Nancy-Carroll Draper:
She Created A Museum

Nancy-Carroll Draper stood out, not just in her hardy, six-foot stance but especially in her wide-ranging accomplishments. 

An heiress and a granddaughter of a Massachusetts governor,  Draper was an author, legislator, dog breeder and judge, a wildlife advocate, conservationist, cattle rancher, photographer, and philanthropist who founded the acclaimed Draper Museum of Natural History near Yellowstone National Park. 

Although she was a member of a prominent Boston family and lived in Ridgefield from 1947 until 1988, she  had maintained  a cattle ranch for many years outside Cody, Wyo., a region that turned out to be her first love. 

Nancy-Carroll Draper was born in Boston, Mass., on Aug. 28, 1922, daughter of Eben Sumner and Ruth Carroll Draper. Her father owned a textile mill and her grandfather, Eben Sumner Draper Sr., was governor of Massachusetts from 1909 to 1911. She attended private schools in New York City and Virginia, and studied at Goucher College in Baltimore.

At the outbreak of World War II, Draper was one of six people appointed by the admiral of the Sixth Naval District to serve in the Headquarters Motor Corps and soon became the youngest supervisor on the East Coast during the war.

In 1947,  Draper bought what had been the country home of Westbrook Pegler, the Pulitzer Prize-winning conservative columnist, and soon became active in local Republican politics, including serving for many years on the Republican Town Committee.

In 1952, she ran for state representative at a GOP caucus in which six people — four of them women — sought the job of representing Ridgefield in Hartford. Interest in the contest was so intense that among those who showed up to vote was former congresswoman and future ambassador Clare Boothe Luce of Great Hill Road. Draper won the party’s endorsement and the November election.

She served four terms as a state representative, losing her bid for a fifth term in 1960 to native son Romeo G. Petroni. 

A breeder of Great Danes since 1945, she had maintained a kennel, Danelagh, at her home on Old Stagecoach Road for many years. Dog News magazine in 1964 named her one of the top 10 Great Dane breeders in the nation. She was a recognized national and international judge of the breed — awards today in Scotland still bear her name — and she served as the president of the Great Dane Club of America. She also wrote the book, The Great Dane – Dogdom’s Apollo, in 1981.

          She traveled extensively in Europe, Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan, and in 1984 published a book of her  photographs of African wildlife, titled On Safari – Dogs Are the Excuse.

          Her love of the West and the Rockies began as a child when her family would visit the well-known Valley Ranch southwest of Cody. Around 1960 she purchased land  along the South Fork of the Shoshone River and created her Slide Mountain Ranch — her 1,900 square foot ranch house was much more modest than her 5,800-square-foot Ridgefield home. She’d spend part of the year in Ridgefield and part in Wyoming, where she raised and bred Highland and Charolais cattle.

          Draper began contributing to  Cody’s Buffalo Bill Historical Center in the 1980s. She was appointed to the advisory board of the center’s Whitney Gallery of Western Art in 1985. After she moved full-time to Wyoming in 1988, she began promoting the creation of a natural history museum at the historical center.  She gave some $13 million to what has been named the Draper Museum of Natural History.

“The Draper” – how Cody people refer to the  facility – was completed in 2002, the first museum of natural history to open in the 21st Century.

 

“The 55,000-square-foot museum looks a bit like the Guggenheim in Manhattan, only with more glass and more light,” said an account of the opening. “A great spiral of levels descends through the building as though the visitor were hiking home from alpine tundra to Douglas fir and lodgepole pine forests, to plains and meadows, all edging a 10,000-square-foot rotunda.  At each level a different ecosystem — its smells, sounds, textures and wildlife — is represented.” 

At the “trail’s” end, there’s a tiled map of Wyoming and Yellowstone, with a great lighted ‘sky’ above that serves as a planetarium.

Before Covid, more than 170,000 people were visiting the museum each year.

Draper said she wanted a natural history museum “to commemorate and interpret the Yellowstone area. I call it the missing link.”

In 1994, she established the Nancy-Carroll Draper Charitable Foundation which today is worth more than $16 million and distributes some $1 million in annual grants to not only the museum, but also natural history and wildlife organizations, including  African Wildlife Foundation and the Nature Conservancy.

Nancy-Carroll Draper died in 2008 at the age of 85. Her gravestone in a Cody cemetery is a simple boulder, bearing her name and the dates of her birth and death.

“It was one of my great privileges in life to know Nancy-Carroll when she first came to Wyoming,” said Alan K. Simpson, a former U.S. senator from Wyoming and the historical center’s chairman of the Board of Trustees — and a neighbor of Draper.

“Nancy-Carroll was big in stature, big in heart, big in generosity, and big in the lives of those of us who love the Buffalo Bill Historical Center,” Senator Simpson added. “I'll never forget the sight of her in that big yellow backhoe at the ground-breaking for the Draper Museum of Natural History. She hoisted herself into the cab, started digging, and has been digging for us ever since.”

Samuel Sidney St. John:

A Man Who Loved To Teach

Nearly two centuries ago, Samuel St. John opened the Ridgefield Boarding School, offering a secondary education to teenagers near and far. Then only 26, St. John would spend the rest of his career in education, leading some of the earliest free schools in New York City.

Later in life, St. John would experience — and survive — much family sadness.

Samuel Sydney St. John was born on a Ridgebury farm in 1806. When he was 12, his father, Thomas, moved to the city and sent his son to the best schools available there.

Samuel graduated from Columbia in 1828 and while he was admitted  to the New York bar, never practiced law. Instead, he moved back to Ridgefield and opened a store in Ridgebury. A year later, he married Lucy Amy Brush, who’d grown up on a  Ridgebury farm about a mile south of the St. John spread. 

Perhaps because of the fine schools he had attended, St. John had a love of learning. In 1832, he  decided to open his boarding school. “As a teacher he excelled — patient, laborious and conscientious, he soon made his school famous and successful,” an obituary said. “It was patronized not only by the citizens of Ridgefield and adjoining towns, but by many from New York City.” His graduates went on to major institutions such as Yale.

The school, which offered college-prep and commercial curricula, was in the village, probably on Main Street, though its exact location hasn’t been found. It operated long before Ridgefield — or most towns — had a public high school; eighth grade was then the highest year of schooling for most Americans. However, if a young man wanted to go into the clergy, medicine, or law,  preparation for college was usually needed, and the Ridgefield Boarding School offered that, along with vocational training for banking and business. 

Tuition was $25 a quarter or $100 a year, which in modern dollars would be about $2,700. If you wanted French or math in that curriculum, the total would be around $3,200.

An 1833 advertisement that appeared in The New York Journal of Commerce  never mentions the sex of students. While the school may have been only for young men, the ad’s wording seems careful not to be gender-specific, and it’s possible young ladies were also admitted. (The Rev. David Short’s private school, which followed St. John’s, was co-ed.)

The advertisement gives interesting glimpses of some aspects of secondary education back then, and a look at how Ridgefield was promoted in the first half of the 19th Century:

RIDGEFIELD BOARDING SCHOOL

This institution is permanently located at Ridgefield (Fairfield Co.) Connecticut, and no exertions will be spared by the Principal to render it worthy a continuance of the liberal patronage it has hitherto received.

Ridgefield is one of the most healthy and retired villages in the State — noted for the morality and intelligence of its inhabitants, and possesses every requisite to make it an eligible situation for youth. It is fifty-four miles from the city of New York, with which it has a direct and daily communication. The course of study will be adapted to the wishes of the parents or guardians of each pupil — preparation for the Counting House or College. The French and Spanish Languages will be taught, if required.

The yearly course of study will be divided into two terms, of twenty-four weeks each — the first to commence on the first Monday of May — the second on the first Monday of November.

Terms for Board, including Tuition in English studies, $25 per quarter — Languages, or Mathematics, an additional charge of $5. No extra charges except for Books and Stationary.

The Principal is a graduate of Columbia College, and has liberty to refer to the President and Professors of that institution. Also, Rev. Wm. A. Clark, D.D.; Rev. Edmond D. Barry D.D.; Dr. Wm. Hibbard; Aaron H. Palmer, Esq; Messrs. S.C. & S. Lynnes; John Moras, Esq.

SAMUEL S. ST. JOHN, Ridgefield, Aug. 19, 1833

The school lasted until around 1841 when St. John received an offer from the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen to run its school in New York City. Founded in 1820, before there were public schools in New York, the Mechanic’s School was one of the first two free schools in that city.

In 1842, the New York City Board of Education was created  and began operating free public schools. A year later St. John was hired as principal of  School No. 26 in the 4th Ward and not long afterward was given general supervision of the other schools of the Ward, overseeing more than 4,000 pupils.  By 1848 his reputation had grown to the point where he was named commissioner of the schools in the City of New York, a post he held for two years. 

While he was leading public schools, St. John also continued to teach privately. “He has had numerous private pupils in the classics, in which he always took great delight,” an obituary said.

St. John retired in 1859 and returned to Ridgefield, living on the family farm on Ridgebury Road, a little north of George Washington Highway. The St. John homestead still stands at 620 Ridgebury Road.

Like his father, Samuel had an interest in public service. In 1837 when he was running his boarding school, he served as a  state senator for the 11th Connecticut District. In 1864 he was elected a Ridgefield state representative  to the General Assembly and served as a selectman a year later. He was also a county commissioner in the days when Connecticut had county governments.

“While he was a man of decided convictions, he was extremely reticent and retiring, never obtruding his opinion upon others unless called upon, or he saw good special reasons for so doing,” his obituary said. He was “a sincere lover of his country and its institutions, ever loyal and hearty in his support — a politician in the best and truest sense of the word, but never an office-seeker.”

Samuel St. John died in 1882 at the age of 75.

He and Lucy had a son who, at age 18, graduated from his father’s alma mater, Columbia. Thomas Platt St. John became a respected attorney in Manhattan and was also a promising political official  — in 1851 at the age of 21, he was elected as a state representative from a district of New York City, and was subsequently reelected.

Thomas St. John was also an accomplished writer and scholar — Annus Mirabilis, a long poem he wrote and read before the Philolexian Society of Columbia College, was published as a small book in 1848 that is still available today in reprints. “He was a great admirer of Shakespeare, and would quote with remarkable accuracy voluminous portions of that celebrated author,” said a biographer in 1881.

However, Thomas apparently tired of the pace of the city. He and his new wife, Mary Louise Runyon, opted in 1859 to join his father in his return to Ridgebury and the life of a farmer. 

Ridgefield, alas,  proved to be a place of sadness. Thomas and Mary lost their infant child soon after they arrived.  Four years later, Mary, only 32 years old, died during a miscarriage. Thomas was despondent and died a year afterward at the age of 35. The official cause was given as diabetes.

Bernard Perlin

Bernard Perlin: 

Artist Who Witnessed History

Bernard Perlin was a celebrated artist with works in many museum collections and who witnessed one of the major historical events of the 20th century. In Ridgefield, he may have been better know as the man whose bad fortune led to improved emergency services in a large part of town. 

Mr. Perlin was born in 1918 in Richmond, Va., and studied at the New York School of Design, National Academy of Design, and the Art Students League in New York.  Only 21 years old, he was commissioned by the U.S. Treasury Department to do a mural for the South Orange, N. J., Post Office in 1939 and, a year later,  the U.S. Maritime Commission hired him to paint murals aboard the new SS President Hayes, a naval transport ship. 

After designing propaganda posters for the U.S. government during World War II, Mr. Perlin became a war artist-correspondent for Life and Fortune magazines, and was embedded with commando forces in occupied Greece. He later covered the war in the South Pacific and Asia and was aboard the USS Missouri for the official Japanese surrender in September 1945. He stayed on to document the war’s aftermath in Japan and China.

Returning to the United States, Mr. Perlin began a series of “social realist” paintings, recording scenes of life on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He also became a successful illustrator for magazines such as Harper’s, Collier’s, and Fortune well into the 1960s.

Mr. Perlin lived and painted in Italy from 1948 until 1954, aided by a Guggenheim Fellowship. There, he began to move away from social realism to instead paint, in his words, “beautiful pictures,” including landscapes, still lifes, and figures.

He returned to New York to document the “cocktail culture” of the late 1950s, but in reaction to the rise of Abstract Expressionism, he left the New York art scene for Ridgefield in 1959. Here, he continued his work as a figurative painter, and his work became increasingly more abstract.

“People always ask me why my paintings are so different they might have been done by several artists,”  Mr. Perlin said in a Ridgefield Press interview when he was 94 years old. “Well, I’ve gone through many different phases of life — it’s been full of changes, so why would I stick to one technique? Many artists decide on one style and they stick to it. Their paintings all look alike. It’s boring.”

In July 1962, a fire heavily damaged Mr. Perlin’s Ridgebury home and destroyed many valuable paintings. It was the last straw. Because of the distance to the village firehouse, several recent northern Ridgefield fires had had long response times by the fire department. The Perlin fire prompted the Ridgebury Community Association to petition the town and actively campaign for a Ridgebury firehouse. Six years later, the new station opened.

Bernard Perlin’s art is in the collections of many museums, including the Art Institute of Chicago; Ashmolean Museum;  Detroit Institute of Arts; de Young Museum in San Francisco; Museum of Modern Art; National Academy Museum; National Portrait Gallery;  Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Princeton University Art Museum;  Smithsonian American Art Museum; Tate Modern in London;   and the Whitney Museum of American Art. His work has hung in many private collections including those of Mrs. Vincent Astor, Mr. and Mrs. John Jay Whitney, Mr. and Mrs Leonard Bernstein, Harry Hirshhorn, and Lincoln Kirstein.

He continued to paint until just before his death in 2014 at the age of 95.

“Every painting is like a book,”  he told the Press interviewer. “You write a book about something. And every book is about something different, and has something a different to say. That’s what painting is like.”

Alan Meltzer: 

A Generous Man of Music

Alan Meltzer, who died on Halloween 2011 at the age of 67, left a rather unusual will: He bequeathed $1 million to his chauffeur, and another half million to the doorman at the Manhattan building in which he lived.

Meltzer, who had a home on Old Branchville Road in the 1980s and 1990s, was a wealthy music entrepreneur whom The New York Post described as “the colorful former head of the New

York-based Wind-Up Records and a celebrity high-stakes poker player.”

Wind-Up, which has produced recordings for Creed, Evanescence, Seether, and many other artists, is one of the largest independently owned record labels in the world; the company says it’s been responsible for establishing many multi-platinum and diamond artists. (Creed’s three CDs had by 2003 sold 30 million copies.)

But when he and his wife, Diana, moved to Ridgefield, Alan Meltzer was involved in the retail side of music instead of production. He’d owned Titus Oaks Records, a small music chain in Long Island and, after moving here, opened Rainbow Records at 88 Danbury Road.

In 1985 he founded CD One Stop, a wholesaler of pre-recorded music. The business, which operated out his house here, was called the first of its kind to distribute only compact discs. Later merged into CDNow, it eventually became part of Amazon.com.

Meltzer was also a serious poker player, and frequently appeared on televised poker programs.

Tragedy struck in 1991. The Meltzers’ only child, Michael, a 20-year-old honors student at Syracuse University and a 1989 Ridgefield High School graduate, was killed in an auto accident on Danbury Road. In Michael’s memory, the couple established a scholarship for music and art students graduating from RHS that has given away tens of thousands of dollars in the years since.

Not long afterward, the Meltzers moved to Manhattan and acquired a small record label, Grass, soon turning it into Wind-Up Records. He ran the business while Diana sought out the musicians — Newsweek called her “the chief talent scout, the woman with the golden ears.”

Eventually, the two divorced. Meanwhile, Alan struck up friendships with his doorman and chauffeur —  The Post called them “two faithful workers who gave him a shoulder to cry on.”

Both were surprised at the bequests.

“I appreciate it,” the doorman said in a 2012 Post story reprinted around the world. “He was a generous guy. He was a really good friend of mine, and I was a good friend of his. It’s a surprise. Peace and rest to him.”

“I don’t know what to do exactly with the money, but one thing I know for sure, every year I’m going to bring the guy some flowers at his grave,” said the chauffeur, the father of five. 

That grave is in Ridgefield: Alan is buried next to his son Michael in Ridgebury Cemetery. 

Fr. Francis Medynski,

A Pioneer Pastor

Father Francis Medynski seemed to have built St. Elizabeth Seton literally from the ground up. In the early days of the new parish, he did almost everything himself — painting, mowing the lawn, planting  the grass and trees. 

When the church building was erected, he hand-made the wooden stations of the cross. 

Though a bit of a carpenter and handyman, Father Medynski was first a priest and second a musician. These two vocations combined when he went looking for a baptismal font for the new church: He used the kettle of a kettle drum. 

A native of New Jersey, Father Medynski was born in 1921, the son of Eastern European immigrants. His parents died in a flu epidemic when he was a baby and he grew up in an orphanage. He graduated from Catholic University of America, got a master's degree in education from the University of Detroit, and also studied music for many years. His specialty was choral music.

Over his career as a parish priest, he started 11 boys choirs. “Every time the bishop moved me to another parish, I started up another choir,” he told an interviewer.

In 1973, when he came to St. Mary’s as pastor, he founded The Little Singers, a choir that less than  two years later sang at the Vatican. Singer Francesco Morales had lunch with Pope Paul VI and personally delivered a message from The Little Singers.

“Ridgefield was little bit different back then. It was less affluent,” said State Rep. John Frey,

one of the Little Singers. “In order to raise money for our trips, we'd be out there with our red blazers and red-painted coffee cans, collecting change in front of the Grand Union.”

In June 1976, the choir flew to London to sing at Westminster Cathedral and Royal Albert Hall. It was to be their last major appearance, however; that summer, Father Medynski was given the huge task of creating a new parish in Ridgefield, and had to suspend his work with the choir. 

“I would like to think that we are putting them to sleep for a while,” Father Medynski told The Ridgefield Press at the time. “It is not easy for me or the boys. They had dedicated themselves to good music, and not just sacred music, but secular music.”

In 1976, as the town's population grew, Bishop Walter Curtis had asked Father Medynski to start the new parish honoring St. Elizabeth Seton, the first U.S. native to be canonized.  

The parish was created later that year, with first masses in Ridgebury School. The church opened in December 1978, and Father Medynski continued as leader of the flock until 1996 when he reached 75, the church's mandatory retirement age. 

"It's been a fantastic, marvelous experience and tremendous to be with the best people in the world for 20 years," he told The Press at his retirement. 

Father Medynski continued his priestly work, serving in temporary assignments in many parishes in the diocese. He died in 2008 at the age of 86.

“He was an incredibly smart, most of the time very patient, very humble man,” Frey said. “Looking back, I didn't realize it then, he was a man who was born into unfortunate circumstances, with his parents dying young, who was of strong character, and was just a humble and good man and was a good role model for hundreds of young boys, not just me.” 

Maurice Sendak: 

The Wild Things

When he moved to Ridgefield in 1972, Maurice Sendak had lived in New York City all his life, and had never needed a car.

“I’m a 44-year-old neurotic who just learned to drive,” he told a Ridgefield Press reporter sent to interview him that year. “Maybe you should warn them that I drive a green Plymouth.”

Six years later, as another reporter arrived to interview him, he asked apprehensively: “You’re not going to take pictures, are you? That means I’m going to have to shave. The guy who writes the kiddie books can’t have his picture taken if he doesn’t shave first.”

They were examples of the dry sense of humor of a man whose visions of fanged but eventually friendly monsters sparked a revolution in children’s literature. 

For more than 60 years — 40 of them in Ridgefield, Maurice Sendak wrote and illustrated books that have entertained children and adults alike, and challenged established ideas about what children’s books should be. The New York Times once said  Sendak’s work “has brought a new dimension to the American children's book and helped change how people visualize childhood.”

His more than 80 titles had sold over seven million copies worldwide in a dozen languages

by the year 2000. They included such classics as “In the Night Kitchen,” “Outside Over There,” and his most famous work, “Where the Wild Things Are.”

Maurice Bernard Sendak was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., in 1928 to Eastern European immigrants. He spent much of his childhood in bed, suffering from a variety of illnesses.
The family didn’t have much money and he didn’t have many friends besides his brother and sister. “He was an outsider at birth, as Christians nearby would remind him, throwing dirt and rocks at him as he left Hebrew school,” the Associated Press reported.

A gifted storyteller, his father entertained the children with often disturbing tales of the old country that frequently ended unhappily.

“These were the stories he told us before we went to bed,”  Sendak said. “No wonder I’m an insomniac. I didn’t know these stories were considered intensely inappropriate for children until I repeated them in school and was sent home to have my mouth washed out.

“Up until my generation, there was a soft innocence, a sweetness in books for children, which I thought was inappropriate. It had nothing to do with my childhood or other people’s as I saw it.”

Sendak’s experience growing up as a poor Jew in Brooklyn during the Holocaust profoundly influenced his life and work. The monsters in “Where the Wild Things Are” were inspired by relatives who’d fled the Nazis and come to live with his family in New York.
“They are my uncles and aunts, who poked us, pinched us, said absurd, patronizing things to us, took up all the room, ate up all the food,” he said.

As a boy Sendak read extensively, drew comic strips, and illustrated his older brother’s stories. He didn’t go to college and worked at a variety of odd jobs until he was hired in 1948 by the famous toy store, FAO Schwarz, as a window dresser. 

He studied at the Art Students League and was only 19 when he illustrated his first book, “Atomics for the Millions,” in 1947 (he did the book for his physics teacher in exchange for a passing grade and a small fee). However, later in life, Sendak confessed, “I was a very late bloomer as an artist. My students, at age 21, are much better technically than I was at their age.”

His break came in 1951 when he was commissioned to do the art for “Wonderful Farm” by Marcel Ayme. By 1957 he was writing his own books.

His many awards include the 1964 Caldecott Medal for the most notable picture book of the year. In 1970, he became the only 20th Century American to receive the Hans Christian Andersen Award in recognition of his entire body of work. In 1997, President Clinton awarded him a National Medal of the Arts in recognition of his contribution to the arts in America.

In 2009 President Obama read “Where the Wild Things Are” for the White House Easter Egg Roll. Yet, when it first appeared in 1963, “Wild Things” was greeted with as much controversy as acclaim. Many parents, teachers and librarians considered the story and artwork too scary for children. Some even thought the book could be psychologically damaging because young Max’s mother deserts him and he’s sent to bed to confront his nightmares alone.

But many child psychologists said the book helped express hidden childhood fears. 

The traditional Dick and Jane were no match for Sendak’s naughty Max, an AP writer said. “His kids misbehaved and didn’t regret it, and in their dreams and nightmares fled to the most unimaginable places.” Monstrous creatures were devised from his studio, but none more frightening than the grownups in his stories. 

“From their earliest years, children live on familiar terms with disrupting emotions — fear and anxiety are an intrinsic part of their everyday lives, they continually cope with frustrations as best they can,”  Sendak said when he received the Caldecott Medal in 1964. “And it is through fantasy that children achieve catharsis. It is the best means they have for taming wild things.”

In 1978, his curmudgeonly side came out a bit as he told Burt Kearns of The Ridgefield Press: “I love as few children as I do adults. I don’t feel that I write for kids. I happen to write books that are seen as being meant for kids because I create talking animals and things like that. But my books are not children’s books any more than any other book is. I just can’t write in any other vein.”

He described his simple style as “a poetic book form. That’s the only form I’m interested in. There is a beauty in the short text poem. I try to keep it potent, short, and full of energy. The reason that children understand it is because they have no fear of symbolic language — they can grasp things. They never feel lost in something unless it’s meaningless, and then they just throw it off into a corner. Adults are afraid to do that because they have too many self doubts in enjoyment when they should be going by instinct.”

“There is a magic in childhood,” he said, “but I like to think that there is the possibility of something magical in every human being. We just allow it more in childhood.”

He added that he didn’t take a condescending approach to children, nor did he attempt to moralize. “Who am I to teach or preach?” he asked. “I aid and assist.”

He bought his 18th Century house on Chestnut Hill Road in an out-of-the-way part of Ridgebury because “I wanted the experience of working in a different place,” he said six years later. 

“My first experience of really being in the country was when I spent a wonderful summer  in Wales. That was very fruitful for me. When I was in my twenties, most of my vacations were spent in Cornwall. They were the best summers of my life. So when I was looking for a place to live, my first indication was to look around here. But I was really attracted to the house, and the house was attached to Ridgefield.”

He said “I don’t think that living in Ridgefield has actually influenced my art, but I guess that as I get older, my work will become more pastoral.”

Over the years his work expanded into the worlds of opera and ballet; he’s designed sets and costumes for several successful productions, including an opera of “Where the Wild Things Are,” which was also made into a movie.

He believed his art had always been deeply connected to the music he enjoyed. 

“Designing for operas is as close as I can get to pretending that I’m a musician,” he said at the time.

Sendak was a mentor to many.  Jamison Odone, a former Ridgefielder, was among the illustrators who felt his mentoring, inspirational influence. 

“I don’t think there are many people made like him anymore,” said Odone, who is now a university professor as well as a children’s book author and illustrator. “There were so many times he’d say to me, ‘I don't even know what I’m teaching you, if anything at all.’ But he didn’t have to be teaching. Just talking to him, and looking at his work — he moved so many.” 

Lynn Caponera, his longtime assistant, helper and friend, said years with  Sendak shaped her way of looking at the world. “Maurice has a way of mentoring people,” she said. “You couldn’t do anything without seeing an artistic side to it, with Maurice. He made sure you felt good about everything you did. If you were painting a wall or weeding — anything you were doing, whether you’d think it was a mundane task — he had a way of making you see it wasn’t mundane.”

Sendak established a program for children’s book authors and illustrators, published or unpublished, in which selected artists would live next door to his house and he would mentor their work. 

“It’s a very low key, loose relationship,” Caponera said in 2012. “That was really Maurice’s legacy of the last few years. He wanted to foster children’s book authors to keep doing what they do.”

In his final years, Sendak would often say he didn’t mind being old because the young were under so much pressure. He would speak about death and missing his late siblings and his longtime partner, Dr. Eugene Glynn, a children’s psychiatrist who died in 2009.

When he was 50 years old, Sendak told interviewer Kearns that he never planned to retire from writing and illustrating. “I’ll stop when I die,” he said. “But who knows? Maybe when I’m 65, the publishing world will decide to retire me and give me a Mickey Mouse watch. I’d like that, but I already have one.”

A few months before he died, he said, “I want to be alone and work until the day my head hits the drawing table and I’m dead — kaput.”  

Death, he said, meant “everything is over. Everything that I called living is over ... I don’t believe in heaven or hell or any of those things. I feel very much like I want to be with my brother and sister again. They’re nowhere. I know they’re nowhere and they don’t exist, but if nowhere means that’s where they are, that’s where I want to be.”

Sendak, who had been in poor health for several years, died of a stroke in 2012. He was 83 and had never stopped working. 

After his death the Maurice Sendak Foundation, which handles his estate, announced plans for a Sendak museum somewhere in Ridgefield. In 2015, there was talk of locating the museum in a former Schlumberger Research Center building on Sunset Lane that had been designed by the noted architect Philip Johnson. 

However, in January 2016, the foundation decided not to use the Johnson building and said it

would look elsewhere. In July it got zoning approval for an art storage building on Sendak’s 17-acre homesite. It allows the foundation to host up to six visitors once a week to do research. The building, holding Sendak’s drawings and artwork, was to be attached to the existing house.

A month later, a stretch of Route 35, Danbury Road, from Limestone Road north to Route 7, was officially designated the Maurice Sendak Memorial Highway. The designation was the result of efforts started by Jake Madeson when he was a sophomore at Ridgefield High School and fostered by State Rep. John Frey. 

“I wanted something that told every traveler who passes through town how much he meant to our town,”  said Madeson, a Sendak fan since he was a small child reading “Where the Wild Things Are.”

“That book was everything to me growing up,” he said.

Huntington Gilchrist: 

A UN Founder

Huntington Gilchrist was a man of many interests who had a unique career in international relations. A journalist, corporate executive, diplomat, soldier, educator, and political scientist, he was the only person from any country to serve as a senior member of the international staff in the establishment and operation of both the League of Nations and the United Nations. 

Born in Boston in 1891, Mr. Gilchrist graduated from Williams, Harvard and Columbia, taught two years at universities in China, was an Army captain in France in World War I, and had a distinguished career with American Cyanamid Company from 1928 to 1955. 

From 1919 to 1928, he was the only American on the senior staff working to establish the League of Nations, and he then worked with the United Nations off and on from 1944 to 1957, helping draft the UN charter in 1945. 

In 1950, he went to Brussels as U.S. minister in charge of the Marshall Plan in Belgium, Luxembourg and the Belgian Congo.  He represented the UN in Pakistan in the mid-1950s and helped found the International School in Geneva. 

He was a longtime trustee of the Brookings Institution, and wrote and lectured on foreign affairs and education. 

In 1960, 20 years after moving to Ridgebury, he was chairman of the 200th anniversary celebration of the founding of the Ridgebury Congregational Church. 

He died in 1975 at the age of 83.

Samuel A. Coe: 

‘Mayor of Ridgebury’

Many men who lost an arm in battle might figure that’s enough public service. Not “Uncle Sam” Coe. The battle-worn veteran of the Civil War came to Ridgefield and led an unusually long life of helping his community in many ways — so much so, he was often called the “mayor of Ridgebury.”

“To say that he was much revered, respected and beloved in no way expresses how deeply the inhabitants of Ridgefield felt about Mr. Coe,” wrote The Ridgefield Press at his death in 1936. “His friends are legion, and they all mourn as one the passing of a true friend.”

Samuel Augustus Coe was born in 1843 in the Peach Lake section of North Salem, the son of Quakers whose ancestors helped settle that town  in the early 1700s. (His great-great-grandmother was said to be the first white child born in the Oblong, the 1.75-mile-wide by 50-mile-long slice of Connecticut ceded to New York in 1731.)

At the age of 19, he enlisted in the Union Army at Brewster, and became a member of the 6th Heavy Artillery, Company G, of New York Volunteers. 

“Mr. Coe saw hard service in the Maryland and Virginia campaigns,” The Press reported. “In different battles he was near death many times. Bullets struck his clothing, one burned his neck, another his cheek, and another cut a furrow through his hair, but no blood was drawn then. Later, he was wounded at the siege of Petersburg in May 1864 where he was under fire for 30 days.”

That wound at Petersburg caused the loss of part of his left arm, “thus depriving him of his dream of becoming a shoemaker.”

He was taken to New York City to recuperate under the care of the Sisters of Charity, an order of nuns founded by St. Elizabeth Seton (Ridgefield’s church named for her is just up the road from Coe’s Ridgebury farm). 

After the war, Coe married Susan Cable of North Salem and by around 1890 the couple had moved to Ridgebury, buying a 100-acre farm at the corner of Ridgebury Road. Their house on Old

Stagecoach Road had been built in 1782 by Captain Henry Whitney, whose son-in-law, David Hunt, established a Ridgebury-to-Norwalk stage line that left from the Whitney homestead at 2:30 in the morning. That house later became the home of Daniel and Louise McKeon, who called their spread Arigideen Farm. It’s now the equestrian Double H Farm, whose owner moved the enlarged Whitney/Coe/McKeon house to face Ridgebury Road at the corner of Old Stagecoach.

Coe became very active in his new community. He was a Ridgefield selectman for the eight years from 1894 to 1902, a state representative from 1911 to 1913, and a member of the Board of Assessors for 20 years. He served on the Board of Relief  — the elected agency that heard complaints that taxes were too high or unfairly levied — until he was 90 years old.  

He was a deacon of the Ridgebury Congregational Church for 35 years, and religiously passed the collection plate — a long-handled one — until a few years before his death. He retired from public service in 1933 and moved to Patterson, N.Y., to live with a friend. He died in 1936 at the age of 92.

“Mr. Coe retained the vigor of his youth for many years and in his declining years was a man of unusual vitality,” The Danbury News said at his death. “His eyesight and hearing remained as keen as when he was a boy and a month ago, he slapped his Ridgefield friends on the back as unceremoniously and with as much vim as he had done 20 years before.”

He was also sharp of mind, The News said. “He recalled the events of bygone days as clearly as if they had happened yesterday and kept in close touch with events of the modern world. On his last chat with friends in Ridgefield, he talked with heightened interest of the 1936 presidential election campaign. He was a Republican and expected to cast his 1936 vote for the GOP.”

He didn’t make it to the polls, however, dying in April. 

Aaron Turner: 

Circus Pioneer

The circus was a form of entertainment immensely popular in the 19th Century. Traveling circuses visited communities large and small across the eastern United States. But Ridgefield had a more than passing connection with American circus history. One of America’s circus pioneers was born here, and some four-legged stars of early circuses died here.

Aaron Turner was born in Ridgefield in 1790, said to be the illegitimate son of Mercy Hony. When he was 9, he went to live on the farm of a court-appointed guardian, Dorcas Osborn, at the corner of Saw Mill and Turner Roads (the house is no longer standing). Turner eventually inherited the farm and much land in the Ridgefield and Danbury portions of Ridgebury. As a young man he farmed the land and also did some shoemaking.

However, farming and cobbling were not his calling. By age 30, he was associated with the circus world, part owner of a troupe that had sprung up from one of the circus families that lived in nearby New York State. By this time, 1820, his 7-year-old son, Napoleon, was already a trick rider in a New York City circus. 

Eight years later, Turner the elder had a traveling circus of his own, serving as ringmaster. In 1836, he hired a young Bethel man named Phineas T. Barnum as his ticket seller, secretary and treasurer.

Barnum became an important asset. When the Aaron Turner Traveling Circus failed to draw many customers on a visit to Rochester, N.Y., Barnum suggested that the circus should announce its arrival in a community by having a parade. Barnum later used that circus parade technique extensively with his Barnum and Bailey Circus.

P.T. Barnum learned another public relations lesson from Turner. During a circus stop in Annapolis, Md., Turner jokingly told a gathering that his ticket-taker, Barnum, was a wanted murderer. The crowd took Turner at his word, immediately seized Barnum  and began beating him when Turner screamed that it was just a joke. Turner later told Barnum, “It’s all for our good. The notoriety will fill our tent.”

During the winter, Turner’s circus stayed at his Ridgebury farm, which included land along

the west side of Ridgebury and Turner Roads. Many circus animals were reportedly housed there and at farms in the neighborhood. Some of these animals that died were believed to have been buried in the old fields along the western side of northern Ridgebury Road—including at least one elephant.

“Turner’s circus was one of the most important and popular in the country,” wrote Ridgefield historian Silvio Bedini, who said both sons Timothy and Napoleon were “skilled riders.”  Turner’s daughter married George Fox Bailey of Somers, N.Y., who later managed the circus and took it over after Turner retired. Barnum, of course, went on to found his own circus, which became the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. (In the 1870s George Bailey was a partner of Barnum, but the “Bailey” in the circus name was a distant relative, not he.)

Barnum described Turner as a genius, a man of untiring industry, a practical joker, and a good judge of human nature, reports William Slout of the Circus Historical Society.

Turner eventually retired to the quieter life of operating a hotel, Turner House, in Danbury facing the Main Street green. 

    He died in 1854 and his hotel, which subsequently became a Knights of Columbus Home, was torn down in the 1960s to make way for—alas—a used car lot. Today, a Walgreen’s pharmacy is there.

Turner Road in Ridgebury, of course, recalls Aaron. So does the Turner Hill subdivision, built in the early 1990s off the south side of Turner Road. Roads there are named for some of the circus families that lived in Ridgefield and nearby, including Hunt, Howes, and, of course, Barnum.

Alexander Ross: 

Artist of the Clinch and Cover

Alex Ross was an artist of many skills. But to magazine editors in the 1940s, 50s, and early 60s, he was the go-to man for a “clinch picture.”

Born in Dunfermline, Scotland, in 1908, Alexander Sharpe Ross came with his family to Wilkinsburg, Pa., at the age of five and spent most of his early years in western Pennsylvania. 

His talent for drawing was recognized early but he could not afford a formal art education and  was a largely self-taught artist. He did attend a year of night school in art at Carnegie Tech. 

Over his long career Ross became a versatile artist, working in a wide variety of media —

oils, watercolors, serigraphs, collages, pastels, halftones, acrylics on gesso, and stained glass. While he spent his later years doing “serious” art, he is most remembered today for his three decades of magazine illustrations. Many of his magazine covers reflect an idealized, upbeat, post-war America — not unlike the pictures of Norman Rockwell and Ridgefield’s John Atherton; the three artists together produced hundreds of Saturday Evening Post covers. 

Ross began his career as a commercial artist in Pittsburgh in the 1930s, doing mostly

illustrations for advertising.

His first big break came in 1941 when Good Housekeeping selected one of his paintings from a roomful of candidates to be a cover on its magazine. It was the start of a 12-year relationship with the magazine during which he painted 130 covers. He was typically paid around $1,000 per cover — about $10,000 in 2017 dollars.

His work also appeared on the covers — and inside — of Saturday Evening Post, McCall’s,

Ladies’ Home Journal, Cosmopolitan, and Collier’s.

Often the covers included at least one of his four children, all of whom learned to model for him early on in their childhood.

Ross also became popular with magazine editors as an artist of “clinch” pictures to illustrate fiction stories. They depicted men and women in romantic positions, especially kissing. One writer

called them pictures “heavy with romance.”

He also did commissions. An assignment for the U.S. Air Force took him to Alaska, where he painted impressions of America’s frontiers, some of which are now in the permanent collection of the Air Force and have won several awards. In 1969 he designed a U.S. postage stamp commemorating the 100th anniversary of professional.

Around 1965, with more than three decades of commercial art behind him, Ross was able to spent more time at fine art. 

“I became fascinated with French Impressionism,” he said. “After that, non-objectives occupied my interests — Picasso, Kandinsky, Miro, Calder. But I got away from these because I hate hard edges. Painting should have  some mystery about it.”

He developed what one writer called “an entirely different and refreshing style” and what he called “inventive realism.”

“My subjects are mainly flowers and dream-like human figures,” he said. “Flowers have

beautiful shapes that lend themselves to abstraction, and I incorporate new dimensions in them, using the essence of ‘flower’ from memory to create a whole gamut of emotions.”

By the 1960s, Ross had also become interested in religious art.  “It’s one of the most fascinating fields of creation I can think of,” he said in 1974. He illustrated three religious books, including “Saints: Adventures in Courage” in 1963 for Doubleday and Company. In 1976, he designed several doors with stained glass windows for St. Peter’s Church in Danbury.

He exhibited widely and won many awards. His work is in the National Academy of Design, the U.S. Air Force Art Collection, the New Britain Museum of American Art, the Mattatuck Museum, and in many private collections.  Originals of his magazine illustrations can fetch thousands of dollars at auctions and sales.

Ross and his wife of 57 years, Helen, lived for nearly 30 years on Hawthorn Hill Road in Ridgebury. Their house had large windows and panoramic views 35 miles westward across the Hudson Valley. He died in 1990 at the age of 81.

As a youth, Alex Ross wanted to become not an artist, but a professional acrobat. For a while, he actually earned money with acrobatic performances. 

“I wanted to fly through the air with the greatest of ease,” he said in a 1970s interview. “When sailing into a high layout back somersault, I felt like a bird, an eagle.”

Walter Hampden: 

Star of Stage and Screen

Although he honed his acting skills playing Shakespearean roles in England, Walter Hampden was a Brooklyn-born son of a prominent New York attorney. He went on to star alongside many of the stage and screen’s greatest names in the United States. 

Walter Hampden Dougherty was born in 1879 and at 16, while studying at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, played Shylock in a student production of The Merchant of Venice. He went to France to study music, but the lure of the stage soon brought him to England, where he joined the Frank Benson Stock Company, touring Great Britain and becoming known for what has been called his “orotund voice.”

He returned to the States in 1907, and bought a Ridgefield farm on Mopus Bridge Road four years later. In 1919, he formed his own company with a predominantly Shakespearean repertory. In the 1920s, he opened his own theater in New York, playing Hamlet with Ethel Barrymore in the premier production. In 1923, he performed Cyrano to much critical acclaim, and revived the play several times during his career. 

While he continued to perform on the stage for most of the rest of his life — his last Broadway performance was in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible in 1953, he increasingly turned to film late in life, often playing “distinguished old blowhards,” as one critic put it. 

Among his film roles were as the archbishop in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), an American Indian in Cecil B. DeMille's Unconquered (1947), a pompous actor in All About Eve (1950), the British ambassador in Five Fingers (1952), and the father in Sabrina (1954).

Over the years Mr. Hampden also appeared on stage in his home town, usually in efforts to benefit one cause or another. For example, in 1938, when a movement was underway to establish a professional summer theater here, he appeared in a production staged at the Congregational Church’s Clubhouse. 

During World War II, he was also active in efforts to sell war bonds at the original Ridgefield Playhouse. On April 16, 1945, four days after President Franklin D. Roosevelt died, hundreds filled the high school auditorium for a memorial service that included Mr. Hampden’s reading “O Captain, My Captain” — he had known the president, and had visited him in the White House.

For more than a quarter of a century, Mr. Hampden was president of the Players Club in New York City; its library is named in his honor.

He died of a cerebral hemorrhage while in Hollywood playing a leading role in the film, Diana, with Lana Turner. His wife, the actress Mabel Moore, and son, Paul — a former Ridgefield Planning and Zoning Commissioner — were at his side when he died. He was 75 years old.