Dick’s Dispatch #84

A History of A Little Dog

By Richard E. Venus

Economic laws can be very interesting when used to compare one era with another, or comparative prices in volume purchasing. The fact that coffee may cost $2 per pound does not mean that two pounds will cost $4 or less. Sometimes the two-pound can will cost more per pound.

Something like that applies to the barber trade. In the 20’s, when the population of Ridgefield was about 2,700, our tonsorial needs were administered by seven or eight barbers, working out of four or five barber shops. Since our population today is in the neighborhood of 22,000 to 23,000, it may be assumed that it would require more than 30 barber shops and some 60 barbers to keep us well trimmed. The last time I looked, there were less now than there were in the 20’s. Perhaps visits to the barber shop have become less frequent.

In the mid 20’s, a Mexican, whose name was Mike, opened a shop where the Candlelight Shoppe is now. He had two barbers working for him and one of them had a marked resemblance to the reigning cowboy movie star and was promptly dubbed “Hoot Gibson.”

At the time “Baldy” had his barbershop in the large three-story building where the Ridgefield Savings Bank in now. The venerable Conrad Rockelein had his shop across the street, over S. D. Keeler’s Store. 

Con moved his shop around quite a bit. He was a very good barber but it always seemed like you had to go looking for him. He was still cutting hair in his 80’s, at his home on the corner of Mountain View Avenue, and Danbury Road.

Mike Massamino had his shop at 3½ Catoonah Street where J. R. Interiors is now. Mike had a Charlie Chaplin-type mustache. He even looked very much like the “Little Tramp,” but no one ever called him Charlie.

Mike was a nice little guy and a good barber. However, he was the victim of hard times and experienced great difficulty in keeping his bills paid. I had a rather extensive newspaper and magazine route at the time and he was one of my customers. One time his bill got to be what was considered a rather large amount by the standards of the time. Mike offered to give me a dog in payment of the bill. Further negotiations looked hopeless and I reluctantly agreed to the settlement.

I had never seen the dog and did not know what to expect. The next time I went to the shop, Mike had a little white poodle waiting for me.

Daisy was a rather forlorn little bundle of white curls that were heavily infiltrated with burrs and nettles of all kinds. She was the albino type and her little pink eyes always seemed to be running. Mike had her tied with a rope that could have moored the Queen Elizabeth II.

In those days, a toy poodle was not considered the proper dog for a boy and I was thinking that I would be the butt of considerable kidding. All of this, plus her bedraggled appearance made me want to reconsider our agreement and I felt like backing out of the deal. However, it looked like my only opportunity to settle the bill so I finally left the shop with Daisy in tow.

When Daisy and I finished the route and arrived home, there was a lot of explaining to do. The first order of business was to make Daisy a little more presentable. My father was experienced in removing burrs from horses’ tails by using kerosene to make them slip along the hair. He helped me and we finally got the last one off the little dog, though the tight curls made it difficult.

After a bath that Daisy seemed to fully appreciate, we started the business of becoming friends. She followed me around each time, on my route and got to be a well-known fixture.

A year or so later, my brother Gus got married and I had nothing else to give him and Stella for a wedding present, so I presented them with Daisy. They lived on Market Street in a garage apartment at the rear of the Main Street home of Dr. William H. Allee (now the office of the D.N.A.) The building has since been moved further down Market Street and converted into a large home.

A year or so later, Daisy had four, very cute, little brown and white pups. Gus gave one of them to George G. Scott, who was then both town clerk and judge of probate. “Tippy” probably became one of the best known dogs in Ridgefield. She used to accompany Judge Scott each day to the town hall. They fixed a little window box for Tippy and she sat in the front window of the town clerk’s office for years and never missed a day. She yelped each time that someone came to the door and then would jump down to meet the visitor. She was a very friendly little thing and I guess you could say she was the official greeter.

In the meantime, Ridgefield’s dog population increased much more rapidly that did that of the humans, as Daisy continued to have puppies and her puppies began to have puppies. By now they began to increase in size and came in various colors.

In the 30’s Eddie Schmidt had one of the pups and in the 40’s Peter Edel had another of the offspring. Peter lived with his mother in the Ashland Cottage, at 321 Main Street, where the Hess family now makes their home.

By now the dogs, through the generations, had increased in size to that of a large springer spaniel. When Peter’s dog, Queenie, decided to join the production line, she had a litter under the kitchen floor. The year was 1948 and there was no basement under the kitchen at that time.

Queenie would crawl out to eat, but never brought the pups with her. They must have been about two weeks old when I brought them out to face the world. They were a nice shiny black and you could see they were going to be big dogs.

A couple of months later, the Knights of Columbus was having a carnival and a crisis developed when they ran out of prizes. I remembered the puppies and mentioned them to John Bacchiochi. Johnny took off for the Edel’s home and bought the litter. When he returned with the puppies, there was a great joy among young and old alike, and the games went on with renewed interest.

When our family moved to its Olmstead Lane home in 1951, we found that the John Moore family next door had one of these puppies. It was now as big as a small black pony. Peter Carboni had one and so did Joe Sheehy. They must have all been males so the lineage that started with a little white poodle, some 30 years before, had come to an end, as far as we know.

Mike Massamino sold that barber shop to Andrew Geria. Andy’s wife was a beautician and was herself, a beauty. They were great dancers and it was a great pleasure to see them glide over the floor at the many dances we used to have. After a few years they moved to Croton Falls, N.Y., and in 1937,  invented a therapeutic device for use in beauty shops and by chiropractors. Andy and Mary had the gadget patented and I guess it is still in use today.

The Gerias sold their business to Paul Laszig, who did his barbering there for many years. Paul made a sizable fortune in the stock market, by listening to advice from his customers; one of which was Philip D. Wagoner [head of the Underwood typewriter company].

Mrs. Laszig, who died only a few years ago, was kind enough to leave a portion of that fortune, in trust, for worthwhile organizations like Meals on Wheels.

(NOTE: Dick Venus, who became Ridgefield’s first town historian, wrote 365 “Dick’s Dispatch” columns for the Ridgefield Press, telling about life in Ridgefield during the first half of the 20th Century. This column appeared Jan. 5, 1984. We plan to publish many of them on Old Ridgefield in the coming months — and, probably, years.)

Paul and Johanna Laszig: 

Surprise Philanthropists

A man who listened to advice and a woman who was grateful for help were behind a generous philanthropic effort. Since the early 1980s, the Paul and Johanna Laszig Fund for the Elderly has distributed more than one million dollars to help Ridgefield’s seniors.

 Paul Laszig was born in Gonswen, East Prussia (now Poland), in 1900. After learning the trade of a barber, he emigrated to Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1923. After only three years there, he decided to come to the United States, arriving in 1926 and living in New York City. There, in 1932, he married Irmgard Johanna Heine, who had been born in 1892 in Dresden, Saxony, which was later part of East Germany. She had come to the United States two years earlier to work as a maid. 

The same year they were married, the Laszigs moved to Ridgefield.

For 33 years Paul Laszig operated The Modern Barber Shop on Catoonah Street, about opposite where the telephone building is today. The couple rented on Gilbert Street for many years before building a house at 245 West Lane (torn down around 2007 to make way for a more elaborate house).

On Wednesdays, when his shop was closed, Paul Laszig would visit the homes of some of

the area’s wealthy and powerful men to cut their hair. In the process, he’d pick up their advice on smart investments, in stocks or real estate. Among his clients were former U.S. Vice President Henry Wallace of South Salem, Ingersoll-Rand Chairman George Doubleday of Ridgefield, Underwood typewriter chief Philip Wagoner of Ridgefield, and pollster Elmo Roper of Redding. “Paul, like most barbers, was a good conversationalist, but more important, he was a good listener,” said town historian Dick Venus.

Laszig retired in 1965 after 51 years of cutting hair. He died in 1974 at the age of 74. 

After Johanna died in 1980 at the age of 87, it was revealed that she had left an estate worth around $1.4 million, most of which was investments her husband had made thanks to his Wednesday clippings.

In her will Johanna bequeathed a share of her estate to create a fund to benefit the elderly. In her later years, she had had difficulty walking and was eventually wheelchair-bound. Friends speculated that the assistance she received from organizations such as Meals on Wheels and the District Nursing Association (now Visiting Nurse Association) helped inspire her to create the fund.

The will specified that the trust fund would aid elderly Ridgefielders “including, but not limited to, providing them with housing, medical assistance, transportation, food, or other  services for their general welfare in order that they may live out the remainder of their lives in dignity.”

The estate took more than two years to settle, delayed partly because the main portion of the bequests was left to five of Mrs. Laszig’s relatives in East Germany including a cousin and a nephew. Since East Germany was a communist country,  the will stipulated that if  “for any reason whatsoever, including but not limited to the law or policy of the government of East Germany,” the German beneficiaries would not receive the money left to them, that money would go to the fund for the elderly.

Union Trust Company, the bank that through several mergers is now Wells Fargo, was in charge of the trust. Attorney John E. Dowling, representing the bank and the trust, questioned whether the money should be sent to East Germany because most of it would wind up in the hands of the communist government there.

Dowling and the bank’s senior trust officer flew to West Germany to meet with a lawyer the East German heirs had hired. They negotiated an agreement in which the East Germans would receive 65% of the investments instead of all of it. The Laszig Fund would get the remaining 35% plus the $100,000 from the sale of the house. Thus, the fund was set up with around $371,000 instead of $100,000. In today’s dollars, that’s $935,000 vs. $252,000 — well worth the trip to Germany.

 Each year the fund provides an average of six grants to nonprofit organizations and efforts helping Ridgefielders who are 62 years old or older. Grants range from $1,000 to $25,000, and total around $50,000 — although some years, as much as $59,000 has been distributed.

Among the efforts the fund has recently help support  are the fitness program at Founders Hall, the work of the town’s Commission on Aging, and buying large-print and audio books for the Ridgefield Library. Groups getting aid also include the Ridgefield Community Center, the town’s Social Services Department, Meals on Wheels, and the Ridgefield Visiting Nurse Association.

In 1983, the fund gave out $25,000 in grants — equivalent to about $61,000 in today’s money. So far over the years, it has distributed more than $1 million to aid the elderly of Ridgefield. The fund itself, which began at $371,000, has grown over the years and now has assets worth just over $1 million.

“I think Mrs. Laszig will be remembered for a long time for her generosity to agencies like Meals on Wheels,” said Romeo G. Petroni, who had been Mrs. Laszig’s attorney when her will was draw up. “Her memory and Paul’s memory will long survive — after we’re all gone — for the good they’ve done.”