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.”

Youth On Parade

Several pictures of the Children’s Parade during Ridgefield’s 250th anniversary celebration  have been posted on Facebook’s “Old Ridgefield” group, but none quite as impressive as this one. 

The scene is Governor Street looking west from East Ridge on Friday, May 23, 1958. Led by the high school cheerleaders, the parade of the town’s public and Catholic school children had marched down Main Street and was now nearing its end as it approached  the athletic field behind the old Ridgefield High School.

The town had about 1,500 school children back then and it’s fair to say most of them marched in this parade. (Today about 4,765 are enrolled, which would make for a much longer parade!)

At the ballfield, thousands gathered for performances staged by students of various grades and schools.

An interesting aspect of this picture is the field to the right. Just a few weeks after this picture was taken, ground was broken for the new Ridgefield Boys’ Club on that property. In May 1958, the club was still in the old Loder House, on the same north side of Governor Street but west of this scene, about where the Fairfield County Bank drive-in is (the trees are hiding it from the camera).

The lawn and walk visible beyond the future club site at the right led to the Victorian house that soon became the Donnelly office building for a half century. It was torn down four years ago for the new Ridgefield Visiting Nurse Association headquarters. (For more on this, search this blog for “House of Friends.”)

Up the hill behind the trees on the same side would, in another year and a half, appear the Donnelly Shopping Center, with its First National supermarket and Woolworth’s. 

The left or south side of Governor Street looks pretty much the same today, except it’s irrigated baseball and soccer fields instead of just lawn.

One last interesting feature of this picture is the cheerleaders. If you look closely, most of them, along with some band members, appear to be looking at something happening behind the lead cheerleader in the middle. And they are smiling about it. Why?

The picture was taken by Bramac Studio, according to the back. While no photographer’s name is given, Bramac was owned by James Kavallines,  and was the contract photographer for The Norwalk Hour; that is to say, The Hour did not have staff photographers and used Bramac for photo assignments for many years.

Michael Skandera: 

A Record Educator

Dr. Michael Skandera may hold the record for longevity as a Ridgefield educator —  45 continuous years. Other staff members have had longer careers, but probably none spent as many years on the job only in Ridgefield. 

Dr. Skandera was proud of that. “Well over 3,000 pupils have passed through my portals during my career, and I’m thankful for the rich experience they afforded me,” he told The Ridgefield Press in 1992 when he retired. 

A Danbury native born in 1924, Dr. Skandera graduated from Danbury Teachers College (WestConn) and, during World War II, was a bomber pilot who flew 50 missions over Europe. 

He came to Ridgefield in 1947, teaching at the East Ridge School, which then housed

elementary, middle and high school years. For a long time he was the only male elementary school teacher in town. 

The starting salary then, considered high in the region, was $2,400, he recalled. “In surrounding towns, most teachers made around $2,000,” he said. ($2,400 in 1947 was about equal to $25,000 in today’s dollars.)

When Veterans Park opened in 1955 to handle elementary grades, Skandera remained at East Ridge with the fourth through sixth grades and was “teacher in charge.” When Ridgebury School opened in 1962, he went there, specializing in sixth grade science. 

Long the only elementary teacher with a doctorate in education and one of the first to be named a “master teacher” here, Dr. Skandera did stints as principal of Veterans Park School and of Ridgebury, but each time returned to the classroom because, he said, he liked teaching kids better than being an administrator. 

Dr. Skandera’s interest in nature showed itself at Ridgebury where he helped set up the nature trails at that school and used them fall, winter and spring to teach science to pupils and to give teacher workshops. 

If teaching in Ridgefield wasn’t enough, Dr. Skandera also spent many years as superintendent of the Sunday school at St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in Danbury.

As a retiree living in Danbury, Dr. Skandera was active in mushrooming, and in his favorite sport, golf, in which he may hold another record, regionally: He had five holes-in-one in his lifetime.

He died in 2014 at the age of 89.

The Abbe Family: 

The Charming Children 

It was 1936, the height of the Depression, and the nation was looking for distractions. Often the youthful and innocent provided them. Shirley Temple was a hit in the movies, Little Orphan Annie was the star of comics and radio. And in Ridgefield lived three children who also won the hearts of many Americans. 

From left to right, John, Patience and Richard Abbe.

In April that year, Patience, Richard and John Abbe became instant celebrities with the publication of their book, “Around the World in Eleven Years.” Written mostly by Patience, 11, and encouraged by their mother, Polly Shorrock Abbe, the travelogue was, according to its jacket, “by children for grown-ups. It is an enchanting odyssey.” 

Indeed, the three Abbes were offspring of James E. Abbe, one of the top photographers of the era, and with their parents, they had spent most of their lives in Europe. They played with Pavlova and Hemingway, loved Lillian Gish, and admired Thomas Mann — all of whom they met along with many other celebrities of the era. 

They arrived in Ridgefield in 1935, living first on West Lane just across the New York line and then on a West Mountain farm, all the time attending the East Ridge School (old high school). The next spring, The Press was full of reports of their exploding fame. The book was well reviewed everywhere — even the crotchety Alexander Woollcott called it “enchanting.” 

Hollywood wooed them for movies and politicians brought Patience to Capitol Hill, where she gave a dinner party — preparing her own food! 

“In spite of the whirlwind of excitement about their book, the youngsters are not the least carried away with any idea of their own importance,” The Ridgefield Press said at the time. “They remain perfectly natural children, with something akin to an air of resignation to their indubitable and meteoric rise to literary fame.”

A year later, they were gone — moving to a 320-acre ranch in Castle Rock, Colo., purchased with the profits from the book, which sold a then-remarkable 100,000 copies. The three — mostly Patience, who essentially wrote the first book — penned two more volumes: “Of All Places” (1937) and “No Place Like Home” (1940). 

Patience went on to work in journalism and lived in California, where she died in 2012. Richard eventually became a noted California judge; he died in 2000. John lived in California, too, and died the same year as Patience.

Their dad, James Abbe, is still recognized today as a pioneer photojournalist, and many of his works are owned by major museums. Though he was born in 1883, he was from Connecticut stock – many Abbes lived in Enfield. 

He grew up in Virginia and worked for newspapers and magazines, photographing many of the stars and political leaders of New York, Paris, London, Berlin, Madrid, and Moscow in the 20s and 30s. His portraits of Charlie Chaplin, Tyrone Power, Gloria Swanson, Cecil B. De Mille, and others were famous. But he went on to cover breaking news, recording the Spanish Civil War, the Nazis rise to power, and events in the Soviet Union — his 1932 portrait of Joseph Stalin was used to stop rumors that the dictator was dead. 

By the 1940s, Mr. Abbe had become a radio broadcaster in the West and in 1950, was one of the nation's first television columnists, writing for The Oakland Tribune until 1962 when he retired at 80. He was the author of I Photograph Russia (1934). Stars of the Twenties, a collection of his work, was posthumously published in 1975. 

Mr. Abbe died in 1973 in San Francisco.