Jerry Tuccio: 

1,200 Ridgefield Houses

 An immigrant mason’s son who had tried his hand at butchering meat and selling cars wound up developing more of the town than anyone in its history. 

By his own estimation, Jerry Tuccio  built “about 1,200 houses” in Ridgefield.

“I’m very proud of each one,” the 85-year-old builder said in 2007, a few months before this death. “I put a lot of pride into every house. We used the best materials and had the best construction.”

Success did not come easily, he added.

“We came into Ridgefield with nothing,” he said. “I had no money when I started. Ridgefield Savings Bank gave me the world. They asked me to go with them for all my business and I agreed.”

Attilio “Jerry” Tuccio was born in 1920 in Compo, Calabria, in southern Italy. As a boy of about 10, he came to the United States with his family and grew up in Bedford Hills, N.Y., where his father was a mason.

During World War II, he served in the North African campaign with the 213th Army Anti-Aircraft Battalion, which fought German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel at the Battle of Kasserine Pass in February 1943. 

Tuccio recalled going into action on Feb. 14 — Valentine’s Day. “I was never so scared,” he said. “I remember thinking I would work the rest of my life for nothing if I could come out of there with my life. I wasn’t the only one that said that. It was a sad day.”

After the war and back home, he tried working as a butcher and as a used-car salesman, “but construction was in his blood,” said Robert Tuccio, one of his two sons.

His first construction experience was helping his father.

“Pop could put up stucco with the best of them,” said Robert Tuccio. “He learned the mason trade from his dad,” 

With his father, Jerry Tuccio began building houses in 1947. The first two he built sold for $12,500 each.

“Can you believe that, $12,500?” Jerry Tuccio said in 2007. “That was a lot of money back then and no one thought I would be able to sell them.”

He was building in Ridgefield by the early 1950s and during two decades, developed subdivision after subdivision — Boulder Hill Estates, Twixt Hills, Mimosa, Stonehenge Estates, Westmoreland, Scodon, Ridgebury Estates, Pleasant View Estates, and West Mountain Estates/Eleven Levels, plus many smaller projects.

In the late 1950s and 1960s, the town’s boom years, houses seemed to sell as fast as they could be built — and  Tuccio honed the art of building them quickly.

“We would put houses in a cycle to be built,” son Robert recalled. “And that cycle was six weeks, from start to finish, from literally cutting the trees down on the lot to having a finished house ready to move into. There were 180 subs working — literally. Subcontractors like plumbers, electricians, they’d have crews that were on the job every single day and they’d literally go house to house as they were being built.”

In the larger developments, many of the house styles he built — with names like The Ridgefield, The Ridgebury, The Brewster, The Sherman — were 3,000 to 3,500 square feet, big houses for that time. And Tuccio dressed them up.

“He was proud of what he built. He tried to put as many features into a home as he could,” his son told The Ridgefield Press’s Macklin Reid. “He was an innovator in the sense the homes were being built with intercoms, central vacuum cleaners, the antenna systems were being put in.”

Many of his developments had recreation areas with swimming pools, tennis and basketball courts.

Over the years, disagreements with town zoning authorities arose — during his application for the Eleven Levels subdivision, Tuccio protested the two-acre zoning and maintained he was being unfairly denied his right to develop his land reasonably. At one point he uttered the declaration, much quoted at the time, “This is Ridgefield and not Russia!”

Looking back in 2007, Tuccio didn’t make much of the disputes with zoners. “I got along well with everyone,” he said. “There were never any big problems.”

He retired in 1970, at age 50.  Robert said his father estimated that he owned some 600 empty building lots around town at that time — many of the lots his brothers and sons would build on in the years that followed.

Tuccio and his wife Ernestine moved to Florida, first to Marco Island and then to Naples. He died in 2007 and is buried St. Mary’s Cemetery.

His family said Jerry Tuccio was a generous man.

“He helped people out whenever he thought they could be helped,” said Arthur Tuccio, one of his two brothers.

“He helped a lot of people along the way,” Robert Tuccio said. “I think helping people gave him a lot of enjoyment.”

Donald I. Rogers:

Economic Conservative

In a 1966 talk to the Ridgefield Republican Women’s Club, Donald I. Rogers disclosed that President Kennedy cancelled his subscription to The New York Herald-Tribune because of Rogers’ column.

“I am worse than a Republican, I am an economic conservative,” he told the group. “I’m not a John Bircher and I’m not a true right-winger, but I am a conservative when it comes to economics.” 

A Connecticut native, Donald Irwin Rogers was born in 1918 in New Hartford, where he grew up and, at the age of 12, created a “news bureau” that covered area towns for several  newspapers. He continued the bureau until he was 18 when he went to work for The Providence Journal. 

Rogers joined The Herald-Tribune in 1950 and was its business and financial news editor until 1963. From 1950 until 1966, he wrote a widely read, syndicated business-affairs column — the one Kennedy disliked.

He was a frequent panelist on the Longines Chronoscope, an early television talk show that aired from 1951 to 1955. Among the people he interviewed was Senator Joseph McCarthy, during the height of the McCarthyism turmoil.

Rogers was the author of 14 books, including “Teach Your Wife to Be A Widow,” “How to Beat Inflation Using It,” and “The Day the Market Crashed.”

In “The End of Free Enterprise: A Manifesto for Capitalists” (Doubleday, 1966), he observed that “what the business world needs is a decision about the principles it stands for. It needs a credo, a manifesto, a set of guides and goals behind which harried and hard-working executives can rally. Lacking this, the enterprise system will be whittled away by the voting strength of those who don’t understand it or who, understanding it, are opposed to it.” 

In 1962, the Conservative Party in New York State attempted to get Rogers to run for governor, but he declined. Years later, he told The New York Times that he had “little in common with organized Conservatives” and considered himself a “moderate liberal who believes in the competitive enterprise system, free markets and the prudent handling of other people’s money by Government as well as by thrift institutions and others in the private sector.”

Rogers moved to Mimosa in 1964 when he was publisher of the once popular Bridgeport Sunday Herald, a conservative Sunday-only newspaper that served all of Fairfield County. Around 1975, he tried to do what no one else has done: He produced a daily newspaper aimed at all of Fairfield County. He was editor and publisher of the short-lived attempt, called The Fairfield County Courier. 

He moved to Manhattan in 1976 and died four years later at the age of 61. His daughter, the late Lynn Wallrapp, a longtime Ridgefielder, was a novelist.

Milton Biow: 

Modern Advertising Leader

What do the Mimosa subdivision, Philip Morris cigarettes, Lucille Ball, and box-top premiums have in common? Milton Biow.

A leader in modern-day advertising techniques, Mr. Biow rose from humble beginnings to operate one of the largest ad agencies, write now-classic ad copy, create radio and TV shows, and come up with the name of what is now a North Street neighborhood.

Milton Harry Biow (pronounced “be-o”) was born in 1892 in New York City. Although he barely graduated from grade school, he had set up his own advertising agency by the age of 25. The Biow Company grew to become one of the nation’s largest agencies, grossing at times hundreds of millions in today’s dollars.

He created such advertising slogans as “It’s Bulova Watch Time,” “Pepsi Cola Hits the Spot,” and “Call for Philip Morris.”  He is also said to have originated the idea of sending in cereal and other product box tops for premiums.

The New York Times once said that among the products “he made household names” were Anacin, Eversharp, Ruppert beer, Schenley whiskey, and Lady Esther cosmetics. 

“We moved them by the ton,” he’d often say. “We are a tonnage agency.”

Although he promoted the sale of  many tobacco and alcohol products, Mr. Biow never smoked or drank himself.

Also involved in radio and TV, Mr. Biow created the “Take It Or Leave It” radio show which became the $64,000 Question on TV. He  also brought to television ”The Lucy-Desi Show,” starring Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz.

He was credited with being an originator of the modern school of advertising and the first to use radio and TV “spot” commercials to saturate the national market, especially for watches.

“All watches offer time,” he once explained. “Bulova watches not only give the time, but provide beauty, a source of pride, an added measure of value to the user. It’s advertising which sells the plus difference.”

Although he shied away from publicity most of his life, Mr. Biow published an autobiography in 1964, called “Butting In: An Adman Speaks Out.” Promotional notes for the book said, “He never really cared much about money — and he made millions. He was not in politics — yet he ‘ghosted’ some of the smartest lines ever spoken by a president of the United States….He still doesn’t know an adverb from a preposition — but he has just written the gayest, wisest, frankest, most hell-raising book on advertising ever published.”

The president was Franklin D. Roosevelt who, according to one author, used “the catchy slogans that Milton Biow passed along for his speeches.”

Mr. Biow came to Ridgefield in 1952, buying as a weekend and summer retreat a 37-acre estate on North Street that had been called “Wood Acres.” He changed the name to “Mimosa” after planting trees of that species around the house. (Accustomed to warmer climates, the trees had died off by the 1960s.)

In 1964 he sold the estate to Ernestine Tuccio whose husband, Jerry, subdivided the property into Mimosa Estates.  (Mr. Tuccio at first wanted to call the main road into the development “Airline Circle” because so many airline pilots were buying his houses in the early 1960s.

The Planning Commission felt the name wasn’t an appropriate and Mimosa Circle was used instead.) 

The estate house, painted “Mimosa yellow,” was retained and still stands.

In 1956, Mr. Biow closed his agency to devote himself to other interests, including his autobiography and work with the National Conference of Christians and Jews, of which he was a founder. He was also active in the United Jewish Appeal, the United Hospital Fund and the Muscular Dystrophy Association. 

He died in 1976 in Manhattan at the age of 83.