Jane Trahey: 

Women and Power

Jane Trahey’s accomplishments read like those of a half dozen people put together, all talented. 

She was a leading fashion copywriter, the first adwoman to earn more than a million dollars in a year, and among the first to establish her own New York City agency (with such clients as Calvin Klein, Bill Blass,  and Elizabeth Arden). 

She wrote a half dozen books of humor, including “Pecked to Death by Goslings,” a novel about living in the small town of Old Gosling — i.e., Ridgefield. It described her conversion of a New Road barn into a home, a place she called Versailles, “not because it looks like it, but because it costs as much,” she said.

Her novel, “Life with Mother Superior,” retitled “The Trouble with Angels,”  was made into a Hollywood movie starring Rosalind Russell and directed by Ida Lupino. 

Trahey was a playwright, the author of  “Ring Around the Bathtub,”  which was on Broadway. 

She had also written screenplays, cookbook parodies, and regular columns for Advertising Age, The Chicago Tribune, and Working Women. 

She was a leader in the National Organization for Women, wrote and lectured extensively about women and power, and was a founder of the First Women’s Bank of New York. She wrote an autobiographical self-help book called  “Jane Trahey on Women & Power: Who's Got It. How to Get It.”

And she won more than 200 awards for advertising, writing and public service. 

Born in Chicago in 1923,  Trahey graduated from Mundelein College, a Catholic women’s school, in 1943. Her first job was at The Chicago Tribune in the records library, known as the morgue. “My mother never got over it,”  she once said. “Every time she would call and someone would answer ‘the morgue,’ she'd cross herself and hang up.”

Her real career began writing advertising copy for men’s underwear. One of her first ad jobs was at Neiman-Marcus in Dallas. She came to New York in 1956 and soon founded Jane Trahey  Associates, which operated for many years under several names..

“It was a very informal company, like a playground,” Rocky Piliero, Trahey’s production manager, told The New York Times. “Ms. Trahey didn’t like accounts. She liked projects. She liked to do something new. She’d be gung-ho for six months, then get bored.”

She had her country home on New Road from the 1950s until the early 1970s, when she moved to Kent. She shared her place here with fabric artist Tammis Keefe, who died in 1960, and with her companion for more than 40 years, pioneering TV producer Jacqueline Babbin. 

Ms. Trahey died in April 2000 in Kent at the age of 76.

Tammis Keefe: 

An Artist of the Cloth

Tammis Keefe lived in Ridgefield only four years, but they were her last four years and the acclaimed fabric artist chose the town to be her final resting place.

Born Margaret Thomas Keefe in 1913 in Los Angeles, Calif., she was called Peg by her family but preferred Tammis, which is Gaelic for Thomas. She studied at the Chouinard Institute of Art (now part of the California Institute of the Arts), and went to work for the Disney studios. She later became art director of the “Arts and Architecture” magazine, and in the late 1940s began designing handkerchiefs for Kimball scarves. 

“Handkerchiefs are fun to do, and I try to make them fun to give,”  she told The San Francisco Chronicle in 1949.

By the mid-1950s, Ms. Keefe had become one of the first women fabric designers whose signature appeared on her work, mostly handkerchiefs, linen kitchen towels, tablecloths, and scarves. Lord & Taylor purchased a full-page advertisement in The New York Times for a “Meet the Designer” day to introduce her and her fabrics. She was featured in many newspaper articles, magazines and books. 

She produced some 400 designs for handkerchiefs and at least 100 for dishtowels, “all featuring her trademarks of unexpected color and subtle wit,” reports the website TammisKeefe.com

She herself described her textile designs as a “happy marriage of the past and the present, with a healthy respect for the future.”

Ms. Keefe came to Ridgefield in 1956, making her home on New Road with author and ad executive Jane Trahey. She died four years later at the age of 46 and is buried in St. Mary Cemetery.

Long after her death, she has been rediscovered through inclusion in events such as “A Woman's Hand: Designing Textiles in America, 1945-1969,” an exhibit of work by women designers at the Fashion Institute of Technology in 2000. Her work is now in many collections and museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian Design Museum, the Henry Ford Museum, and the Brooklyn Museum.

Jacqueline Babbin: 

Early writer for television

Jacqueline T. Babbin was an Emmy-winning pioneer among women in the field of television production.

Born in Manhattan in 1921, Ms. Babbin started high school at age 11, and Smith College when she was only 15. She began her career working for a literary agency, but moved to television in 1954 becoming a script editor for David Susskind’s production company, Talent Associates. There she was soon writing TV adaptations of stage plays, including Our Town, Ethan Frome, Billy Budd, and Harvey. She moved to producing, becoming one of the first women to be a head producer, and leading such acclaimed series as Armstrong Circle Theater and The DuPont Show of the Month.

With Mr. Susskind’s company, she produced many top TV specials including Hedda Gabler (1963) with Ingrid Bergman and Michael Redgrave  and The Crucible (1967) with George C. Scott, Colleen Dewhurst, and Fritz Weaver. Her 1976 TV movie Sybil, about a woman with multiple personality disorder, starred Sally Field and Joanne Woodward; it won both Emmy and Peabody awards for her and a total of four Emmys, including one for Ms. Field.

“Jackie, next to me, you’re the best TV producer I know, ” Susskind once told her.

In 1968 she started her own production company, called Clovis, doing original dramas for children and earning a Peabody for one of them on the Children’s Hour, called J.T.,

ABC hired her in 1979 as a vice president in charge of bringing novels to television through mini-series, including  Inside the Third Reich, Masada, and The Winds of War. 

“In order for a miniseries to be successful in today’s market,” Ms.  Babbin told The New York Times in 1980, “it has to have a high concept and a high theme. The subject matter has to be something special. There has to be a reason to disrupt the regular programming.”

By then she was working in California, but in 1982 she grabbed the opportunity to return to New York by producing the popular soap opera, All My Children. “She helped enliven the tired soap opera formula with fast-moving stories of adventure and international intrigue,” said the Paley Center for the Media.

Babbin lived on New Road from 1961 until the mid-1970s, with her companion of 40 years, Jane Trahey. (Ms. Trahey was a leading advertising executive, a screenwriter and a novelist, whose book, Pecked to Death by Goslings told of her experiences living in suburban Ridgefield.)

The two moved to Kent where  Babbin, who retired in the early 1990s, wrote two mystery novels, Prime Time Corpse and Bloody Soaps. She died in 2001 at the age of 80. Ms. Trahey had died a year earlier.