Richard Scarry:  

The Father of Busytown

The man who created Bananas Gorilla with his armload of watches, Sergeant Murphy blowing his whistle, and Mr. Fixit with his chest of tools, was — in his early years — a Ridgefielder.

Many kids who grew up from the 1960s onward knew the creations of Richard Scarry. Huckle Cat, Lowly Worm, and many other characters from his pen have been friends to tens of millions of children. 

“Scarry revealed to kids that the everyday world was a place that could be understood — and that learning was fun,” said one biography of the author and illustrator. 

Born in 1919 in Boston, Richard Scarry dropped out of business school and then studied at the Museum of Fine Arts School in Boston. After serving as an Army lieutenant during World War II, he became a freelance artist in New York City. 

In 1950, he illustrated Katherine Jackson’s “The Animals Merry Christmas” for Simon and Schuster, and a career was born; first editions of this 19-cent book can fetch hundreds of dollars today. 

In February 1951, he and his wife Patsy moved to Ridgefield from New York City, leasing a place on the Conklin farm on North Street — a locale that inspired many of his later farm illustrations. In 1953, the couple bought their first home, also on North Street. The Scarrys could often be seen driving around town in their MG sports car. 

Throughout the 50s he illustrated books for Golden Press. In 1955, he did Jane Werner’s “Smokey the Bear,” a Golden Book. Many of today’s images of Smoky the Bear are based on Scarry’s imagining of him. 

In 1953, their son was born;  though they named him Richard Jr., he was always called Huck — like the Busytown cat who would follow — and today Huck Scarry produces children’s books himself. 

In 1959, the Scarrys moved to Westport, and 10 years later, to Switzerland. 

Scarry’s first major success as an author illustrator was “The Best Word Book Ever,” published in 1963, which introduced Busytown; it sold more than seven million copies in its first 12 years. Over his 26-year career, he did more than 300 books that have sold more than 100 million copies in 30 languages; scores are still in print. 

“I’m not interested in creating a book that is read once and then placed on the shelf and forgotten,” he once said. “I am very happy when people write that they have worn out my books, or that they are held together by Scotch tape. I consider that the ultimate compliment.” 

He died in 1994 in Switzerland at the age of 75. His papers and much of his art are now in the University of Connecticut archives. Huck lives in Vienna.

Ralph Edwards: 

A Man of Consequences

Anyone who owned a radio in the 1940s or a television in the 1950s knew Ralph Edwards. He created and starred in shows with titles that became so familiar that even a town took one as its name. One of his shows — The People’s Court — is still running today, 78 years after his first success — Truth Or Consequences — went on the air.

 For all his fame, however, few people knew that Ralph Edwards and his wife, Barbara,  had a home in Ridgefield — a town he had earlier visited as part of his $500-million bond-selling efforts in World War II.

 Ralph Livingston Edwards was born in 1913 on a Colorado farm. When he was 13, his family moved to Oakland, Calif., where as a teenager he combined his ability as a writer with his love of radio to create skits for the local station, KROW.  While studying at the University of California at Berkeley, where he earned a degree in English, Edwards worked at Oakland’s KTAB, now KSFO, doing nearly every job from janitor to producer. After graduating in 1935, he   worked for a while at KFRC in San Francisco, but the mecca for radio in the 30s was New York  so in 1936 he hitchhiked across the country to Manhattan where, he said, “I ate ten-cent meals and slept on park benches.” He landed some part-time announcing work, but his big break came when CBS hired him as a full-time announcer (among his young cohorts was Mel Allen).

By 1939 he was doing 45 programs a week, including The Fred Allen Show, Major Bowes’s Amateur Hour, and the Lucky Strike Hit Parade — all among the most popular shows on radio at the time.

A year later Edwards sold NBC his idea for a game show, called Truth Or Consequences, in which contestants were asked a ridiculously hard or nonsensical question and if they failed to answer correctly — as most people invariably did — they had to undergo some sort of silly task or stunt in order to win the prize. “They had to do such things as bark, crawl on their bellies, push a walnut with the nose, bathe an elephant, get into a doghouse and, in one instance, sell an icebox to an Eskimo,” The New York Times reported.

The show began on NBC radio in 1940, with Mel Allen as host. A year later, a special edition of Truth Or Consequences was aired on the first day of commercial television in the United States. Back then TV was in its infancy — only 7,000 television sets were sold in 1941 (compared to 15 million 10 years later). The show continued on radio until 1957, but in 1950 also became a regular on television; for many years, an Edwards discovery, Bob Barker, hosted Truth Or Consequences. It lasted until 1988, one of the longest running game shows in TV history.

During World War II, Truth Or Consequences went on the road as part of an effort to sell war bonds. On Dec. 14, 1944, Edwards and his crew staged a show at the Ridgefield Playhouse on Prospect Street (now the site of the Prospector) during the Sixth War Loan Drive. With the show’s

help Ridgefield topped $1 million in bond sales in that drive, a record for the town (it was equivalent to about $14 million in 2018 dollars). In all during the war, Edward was credited with selling more than $500-million in war bonds — about $7 billion today! 

In 1948, Edwards started an equally popular radio show, This Is Your Life, in which guests,  both famous and unknown, were surprised and then profiled through reminiscences of family and friends. Considered a pioneer of today’s reality TV, This Is Your Life switched to television in 1952 and continued until 1984. Edwards himself hosted this show most of its run (Ronald Reagan filled in twice for him).

Edwards, who won two Emmies for This Is Your Life and one for Truth Or Consequences, also created a dozen other programs including such long-running shows as   Name That Tune and The People’s Court — the latter is still being broadcast. 

In 1958, Edwards and his wife, Barbara, bought a house on the corner of North Street and Stonecrest Road, and used it off and on until 1971 — probably mostly on visits from the West where they had a home in Hollywood. Barbara died in 1993 and Ralph in 2005 at the age of 92.

Truth Or Consequences was so popular that in 1950,  Edwards announced he would broadcast his 10th anniversary program from the first town in the United State to change its name to Truth Or Consequences. Hot Springs, N. Mex., did just that, and the community of about 6,000 people now also has a Ralph Edwards Park.  Edwards made a point of personally visiting the town at least once each year for the next 50 years.   

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. 

Mary Fuller Frazier: 

The Heroine of Perrypolis

One of the more peculiar — and at the same time, one of nicer — people to have lived in Ridgefield was Mary Fuller Frazier.  The eccentric heiress arrived in town in 1946 at the age of 81, lived in a small portion of a large house, and then departed for a sanatorium and her death.

While here, however, she made out a will that gave $1.5 million — $15 million in today’s money — to a small, impoverished town in southwestern Pennsylvania where she was born, but which she’d visited only once in 60 years.

And despite being contested by greedy relatives with a champertous lawyer, her bequests helped provide her home town with schools, a library and even street lights.

Mary Fuller was born in 1864 in Perryopolis, Pa., and grew up there. She spent much of her childhood with an uncle, Alfred M. Fuller, a multimillionaire coal and cattle man who was among the first Americans to ship beef to Europe by freezing the meat. After her uncle died in 1917, she inherited some $5 million — nearly $80 million today — from his estate.

She left Perryopolis in 1887 and returned only once in the 61 years that followed. She married and divorced twice, the last time to hotel manager J. Miller Frazier of Philadelphia, and lived most of her life in Pennsylvania. 

However,  court documents say there were “relatively short periods during which she lived in various cities in California, Kentucky, Nevada, Connecticut, New York, and France. She built or purchased a number of homes. She lived in some of these homes; others she abandoned before completion.”

In March 1946, she paid today’s equivalent of a million dollars for a 13.5-acre estate on North Street. There she lived alone with her servants and was known locally as an eccentric. A Pennsylvania court described her “palatial” 12-room house in Ridgefield where “only a few rooms were furnished. Rugs in rolls were in evidence throughout the house and were never finally laid.” Nonetheless, she had her last will drawn up in Ridgefield by Judge Ralph E. Cramp.

By 1948, she was building a new house outside Philadelphia and planned to move there. That January, she put her Ridgefield estate on the market and admitted herself to a New York City sanatorium where, that August, she died. (The house, just south of Pinecrest Drive, was sold in 1949 to Sherwood Summ. It was later owned by Ridgefield builder Tony Czyr, who subdivided the acreage.)

Frazier left an estate worth $2 million ($20 million today), most of which went to Perryopolis, where “I was born and lived, and where my father and mother lived and my grandfather and grandmother lived,” her will said.

Among 18 much smaller grants was one peculiar one: A $100,000 trust fund to provide a watchman and upkeep for the family mausoleum in a Perryopolis cemetery. As a result of the fund, a

guard was hired and lived in a trailer parked in the cemetery near the mausoleum.

The Perryopolis bequest made national headlines, including several stories in The New York Times and a two-page spread in Life magazine — which included a picture of the mausoleum with the guard’s trailer in the background. (Frazier herself was never pictured.)

The bequest also attracted the attention of a Chicago man named Bales, who a Pennsylvania court later described as “a professional heir-hunter” with a criminal record. Bales and an attorney associate named Berg from Chicago approached six alleged relatives of Mrs. Frazier and offered to fight the will and its bequest to Perryopolis — free of charge if they lost, and for 25% of the value of the estate if they won. 

The legal battle took two years. In a lengthy decision in the Pennsylvania Court of Common Pleas, a judge ruled the six could not prove a valid relationship to Mary Frazier. He pointed out that none of the six even went to her funeral — they did not “know that she was dead for a few days until we seen it in the paper,” the judge quoted one plaintiff as saying. He then pointed out that “none of these alleged first cousins ever saw or communicated with [Mrs. Frazier] except Emma Mae and the last time Emma Mae communicated with her was before 1900.”

Clearly irked by the case, the judge accused Bales and Berg of champerty  — an illegal agreement in which a person with no previous interest in a lawsuit finances it in order to share the disputed property if the suit succeeds. “The solicitation and champerty in this case are patent,” he said. “We would be derelict in our duty were we to lend the aid of this court to contestants in this litigation, so begun and so fostered.”

Perryopolis is an unusual community of 1,700 people south of Pittsburgh. Most of it was part of  56,000 acres once owned by George Washington. In a 1770 visit, Washington said the place was “as fine a land as I have ever seen, a great deal of rich meadow; it is well watered and has a valuable mill seat.”

He drew up plans for a town, laying out the roads in the design of a wagon wheel — just  as Washington, D.C. would later be laid out. (There is a legend Washington wanted Perryopolis to be the capital of the United States.) After Washington’s death in 1799, his land was sold and when a town was developed, his circular layout was used. But rather than name the place for its former owner and designer, the town fathers chose to commemorate Oliver Hazard Perry’s famous victory over the British on Lake Erie in the War of 1812.

In August 1948, Perryopolitans were in shock at the news of the enormous bequest. Hardly anyone in town had ever even heard of Mary Fuller Frazier. 

“Mining Hamlet That Lacks Lights Inherits Millions in Woman’s Will,” said the two-column headline in The New York Times Aug. 18. The reference to lights was apparently designed to show how poor and backward Perryopolis seemed — indeed, the community had only one streetlight, and lacked many other amenities. 

Frazier somehow knew Perryopolis needed help, and specified that her bequest be used for “public, charitable, literary or educational purposes.” Through her financial advisers, she had indicated “she wanted to provide lighting, a water system, schools, roads, and other things the town needed and that funds be provided for the upkeep of these improvements so there would be no burdens on the taxpayers,” said Howard Adams, the town banker, who had been consulted by her attorneys before the will was drawn up.

Today, largely thanks to Mary Frazier, the community has Frazier High School and Frazier Middle School, as well as the Mary Fuller Frazier Library, plus other facilities and services it might not otherwise have had. 

Ten years after her death, as the new Frazier School District was building its new high school, the Class of 1958 dedicated its yearbook, The Commodore, to this mysterious benefactor.  “It is only through her generosity and loyalty to her hometown, that our new school is becoming a reality,” the class said. “Mrs. Frazier, heiress of a local coal-mining fortune and native of Perryopolis, made possible by her will, our splendid new building and contributed much to other progress in our community. May her qualities be reflected in the character and conduct of the students who will attend the school dedicated to her, the Mary Fuller Frazier High School.”