Isabel M. O’Shea: 
A Compassionate Principal

The plaque outside the library at Veterans Park School reads: “An innate compassion and deep understanding of human beings, coupled with a keen mind and fine administrative talents, make her an outstanding personality.” 

The plaque honors Isabel M. O’Shea, the first principal of Veterans Park School. The school’s library is named for her; so is the auditorium of East Ridge Middle School, a building she helped to design. 

Isabel Margaret O’Shea was born in Ridgefield in 1905, daughter of a popular chauffeur. After graduating from Ridgefield’s Hamilton High School in 1923, she studied education in normal school and two years later became a teacher at the old Benjamin Franklin Grammar School (which soon became the East Ridge School and then Ridgefield High School). Both she and her sister Elizabeth (Mrs. Harvey Lown) were teachers. Both women, said historian Dick Venus, “were the old-fashioned type of teacher who insisted on getting some knowledge into the heads of even the poorest students.” 

Isabel O’Shea was named principal of the town’s elementary level in 1944, when those grades were housed both at the East Ridge School and at the Garden School on Bailey Avenue.

When Veterans Park opened in 1955, she became its principal, serving till her retirement in 1960. 

Though O’Shea left her job with the schools, she didn’t leave community service. In 1961, she became a member of the building committee that erected Farmingville School and then served on the East Ridge Junior High’s building committee. 

She was chairman of a town study committee on recreation needs, and was active in the District Nursing Association, now the RVNA. In 1960, she was named Rotary Club Citizen of the Year, the first woman so honored. Rotarians noted that O’Shea was chosen for “contributing a great deal to the educational system and devoting to it more hours and actual labor than her duties called for.”

In 1965, the year she died, the Veterans Park library was dedicated to her. When the school was built, the space devoted to the library turned out considerably smaller than what O’Shea had requested. In the years that followed, she pressed administrators to enlarge the library, which was finally accomplished a short time before her death. 

The bronze plaque outside the library notes that “she devoted her life to the community, its people, to her family and to her God,” adding that, through the dedication of the library to her, “It is hoped that her devotion to education will thus be remembered and serve as a constant inspiration to all people who visit this library.”

Both the plaque and an artist’s portrait commissioned by former student Louis Ridolfi would help keep her memory alive, said George Stromberg, her successor as principal of Veterans Park. 

“To forget her and to permit her memory to fade into oblivion would be unthinkable,” Stromberg said. “Her life has touched all of us in one form or another. Future generations should be made aware of her interest in their welfare.”

Edward Brolin:  

The Principal Who Pitched 

to ‘The Splendid Splinter’

Ed Brolin loved being a teacher and a principal. But get him talking about baseball and he sparkled. Brolin had, after all, come close to being a professional ball player and had — as a teenager — pitched to one of the greatest hitters of all time.

 A native of Boston, Edward M. Brolin was born  in 1930  and graduated from Bridgewater (Mass.) State Teachers College with a degree in biology, later earning a master's from Fairfield University. During the Korean War,  he served in the Marine Corps.

After a period of working as an insurance investigator in the Boston area, he turned to education and in 1963 took a job teaching biology at Ridgefield High School on East Ridge. 

“I came to Ridgefield because it was a good place to teach, to live and to raise my family,” he said in a 1990 interview. “I’ve never been sorry for that decision.”

In 1966,  Brolin was named the Jaycees “Outstanding Teacher of the Year.” He was elected president of the Ridgefield Teachers Association a year later. 

Brolin became chairman of the science department at Ridgefield High School in 1968.  Two years later, he was named assistant principal of the school, but only a few months after that appointment, he became principal of East Ridge Junior High School (today a middle school).

Brolin led the junior high for 13 years, including a difficult period in the 1970s when it was the most overcrowded school in the system — some 1,300 seventh and eighth graders were packed into a building designed for about 850. The school system had more than 6,000 students back then — the systemwide enrollment today is about 4,000. 

Because of his background as a teacher and administrator at the high school,   Brolin was named chairman of a committee that planned the use of the “new” high school that was about to open in 1972 on North Salem Road. He served on many other curriculum and administrative committees, and headed the Ridgefield Administrators Association for 10 years, often negotiating contracts. 

Around 1984, Brolin moved to the high school, serving as assistant principal until his retirement in 1990.

When he announced that retirement, he told an interviewer he felt the best part of his career was working with the students, parents and teachers. “Deep down,” he admitted, “I hope they’ll miss me just a little bit.”

“We’re going to miss him,”  said Guidance Counselor Arlene Heissan. Besides providing “the best advice,” she explained, “he cares about kids and the faculty.”

Ed Brolin died in 2002 at the age of 71. He and his wife Mary, a former elementary school teacher who died three years later, had lived on Walnut Grove Road where they raised three sons.

An avid sportsman and collector of sports memorabilia,  Brolin had been a top college baseball player who was once scouted by the Boston Red Sox. When he was still in high school in 1948, he was invited to a tryout with the Sox at Fenway Park. There, he was given the opportunity to pitch to Ted Williams. 

“He hit a couple that I think are still going,” Brolin said during a 1983 interview at a Ted Williams appearance in Greenwich. “But it’s something I’ll remember for the rest of his my life.”

He also remained a lifelong Sox fan.

In Ridgefield, Brolin shared with kids his love of baseball by serving as a coach in both Little League and Pony baseball. His first team, Ridgefield Savings Bank, became the undefeated Little League champion that year.