Dr. John Norman: 

Professor, Poet And Secret Agent

Dr. John Norman was as comfortable writing poetry as he was working for the OSS. In his long life, he associated with secret agents and a Nobel Prize-winning author, loved and probed propaganda, taught at many universities, wrote books, and took part in the workings of Ridgefield government.

A native of Syracuse, N.Y., John Norman was born in 1912. He did his undergraduate work at Syracuse University, earned his doctorate at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., and began teaching in colleges. 

Early in his career, Norman became a noted expert on fascism and several of his articles drew the attention of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency, which recruited him during World War II. 

There he served as a field representative, debriefing refugees from Nazi Germany and others who had fled fascism in Europe before and during the war. Among the people he interviewed were Thomas Mann, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist; Don Luigi Sturzo, the founder of Italy’s Christian Democratic Party; and Lion Feuchtwanger, the German Jewish writer — whose escape from the Nazis was engineered by another Ridgefielder, Varian Fry (q.v.). What information refugees reported to him was turned over to the State Department, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and intelligence officers.

“They were walking encyclopedias on names, dates, places, and politics of their respective countries,”  Norman said about the refugees years afterward.

He later worked as section chief of the Italian Desk of the State Department’s Office of

Intelligence Research, and was a historian on Sino-Soviet affairs for the State Department. He also served with the American delegation to the United Nations Conference in San Francisco in 1945 that led to the founding of the UN.

He subsequently became one of the first professors to create and teach a college course in U.S. intelligence and espionage, and a number of his students went on to work for the CIA.

Over the years,  Norman taught history, political science and government at Syracuse, Carnegie Institute of Technology, Chatham College, Fairfield University, and finally at Pace University in Pleasantville, retiring in 1987. He was included in the Outstanding Educators of America in the 1970s.

A public lecturer and author of many articles including contributions to the Encyclopedia Britannica, American Encyclopedia and to the Funk and Wagnalls Encyclopedia Yearbooks,  Norman wrote two books, “Edward Gibbon Wakefield, A Political Reappraisal” (1963) and “Labor and Politics in Libya and Arab Africa” (1965). 

In 1954, his essays on the rise of fascism in Italy before World War II led to a knighthood from the government of Italy with the Order of Al Merito Della Repubblica. 

He was a voracious reader of publications from around the world, even propaganda. “Propaganda lets you know what that country wants you to believe, and that’s important,” he told Ridgefield Republicans in 1980.

  An expert at interviewing, Norman served as a fact-finder for the Connecticut Board of Mediation and Arbitration for 12 years; Gov. William A. O’Neill commended him in 1984 for his “record of integrity and professionalism.”

He and his wife Mary Lynott met at Chatham College in Pittsburgh, Pa., when he was the chairman of the political science department and she was a student. They were married for more than 50 years. The couple moved to Ridgefield in 1968 where he became active in the Democratic Party,

serving on the Democratic Town Committee many years and working on the campaigns of a number of candidates.

Norman frequently spoke on national and international government and politics before local clubs and organizations, often wrote letters to The Press on local and national political and education issues, and spoke out at town meetings.

 He also wrote many poems that appeared in Arcadia Poetry Anthology, Our World’s Most Treasured Poems, and the National Library of Poetry. “Life Lines,” a collection of his work, came out in 1997 on the occasion of his 85th birthday. 

After his retirement from Pace in 1987, the Normans traveled to many places in the world that had been subjects of his classes, including the sites of Homer’s Odyssey in Greece. (In the 1960s, he had written the script for a movie entitled “Brother Anne,” which was filmed in Greece.) They also traveled to Mexico to pursue a mutual interest in the Mayan and Aztec civilizations. 

He died in 2002 at the age of 89 and is buried in St. Mary’s Cemetery.

John Norman shared many of his often light-hearted poems with the readers of The Ridgefield Press. Here’s one he wrote for a pre-Christmas issue in 1985, called “Gifts for Santa”:

Dear Santa Claus, you always give
And never get. How can we live
In wait each year when we all know
Your gifts are more than we should owe?
It's time we showed appreciation
For all your Christmas recreation.
It’s now our turn to try to guess
Your needs and wants, Oh, more or less.
 
Let’s see if we can get a belt
That fits; or buy a cap that’s felt;
A tie that matches; underwear
To cover what’s so big and bare;
A book about your losing weight;
A watch to keep from being late;
A larger sack to carry more —
Oh no, your back’s already sore!
In short, let’s see your features glow
As we all laugh, ‘Hoho, Hoho!’
From this, do we indeed believe:

’Tis better to give than to receive?

Paul Ullman: 

Artist and Patriot

A Ridgefield-based artist-turned-underground fighter died in the service of both his native and adopted countries.  

Born in Paris in 1906, Paul Ullman was the son of French artist Eugene-Paul Ullman and American writer Alice Woods. He first came to America as a child in 1914 when war in Europe broke out. While he became a U.S. citizen, he returned to France after the war for his college studies and decided to establish a studio in Paris, painting there from 1928 until 1939. 

“He was one of the outstanding young painters of France, belonging to an important group of exhibitors in Paris,” The Ridgefield Press said in 1944. Several books about him and his work have been published, and he has been exhibited at major museums in both the United States and Europe.

After Paris fell, Ullman served in the American Field Service as an ambulance driver. But he, his wife, Babette, and son Jacques were still based in France, and the dangers to Ullman, a Jew, were increasing. 

The Ullmans decided to move to the United States and eventually came to Ridgefield to live with his uncle, George Ullman, who, in 1942, bought the large Main Street house (114)  just south of

the Keeler Tavern and opposite the fountain. George was the head of General Printing Ink Corporation in New York City, which, in 1945, became Sun Chemical, today the world’s largest producer of printing inks.

A nephew of his father was involved in helping British Intelligence track the activities of German sympathizers and suspected agents in this country, and encouraged  Ullman to join the U.S. Army’s Office of Strategic Services (OSS) soon after it formed in 1942. 

Ullman jumped at the opportunity. During his more than a year of training, he was able to occasionally visit his wife and son in Ridgefield.

Because he was fluent in both French and English, the OSS loaned Paul to the Special Operations Executive (SOE), a highly secret British espionage unit. There he underwent extensive training as an underground agent who would serve in France.

Meanwhile, in Ridgefield, his wife Babette became involved in efforts to help her native country. She packed hundreds of boxes of food and clothing for war relief efforts in France and hosted French sailors and other French visitors at the Ullman home. 

In the summer of 1944,  she and a family friend, Michael Wills, organized a Quatorze Juillet — Bastille Day — celebration to publicize and support the French war relief effort, reports Constance Crawford, who wrote the biography, “Babette.” They got permission to close off Main Street in the center of town, set out tables with checkered cloths in front of the stores to simulate

Parisian cafes, and had various celebrities perform — among them was the noted harpsichordist Wanda Landowska. There was dancing in the streets, The Press reported.

While the celebrating was going on, Babette was unaware that her husband had been killed by the Nazis.

In April of 1944 Paul Ullman was parachuted into France near Dijon on a mission to blow up a railroad bridge near Montbeliard.  He was taken to a supposedly safe house belonging to a man named Jean-Pierre Barbier in the village of Valentigney. 

On his second night there, the house was surrounded and raided by the Germans.

“Waking, Ullman pulled an overcoat and trousers on over his pajamas and while Madame Barbier was being questioned by the Germans, he jumped from a window,” reports British military historian Paul McCue. “As he made a run for it down the street, however, he was spotted and fired upon, a burst of automatic gunfire from the enemy hitting him from behind in the head. 

“Gravely wounded, he was taken to the German military hospital where two bullet wounds to his head were treated and dressed, but Ullman did not recover and died shortly after admission. 

“The Germans — reported to be the Gestapo from Belfort — were said to have been looking for the Barbiers' son (the family was very active in the Resistance, but the son was not then at home), rather than an Allied agent. If so, it was remarkably bad fortune that Ullman was spending only his second night in the field in the suspect house.”

The Germans never knew who Ullman was and his body, labeled “unknown,” was quickly released for burial in a local cemetery.  “A positive identification of Ullman was made post-liberation by the American Graves Registration Service from the morgue’s records and photographs and the body was subsequently re-interred in the American Military Cemetery at Epinal,” McCue said.

Ullman was 38 years old when he was killed. He was posthumously awarded the Bronze Star by the U.S. Army, and the Croix de guerre and Legion of Honor by the French government.  At the OSS Memorial Wall at Central Intelligence Agency headquarters in McLean, Va., he is included in the Book of Honor, which lists OSS operatives killed in action.

He died “fighting for the peace of the world and for the love of two countries,” The Press said at his death. 

Because of the secrecy surrounding his mission and the agency he worked for, Babette did not learn of her husband’s death until November, seven months later. Devastated, she attempted suicide by drinking a belladonna mixture, which severely sickened but did not kill her. 

She eventually married Michael Wills and moved to California. The Wills’s home in Portola Valley was called “Willy Nilly” and became a gathering place for artists, intellectuals and activists, including Nobel laureate Linus Pauling, United Farm Workers leader Cesar Chavez, filmmaker Felix Greene, and author Wallace Stegner.

Babette Ullman Wills died in 2009 at the age of 97. 

While she and Michael Wills were happily married until he died in 1994, she told   biographer Crawford that it took her 20 years to get over the loss of Paul Ullman.