Michael Skandera: 

A Record Educator

Dr. Michael Skandera may hold the record for longevity as a Ridgefield educator —  45 continuous years. Other staff members have had longer careers, but probably none spent as many years on the job only in Ridgefield. 

Dr. Skandera was proud of that. “Well over 3,000 pupils have passed through my portals during my career, and I’m thankful for the rich experience they afforded me,” he told The Ridgefield Press in 1992 when he retired. 

A Danbury native born in 1924, Dr. Skandera graduated from Danbury Teachers College (WestConn) and, during World War II, was a bomber pilot who flew 50 missions over Europe. 

He came to Ridgefield in 1947, teaching at the East Ridge School, which then housed

elementary, middle and high school years. For a long time he was the only male elementary school teacher in town. 

The starting salary then, considered high in the region, was $2,400, he recalled. “In surrounding towns, most teachers made around $2,000,” he said. ($2,400 in 1947 was about equal to $25,000 in today’s dollars.)

When Veterans Park opened in 1955 to handle elementary grades, Skandera remained at East Ridge with the fourth through sixth grades and was “teacher in charge.” When Ridgebury School opened in 1962, he went there, specializing in sixth grade science. 

Long the only elementary teacher with a doctorate in education and one of the first to be named a “master teacher” here, Dr. Skandera did stints as principal of Veterans Park School and of Ridgebury, but each time returned to the classroom because, he said, he liked teaching kids better than being an administrator. 

Dr. Skandera’s interest in nature showed itself at Ridgebury where he helped set up the nature trails at that school and used them fall, winter and spring to teach science to pupils and to give teacher workshops. 

If teaching in Ridgefield wasn’t enough, Dr. Skandera also spent many years as superintendent of the Sunday school at St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in Danbury.

As a retiree living in Danbury, Dr. Skandera was active in mushrooming, and in his favorite sport, golf, in which he may hold another record, regionally: He had five holes-in-one in his lifetime.

He died in 2014 at the age of 89.

Simon Greco: 

Outspoken Artist

Artists in Ridgefield have tended to focus on their art and avoid the political limelight. Not so with Simon Greco, who spoke at many meetings, penned many letters to the editors and challenged laws, budgets, schools and other matters.

However, though even The New York Times covered his feisty ways, Greco was much better known nationally for his art, not his complaints.

“Simon Greco was an extraordinary artist,” said art historian Terence E. Hanley. “His work is mesmerizing.” 

A native of Italy, Simon Greco was born in 1917 to an Italian-American father and an Italian mother.  The family came to the United States in 1921 and settled in St. Louis where his father

worked for a gas company. Greco said that St. Louis abounded in cultural opportunities and that his early art education was acquired at the St. Louis public library. His formal education consisted of two years of high school and two years of vocational training.

“Almost entirely self-educated, Greco is widely informed in such diverse arenas as philosophy, religious history, literature, and music,” said a 1952 profile of him in the Bridgeport Sunday Post.

 By the 1940s, Greco had moved to New York to do commercial art as well as his own work. He was best known for his “magic realism” paintings, a style that was popular in the mid-20th Century, and was considered an expert at it. He became well known for two series he illustrated for Life magazine, The World We Live In in 1953 and The Epic of Man in 1956. He also painted many covers for magazines during the 1950s and 60s.

Greco’s moving to Hayes Lane in 1949 helped inspire a second direction in his art.    “Since moving to Ridgefield, my thoughts have turned more and more to the manifestations of nature with which we are surrounded, and with the problem of extending the range of ideas and thoughts which

could be adequately handled by non-objective art,” he told The Post.

 He began painting non-objective works — what some consider abstract expressionism — while continuing to produced the “magic realism” pieces. And it was the latter that were more popular. His works are in the  Smithsonian Institution, the American Museum of Natural History, the U.S. Naval Academy, and other collections. 

In Ridgefield, he became involved in the community, and was a frequent voice at town meetings and in letters to the newspaper. A Democrat, he tried in 1963 to vote in a Republican primary here in an attempt to challenge what he considered a flaw in a state law. He was unsuccessful, but his effort was covered by The Times.

He was a voice of conservatism when it came to schools, going so far as to maintain that libraries in elementary schools were wasteful. He felt that the proposed Ridgebury School should not be a spread-out affair, but an efficient, two-story, box-like building with many fewer toilets than planned. “I think it is absurd to have 12 rooms with separate toilets — if the children are so retarded beyond kindergarten that they require such toilets, then they should be in special schools,” he wrote in 1960.  “We should not waste tax money on extravagant buildings. We should spend it instead where it will do the most good, that is, in securing the best teachers, books and educational materials available.”

Perhaps Greco felt a closeness to teachers and books. He himself taught at at various institutions in Fairfield County and, in 1968, he wrote the book, “The Art of Perspective Drawing,” for the well-known Grumbacher series.

Nonetheless, Greco criticized the way art and the arts in general were taught.  Speaking at a gathering with the Connecticut Commission on the Arts in 1964, Greco was quoted as saying, “With

everyone taking up art in schools, colleges and adult classes, art is constantly being thrown at the public and a general vulgarization of theater, books, music, and art has descended upon us,” he declared. “When you cater to the masses on a cultural level, you debase the arts. Instead of education and elevation, our society is getting entertainment. Art is not entertaining.”

In 1964, Greco moved to North Salem Road and a few years later, relocated to Fairfield after joining the staff of the University of Bridgeport. He later lived in Westborough, Mass., where he died in 2005 at the age of 87.