Octavius ‘Tabby’ Carboni:

A Caesar as Spry as A Cat

Tabby Carboni came to this country as a child and grew up to become a contributor Ridgefield’s civic, business and recreational life for most of the 20th Century. He was an insurance agent, a banker, a school board member, the town’s treasurer, and a lot more — including an accurate source of what life was like a century ago.

Octavius Joseph Carboni was born in Monterado, Italy, in 1899, a son of Benvenuto and Assunta Casagrande Carboni. His father came here in 1901 and worked as a mason on the town’s new water supply system. In 1903, Tabby, his older brother, Adrian, and their mother sailed to the United States to join Benvenuto in Ridgefield. (The family would later grow to include Olinto “Lynce” Carboni, Mary Carboni Mitchell, and Reno “Renz” Carboni.)

“My mother was the first Italian woman in town,” Carboni said in a 1971 interview with his sons Stephen and Robert (which will be posted here in the coming days). “My brother and I were the first two Italians who went to the public schools.”

In 1908 his parents opened a grocery story at the corner of Prospect Street and Bailey Avenue, living in an apartment on the second floor. As a boy, Caboni worked at the store, doing various chores to help his parents.

Also as a boy, he had to deal the discrimination aimed at the immigrant population. “I always felt a little inferior,” he said. “I regarded myself as a foreigner. I just felt myself lower, especially when they called you names that you don’t hear too much today. Kids would do that.”

But he quickly decided to become a part of his new nation and community. “I paid more attention to school work and Adrian and I did pretty well. We both graduated at the top of the class in the school we went to through the eighth grade.”

This, after attending kindergarten for two years, “just to learn the language.”

He in fact learned the language so well that, from his childhood through his teen years, he served as a translator. He was often called upon to accompany Italian-speaking mothers when they took sick children to English-speaking doctors, and was also a translator at weddings and other ceremonies. Even adults studying English in night school would seek the boy’s help with their homework.

Besides helping his father at the store, Carboni got his first official job when he was 13: he was a “printer’s devil” at The Ridgefield Press, assisting in the paper’s production in the basement of the Masonic Building, just south of the town hall. However, he also wrote up local sports events for The Press — setting his words in lead type, letter by letter, with his own hands. He eventually earned $7.50 a week — about $190 in 2018.

Carboni later worked for the Gilbert and Bennett Manufacturing Company in Georgetown, and the U.S. Post Office. He then spent 28 years as an agent for the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, retiring in 1957. Two years later, he joined the State National Bank — among the first employees of the office here when it opened in 1959 as the first new “commercial bank” in town since 1900. He retired in 1967.

During World War I he served in the Connecticut Home Guard. In World War II, he was a member of the Ridgefield Ration Board, in charge of tire distribution, which was very restricted in the war years. Sometimes, he recalled, people without a real need for a tire would come up to him and ask for one, half in jest. 

“Walk!” Carboni would reply. “It’ll do you good.” 

He believed in exercise. In 1989, on the occasion of his 90th birthday, more than 100 family and friends attended a party at the Italian American Club where he joked to the audience: “I’ve had to cut my jogging down to two miles a day from five.”

Active in sports from his youth onward, Carboni played  for Ridgefield baseball, basketball and football teams. He was also an accomplished golfer and bowler.

In 1992 interview, he described the source his nickname “Tabby,”  bestowed by schoolmates. “I was spry and somewhat athletic,” he said with a grin. “The kids called me ‘Tabby Cat.’ Finally, they left off the ‘cat.’”

He was honored for his sports achievements by the Danbury Old Timers in 1973 and the Ridgefield Old Timers in 1992 — the first year the then-new organization handed out awards.

Carboni was also active in the Italian-American Mutual Aid Society — the “Italian Club” — and served as its president during World War II. (Years later, his son Steve was elected president, the only father and son to have both served as president.)

Carboni was a member of the Board of Education for 20 years during the 1930s and 40s, and was the town’s treasurer from 1957 to 1959 — between his retirement from Met Life and his job at State National. 

His concern for the older population in town was demonstrated by his service on the Housing Authority, which oversees apartments for the elderly, from the 1970s until his death in 1992 at the age of 93.

Carboni was esteemed for his memory of the long-ago people, places and events in Ridgefield. Over the years he was often consulted for information about life in the early 20th Century, and his recollections of the people and events of long ago remained clear, even when he was in his 90s.  (He and another oldtimer, Francis D. Martin, sometimes publicly disagreed about  various historical events. In the end, however, Carboni was usually proven to have the more accurate information.) 

For many of his last years, Carboni met regularly with other older Ridgefielders at the Keeler Tavern Museum to help identify scenes and individuals from the historic collection of photographs taken by Joseph Hartmann from the 1890s into the 1930s. 

Many were snapshots of the details of life long ago. Recalling in 1971 what the Ridgefield Station — across Prospect Street from his father’s store — was like, Carboni said, “The 5:15 was a very popular train, coming in at night with people who commuted to New York City. The area where the Ridgefield Supply Company is now was full of horses and carriages waiting for the trains…. Some of the horses were high spirited. When the train came in, it made a lot of noise and the people had to hold on to them with all their might.” 

While everyone knew him as Tabby, Carboni had a somewhat unusual given name, Octavius. It wasn’t until well into adulthood that his father explained where that name came from and that one of his middle names was Caesar. 

Asked whether he was impressed to learn he’d be named for Octavius, who became Caesar Augustus, the first Roman emperor, Tabby Carboni replied with a chuckle, “No. I didn’t know him — or Julius either!” 

Olinto Carboni:  

‘Battling Bones’

Olinto “Lynce” Carboni must have held some sort of record for an active life. He did not retire from working until he was 91, would hit the dance floor at 95, and was still mowing his lawn well into his 90s.  “Why should I pay someone when I can do it myself?” he told an interviewer

A Ridgefield native, Olinto P. Carboni was born in 1909, a son of Benvenuto and Assunta Carboni (Benvenuto is already profiled in Who Was Who). He had four brothers, Adrian (“Ade”), Octavius (“Tabby”), Navio (“Pete”), and Reno (“Renz”), and a sister, Mary Carboni Michell, who all became well known in town.

As a boy he got his first job carrying water to thirsty workers building Branchville Road into one of the region’s first paved highways. He also caddied at Silver Spring Country Club, when carrying two bags for 18 holes would earn $2. “I had to give the money to my mother and she let me keep 10 cents,” he recalled in 2004.

While he was attending Ridgefield High School, he worked before and after school doing bookkeeping and deliveries for “Jimmy Joe” Joseph’s store at the intersection of Main Street and North Salem Road (“Joe’s Corner”).

He was a star athlete at RHS, captaining the baseball and basketball teams and playing football. After he graduated in 1927,  he played for Ridgefield’s baseball and football Spartans and its basketball team, The Millionaires, in the region’s popular inter-town sports leagues. 

Town historian Dick Venus wrote in 1983 that Lynce Carboni “was probably one of the very best all-around athletes that Ridgefield ever had. Though he was good at baseball, like his brother Pete, Lynce excelled in basketball and was very exciting to watch. Many of us thought he could have played with any of the professional teams” — even though he was not very tall and “would probably not stand much above the belts on some of the gigantic basketball players of today.”

For many years he served as a high school basketball referee, with legs strong enough to work two games in one night.

As “Battling Bones,” Carboni was also a successful boxer, fighting in his late teens as a featherweight in bouts in throughout the area. He never lost a fight.

He, his father and his brothers all conspired to keep his boxing a secret from his mother, who opposed her son’s participation in the sport. 

Charles “Chip” Bliss, his nephew,  told how Carboni’s undefeated boxing career came to an end.  “His mother didn’t want him to box — he never told her,” Bliss said. “He used to sneak out the windows from home. One day the iceman came early, and he had a big fight that night, and his mother asked the iceman why’d he’d come early, and he told her, ‘I’ve got to get through my route early so I can go see Lynce box tonight.’”

Assunta Carboni threw all of Lynce’s clothes out the window and said “You’re not going anywhere.” “And that,” said Bliss, “was the end of his boxing career.”

In the late 1920s Carboni began courting Dorothy “Dot” Bennett,  whose brother, artist Harry Bennett, had been a close friend. “He was my brother, he was my father,” Harry Bennett said. “I had no father, he died before I was born, so I had Lynce. I leaned on him,” 

Bennett was about 12 and Carboni 22 when Bennett’s dog Duke was killed by a car.  “Lynce came, helped that dog up, picked him up, brought him into the yard, called the vet, had him declared dead, got a shovel, made a box, and buried him, then made a tombstone,”  Bennett said. “He found a piece of rock and chiseled it so it had a semblance of a tombstone and then chiseled the word ‘Duke’ into it. He could do anything.”

Carboni and Dot Bennett eloped in 1931. Both loved to dance and were famous throughout their lives for their prowess on the dance floor. When they were courting, Lynce would take her dancing at Peach Lake, in Danbury, Bridgeport and even New York in his Model A Ford. They marked their 65th wedding anniversary in 1996, the year she died.

Carboni began his career as a plumber. “He was a great plumber — marvelous,” said brother-in-law Bennett. “Anything he did was like brand new, just perfect. He was meticulous, he was reliable, and he had lots of knowledge. And anybody could call him, and he’d just rush to help them.”

“He was a hard worker,” said Chip Bliss. “He single-handedly built the foundation on his house — dug it out. He had it all done and a terrible rainstorm caved in two walls and he had to rebuild it. That just shows the persistence he had.” That house on Pound Street was his home for some six decades, but in his last years, he lived on Prospect Street.

Carboni served in the Navy during World War II aboard the U.S.S. Astoria, a light cruiser, in the Pacific. He thought his knowledge of pumps would land him a job in damage control, but he could also type and was made yeoman to the executive officer, the ship’s second-in-command.

He was on the Astoria in the China Sea in December 1944 when it survived a huge typhoon that capsized and sank three U.S. Navy destroyers. “They ran out of fuel and were at the mercy of the sea,” he reminisced in 2000.

His ship was the target of kamikaze pilots during the invasion of Okinawa, and he recalled one crashing so close it shook the entire ship. He was on the Astoria in Tokyo Harbor when the Japanese surrender was signed aboard the U.S.S. Missouri.

After the war Carboni joined John Tulipani in forming a plumbing business. In 1959, he did a plumbing job at the Board of Education offices in what is now St. Stephen’s South Hall, and his work caught the eye of school administrators. He was offered the job as the only “maintenance mechanic” for the Ridgefield Public Schools, which then had only two buildings, Veterans Park and the old high school. When he retired in 1976, the district had grown to eight school buildings and he headed a crew of five men who kept them all in repair.

But he didn’t really retire that year. He continued to work as the schools’ “courier,” ferrying documents and other deliveries among the various schools and administrative headquarters. He continued courier services until finally retiring in 2000, nearly 92 years old. And he continued driving until he was 95. 

Over the years, Carboni encouraged and inspired many young athletes and coached Little League baseball for many seasons. 

He was a life member of the Ridgefield Volunteer Fire Department and the Italian American Mutual Aid Society — he continued to serve at the club’s monthly men’s and women’s dinner nights into his  90s. He was also a founding member of the Ridgefield Old Timers Association and was honored by the Danbury Old Timers.

Lynce Carboni died in 2006 at the age of 97 and is buried beside his wife in the Bennett family plot in Fairview Cemetery.

“He was a man of few words,” Chip Bliss said. “He never had a bad thing to say about anybody. He was always upbeat. Everybody liked him — didn’t have an enemy in the world.”