David W. Workman: 

The Editor Who Became A Cop

David W. Workman was a small-town newspaperman with a large involvement in the community he covered for three decades. After he retired from newspapering, he turned to protecting the village, even packing a pistol as he patrolled village streets.

Workman spent 33 years at The Ridgefield Press, many of them as an editor,  changing the newspaper’s focus to solely local news. He also was unafraid to criticize powerful people, as a 1922 racial incident demonstrated.

“He was a staunch and loyal supporter of our town and lent his influence to its growth and progress through critical periods,” The Press said the day after his funeral.

David Whitney Workman was born in Norwalk in 1876, attended private and public schools there, and graduated from Brown Business College in Norwalk. He got his start in newspapers, working for the South Norwalk Sentinel, a weekly founded in 1870. 

In 1900, he joined the staff of The Press, then housed in the Masonic building just south of the Town Hall. He was in charge of what was called the mechanical department — the printing presses and typesetting. Back then the Press also did “job printing” and had both small and large presses to produce a variety of printed documents. 

It was also at a time when most of the type — the backward letters made of metal — were put together by hand, one letter at a time. Under Workman’s subsequent management, a Linotype machine, the company’s first “modern” piece of printing equipment, was installed. The giant, keyboard-controlled machine considerably speeded up the process of producing type.

Workman soon began taking on reporting and writing assignments and became assistant editor  in 1904 under S. Claude O’Connor. He wound up doing most of the writing. When O’Connor left in 1923, Workman took over full control. He ran the paper until it was sold in 1932, staying on for a while to help the new editor and publisher, John A. Thayer.

Under Workman’s reign, The Press became an entirely local newspaper. Before he took control, half of each issue was printed in New York City, filled with national stories, columns, pictures, and ads. The outside pages were written and printed in Ridgefield, then collated with the “boilerplate” pages. By the time he retired, the entire Press was printed in Ridgefield, and all its pages contained local news locally written.

Workman knew the town like few others. Besides covering Ridgefield for the newspaper he was for many years  the clerk of the Board of Finance, clerk of the Board of Education, and  a registrar of voters for the Republican Party. His wife, Edna Innes Workman, was secretary, treasurer at St. Stephen’s Church and superintendent of its Sunday school.

His special interest was Ridgefield’s woodlands and for 17 years, he was the district forest fire warden for the State Department of Forestry, issuing state-mandated burning permits and  overseeing fire prevention measures. Back when Ridgefield was much more rural, it was considered an important office.

“He devoted a great deal of time to the preservation of the beauty of the out-of-doors so often threatened by an expanding urban civilization,” The Press said in its tribute to Workman. “The blanket of pine and hemlock which covered his casket gave testimony that his efforts had not been in vain.”

 After leaving the Press in 1932, he became a town cop. Back in the 1930s, long before the town had its own “real” police department, Ridgefield’s policing was done by the Connecticut State Police, supplemented by town constables, local people who were chosen for that office at town elections — and had been since the early 1700s. Some of those constables were hired as paid employees of the town — one for daytime and one for night — to patrol the village, handle traffic, and deal with other minor offenses. The evening constable was often called the “night watchman.”

However, after the state enacted a new civil service law, the policing job conflicted with his fire prevention post. The state paid fire wardens a stipend of a mere $10 a year, but because it was a payment for an official position, he was considered a state employee; as such he fell under the  newly enacted civil service laws. Those laws forbade state employees from “political activities.” That meant Workman could not hold elective office — even constable.

So in 1937 he retired as forest fire warden (his son, Kenneth, took over) so he could continue as a “night watchman.” 

It turned out to matter little. Workman died the next year, 1938, after a lengthy illness. He was only 62 years old. 

The large crowd that attended his funeral at St. Stephen’s Church included “a squad of state policemen...in uniform,” The Press reported.

That might have been a little surprising to people 16 years earlier. Back in October 1922, The Press ran a fiery, front-page editorial criticizing the state police’s handling of the brutal beating of a black man on Bailey Avenue. 

The incident occurred in September when the inebriated brother of the commander of the Ridgefield state police barracks accosted the black man who was eating at Coleman’s Lunch behind town hall. After entering the diner, Thomas Kelly declared that he didn’t want to eat at the same counter with  “a nigger”  and ordered Robert Cooper to leave. When Cooper refused, Kelly punched him in the face. He then chased Cooper up Bailey Avenue, hit him, knocked him down, and kicked him  before several people finally rescued Cooper and called a doctor.

Several days later Kelly was arrested for assault and breach of the peace, but after a quick trial, was given a $15 fine.

The Press minced no words in expressing its outrage. “A brutal bully makes a most atrocious attack on an inoffensive peaceful man of good reputation, simply because he is a colored man, and he goes unpunished in this town,” an editorial said. “The state police take charge of the arrest and punishment of the bully and do not call Mr. Coleman [the lunch counter owner] or the doctor or any of the witnesses to testify to the assault or the seriousness of the crime so that the justice may know what punishment to inflict.” 

Then, it pointed out that “Thomas Kelly is a brother of John C. Kelly, head of the State Police in this town. Are relatives of the State Police exempt from punishment for crimes? Apparently an investigation should be made by those who appoint and control the State Police.”

Several wealthy townspeople wound up hiring a major New York City lawyer to demand that the Connecticut State Police headquarters in Hartford investigate the incident and its handling. The commissioner of state police said he’d look into it, but the outcome was handled quietly. 

Apparently Lt. John Kelly, the Troop A commander, was not found at fault, for he eventually rose to the position of commander of the entire Connecticut State Police.

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.”

Charles S. Nash: 

The First Chief

Charles S. Nash, the town's leading carpenter and builder for many years, has had the unusual distinction of having his birth and very early life recorded in a diary that has been published in The Ridgefield Press and is available online. 

On Friday, Oct. 8, 1865, Jared Nash, his father, inauspiciously wrote in pencil in his diary: “Clear, some warmer. Dug potatoes in orchard. Went to P.O. Just at night Chas. S. Nash born.”

Later entries talk of “Charly” and the toys and shoes his father made for him, his sicknesses, and his first birthday and baptism. 

As a boy Charles Nash attended the old Flat Rock School on Wilton Road West and the West Lane School, now a museum on Route 35.

He learned the carpenter's trade from William H. Gilbert, and took over his business when Gilbert retired. William F. Hoyt joined him and as Nash and Hoyt, they did much of the building in Ridgefield during the first quarter of the 20th Century, including mansions like Casagmo. 

Unlike his diarist dad, who stuck to the farm, Charles Nash was very involved in the town. He was the first chief of the Ridgefield Volunteer Fire Department, helped organize the Boy Scouts here, and was a member of the Board of Burgesses that ran the old village borough. He later served on the Board of Finance, as a trustee of the Methodist Church, a director of the Ridgefield Savings Bank for many years, and vice president of the First National Bank and Trust Company. He ran for state representative on the Democratic ticket in 1906 and 1910.

Nash was also very sharp. The Press once reported that while on the Board of Burgesses, “Mr. Nash figured out how to connect the sewer line for the new Bryon Park development into the borough’s main sewer system, rather than to build a new treatment plant. Mr. Nash was quite proud of that accomplishment because the skilled civil engineers who had been called in to study the problem said it couldn’t be done.”

He died in 1929 at the age of 64. Among the  pallbearers at his largely attended funeral was Francis D. Martin.

Richard T. McGlynn: 

First Professional Fire Chief

Richard T. McGlynn was fated to be a fireman.  He was born in 1927 literally across the street from the firehouse and his grandfather, Michael T. McGlynn, had been a founder of the fire department in 1895. 

He began fighting fires as a high school kid during World War II when many of the regular volunteers were in the service. When he was old enough, he joined the U.S. Navy during the war and served as a seaman in the Pacific aboard the USS Hugh Purvis, a convoy carrier.

After the war he worked in the family plumbing business while resuming service as a volunteer firefighter.

In 1950, only a couple of years after Ridgefield created the position of paid, full-time fireman, Dick McGlynn joined the paid force of four men. Still also a volunteer, he was elected chief of the volunteer department from 1964 to 1968. 

In 1973, he became the paid department’s first chief, a post he held until his retirement in 1989. (In the early years, he was both the paid and volunteer chief at the same time.) 

“He’s one of those rare individuals who gives everything of himself to the town,” said First Selectman Sue Manning at his retirement banquet. 

When he started with the paid department, it had four people, enough to schedule one person on duty around the clock, seven days a week. If a call came in, that man could roll the ambulance or a fire truck while volunteers were being summoned. 

Much changed in the McGlynn years. There was one ambulance, one firehouse, and four fire trucks when he started. By the time he retired, there were 26 men, two ambulances, eight trucks, and two firehouses. 

He died in 2009 at the age of 82.

At McGlynn’s retirement party, Police Chief Thomas Rotunda suggested that if the long-discussed “new firehouse” is ever built, it should be named the “McGlynn Firehouse.” After all, he said, one McGlynn helped found and lead the volunteers a century earlier, and another led the development of a modern professional department that still works side-by-side with volunteers.

John Edward Dowling: 

A Jewel of A Jurist

Eddie Dowling was one of Ridgefield’s most intelligent, colorful and well-liked attorneys. He was also a war hero.

“He’s the sweetest guy around,” said Superior Court Judge Patricia Geen at a 1985 dinner in his honor. He’s a “classic Irishman, a rare jewel,” added Judge Howard J. Moraghan.

Famed for his sharp, wry wit, Dowling often regaled people with tales from his long career. Some described his FBI days, such as the time, in a Midwestern cornfield, he had his gun drawn as he stalked a criminal who turned out to be a scarecrow. Some told of unusual legal cases, such as the Bethel woman who left her sizable estate to a name she discovered using a Ouija board. And many were about life in Ridgefield, such as the time a prominent clergyman, who had been complaining for weeks about a pothole at a local gas station, grabbed a pole and went “fishing” in it to emphasize his point.

While Dowling loved to talk, he usually said little when it came to the two Purple Hearts he earned in World War II.

John Edward Dowling was born in 1922 in a High Ridge house behind St. Mary's Church, where his father was the sexton for many years.

As a boy, he earned money for the family delivering newspapers. One of his customers was Judge Joseph H. Donnelly, then the only lawyer practicing in town. At a dinner honoring Dowling many years later, Donnelly observed that then-heavier Dowling had been a “skinny” kid back then. Dowling replied: “Donnelly didn’t tip too much either.”

Dowling graduated in 1939 from Ridgefield High School where the six-foot-four inch student played basketball. He was an usher at the old Ridgefield Playhouse movie theater, clerked at a store, and drove a school bus to earn money while attending Danbury State Teachers College.

In 1942, he joined the U.S. Army and fought with the infantry in the invasion of Europe. Around Christmas 1944, during the Battle of the Bulge, he rescued two injured comrades. 

Usually quiet about his war years, Dowling would say little about the event, describing it tersely: “We were under attack and these fellows got wounded and I went out and got them out, back to a medic. It was under fire, but I got away with it.”

Private Dowling was wounded twice in the war, the more serious injury occurring in April 1945 during the invasion of Germany. “The war was rapidly ending,” he said in a 2002 interview. “We were liberating towns. They were happy to see us and not the Russians.”

He was a member of an infantry anti-tank unit that set up a 57-mm gun on a road near the town of Unter-Gruppenbach. An approaching German tank blew up the gun. Dowling and two other men were hit, and a fourth man was killed. Injured seriously enough to have been later given the Last Rites, Dowling nonetheless dragged the two injured comrades to a ditch alongside the road. All three hid there wounded as the German tank drove by (it was knocked out down the road). Dowling was sent to Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington, D.C., to recover, and was discharged from the Army in July.

Though he earned the Soldiers Medal, two Purple Hearts, the Bronze Star with Oak Leaf Cluster, and other commendations, Dowling rarely talked of his war exploits and did not even receive his medals until 40 years after the war — and then, only because his son, Michael, researched and requested them from the Army.

One time when he was asked about his war record, he replied, “You want a war record? Go see Dom Bedini. He jumped at D-Day.”

As for himself, “I was in the service — period.”

Nonetheless, late in life, when efforts were being made by the Ridgefield Historical Society to record the experiences of Ridgefield soldiers in World War II, Dowling allowed Press editor Macklin Reid to interview him on his service. He spoke little of the battle exploits, however, and much of the lighter incidents in the war.

"We never did hit a tank," he admitted with a gleam in his eye. "My first shot with the anti-tank gun, I missed the tank and hit a house and it went through the basement. And you know what came out? Four hundred chickens! So after that, everyone in my unit would say, 'Hit another house!' They liked dead chicken meat.”

After his discharge, Dowling earned a law degree from Fordham University, and spent three years as an FBI agent in Illinois and Texas. 

He returned to town in 1951 and accomplished the then-incredible: As a Democrat he was elected judge of probate in this largely Republican town, defeating a well-known Republican attorney, Michael Bruno. The last Democrat to hold that office had been in 1879, and none has held it since.

“The response of townspeople to his candidacy must warm this young man’s heart and give him renewed inspiration to pursue his career with vigor and enthusiasm,” a Press editorial commented at the time. “During his school years here, Eddie Dowling worked hard. He clerked in a grocery store to earn money to continue his education in teachers college and later law school. Here is a local boy who has made good, a youth who, by diligent application to a program of study and work, has demonstrated that Ridgefield boys and girls need not necessarily go far afield to make their way in life.” (The editorial was written by Karl S. Nash, a native son who went off to Harvard and returned to town to run its newspaper.)

Judge Dowling continued to practice law here for most of the next half-century. Many young attorneys began their careers working in his office, including Joseph Egan, the current (2016) probate judge, Romeo Petroni and Sue Reynolds, both of whom later became Superior Court judges, George M. Cohan, and Jane Belote.

At his funeral Judge Egan called Dowling “one of the best known and beloved people in Ridgefield.” Describing him as a “townie in the true sense of the word,” he said “Ed was great to and for the town of Ridgefield.”

“His life had its ups and downs,” he added. “He handled them all with class and dignity.”
Jane Belote said, "More than any other attorney I have ever known, John Dowling truly loved the law and enjoyed being a lawyer. As a summer intern in his office I discovered that, despite the roguish sense of humor and abundant Irish charm, he brought to his practice not only a keen analytic mind but also understanding, concern and tolerance for his often colorful clients.
“Unusual things happened regularly in John Edward's life,” Attorney Belote added. “Every day was an opportunity for adventure.”

Pam Allen, who had been his legal secretary on and off for more than 30 years, said “he was a great boss. He was a legend. There won’t be another like him, ever.” 

Many remembered him also as a caring man, who often used his legal skills to assist people in need. “He’s helped Ridgefield a lot,” The Press once said in an editorial. “He’s one of the nicest guys in town, and if somebody needs a lawyer and can’t afford to pay, he’s the one most apt to help.”

Dowling also served the community as a member of the Board of Finance in the 1960s and the Veterans Park School Building Committee in the 1950s. He was appointed town attorney, both in the 1950s and in the late 1960s, and was frequently a moderator of town meetings. He was a member of the Ridgefield Housing Authority for several years while living at Ballard Green. From 1959 to 1961, he was chief prosecutor in the Danbury Circuit Court, now the Superior Court, and was for a while president of the Danbury Bar Association. He was one of the founders and a director of the Village Bank and Trust Company.

He was a longtime member of the Ridgefield Volunteer Fire Department, and had served as a trustee for many years. At one point, he acquired an antique Seagraves fire engine, which he outfitted with church pews and used to haul fans to football games at Immaculate High School in Danbury. He later gave the truck to the Volunteer Fire Department, which used it for parts in restoring and maintaining its 1931 Seagraves, which is used in parades.

He had been active at St. Mary’s Church where, in 1962, he chaired the committee that helped persuade voters to provide school bus transportation to St. Mary’s School in the days before state law required public busing of private school children.

In 2002, the Ridgefield Old Timers honored him at its annual awards banquet. In 2001, he was a grand marshal of the Memorial Day Parade.

He enjoyed golf, and played frequently with other leaders of the business and professional community. He was a member of the Silver Spring Country Club for many years.

Dowling’s wife, the former Regina Marie Malkiewicz, died in 1972. The couple met when he was an FBI agent in Chicago and they had eight children. Eddie Dowling died in 2004 at the age of 82.

When he was in his 70s, Judge Dowling lived at Ballard Green, the senior citizen complex that he called “Geritol Gardens” and where he was still practicing law. One of the few single men living there, he used to quip, “I never lock my door because there are 50 women watching it at all times.” 

Dr. Russell Lowe: 

A Physician and A Power

Russell Lowe was no ordinary local doctor. The physician practiced more than a half century in Ridgefield but was involved in many aspects of community life, including government. Although he never held an elective office, Lowe was among the handful of leading citizens who were always looked to for advice on running the town. 

Russell Walter Lowe (pronounced to rhyme with “cow”) was born 1866 in Oneida, N.Y., where he grew up and attended local schools. He graduated from New York University medical school in 1889 at the age of 21, the youngest in his class. By 1893, he had arrived in Ridgefield where he practiced for 53 years. The only break was for service in the Army  in World War I. As a captain in the Medical Corps, he treated soldiers at several camps in the South and was then assigned to the Surgeon General’s Office in Washington D.C.

Dr. Lowe was named the town health officer in 1893 and kept that job most of his career. “He has been very diligent in his duties, ever striving to maintain the high standard of health for which the town of Ridgefield is famed,” wrote George L. Rockwell in his 1927 “History of Ridgefield.”

For most of his years here, he was also the medical examiner and the school physician — he was largely responsible for instituting medical examinations for school children.  In 1897 he was named “special physician” to the Ridgefield Volunteer Fire Department.

For his first 25 years, he had his practice in the building at the north corner of Main and Governor Streets, but for the rest of his career, his office was at his home on Main Street just north of Gilbert Street — the house later owned for many years by Dr. Peter and Beth Yanity.

A longtime member of the Republican Town Committee, he was “one of the party’s most influential leaders,” his obituary in a 1944 Press said. 

Historian Dick Venus touched on that influence in a 1984 Ridgefield Press column about Harvey P. Bissell, the drug store owner who was also comptroller of the state of Connecticut. “Bissell and his close friends, Dr. Russell W. Lowe and the Rev. Richard E. Shortell, made up a triumvirate that pretty much controlled the political action in Ridgefield,” Venus wrote. “The Rev. Hugh Shields, pastor of the First Congregational Church, told a story that pretty much sums up the power that these men had in the political arena. 

Shields “told of how during the late 20s it became necessary to find a new representative to the General Assembly in Hartford. According to Mr. Shields, a meeting took place in the back room of Bissell's store, with all three of the leaders present. Mr. Bissell and Dr. Lowe argued at some length as to who the replacement would be. Father Shortell stood quietly by, listening to the other two, extolling the virtues of their candidates. When, after some time they were still at loggerheads, they turned to him and asked who his preference was. Father Shortell brought up a name that had not been mentioned and said, ‘The best qualified man is the Rev. Hugh Shields.’” And Shields soon became Ridgefield’s state representative. [Shields, Bissell and Shortell — the longtime St. Mary pastor — are all profiled in Who Was Who on the Old Ridgefield group.]

Dr. Lowe was active in the Branchville Fresh Air Association, which brought many city kids to spend part of the summer in Ridgefield.  He was a supporter of Chautauqua,  a sort of traveling educational school that included lectures, musicians and entertainers early in the 20th century.

He was a major fund-raiser for Danbury Hospital — a waiting room was named in his honor in the 1940s — and was president of the Danbury Medical Society for more than 25 years. 

Dr. Lowe was also among the first Ridgefielders to own a car, which he used primarily to make house calls. His first car, purchased around 1904, was a Stanley Steamer, and it was said that he bought a new car almost every year, apparently wearing them out quickly on Ridgefield’s rough roads.

When he died in 1944 at the age of 76, The New York Times ran his obituary under a headline that called him the “Dean of Ridgefield Physicians.”

“To have known Dr. Lowe was an inspiration — a perfect gentleman, a wonderful diagnostician, and a man who gave everything to the public and his profession,” said a testimonial in The Ridgefield Press. “In his practice, he was extremely conscientious — rich and poor were treated alike.”

Dr. Patrick Neligan: 

Raising Health Standards

 In 1970, when Dr. Patrick Neligan was appointed Ridgefield’s director of health, the town was in serious trouble. Scores of septic systems, some only a few years old, were failing because of poor design and improper installation and placement. Wells were being polluted. Restaurants weren’t being inspected. 

“This town needs some drastic changes for the better,” Dr. Neligan warned the selectmen. 

Dr. Neligan was appointed and immediately created the town Health Department. He  hired George Frigon as the town's first full-time, registered sanitarian, and the quality of health-related services immediately began to improve. 

In the 34 years that followed, Dr. Neligan, through the Department of Health,  ensured strict compliance with the state’s public health code. 

In 1985, he also initiated and aggressively promoted the concept of having paramedics provide around-the-clock medical care through the Ridgefield Fire Department, and the next year, they were in place. In 1974, working with the Ridgefield Visiting Nurse Association, he established the annual spring Health Fair that has continued to this day.

A native of Ireland, Patrick Neligan was born in 1926 and graduated from the University College Dublin School of Medicine in 1951. While attending medical college, he was editor of the “National Student,” a literary quarterly published by students of the university.

He came to the United States in 1954 on a fellowship to study at Cornell, sponsored by Sir Daniel Davies, who’d been physician to King George VI, and Sir Alexander Fleming, discoverer of penicillin who was a friend of Dr. Neligan. 

In 1956, he and his wife, Veronica, moved to Ridgefield and he opened a family practice on Main Street. A year later, he joined the staff of Norwalk Hospital and in the years that followed he served on almost every committee of the medical staff and held many offices. In 1975, his peers elected him chief of staff and he served three two-year terms. From 1985 until his retirement in 1995, he was vice president of medical affairs, medical director and director of medical education. 

In 1996, he was given the William J. Tracey M.D. Award for “exemplary commitment and philanthropic leadership” at Norwalk Hospital. 

But retirement from the hospital and the practice of medicine did not mean retirement from promoting and advancing good quality medical care. Dr. Neligan immediately set about solving a problem that had long concerned him: The desperate need for good health care services for the people of South Norwalk. 

No primary care physician had opened a private practice in South Norwalk in decades, and the poverty was so extreme that many people could not even afford transportation to go to the hospital for medical help. 

“I know what it's like to be poor,” he said, recalling his work as a medical student helping the destitute in the slums of Dublin. 

In April 1999, the 10,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art Norwalk Community Health Center opened. Today, an even larger successor facility cares for 12,000 of Norwalk’s residents, and provides over 48,000 medical office visits a year.

“Everyone in this country has a basic and fundamental right to quality health care — a place where the sick, the poor, and the indigent, can get quality health care in their own community,” Dr. Neligan said.

He retired as Ridgefield’s director of health in 2004 after 34 years in the job.

Patrick and Vera Neligan raised a large family in town. They lived at first on Main Street and then, in 1964, moved to an 88-acre estate, which they called Innisfree, off West Mountain Road. 

In 2013, with Dr. Neligan in failing health, the couple moved to the Meadow Ridge community in Georgetown. He died a year later at the age of 88.

When he retired 10 years earlier, Helena Nicholas, head of the RVNA, wrote a tribute to Dr. Neligan, saying he’d “worked tirelessly to promote health and wellness in all settings — he has always been accessible and giving of himself….The community has a great deal for which to thank Dr. Neligan.”

He often volunteered at the RVNA flu clinics, and, Nicholas noted, at one clinic, “we recorded 250 vaccines given in under two hours' time, single handedly, by the good doctor.”

Joseph Hartmann: 

Artist and Historian on Glass

Joseph Hartmann may have thought himself an artist, but it’s doubtful he considered himself a historian. Yet, the photographs he took of Ridgefield and its people from the 1890s through the 1930s

are a graphic history of the town in one of its most fascinating periods.

Pictures of rich and poor, young and old, luxurious mansions and dusty workshops, are included in the 6,000 negatives he left behind. Almost all the negatives are on glass plates — he worked most of his years with a large-sized camera in the days before “film” was available. For each photograph, a glass negative had to be inserted into the back of the camera. He stuck with glass well into the 1920s, switching to a plastic negative late in his career.

A son of a physician, Josef Hartmann was born in 1867 in a German village not far from Munich, a great artistic center. He studied photography in Italy and was accomplished at his art when he came to the United States with his father in 1888.

Around 1890, he set up a studio in the top floor of the Bedient building at Main Street and Bailey Avenue — it burned down in the great fire of 1895, but he moved into its replacement soon afterwards. Over the years that followed, he took thousands of portraits in that studio. He also photographed weddings, civic and social groups, babies, musicians, insides and outsides of houses, cars, gardens, pets, and even bodies in caskets. 

“His work, characterized by the use of natural light and perfection of pose and detail, clearly

shows the influence of the Munich painting school,” said a 1981 article in Antiques Weekly.

His later work was influenced by Frederic Remington and Frederick Dielman, noted American artists who lived in Ridgefield and were friends of Hartmann. 

“His photographs … are marked by richness and depth of tone, marvelous resolution and perfection of composition,” the article said. 

In 1898, Hartmann married Amalie L. Diedrich (1867-1943), who had been working as a German teacher for the children of the Rufus King family on King Lane. They had three children,

including Elsa Hartmann, who became a longtime teacher at Ridgefield High School.

Hartmann was a longtime member of the choir of St. Stephen’s Church. 

Hartmann, who lived  on Catoonah Street just west of the post office, retired in 1938 due to

declining health, and died in 1942.

For many years after his death, his glass negatives sat in boxes in an unheated barn next to the Hartmann homestead on Catoonah Street, two doors west of the post office (next to the Cumming house that’s about to be torn down). 

In 1950, daughter Elsa donated the collection to The Ridgefield Press, hoping that they would

be cared for and that their images would be published in the newspaper.

“I personally carried the boxes of plates out of the barn cellar and took them by car, first to a garage at my house, then to The Press office,” recalled Press publisher Karl S. Nash in 1990. He did

not point out that the boxes were exceedingly heavy since they were packed tightly with big, glass plates.

For more than a decade, the boxes of negatives remained stored in the newsroom of The Press. Many were turned into prints that appeared in The Ridgefield Press, especially in the long-running

“Old Ridgefield” series that attempted to get many identified. The Press was assisted by The Hartmann Society, formed in the early 1980s by Barbara Wardenburg and others to both preserve and identify the pictures.

The Press in 1990 donated the collection to the Keeler Tavern Museum, which with the help of

the Hartmann Society and others, set about not only getting modern negatives and prints made from each plate, but also figuring out the people and places depicted. Committees of oldtimers worked for years to identify as many pictures as possible.

The museum still holds the collection today.

Many of Hartmann’s pictures were used in the 1999 book, “Images of America: Ridgefield,” produced by the Ridgefield Archives Committee, a sort of successor of the Hartmann Society that has melded into the Ridgefield Historical Society. The book is still in print today.