Elizabeth Biglow Ballard: 
The Lady of the Park
     Some people are influential through the works they performed in life. Some, like Elizabeth Ballard, were influential in death as well. She bequeathed Ballard Park, the five acres of her old homestead that have brought enjoyment to countless Ridgefielders of all ages and that have helped keep the village business district within its ancient boundaries.
     Ballard Park has been the scene of countless concerts, and it was probably 19th Century musicians who helped bring Mrs. Ballard’s family to Ridgefield.
     Elizabeth Biglow Ballard was born in 1876 in New York City. Her father, Lucius Horatio Biglow, was a major publisher of music, particularly hymns, whose company was called Biglow and Main. The Main was Sylvester Main, a Ridgefield native who was a music teacher and hymn composer. His son, Hubert Main, also born in Ridgefield, was also a composer who wrote the music for many of the songs Biglow published. And both Mains were close friends of Fanny Crosby, the blind hymnist who spent much of her childhood in Ridgefield and eventually wrote more than 8,000 hymns, many published by Biglow and Main.
     With all those Ridgefield ties probably singing the praises of the town, as well as of the Lord, Mr. Biglow may have been inspired to check out Ridgefield, liked what he saw, and in 1887 bought a home recently vacated by Dr. Daniel Lucius Adams, a retired physician who many credit with being a founder of modern-day baseball. The house had earlier belonged to Col. Philip Burr Bradley, a Revolutionary War leader.
Biglow called his new Main Street estate Graeloe, a word made up of the name of his wife, Anna Graham, and his own name, with the E’s added to give it a Gaelic flavor. 
     

     Elizabeth would have been about 11 when she arrived in Ridgefield; she spent much of  the rest of her life at Graeloe. In 1906, she married Edward Lathrop Ballard (1870-1937), founder and former chairman of the executive committee of the Merchants Fire Assurance Corporation of New York. They had two daughters and a son, and lived at both Graeloe and a home on Park Avenue in Manhattan.
     Over the years Ballard was active in the community. In 1936 during the height of the Depression, she and 10 other women got together to do something about problems of juvenile delinquency. They decided to create the Ridgefield Boys’ Club to keep boys busy and out of trouble (girls, presumably, were not troublemakers in need of activities beyond the home!). Mrs. Ballard served as chairman of the club’s board for many years and in 1960, she received the National Boys Club’s Keystone Award.
     She joined the Ridgefield Garden Club shortly after its founding in 1914 and  twice was its president. “Mrs. Ballard was keenly interested in horticulture and maintained the flower garden on Gilbert Street which had been started by her parents,” The Ridgefield Press said. “Her entries in flower shows won many prizes over the years.”
When she died in 1964 at the age of 87, she ordered that her house be torn down so that the property could be used as a park. She felt that Ridgefield already owned an old mansion on Main Street — the Lounsbury House — and that a second mansion would be a burden.
     However, a couple of outbuildings were retained, including her greenhouse, now used by both Ridgefield and Caudatowa Garden Clubs. She also left community grants totalling $250,000 (about $2.1 million today), among them $25,000 ($210,000) for a fund to maintain the trees and shrubs in the new park.
     In her will, Mrs. Ballard explained her bequest of the park: “Having resided the greater part of my life in the heart of Ridgefield, I have become increasingly aware of the expansion of business and commercial activities to the exclusion of open land available for the pleasure, rest  and recreation of the citizens of the town,” she said. “The easterly portion of my home property, with its landscaping and varied trees and shrubs, originally planted by my father, the late L. Horatio Biglow, over 75 years ago, has appeared to me to be ideally suited for a park to satisfy the increasing need for an area close to the business center of the town where persons, both young and old, may be free to gather in pleasant surroundings for rest and recreation.”

Kathryn Morgan Ryan: 

A Woman of Words

Often working in the shadow of her famous husband, Kathryn Morgan Ryan was nonetheless an accomplished writer and researcher, who wrote four books and had a successful career in magazines. 

The work through which she touched the most lives may well have been as a researcher and editor on her husband Cornelius Ryan’s World War II books, including “The Longest Day” and “A Bridge Too Far.” 

Mrs. Ryan grew up in Iowa, the setting for her 1972 novel, “The Betty Tree,” which The New York Times described as “a novel about Midwestern attitudes and two adolescent children coping with affluent, busy parents.” (She admitted later that she wrote “The Betty Tree” after a dispute  with her husband in which he maintained she could not write a book on her own; she wanted to prove him wrong.)

In 1946, at the age of 19, she graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism and had an early career that included writing and editing for Conde Nast magazines.  She was an editor at House and Garden until 1953,  starting out making “the extraordinary sum of $30 a week, but we were encouraged to wear hats in the office — the mark, in those days, of a lady editor,” she said.

From 1955 to 1960,  she was an associate editor with House and Home magazine.

“I was the resident house author on Frank Lloyd Wright,” she told an interviewer in 1972. “While my husband was roaming the world in search of one story after another, I seemed to be knee-deep in bricks and mortar.”

She and Cornelius Ryan were married in 1950, they had a son and a daughter, and for a while Kathryn Ryan was supporting the family while he was researching “The Longest Day.”

“Life really became difficult for us,” she said. “I was working full-time because my job was the Ryans’ only source of income. Our three-room apartment in New York was almost uninhabitable. The children slept in what we laughingly called ‘the master bedroom.’ We bedded down in a room that wouldn’t have made a good-sized closet. Everywhere else, the apartment was piled high with research.”

At the same time, she was also raising two children and helping her husband. “I organized, cross-referenced, filed mountains of information and edited copy,” she said. “Sometimes we worked until 2 or 3 a.m.”

During the same period she also wrote two books, “House & Garden’s Book of Building” and, with comedian Alan King, “Anyone Who Owns His Own Home Deserves It.”

Kathryn Ryan is best known for writing “A Private Battle,” the story of her husband’s death

from cancer, which became a Book of the Month Club selection, was condensed by Reader’s Digest, and made into a television special. The book, which bears her husband’s name as co-author, is based on secret notes and tape recordings her husband kept as he was dying from prostate cancer. The notes were discovered after his death.

“Connie was so objective he couldn't resist interviewing an ashtray if one happened to be there, and I think he was both fascinated and repelled by cancer,” she told a Times interviewer. “I think his attitudes indicate he probably would have written a pretty definitive book about it.”

She decided to use his notes to write “A Private Battle,” which was published by Simon & Schuster. 

It was a difficult, but cathartic experience, she told The Times. “Connie’s great desk sits just nine feet across the office from mine, and as I was writing it, I would be so immersed in the book I would really feel he was there.”

Over the years she received many honors. Some were unusual including, for her work on World War II, being made an honorary member of four paratroop units in the United States, England, and Poland. 

A Ridgefielder for nearly 30 years, she was active in community organizations, including St. Stephen’s Church, the Ridgefield Garden Club, and the District Nurse Association. She lived for many years on Old Branchville Road in a Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired house of redwood, cypress and 84 windows overlooking eight acres. After her husband’s death, she moved to  Jackson Court in the village and some years later, to Florida where she died in 1993 at the age of 68.

Kathryn Ryan’s lifelong love of words came from her mother, who was an English teacher. “We played great games of parsing English sentences,” she recalled in a 1976 Ridgefield Press interview. “We learned grammar in a very entertaining fashion.”

She felt English often wasn’t well taught. “The problem today was the same thing my husband encountered and overcame in writing. History doesn’t have to be dull, and neither does English. It all goes back to imagination, to making something truly interesting to the pupil, to make him want to participate in what you are teaching.

“Once you get participation, you don’t have someone in the back of the room yawning.” 

George Doubleday: 

The Man of Westmoreland

George Doubleday was the once-famous, rich and powerful head of Ingersoll-Rand Corporation, but his legacy in Ridgefield is a house of worship and a neighborhood. 

Born in 1866 in Michigan, George A. Doubleday had no connection with the book publishing company (as is sometimes reported in town). He joined Ingersoll Sergeant Drill Company in 1894 as an auditor, soon became treasurer, and when it consolidated into Ingersoll-Rand in 1905, was named a vice-president. By 1913, he was president, a post he held until 1935. He was chairman of the board till 1955, the year he died at the age of 89. 

When he took over the company in 1913, a corporate history says, “Doubleday was determined to make Ingersoll-Rand the leader in its product areas — drills, air compressors, jackhammers, pneumatic tools, and industrial pumps.” He kept the company very profitable and debt free, but in the end was criticized for failing to diversify. After his death subsequent leaders did just that. Today, Ingersoll-Rand owns such brands as Schlage locks, Thermo King transport temperature control equipment, Bobcat compact construction equipment, and Club Car golf vehicles.

Ingersoll-Rand had major plants in Phillipsburg, N.J., Easton and Athens, Pa., and Painted Post, N.Y. “In these locations, Ingersoll-Rand was the major employer,” the company history said. “Community life centered on the firm: Many workers lived in company-owned houses, and community and school events were held in company buildings. 

“Doubleday hired boys off the farm and trained them to become skilled machinists through a seven-year apprenticeship. These artisans accepted the company’s credo of pride in personal work, and only a handful of quality-control specialists were needed. Doubleday charged a premium price for the high-quality machinery this system produced.”

George Doubleday was a rather private individual — he would not even provide a picture of himself for the press and images of him are exceedingly rare. He carried this trait over into his operation of the company, the history said.  “He provided a bare minimum of information about

Ingersoll-Rand. Under Doubleday the company never released a quarterly report and its annual report was a single folded sheet of paper containing only the figures the New York Stock Exchange required.”

  In 1939, the House Ways and Means Committee listed the highest salaried men in the nation, and George Doubleday, at the then-tidy sum of $78,000 — equal to $1.4 million today — was the only Ridgefielder on it. 

Doubleday made Ridgefield his home for 40 years, buying the former Francis Bacon mansion, “Nutholme,” on Peaceable Street in 1915. He proceeded to acquire much of the neighboring land, mostly to the west and totalling nearly 300 acres. He gave his vast estate a new name, “Westmoreland,” presumably because it was moorlike and west of the village. 

In town, he was president of the nearby Ridgefield Golf Club (later Ward Acres) for many years, and his first wife, Alice Moffitt Doubleday, was active in the Ridgefield Garden Club and sang in St. Mary’s Choir. (Her sister was Mrs. John H. Lynch, whose West Mountain estate is now the Ridgefield Academy.) After Alice Doubleday died in 1919, George married his secretary, Mary White, and she, too, was active in the garden club and was a founder of the Ridgefield Boys’ Club. 

In the early 1960s, Doubleday’s heirs offered the town 250 acres of Westmoreland, some of which was talked of as the site for a multiple school campus; town fathers turned it down as expensive and unneeded. A Massachusetts firm quickly bought the property and subdivided it into 150 house lots, which the late Jerry Tuccio developed. 

In the early 1970s, the estate’s mansion was acquired by Temple Shearith Israel, now Congregation Shir Shalom, which still uses it as its temple and school.

George’s son, James M. Doubleday (1907-1970), became well-known in town. Over the years the Princeton graduate and local banking leader bought  several estates, razing the old mansions and replacing them with more modern and efficient equivalents. One place was the old Hillaire estate off West Mountain Road where his new home was called Hobby Hill. The estate was later subdivided and a road serving it, Doubleday Lane, today recalls James.

Anne S. Richardson: 

Benefactor Par Excellence

For most Ridgefielders, her name is the park on North Salem Road or the auditorium at Ridgefield High School. However, Anne S. Richardson was once one of the most influential women in town, “a moving spirit for its preservation and betterment,” The Press reported when she died in 1965. 

A half century after her death, she is still helping Ridgefield and the region.

Born in 1884 into a wealthy family, Richardson came here in 1915 and built her home, Mamanasco Farm, on the plateau created by the great rock overlooking the north end of lake. The estate employed many people whose families still live in Ridgefield.

Soon after arriving, Richardson became active in the community. She and her lifelong companion, Edna Schoyer, helped organize the League of Women Voters in town.

Though she lived far from the village, she promoted the beautification of Main Street, especially preservation and replacement of trees, both as a longstanding member of the Ridgefield Garden Club and as head of its Village Improvement Committee. 

In 1939, Richardson, a Republican, and Schoyer, a Democrat, were elected to the Board of Education, serving three years. (Ridgefield High School and Scotts Ridge Middle School stand on part of her farm; the land was purchased by the town from her estate for a relatively small price.) 

Richardson was appointed to the original Park Commission in 1946 and remained in office until her death. She helped found the Ridgefield Boys and Girls Club (then just a Boys Club), was active in selling War Bonds, and served in the American Women’s Volunteer Service Corps, aiding the war effort on the home front during World War II. 

In 1964, she was named Rotary Citizen of the Year. 

She and Schoyer loved travel, and visited scores of countries on every continent (after sailing up the Amazon, The Press once reported, she confided in friends that the natives on the shore were more fully clad than some of the women on board the ship). 

Her will, which bequeathed millions to trusts and charities, gave Richardson Park to the town, ordering that her house on the land be razed.  

Arguably her most significant bequest was to create the Anne S. Richardson Fund, which, since the mid-1960s, has given away many millions of dollars; in 2015 alone, the fund donated $610,000. 

Richardson specified that the gifts be in three areas: Ridgefield organizations (10 got a total of $275,000 in 2015); Fairfield County organizations (mostly helping the poor, youth and conservation); and eight organizations that Miss Richardson had a special interest in. The last group includes the Boys and Girls Club, St. Stephen’s Church, Connecticut College, Yale University, and several hospitals. 

Maude Davis: 

Flappers, Bouviers and Kennedys

In Maude Davis, Ridgefield had a link to some of the more colorful and interesting characters of the 20th Century — from the “flappers” of the 20s to the Kennedys and Bouviers of the 50s and 60s. An aunt of Jackie Bouvier Kennedy, she was the mother of an author who documented the lives of both Bouvier and Kennedy families.

Maude Bouvier was born in New York City in 1905, a daughter of John and Maude Sergeant Bouvier — her brother was Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis’s father.  She came of age in the “Roaring 20s” and in an interview with a Long Island history project, reminisced about her youthful life at Lasata, the family estate in East Hampton, and in New York City. When she and her twin sister, Michelle, were 18, their photos appeared often in the society sections of New York newspapers. “Oh, my,” she said in that 1993 interview, “those debutante parties at the Ritz Carlton! We were doing all the usual things. We went to boarding school at Miss Porter’s. We went to coming-out parties at Sherry’s. We did all the things debutantes did.”

It was the era of the flappers and Prohibition, but she was not drawn into its perils. Whiskey

and other drinks were readily available at parties, she said, “but my twin sister and I were probably the most stupid innocents in East Hampton. We never drank or smoked. I don’t know why …”

She added that, “We were from an old family in New York. We didn’t worry about keeping up with the Joneses — we were the Joneses. But we had a wonderful time, just dancing and singing at parties.”

On a stormy Labor Day in 1928, she married stockbroker John E. Davis in Lasata’s large living room. The scene is described in “The Bouviers,” one of many books written by her son, John H. Davis. “Maude remembers that just as she said, ‘I do,’ the sun streamed through the great French windows,” he wrote.  Then, the wedding party went onto the terrace where a jazz band played the Charleston. Bridesmaids and ushers bobbed to the beat, he wrote, while sister Michelle, the matron of honor, led the dancing like a high-stepping Rockette.

After her marriage, her interests turned to civic and charitable work in New York City, often involving hospitals. During World War II, Davis served as a “gray lady,” helping wounded soldiers returning from Europe. She was also a longtime volunteer at Memorial Sloan Kettering  Hospital.

From 1928 until 1998, she spent most of her summers and autumns in Ridgefield, a town she deeply loved. After renting various houses, she and her husband eventually bought 17 East Ridge, a large Victorian next to today’s East Ridge Middle School. 

Among the summertime visitors to the Davis home was her young niece, Jacqueline Bouvier, and the Davises were often a part of Bouvier and Kennedy gatherings. Maude Davis attended the wedding, inauguration and funeral of John F. Kennedy.

She remained in the East Ridge house until the death of her husband in 1966 when she bought

a much smaller place on New Street that had previously belonged to Metropolitan Opera star Geraldine Farrar (Farrar had called the place “Butterfly,” after Madama Butterfly, the opera in which she had starred with Enrico Caruso).

She was an expert golfer and, with her husband, was among the founders of Silver Spring Country Club. 

Over the years she was also active in the Ridgefield Garden Club, serving a term as its president. For many years she fought to keep the town beautiful. For instance, in 1973, when she discovered that a road widening project on Peaceable Ridge had resulted in the cutting of many dogwoods, she wrote The Ridgefield Press, decrying the work and calling for more care in highway planning. “In the spring when the dogwood was in bloom, right here in Ridgefield we had our own Greenfield Hill,” she wrote, referring to the location of the famous Dogwood Festival in Fairfield. “The dogwood has to rank high on everybody's list [but] one more lovely dogwood-lined road has bitten the chain-saw dust.”

As Davis grew older she sold Butterfly and would stay instead at The Elms Inn on Main Street until she became too frail to do even that.

In 1999, “shortly before she died, she expressed a fervent wish to see Ridgefield again,” said her son John. Arrangements were made to have her stay in an inn and to celebrate her 94th birthday at the Silver Spring Country Club. But by the time of her birthday, she had become too weak to make the trip from New York City. 

“She died peacefully in her New York apartment after her desire to go to Ridgefield one more last time was thwarted,” John Davis said.

Elizabeth Hull: 

Feisty and Generous 

Teddy Roosevelt gave a flower to a young Elizabeth Hull. An old Elizabeth Hull gave Ridgefield countless flowers, the ground they grew on, and a lot more. 

A conservative, often feisty personality in the town for more than a half century, Hull  supported environmental, conservation, arts, religious, and humanitarian causes, both here and nationally, and at her death gave more than $4 million to many local, regional and national non-profits.

But Miss Hull could raise hell  — and did, especially when the town announced it was changing her house number.

Elizabeth Abernathy Hull was born in 1900 at the Government House for Volunteer Soldiers in Leavenworth, Kansas, where her father, Albert Gregory Hull, M.D., was chief surgeon and hospital administrator. Her grandfather had been U.S. chairman of military affairs under Presidents James Garfield and Theodore Roosevelt, and Hull once met President  Roosevelt when she was five or six. “He gave me a white carnation,” she recalled with a smile in a 1992 interview.

Her mother, Cora Abernathy Hull, was a singer and ceramics artist.  

Early in the century the family lived on many military bases around the country, but in 1919, moved to New York City where Miss Hull studied music, a lifelong interest. She graduated from Mt. Holyoke College in 1921.

Fifteen years later, she and her mother came to Ridgefield, against the advice of friends who warned her, as she put it, “Ridgefield has the reputation of being terribly snobbish. You’ll never get ‘in’ there.”

“So what?” Hull told them.

So in 1936 she and Cora bought an 18th Century house at the top of Silver Spring Road, across from the Little Red Schoolhouse. Architect Cass Gilbert, designer of the U.S. Supreme Court and the Woolworth Building, had purchased and renovated the house for his daughter, but she died unexpectedly and never got to live there.

Hull almost immediately became involved in her new community. For most of her years here, she was active in environmental and conservation work, and was a member and past president of the Ridgefield Garden Club. She frequently championed efforts to acquire more open space in town. 

 During World War II, she was a member of the American Women’s Voluntary Services Mobile Transport Service, which taxied military and civilians around the area when cars and gasoline were in short supply. 

She was instrumental in founding the Ridgefield Auxiliary of Family and Children’s Aid, which helped the needy. She was the first president of the Women’s Town Club, an organization founded in 1956 to promote community improvements. 

Her interest in music led to efforts to bring concerts to town. Years ago she and Metropolitan Opera star Geraldine Farrar, who lived a few doors away on West Lane, arranged a series of musical programs. In some Farrar would sing and Hull would accompany her on the piano. Later she became a longtime benefactor of the Ridgefield Symphony Orchestra.

She was a supporter of the Keeler Tavern, the Visiting Nurse Association and was a substantial contributor to a children’s hospital and a college aimed at the underprivileged.

Hull was also interested in politics and local government, and was a frequent speaker at town meetings. In her later years she became somewhat discouraged with the direction the major parties were taking. “I wish they’d take all the politicians out and put women in their jobs,” she said when she was 92. 

Elizabeth Hull died four years later at the age of 96. Her mother, Cora Hull, had died in 1972 at the age of 101.

After her death it was revealed that Hull gave the bulk of her $4.4-million estate to conservation organizations, museums and charities.

The biggest grant went to the Nature Conservancy, the national conservation group. The gift of some $1.9 million came from the sale of Hull’s house for $821,000 plus the $1.1 million sale of an 18-acre parcel across West Lane at the corner of Golf Lane, which was subdivided as Golf Court. 

Another 24 acres off Silver Spring Road and West Lane, including woods, fields, wetlands

and a pond at the head of Silver Spring Swamp, was given to the Land Conservancy of Ridgefield. That tract was said to be worth nearly $1.5 million at the time.

Among the many recipients of Hull cash grants were the Ridgefield Library, Community Center, Visiting Nurse Association, Ridgefield Garden Club, and Keeler Tavern. Other bequests went to various Bible study groups, several museums, conservation organizations, and charities helping the needy.

She gave her Steinway grand piano to Charles Rex, an internationally known concert violinist and assistant concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic, who was a good friend. Two paintings went to the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington.

Elizabeth Hull had strong feelings about a number of issues, including the issue of numbers.

In the summer of 1969, after a lot of debate, the Planning and Zoning Commission hired a professional firm to renumber the houses, businesses, and lots along all the roads in town. For years the police and fire departments had complained about the town’s haphazard house numbering — where numbering existed; some roads had no numbers at all.  The disorganized numbering may have been okay when Ridgefield was a few thousand people and everyone knew everyone, but as the town grew, it often made responding quickly to emergencies rather difficult. The commission’s renumbering followed a logical system that even created numbers for lots that might be developed in the future. The system started with the lowest numbers farthest from the center of town.

“They must be mad as a hatter,” Hull declared in August 1969 as she began a petition drive to have the renumbering program rescinded.  “We can easily get 1,000 signatures,” she said.

Hull and others argued that while numbering houses that had no numbers would be a good idea, making thousands of people and businesses change their long-standing numbers was expensive and time-consuming. She estimated that just sending change-of-address notices to correspondents, magazines and bill-senders — plus changing stationery — could cost homeowners $125 to $150, and would cost businesses even more. 

She also felt that numbering in 50-foot intervals — to allow for the possibility of future homesites on vacant land — “is playing into the hands of the developers.”

Finally, she objected to the commission’s system of numbering roads starting at the point most distant from the center. Other towns, she said, number from the center and work out.

In the end, Miss Hull was unsuccessful, and spent her final years at 478 Silver Spring Road instead of 1 Silver Spring Road.

Kay Young Eason: 

Actress Who Missed the Battle

Kathleen Young Eason, an actress who was a friend of some of England’s greatest theatrical figures, was better known locally as a pillar of her church and garden club. A longtime Ridgefielder,  Eason acted on the British stage, a half dozen movies and later became a costume designer for RKO in Hollywood. She had been married to actors Michael Wilding, Douglass Montgomery, and Myles Eason.

A native of England who was born in 1912, Kay Young began her theatrical career as a student at the Guildhall School of Music where she had hopes of becoming an opera singer. “I was a lyric soprano, but I was very tall and decided I couldn’t be a great, fat opera singer,” she said in an interview in 1989, adding that she was five feet, ten inches tall when she was 13.

While still a student, she auditioned for a part in an opera being produced by Australian actor Cyril Ritchard, who was to later live in Ridgefield and be a major catalyst in her life. She did not win the part — “Cyril looked at me and said, ‘You’d be much too tall, taller than me!’ ” — but was picked as an understudy for a major role.

She then turned to acting and studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Her first break was a part in a Beatrice Lillie revue which, despite receiving poor notices, had a long run because of its star.

She was in various productions during the 1930s and early 1940s, performing with such stars as David Niven, Stewart Granger, Jill Esmond, and Sir Laurence Olivier.

In the late 30s, she met Michael Wilding at an audition, and the two were married in 1939. They later divorced, and he married actress Elizabeth Taylor.

It was in the 1930s that Kay Young met Olivier, then a young stage actor, and the two became longtime friends. “I knew Larry through the theater and was in one flop with him,” she said. “He had even then a commanding presence and remarkable voice. And he had a devastating sense of humor.”

When he was making “Henry V,” Olivier invited many of his friends to a 12th Century abbey he and his wife, Vivien Leigh, owned in the country. Only after they had arrived and settled in did he

tell his friends he wanted them to perform in what was to be the famous Battle of Agincourt scene that would be shot there.

“We sat on those bloody great horses which we mounted in the stable and the horses were to back out. Mine wouldn’t back and when Larry say, ‘Where's Kay?’ I said, ‘I'm here in the stable.’ He gave my horse a tremendous whack, it shot out of the stable, and I fell off. Then my horse wouldn’t move. So I was never in the Battle of Agincourt.”

Kay Young did appear in a number of British movies, including Noel Coward’s Academy Award-winning film about World War II, “In Which We Serve.” 

During World War II, she entertained the troops in North Africa, sharing a tent with Vivien Leigh. “We traveled as soldiers, and many an hour I spent under tanks and trucks and I was scared.”

In 1944, she was sitting in front of a fireplace in a London apartment building when it was hit by a German V-2 rocket. “The building collapsed,” she recalled. “All the windows were blown out and I was drawn halfway up the chimney. My arms were burned…”

The same year, she began studying at the London School of  Fashion Design, and started designing for movies. Her work for films brought her to RKO in Hollywood in 1950.

In 1953, a year after her divorce from Wilding, she married actor Douglass Montgomery, whom she had met in London at the end of the war.  Montgomery had become a Hollywood star, but also did   television plays in New York City. She appeared in at least one film, “Woman to Woman,” with him.

She eventually became a successful interior decorator, living in New York. She and her husband decided to move to New England and in 1965, moved to a home on Golf Lane. A year later Montgomery died.

In 1968, she was at a party at the Ridgefield home of Cyril Ritchard (perhaps best known for his portrayal of Captain Hook in the famous 1954 TV production of Peter Pan). There she was introduced to another actor from Australia, Myles Eason, who had met her many years earlier at the Chelsea Arts Ball in London.

“Who is that girl?” Mr. Eason had asked Laurence Olivier at the ball. “I’m going to marry her some day.”

And six months after they were reunited in Ridgefield, the two were married. 

In Ridgefield, Mrs. Eason was active in St. Stephen’s Church. She was a frequent lector and for a long while, was head of the lectors. She also worked each year at the Nutmeg Festival, the church’s fair. Both she and Myles were gardeners; she was a member of the Ridgefield Garden Club and he was an honorary member. For many years, she maintained the plantings in the watering trough triangle at the intersection of West and Olmstead Lanes.

Kay Eason died in 1994 at the age of 81. Myles Eason died in 1977.