Norman Craig: 

‘Stormin’ Norman’

“They used to call him the best-dressed fireman, because he always wore a shirt and a tie,” said Elsie Fossi Craig. 

Her husband Norman, longtime owner of Craig’s Jewelry Store, was an active volunteer fireman for 15 years. When a call came in, he’d have to politely ask customers to leave, lock up the store, and run to the fire station to drive the second truck. 

Born in 1927 in Bronxville, N.Y.,  Norman David Craig grew up in Scarsdale, N.Y., After graduating from high school and moving to Ridgefield in 1946, he joined the U.S. Marine Corps for two years and then began watch-making studies. He entered the jewelry business in 1950, when his mother, Helen Craig, bought the 40-year-old jewelry store of Francis D. Martin, then located near today's Roma Pizzeria. Seventy years later, at around 110, Craig's is the second oldest local retail business in Ridgefield  (only Bissell’s is older). 

In 1951, he and Elsie Fossi – who had been Mr. Martin’s secretary for nine years – were married. While  Craig technically retired in 1983, he continued for many years to help at the store, which was taken over by son William and daughters Karen Petrini and Lori Corsak. 

Craig had the rare distinction of having been a member of both the Democratic and Republican Town Committees. He started out a Republican, and served on that town committee and on the Board of Tax Review. A Democrat during the administration of his brother-in-law, First Selectman Louis J. Fossi, he served on various town study committees, was a delegate to the 1978 Democratic State Convention and was almost elected state representative in 1981. 

Later in life, he returned to the Republican fold, and in 1998, won a seat on the Board of Finance. 

His community service was extraordinary. He was an incorporator of the Visiting Nurse Association and the Boys and Girls Club, trustee of the Family Y, an assistant chief and president of the Ridgefield Volunteer Fire Department, director of the old Teen Center, Boy Scout scoutmaster, president and founding member of the Kiwanis Club, a founder with Clarence Korker of the Chamber of Commerce, and a sponsor of many Little League and other youth sports teams. 

He was a member of the American Legion and helped plan countless Memorial Day parades — and invariably marched in them, sometimes with the Legion and sometimes with the Knights of Columbus.

A devout Catholic, Craig served on the St. Mary Parish advisory board, its fund-raising committee and as an acolyte, and was a grand knight of the Marquette Council Knights of Columbus. He was also a supporter of Immaculate High School in Danbury, where he served on the original fund-raising committee that helped build the school, was president of the parents club and was a recipient of the lifetime achievement award.

For relaxation, Craig loved golf — and colorful golfing attire. He once remarked, “The Ridgefield Golf Course, I think, is one of the best things this town has done, as far as athletics is concerned for adults and kids — it gets a lot of play.”

All this activity helped earn him the Chamber of Commerce Public Service Award in 1986 and Kiwanis Citizen of the Year Award in 1990.

It also earned him the nickname, Stormin’ Norman.

Ida Fossi Makes Her Own

Ravioli, Sauce & Passatelli 

Ridgefield Press, Feb. 24, 1977 — Homemade ravioli like the kind Mrs. Domenic Fossi prepares on special occasions is a whole different ballgame from the somewhat limp squares of stuffed pasta in sauce which we had tasted before we tried hers. And for anyone who has, or can borrow, a pasta machine, these little spicy Italian mouthfuls are not hard to make.

Her grandchildren love ravioli, Mrs. Fossi explained, and after one bite we came to the conclusion that anybody’s grandchildren would love them!

Ravioli takes time to make, however, so Mrs. Fossi also showed us how to make some marvelous cheesy noodles for soup which can be prepared quickly and ground out through an old fashioned meat grinder. These are called passatelli and are as unusual as they are good. Both ravioli and passatelli freeze successfully.

Ridgefield’s First Selectman, Louis Fossi, was one member of a large family which grew up enjoying such treats. Mrs. Fossi is his mother. Her daughter, Norma Contessa, and Mrs. Louis Fossi were on hand to learn exactly how to make the ravioli. With one accomplished ravioli-maker in the  family, they have tended to have other specialties.

Good eating has always been a family tradition, and Norma reminisced  about the homemade ice cream they took turns cranking in an old-fashioned machine when she was a child and the Fossis lived on a farm in Ridgefield with plenty of cream from the cows.

For  ravioli stuffing for one meal for eight people, you need:

One pound ground beef

A half pound ground pork

One pound spinach

One teaspoon salt

Half teaspoon pepper

Quarter teaspoon nutmeg

Half teaspoon clove

One egg

Cook pound of fresh spinach and chop fine. Mix well with other ingredients.

To make the pasta in which the filling will be stuffed, combine:

Yolks of 10 eggs  

Whites of eight eggs

Six cups sifted flour

Reserve extra two egg whites to use later.

Mrs. Fossi makes a mound of flour on a board, then scoops a hollow in the center of the flour and pours in the ten yolks and eight whites. Then she kneads the egg into the flour with her hands. If the dough were to be rolled out by hand in the old-fashioned way, it would require quite a lot of kneading, and then an hour’s time to rest before rolling out, she says. But by using a pasta machine, the cook cuts down the kneading to a minimum. Also, the pasta machine makes the hour’s rest unnecessary.

Mrs. Fossi pushes a small flat oval of the dough into the widest adjustment in the slot in the machine. The machine has two rollers and a handle which turns these in such a way that they pull in, and flatten the dough in the slot between them.

The long thin strip of dough which results gets folded double and put through the slot again, then folded and pressed through the rollers a third time.

An attachment on the machine will vary the space between the rollers. She adjusts the space between the widest and the narrowest, then puts the strip through again. Then she adjusts the machine to the next-to-the-narrowest width, and puts the dough through again. 

By this time the dough is in a long strip, several inches wide and very thin.

This strip of pasta gets laid flat on the board, and Mrs. Fossi beats the two egg whites till frothy and paints the strip with egg white. A pastry brush is best for this job. Then she places tiny mounds of the stuffing mixture two abreast on half of the length of dough and folds the other half of the strip of dough on top.

No need to press down to seal the edges. Just take a pastry wheel and cut down the center of the doubled strip of dough. Then cut cross-ways between each set of two mounds of stuffing. Next, trim the outside edges so the tiny dumplings are cut zig-zag and sealed all round. The scraps cut from the edges may be kneaded into a flat oval and put through the machine again, or cooked like noodles and served with a sauce on some informal occasion. 

Repeat till all dough and stuffing are used. This recipe makes between 200 and 300 ravioli squares, depending on size. Mrs. Fossi generally doubles the recipe and simply spends a day making lots of ravioli. She suggests a beginner might wish to halve it and try making ravioli for four.

To freeze the ravioli, Mrs. Fossi puts them in a single layer on a cookie sheet and, as soon as they are frozen enough to handle, packs them in plastic freezer bags, each bag containing enough for one meal.

To cook, drop the ravioli squares into well-salted boiling water with about one tablespoon of salt to three quarts of water. If the ravioli is fresh made, cook about five minutes and test one by

tasting. It should be “al dente,” or firm to the tooth, not mushy like canned ravioli. If frozen squares are dropped into the boiling water, the ravioli should be done about three minutes after the water comes back to a full boil.

Drain, top with tomato sauce and freshly grated real parmesan cheese  (we cut cheese in squares and grate it in a blender, but the texture is even nicer grated by hand the way Mrs. Fossi does it.) She served a dry red wine with the ravioli. At a holiday meal, this would be a first course, followed by a roast and vegetable and then dessert and coffee.

Freezer buffs may like to make spaghetti sauce wholesale the way Mrs. Fossi does. She browns five or six Italian sausages and a piece of chuck in sausage drippings, adds a small onion cut fine and two cloves of garlic, and when these are golden brown, takes out the sausage and chuck, and adds about a pound and a half of chopped meat, and browns that.

Then she puts sausage and chuck back, adds 28 ounces of tomato puree, eight six-ounce cans of tomato paste, and enough water to make a sauce that can simmer for three hours. Her daughters say they add some whole canned tomatoes, too, and Mrs. Fossi noted that the amount of onion and garlic can be varied to taste.  The maker also adds salt and pepper and spices as desired.

Generally, Mrs. Fossi removes the sausage and chuck and serves those for supper on the day she made the tomato sauce. The sauce gets frozen in quart containers and thawed as wanted for ravioli and other treats. Be sure to use a rich, meaty sauce on the ravioli, Mrs. Fossi says.

But suppose you don’t have a pasta machine, or time to make ravioli. Try passatelli. 

Mix well with hands:

A cup and a half of bread crumbs

Three eggs, beaten

One cup grated parmesan cheese 

One tablespoon of flour

A fourth teaspoon of cloves

A dash of nutmeg.

The mixture should be pretty firm, almost like bread dough, but moister. It will stick to the hands slightly as you kneed it.

Put dough through meat grinder. It will come out of the holes as small, slightly rough noodles. You can freeze these now and use later if desired.

Drop into simmering chicken stock and cook seven minutes. The resulting chicken soup is just the thing for cheese lovers. The chicken soup may contain diced chicken meat, or just the passatelli — marvelous either way.

Mrs. Fossi follows her usual custom of making lots of chicken stock all at once and freezing in meal-sized amounts. Into several gallons of water she puts one chicken, a few ribs of celery, carrots, a small can of tomatoes, and near the end when the chicken is tender, salt and pepper to taste. The chicken becomes chicken salad for immediate consumption and the stock goes in the freezer.

[Note: Ida Frances Montanari Fossi (1906-1987) lived on Mulberry Street and, at the time of this story, was a widow. She was born  in Senigallia, Ancona, Marche, Italy, a daughter of John and Matilde Montanari, and came to this country in 1917. She and Dominic Fossi were married in 1923 in St. Mary’s Church. They had seven children: Lou Fossi, Norma Contessa,  Elsie Craig, Dorothy Marconi, Thomas Fossi, John Fossi, and Robert Fossi. Members of the Fossi family still live in Ridgefield. The article was written by Elizabeth Daniels Squire, who became a successful mystery novelist in her later years. She also wrote books on phrenology and palm reading. A former resident of Ridgefield and Redding, she produced the “Food and Drink” column in The Ridgefield Press for many years.]

Lillian Moorhead: 

Ahead of Her Time

Men had populated the Board of Selectmen for 265 years, when, in November 1973, that all changed: Lillian Moorhead was elected the first woman ever to hold a seat on the board. 

“Womenpower” did it, she said the day after the election. “I hope my election will encourage more women to run for office.”

It may, indeed, have have helped do just that, for in the years after her election, women began winning more and more seats in town government, often holding majorities on boards and commissions. And eight years after her pioneering win, Ridgefield elected its first woman chief executive, Elizabeth Leonard, who, ironically, defeated Moorhead for the job of first selectman.

“I was in favor of a state income tax and Liz creamed me,” Moorhead said 10 years later. (In 1991, after years of debate, the income tax was finally adopted. “It takes the state a while to catch up with me,” Moorhead said afterwards with a smile.)

A native of New Jersey, Moorhead was born in 1932. She and her husband, James, had lived in the South and on the West Coast before moving to Ashbee Lane in 1963.

She was a liberal Democrat who won the 1973 election alongside First Selectman Louis J. Fossi, also a Democrat, but more of a conservative. Despite Ridgefield’s heavy Republican majority, the two Democrats controlled the board, holding two of its then three seats.

“Lou is a native, a very popular guy,” Moorhead said, explaining the win years later. “Also, there was Watergate and the beginning of the women’s movement.”

Moorhead was re-elected four times, holding her seat until 1983 when she retired. As a selectman, she was an especially strong advocate for creation of the Housing Authority that eventually built the Ballard Green senior housing project.

“There were few believers in the Housing Authority in those early days,”  Fossi told Moorhead in front of more than 200 people who gathered for her retirement party in 1984. “But you acted out of concern for people who are less fortunate than most of us.”

Fossi and Moorhead often disagreed on issues, and votes sometimes found her in the minority, despite party affiliations.

“It’s better to be ahead of the times than behind them, and Lillian, you were ahead of them,” said Judge Romeo G. Petroni, a lifelong Republican, at the retirement dinner. “You have your principles and you stood behind them, even when Lou didn’t understand.”

Moorhead later served many years on the Housing Authority she helped to create. She was also on the Youth Commission, was a trustee of Danbury Hospital, and was a board member of the NAACP, and Regional Y. She was a founding member of the Women’s Political Caucus, which was active here in the 1970s and 80s, and which successfully pressed for the conversion of the Boys Club into a Boys and Girls Club. She also belonged to Friends of the Library, Meals on Wheels and the League of Women Voters.

Professionally, she tried on several different career hats, last of which was as a Realtor. She was well-regarded at that: In 1984, Governor William O’Neill appointed her a member of the Connecticut Real Estate Commission.

When she was moving to Martha’s Vineyard in 1991, she told a Press interviewer, “I used to be a newcomer. Now I’m a townie. It happened in the blink of an eye.”

A 1984 Press editorial said of Moorhead: “One of the most independent thinkers among recent selectmen, she was not afraid to stand up for positions that may have been unpopular with the administration and even with her party. Yet always her positions were enlightened ones, well-considered and with the community’s best interest  in mind.”

When Moorhead died of cancer in 1997 at the age of 65, her daughter, Sarah, observed, “My mom was one of those individuals who truly touched the souls of everyone who was lucky enough to have met her. She embraced life with such determination and zest and tried to impart that to others.”

Louis J. Fossi:

‘King Lou’

“Lou Fossi’s fingerprints are all over Ridgefield,” The Ridgefield Press once wrote. He sold shoes, insurance, groceries, and real estate. He served on two town boards, and then for eight years became one of the most popular first selectmen of the 20th Century.

A native son who devoted much of his life to his community, Louis John Fossi was born in 1930, one of seven children of immigrants from the Marches region of Italy. He graduated from Ridgefield High School in 1949 and served in the Air Force where he met his wife, Anne, an Alabama native. He returned to town with his bride in 1955 and worked at Fossi’s Footwear and at selling insurance for Prudential. He later operated the Wayside Market on Danbury Road, opposite Grove Street. 

Always civic minded, he was active in scouting and other community organizations, but in the early 60s, “I ran for public office – got crazy, lost my head,” he joked many years later. 

He served on the Board of Finance for two years, then eight years as the only Democrat on the Board of Selectmen. 

In 1973, he was elected first selectman, one of those uncommon Democrats who could win handily in what was largely a Republican town. 

“The Watergate scandal in 1973 may have helped a little, and his personable nature surely helped a lot,” said his son, Larry Fossi. “He was, as his wife says, a ‘people person’ through and through. Everybody knew Lou, and Lou knew everybody.”
Two months after he took office, nature gave him his first test as a leader – a December 1973 ice storm devastated the area, knocking out power for as much as a week in some parts of town while temperatures dipped to minus-2. (The storm inspired the Ang Lee movie, “The Ice Storm.”)

There followed constant budget battles and problems with school closings. 

Nonetheless, his administration had many accomplishments: it built Ballard Green senior housing, helped bring Boehringer Ingelheim to town, replaced the dump with a transfer station, moved the police out of the town hall basement and into their own headquarters, and found new uses for the empty, deteriorating old high school. 

Campaigns were lively. One year, Republicans slighted his years as a grocery store owner, saying a sophisticated town couldn’t be run like “a mom and pop store.” Another year, the GOP  

characterized him as too dictatorial, calling him “King Lou” in advertisements — for years afterward, his friends presented him with crowns, scepters and other symbols of royalty as joke gifts. 

He was also the target of the Ridgefield Taxpayers League and its longtime leader, Lou Garofalo. A reporter for The Press recalled traveling with Fossi in a town vehicle on hot summer day when the first selectman turned on the air-conditioning, which was something of a luxury in those days of gas rationing and long lines at the pump. What would the head of the Taxpayers League think of that? asked the reporter.  “It’s because of people like him that I need the air conditioning,” Fossi shot back. Except that he didn’t say “people.”
That same reporter remembered one of the few times that  Fossi was genuinely upset with one of his  news stories. He had quoted  the first selectman using the word “damn,” which to the reporter seemed inoffensive.  Fossi was livid; his wife would read the quote, and he would be in hot water for weeks for cussing so freely in public.
Yet, despite his critics and tough times, Fossi always won re-election by wide margins every time he ran. 

Retiring from office in 1981, he worked in real estate until moving to warmer South Carolina in 1997. 

“You have to take your hat off to the people that run this town, whether it’s the boards and commissions or the garden clubs, whatever,” he said in an interview just before moving. “They do make it a very, very attractive town to live in.”

After he survived major surgery in 2003, Fossi’s oldest daughter, Cathy, asked him whether he had any regrets. Yes, he said, he regretted missing the funeral of John F. Kennedy, whom he admired. A year later, when Ronald Reagan — whom he also admired — died, Cathy phoned her father and asked if he wanted to go to the funeral ceremonies in Washington. He jumped at the opportunity and they spent a memorable day together.

Fossi died in 2013 at the age of 83.

Ruth Hurzeler: 

Breaking Down A Barrier

One of the town’s most important jobs is that of the town clerk, the person who records and preserves all of Ridgefield’s important data and documents. 

The town clerk’s office is the official repository of the records of births, marriages, deaths, and burials;  the countless documents that deal with the land and its ownership such as warrantee deeds, mortgages, liens, and releases, as well survey maps; and the minutes of all meetings of every board and commission. The town clerk supervises elections and send the results of the secretary of the state; distributes and receives absentee ballots; posts notices of government meetings; and maintains records of all town ordinances, regulations and charters. All town officials are sworn in by the town clerk or the clerk’s assistants.  The town clerk can swear you in as a new voter, issue you a marriage license, and sell you a license to fish, hunt or trap. If you’re a dog, the town clerk will sell your owner a tag.

The first town clerk was John Copp, who had also laid out the village settlement and was Ridgefield’s first teacher. And for more than 230 years, every single one of the 18 people who succeeded him as town clerk was a man. Then along came Ruth Hurzeler, and ever since, every town clerk has been female. It was one of the first traditionally male offices to be won by a woman.

Ruth Mildred Hurzeler was born in Bethel in 1917, a daughter of Swiss-German parents — Rudolph and Pauline Hurzeler — who operated the Ridgefield Bakery in the space now occupied by Planet Pizza (and long the home of Roma Pizzeria). 

After graduation from Ridgefield High School, she worked at the bakery, but in 1946 took an appointed position as assistant town clerk under Judge George G. Scott. When Scott decided to retire in 1949, Hurzeler was one of several people who ran for the office. She received the Republican

nomination without difficulty and in the October 1949 election (municipal elections were a month earlier than state and national elections back then), she handily defeated Democrat Susan C. Duncan, 999 to 586. She won the seat even though the top of the ticket was taken by a Democrat, Harry E. Hull, who received almost the same plurality for first selectman as Hurzeler did for town clerk.

Two years later, she defeated soon-to-be Postmaster Richard E. Venus (who later became town historian) by the wide margin of 1,157 to 662.

She went on to win every biennial election until the early 1970s when one of the great campaign battles of 20th Century Ridgefield was waged. A young woman named Terry Leary decided to take on the seemingly entrenched Hurzeler in the 1971 election. Leary came close, amassing 2,239 votes to Hurzeler’s 2,461. Although Leary lost, the Democratic party saw the potential for a victory in two years. In 1973, she ran again, making the town clerk’s salary her major campaign theme — a theme that appealed to both Democrats and some fiscal-minded Republicans and unaffiliateds. 

For centuries, town clerks had been compensated by the state-defined fees they charged people who were filing documents, particularly deeds and mortgages. In the 18th, 19th and early 20th Centuries, that usually didn’t amount to much, since relatively few land transfers took place. But when the Ridgefield building boom began in the 1950s, thousands of warrantee deeds, mortgage deeds, and many other land-related documents were being filed — and the income of the town clerk increased manifold.

Leary focused her campaign on making the job salaried. She estimated that Hurzeler was taking in more than $100,000 in fees that could instead go to the town coffers or to cover operating costs of the office. Hurzeler refused to reveal how much she earned in fees, saying that was her own

business, and she maintained that it was the age-old, statutory, and fair way to compensate the job. However, she said in 1972 she would be willing to be salaried, if the salary properly compensated all the work the job required. She said she did as much as a first selectman, and that job was paying $20,000 at the time (equivalent to about $116,000 in 2017 dollars).

In 1973, which would have been Hurzeler’s 13th term in office, she lost the election to Leary, who prevailed by a sizable margin, 3,350 to 2,812 — probably helped a bit by riding the coattails of Louis J. Fossi, a popular Democrat who won a landslide victory for first selectman. But clearly the salary issue was important, and Leary immediately asked the Board of Selectmen to propose that the office be salaried. The voters eventually agreed.

“We at the newspaper, who have known Miss Hurzeler for years, have received valuable and continuing assistance and cooperation from her,” a Ridgefield Press editorial said in 1974 as she was leaving office. “Some of us have tangled with her, a not unusual occurrence when strong wills come up against one another, but such occasions have left no lasting ill-will. Actually, the town clerk has had to rule with a strong hand, else things would have gotten out of hand. Many do not know of the lots of little things she had done for people, of the cases in which she has gone out of her way to be helpful.”

Hurzeler maintained the day after the election that she would run again in two years, but ill health prevented her from doing so. She remained an influential member of her party, and was vice-chairman of the Republican Town Committee when she died in 1977 at the age of 60. 

At a her retirement party in January 1974, newly elected First Selectman Fossi praised her years of hard work. “No one in Ridgefield … does not appreciate the efforts and quality of your work and your dedication over the years,” he said, adding that she would now have time to relax, enjoy life and travel.

“Now that I have time to take a trip,” replied Hurzeler with a smile, “there’s no gas.”

The nation was in the midst of the first great “oil crisis,” thanks to an OPEC embargo sparked by the Yom Kippur War.