the school was struggling to pay not only its staff of 15 people, but its mortgage.

The school also had to deal with a serious public relations blow. On Dec. 5, 1966, while Carl Shapley was conducting a Bible class, 15 policemen descended on the campus in a drug raid, and wound up arresting two 17-year-old juniors for possessing marijuana and alleged amphetamines. The raid, which made headlines in many newspapers, was the result of an undercover investigation in which at least one especially youthful-looking police officer was posing as a student.

Rumors of the school’s possible closing worried students. “There is nowhere else I can go after this,” one student told a reporter. “This was my last chance to...to...I guess, make it.”

Desperate efforts were underway in the spring of 1967 to save the school — Shapley promised it would open in September. But despite an April fundraising art show and sale that featured works by Picasso, Utrillo and Chagall, the school continued to fall behind in its mortgage payments. A court approved a foreclosure sale at which the high bidder was David Paul, who went on to build Fox Hill condos. Paul, who was building Casagmo at the time, offered $146,500 ($1,093,000 today), far less than the $200,000 ($1.5 million) Shapley said the property was worth.

After the Ridgefield campus closed, the Shapley Schools International maintained a school in Florence for eight years.

The Shapleys then taught and traveled extensively, including in the United Kingdom, India, Greece, and Russia. Carl Shapley promoted the New World Educational Foundation, which he helped found, and was also a fellow of Royal Society of Arts in England.

 In 2005, Virginia Shapley moved to Ridgefield where, in her 80s, she became involved in the community.

“Even at 85, she was amazingly energetic, taking an active role in her new ‘hometown’ — from participating in peace walks to being an administrative assistant for life-enhancing techniques presentations to members of Founders Hall,” said her daughter, Judith Watkins of Hamilton, Mont. 

“She and Carl have had an exciting, exotic life since Ridgefield days and it was a bit ironic

for her to move back there and even to tour the condo development on the grounds of the old school, pointing out to me the preserved features from ‘the old days.’” 

Virginia Shapley died in 2007.

Carl Shapley continued his travels and humanitarian activities. He was a “peace ambassador” in the Universal Peace Federation, based in England, which said at his death, “He has been a longtime supporter of UPF and preceding organisations with the uncanny ability of turning up in the UK at the right  times to support our major activities.”

Late in life he considered himself an ontologist, one who studies the “branch of metaphysics concerned with the nature and relations of being.”

In 2012 he died at age 84 in Chisinau, Moldova, part of the former Soviet Union, where he is buried.

When the infamous drug raid occurred in 1966, most Shapley students were saddened at the harm it did to their school’s reputation. Several suggested that marijuana use was “more prevalent at the more placid-seeming Ridgefield High School,” one New York City newspaper reported.

A 17-year-old — who had earlier attended the National Cathedral School with President Lyndon Johnson’s daughter, Luci — observed: “Shapley is a trip in itself. You don’t need drugs.”

Col. Louis D. Conley:

The Man from Outpost

Col. Louis D. Conley built an empire like no other Ridgefield has seen. At the height of the operation of Outpost Nurseries and Outpost Farm, he owned some 2,000 acres — nearly one tenth of the town’s area. He had a large home that became a famous restaurant, maintained a sizable farm with its own electricity, had the largest kennel in New England, and established a popular inn frequented by movie stars and even a first lady. 

And thousands of trees he planted still beautify the town.

He was, as his Ridgefield Press obituary observed, a “man of large affairs.”

Louis Daniel Conley was born in 1874 in New York City, where he grew up and attended St. Francis Xavier College (now Xavier High School) in Manhattan. He and his two brothers took over their grandfather’s Conley Tinfoil Company, considered a major U.S. industry at the time. He married Elise Ehret, daughter of beer baron George Ehret of the once thriving Ehret Breweries.

In the early 1900s, Conley became active in the military, serving in New York’s “Fighting

69th” and rising to the rank of colonel, in command of the entire regiment. However, in 1916, when the 69th was sent to Texas to Pancho Villa who was raiding border towns, Army surgeons found Conley had a heart ailment and ordered that he be relieved from duty. The colonel appealed, but President Woodrow Wilson sustained the surgeons’ opinion.

Around 1914, apparently wearying of the hot, fetid summers in New York City, Conley acquired a large tract of farmland along Bennett’s Farm Road west of Route 7 and erected his 34-room mansion atop the hill as an “outpost” from city life.

“It was the most beautiful place in the state of Connecticut,” said Julius Tulipani, who came to work as superintendent at Outpost Farm in 1919. “And it was the most difficult to run.”

Tulipani first met the colonel when he did some contracting work on the estate. Then only 20 years old, Tulipani had almost single-handedly constructed a 40-foot-high water tower that could hold 90,000 gallons. (The tower stood off Great Hill Road until 1974 when a pair of youthful arsonists who had been on a rampage burned it down in a spectacular, nighttime blaze.)

Outpost Farm was a self-sufficient operation in those days. Water came from springs across

Route 7, and was pumped up the hill into the tank to serve the house and barns. Conley even had his own electrical generating plant (the generator had two 4,500-pound flywheels) that supplied all of the electricity for Outpost until sometime in the 1920s when utility lines replaced it.

To back up the power plant, Conley purchased a giant, wind-powered  generator with a flywheel some 36 feet across. Manufactured by a Canadian outfit, only two or three of the devices ever operated in the United States, Tulipani said. A 1926 Ridgefield Press article called it “the second largest windmill in the world.”

Running Outpost required many skills, Tulipani recalled in 1973 when he was 82. Besides fields of rye, oats, corn, and 10 acres of lawn to care for, there were thoroughbred Guernseys and their products. When the colonel wintered in Manhattan, he’d have the fresh milk and butter, packed in ice, sent almost daily to the city on the 7:32 train out of Ridgefield.

Pigs were bred on the farm — 40 to 50 of them a year —  but like the other farm products, were used only for the estate and never sold. Tulipani also oversaw the raising of sheep, chickens, pheasant, and even quail for the Conley food supply. He also had charge of the work and riding horses.

Conley was always a large-scale employer. In the early days of Outpost Farm, five families lived on the estate, tending to the farm and grounds. Among them were names later commonplace in Ridgefield: Marinelli, Cassavechia, Servadio, Baldaserini and, of course, Tulipani.

In the house the colonel employed a staff of at least seven women, including a cook, kitchen maid, waitress, parlor maid, chambermaid, laundress, and nurse for his four children. He also had one or two chauffeurs and a private secretary.

Tulipani described  Conley as tall and “quite a man. They were a nice family, a good-living family.”

“They were very nice people, lovely people,” agreed Bill Oliverson, who tended to the Conley dairy operation. “They were very good to the workers.”

With the invention of cellophane sometime around 1920, the future of tinfoil began to dim. Conley sold off his interest in the company and retired. But one day soon after, he was chatting with his friend, Max Schling, head of a well-known seed producing firm on Long Island (and whose name was used in the title of an Ogden Nash poem). Schling had visited Outpost and was struck by the land, then almost all fields. He suggested that Conley put some trees on it.  

The colonel like the idea, began planting trees in 1923 and founded Outpost Nurseries. While the operation was started as a hobby, it wound up as a business — and a giant business at that.

During the 1920s Conley awed the small town of 3,500 people by buying up parcel after parcel of land, paying comparatively high prices. Before he was finished, he had acquired virtually every acre along both sides of Route 35 from just south of Copps Hill Plaza  north to the town line on Route 7 and onward into Danbury. His holdings also stretched through Farmingville to Route 7 and up into Ridgebury.

Conley’s control over the northeast portion of town, particularly Danbury Road, prompted some to call him “a one-man zoning commission,” for he prevented those properties from being developed for many years.   

Throughout most of this 2,000 acres, Conley and his successors planted hundreds of thousands of trees and shrubs. Although most were sold over the years, thousands still stand today in town. Roads recall the names of species of nursery stock Conley grew in their vicinity: Poplar Road, Birch Lane, Linden Road, Cherry Lane, Copper Beech Lane, Dogwood Drive, and Laurel Lane. And, of course, there is Nursery Road.

Outpost Nurseries also had a huge greenhouse where Copps Hill Plaza is today. Several hundred thousand seedlings were raised there each year.

Outpost  soon became one of the largest retail nursery businesses in the East. Among its many jobs between 1925 and World War II were the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair, the 1939 New York

World’s Fair, the National Gallery of Art  in Washington, D.C., parks along Riverside Drive in New York City (for which trees were brought down the Hudson River on barges), Tryon Park in Manhattan, Parkchester in the Bronx (one of the first large-scale housing projects in New York City), colleges like Harvard, Yale, and Williams, Narragansett and Monmouth Raceways, and the estates of such people as songwriter Cole Porter, commentator Lowell Thomas, statesmen Franklin D. Roosevelt and Thomas E. Dewey, columnist Walter Winchell, actor Robert Montgomery, and the Buckleys at Sharon.

The business was doing so well that additional nurseries were established in Long Island, and in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina to grow trees and shrubs that couldn’t be raised in Ridgefield’s climate or soil. The company also maintained a Park Avenue office in New York City.

At the height its operation in the late 1920s and 1930s, the Outpost estate, farm and nurseries included between 30 and 40 houses in which employees lived; a 1926 Press article places the number of employees at between 30 and 60, depending on the season. Those numbers grew in the 1930s when Outpost became Ridgefield’s largest employer.

Besides supplying much food to its workers, Outpost also had its own garbage removal system and dump, and provided ice cut from Bennett’s Pond for the iceboxes.

But the nursery wasn’t the colonel’s only interest. In the 1920s, he built a kennel along

Danbury Road, right at the intersection of Routes 7 and 35. The 175-foot-long building was the largest kennel in New England. At one point the colonel had 20 Kerry blue terriers (his favorite — he was a pioneer in bringing the breed to America), 19 Sealyham terriers, 40 cocker spaniels, and 60 English setters in the kennel. After the colonel’s death, the building was acquired by Waldeck Kennels, which bred St. Bernards and cocker spaniels. Later the Coast Guard trained dogs there, and then the Gaines dog food company took it over as a research center. Finally, in the 1950s, the doghouse became a steakhouse, and then in the 1970s, the Red Lion. The Italian restaurant, with that odd hidden history, was torn down in 2006 to make way for apartments.

Just north of the old kennel site is a large stone and wood building, which served as Outpost’s

offices. It’s now part of Stonehouse Commons condominiums.

In 1928, Conley acquired a Danbury Road house that had been built around 1812 by a carpenter for his bride. Two years later and only two months before his death, the colonel opened The Outpost Inn on what is now the site of Fox Hill condominiums. He created the pond that still exists

there — calling it Willow Pond — on which thousands of Ridgefielders used to skate in winters from the 1930s until the 1960s.

Many celebrities visited the inn — most to dine and some to stay overnight. Among the diners was Eleanor Roosevelt, who drove herself there for lunch in 1940. It was also a popular dining spot for Ridgefielders, and several local organizations had their meetings there.

In 1983 letter to this writer, Elise Conley Cox, the colonel’s daughter, reminisced about the inn.

“I remember the Japanese room, with its imported silk panels; the blue crystal sconces in the

Sheraton dining room; the lovely entrance hall, with its graceful stairway.  Lily Pons had a beautiful dinner party there one evening — and wore a stunning gown!

“The antiques throughout were carefully chosen by my father, who loved scouting them out: The wall fountain, in the formal Linden tree garden, we found in Florence. Heavens only knows what happened to Bacchus and the other statues.

“When the swamp was drained and the Willow Pond formed, we had stately swans patrolling — and its rustic bridge was a copy of the one in Monet’s garden.”

As for Danbury Road, it was a “lovely winding maple-shaded road, wandering to the village — somewhat different now.”

Outpost Inn operated until the early 1960s when it became the Shapley School, a college preparatory school that lasted until around 1967. David Paul, developer of Casagmo, bought the 28-acre property and turned it into Fox Hill, the town’s first condominiums.

While Conley’s inn became a site for homes, his home became the site of an inn. In 1946, his Outpost Farm mansion was sold and converted into the Fox Hill Inn. Known for its fine dining and

spectacular views of the countryside, the inn drew many diners from New York City. In 1970, owner John Yervant accepted an offer from IBM to sell the property. The computer company wanted to use the site as school for its executives in a country-club setting. But IBM also wanted to be able to fly those executives in and out by helicopter, and the uproar over the potential aircraft noise prompted IBM to abandon its plans. Vandalized, decaying and a hazard, the Outpost/Fox Hill Inn mansion was torn down in 1975.

IBM held on to the Fox Hill land until the 1990s when it sold its holdings to a New Jersey developer called Eureka, which wanted to put multifamily housing there. After battling the developer for several years, the town acquired the Fox Hill Inn site and other former IBM land totaling 458 acres in 2001, and sold it to the state for Bennett’s Pond State Park two years later. (In 2017, Eureka still owned former Conley/IBM land on the south side of Bennett’s Farm Road, but no development has taken place there.)

Colonel Conley was active in various civic efforts. For many years he operated a camp at Outpost Farm  for underprivileged Catholic boys from the city. The camp took children for two-week sessions throughout the summer, had its own director and staff, and offered many activities, including swimming in a large pool.

 The colonel was a strong supporter of Boys Scouts, and contributed substantially to St. Mary Parish (more than 25 clergymen attended his funeral there). 

After Conley’s death, his family took over the nurseries operation.  

Conley and his companies left behind a legacy of the countless trees that still grow in the Farmingville, Limestone and Ridgebury districts on his old nursery land. But he also bought many people to Ridgefield who had worked for him or his family, including two nurserymen who became first selectmen — Harvey Tanton and J. Mortimer Woodcock. Others were also significant contributors to the community, among them Bill and Marywade Rodier, whose flower shop still exists today on Main Street — Bill was one of the five founders of the Ridgefield Symphony Orchestra in 1964.

     In 1942, Outpost Nurseries joined the war effort, setting up a large sawmill on Route 7 south of Little Pond (site of the old Benrus/Perkin-Elmer plants, now used for the Pond’s Edge medical offices). Another mill stood on the site of today’s Pamby Motors service center at Danbury and Copps Hills Roads. Outpost could cut huge logs for building Navy patrol vessels, minesweepers, PT boats, and other small craft that required structural wood instead of iron and steel. President Franklin Roosevelt supplied trees from the 1,500-acre Hyde Park estate for this effort — some of them may have come from Outpost originally. 

      Several hundred thousand board feet of oak for shipbuilding was cut from Hyde Park in 1942 alone. The trees had to be hauled 55 miles to Ridgefield where the wood was cut and then

distributed to several shipyards along the Atlantic Coast.

     After Conley died of meningitis on Sept. 7, 1930 at Outpost, many words of praise were written.  “The colonel has done much to beautify Ridgefield,” The Ridgefield Press said. “Attractive buildings have been created, and formerly where hundreds of waste acres had been allowed to run to scrub and wild grow, have been cultivated, grade and thousands of trees have been planted.”

His home, The Danbury Times said, was “one of the showplaces of the East.” The nursery became “a splendid public park, running for miles along both sides of roads between Danbury and Ridgefield.

“The instinct for beauty which Colonel Conley possessed ran peculiarly to the improvement

of the great outdoors. He had as well a sense of beauty in architecture, but chiefly he made the land which he owned flare into such satisfaction of eye and mind as artists desire.”

Praising the colonel’s revamping of miles of the Routes 7 and 35 corridor, The Danbury News added: “Thousands of people… who did not know this splendid man personally became familiar with his name through his work along this busy highway and came to respect and admire him through the exceptionally fine character of that work.”

In a 1973 letter, Elise Cox, his daughter and last surviving child, observed: “He loved Ridgefield and Outpost Farm, and constantly sought ways to make both more beautiful. His life was simply lived, with honor and integrity the measure of all his actions.”

Cyril Ritchard: 

‘Captain Hook’

Millions knew him, not by his name but by his character. For Cyril Ritchard played Captain Hook alongside Mary Martin when the acclaimed Broadway production of “Peter Pan” was staged live for television March 7, 1955, making TV history with its huge audience and high quality production. 

His face and his voice were famous and he enjoyed telling of the time he was spotted by a rough-looking gang of teenagers who surrounded him. 

“I thought they were going to attack me, but instead they stared and exclaimed: ‘You're

Captain Hook!’ I'm glad the reason for their attention was curiosity, not animosity.”

The witty actor from Australia starred in countless stage and screen productions around the world and over a career that started before World War I and ended in 1977 when he collapsed on stage of a heart attack. 

Born Cyril Trimnell-Ritchard (a name he shortened to fit on marquees) in 1898,  Ritchard was the son of a hotel manager father who wanted him to become a doctor. However, he quit medical school at the age of 19 and took to the stage, making his debut in the chorus of a Sydney musical. Three months later, he was performing the lead.

From there he went on to appear over the next half century in innumerable comedies,

Shakespearean plays, musicals, and even operas.

“I have four notes, two of them good,” he said of his singing abilities. 

Ritchard also made six movies, including “Half A Sixpence” in 1967.

Shakespearean comedy fascinated Ritchard, who often performed at the American Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford, Conn., and worked to raise money for its survival. In an effort typical of both his energy and his versatility, he directed the play and performed two parts (Oberon and Bottom) in a 1967 production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” at Stratford.

“It’s really a mental feat,” he said at the time. “The changes would be quite impossible if my mind panicked...But I like the challenge.”

Throughout his career he was known for his smile and his sense of humor. He once told Leonard Lyons of The New York Post That he was unaffected by small audiences in theaters. “Fortunately,” he said, “my sight is bad, so I can’t even see the empty seats.”

“He was a very funny and witty fellow,” said actress Kathleen Eason, a longtime friend and fellow Ridgefielder. “His stories and anecdotes of happenings to him on and off stage were hysterically funny. Once, when he was very young and just starting to be successful, a fan asked for his autograph at a movie premiere. Cyril brightened right up and with his pencil poised, began laboriously to write: ‘Best wishes and good luck, Cyril Ritchard’ The irate fan said: ‘Come on, hurry up, don’t write a book. Here comes Greta Garbo!’ ”

He maintained that he developed his abilities at comedy as a child. “As I was taken to my room to be spanked by my father, I had to think of something to make him laugh,” he said. “If I could, it was a pretty weak spanking.”

He bought his Danbury Road home, which he called “Lone Rock,” in 1960, and “absolutely loved Ridgefield and that little house,” Eason said. “He couldn’t wait to get out of New York and to his Shangri-La, as he called it.”

Ritchard frequently entertained guests from New York at Lone Rock. One Sunday in the summer of 1965, he bused up the entire cast and crew from “The Roar of the Greasepaint — The Smell of the Crowd,” in which he played one of his best-known roles. He had planned to serve them beefsteak and kidney pies, but changed his mind. “I remembered about Americans and kidneys, and substituted the beef Wellington,” he said, adding that Americans are likely to find kidneys appealing

only when they denote the shape of swimming pools.

He was often seen about town with his poodle, Trim (a trimmed version of his trimmed name). “He got to know a great many people in the town,” Mrs. Eason said. “He always raised his hat, helped old ladies across the road, and stopped to talk to people.”

Ritchard contributed to many local organizations including the Ridgefield Workshop for the Performing Arts. He read the Declaration of Independence at a 1976 Bicentennial ceremony at the Community Center. “I was shocked when they asked me to do this,” he told the crowd. “I'm not an American. I'm a citizen of Australia. And I love the British. So there!”

Despite his age — he had turned 79 a couple weeks before his death — and warnings from his doctor, Ritchard maintained a work schedule that would tire a much younger man. In 1974, when he was hospitalized after collapsing at work in California, he admitted that “the doctor here says in the future I should be a little less enthusiastic in my work. I had been under pressure for six weeks. I was directing (“Sugar”), but nine other people thought they were, and kept screaming.”

A few months later the 76-year-old appeared in three concerts of “La Perichole” in Miami and a short time after that, gave 22 performances of 11 different programs during a 2½ week Theatre Guild at Sea cruise in the Caribbean.

“I never worked so hard in my life,” he admitted afterward.

A devout Catholic who attended  Mass almost daily, he was a benefactor of St. Mary's Parish.

His funeral in 1977 was at St. Mary’s, with the Mass celebrated by longtime friend and TV celebrity, Bishop Fulton J. Sheen.

Cyril Ritchard is buried at St. Mary’s Cemetery next to his beloved wife, actress Madge Elliott, who had died five years before he moved to Ridgefield — he loved the town so much he had had her remains moved here from New York.

Under his name, Cyril Trimnell-Ritchard, on the gravestone, it says, “Captain Hook.”

Albert Tramer: 

The Last Outpost

From the 1920s until 1962, one of the most popular — and most beautiful — places to dine or spend a weekend in southwestern Connecticut was the Outpost Inn on Danbury Road. Guests seeking an escape in the country included Marilyn Monroe and her then husband, playwright Arthur Miller; Walt Disney and his family; and Broadway star Ethel Merman.

First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt drove herself over to have lunch there one day.

The Outpost Inn began life in 1928 when Col. Louis D. Conley, who owned nearly 2,000 acres of northeastern Ridgefield and nearby Danbury as part of his Outpost Nurseries, decided to create a

country inn on a piece of his property along Danbury Road just north of the village.

The main inn building was a house built in 1816 by Albin Jennings, a popular Ridgefield carpenter in the early 19th Century. Jennings had waited four years to gain permission from the parents of Polly Dauchy to marry his sweetheart, and once the parents acquiesced, he built this house

for his new bride. It had a number of features that demonstrated his skill as a fine builder, including a spiral staircase near the front entrance.

Over the years, the inn had had several managers or owners. The last owner was Albert Tramer, a Swiss-born and -trained chef who had held positions in some of New York City’s top restaurants, and his wife, Gloria, who helped run the inn.

Born in 1905, Albert D. Tramer came to the United States in 1924. By the late 1930s, he

owned and operated La Petite Swiss, The Swiss Chalet, and the Tramer Restaurant in the city, taking time out during World War II to serve as a Navy chief petty officer in the South Pacific.

In 1953, the Tramers bought what was then called the Hearthstone Outpost Inn. They lived on the inn grounds with their three daughters; he commuted between Outpost and his New York restaurants for a couple of years before deciding to devote his full time to the Ridgefield operation.

Outpost attracted not only celebrities, but local organizations, such as Rotary and the Jaycees,

who would meet there — Rotary was so pleased with the accommodations the Tramers provided that the club gave them a silver bowl in appreciation. Major magazines used its elegant setting and gardens for photo shoots. And townspeople enjoyed not only the food, but Outpost Pond.

“The pond along Route 35 was always open to the townspeople for ice skating during the

winter and was hugely popular,” said Tramer’s daughter, Diane Wilush. “Often Albert would serve hot chocolate to the skaters.”

In 1962, Tramer sold the place to Carl Shapley, son of Harvard astronomer Harlow Shapley

and brother of Nobel economist Lloyd Shapley. Carl operated The Shapley School, a prep school, which soon got into financial troubles and closed in 1967.

Soon after, David Paul — who was building Casagmo at the time — bought the property at a

public auction, and developed Fox Hill, the town’s first condominiums. Plans were to turn the main inn building into a community center, but the building caught fire in 1968 and was eventually razed.

Tramer worked for a while as director of the restaurant at The Westport Inn. He retired and moved to Florida in 1973 where he died in 1994 at the age of 88. Gloria Tramer died 10 years later.