Walt Ryba:

Good Sport & Good Business

Fellow students at Ridgefield High School knew that Walt Ryba would be a future leader. After all, the recently arrived Ridgefielder  had, by his graduation in 1959, been president of his sophomore, junior and senior classes, and co-captain of the football, baseball and basketball teams.

In fact, the Class Will gave “Walt Ryba’s many abilities and class leadership to future senior class presidents.”

It also gave his “oinky Studebaker to anyone who doesn’t like fast cars.”

His abilities and class leadership — not car choices — led to a lot more, and 40 years later, Dr. Walter George Ryba Jr., was dean of the School of Business at Fairfield University, where he was also professor of business law. 

Dr. Ryba (pronounced Ree-ba) was born in Stamford in 1941. His family moved to Craigmoor Road when he was a freshman. Learning that he had been active in youth sports in Stamford, RHS Principal Kip Holleran quickly signed up Ryba  for the baseball, football and basketball teams. He played end on the school’s first 11-man football team, was a basketball forward known for his “stylistic jump shot,” and as catcher for baseball, was “a mainstay of the team.” He was a leading hitter in the Housatonic League and named the high school's MVP in 1959.

Ryba went on to Dartmouth where he played baseball and football until a severe injury ended his college athletic career, but not his educational pursuits. After graduating from Dartmouth in 1963, he earned a master’s degree in economics at Trinity College in Hartford in 1971 and a law degree from the University of Connecticut in 1975.

Dr. Ryba began teaching at Fairfield University in 1982. He specialized in business law and regulation, focusing on antitrust regulated environments and international regulation, and his research appeared in many professional journals.

In 1994, what had been an academic department at the university became a separate school, offering a master of business administration (MBA) program. Three years later Ryba was named acting dean and the following year, dean.

He and his wife, the former Geraldine Pannozza — his high school sweetheart from the Class of ’59 — had been living in Lyme for two decades. As Ryba’s workload increased, the commute to Fairfield — as much as three hours coming home — became too much and the couple bought a house on New Street in their old home town.

At the school, now called Charles F. Dolan School of Business, Dr. Ryba made many changes. Under his leadership, the university added concentrations to the MBA in e-business and health care management, introduced a master’s in management of technology — offered jointly with the School of Engineering — and joined a consortium of Jesuit universities offering an MBA program at Peking University in China. He opened sites for MBA courses in Greenwich and Stamford and  added an “Executive MBA in Community Banking,” the first of its kind in the nation.

Dr. Ryba also oversaw the school’s final approval of accreditation and its move to the former campus Conference Center, which was completely renovated to accommodate the school’s expanding programs.

All the time, he continued to teach at least one course a year to maintain close contact with the students. 

“His door was always open to students and faculty,” said his wife. “As a result, he brought home a lot of work. He used to stay up till 1 o’clock in the morning doing work. But he loved it, he absolutely loved it. And he had so many plans.”

Dr. Ryba’s energetic leadership was tragically cut short. In August of 2000, he was stricken ill at his home and died shortly afterward at Danbury Hospital. He was only 59.

 “Walt Ryba was honest, straightforward and always used good judgment,” said Dr. Orin Grossman, academic vice president of the university at the time of his death. “His contributions to Fairfield University and particularly the School of Business will have a lasting impact.”

A year later, the Walter G. Ryba, Jr. Scholarship was established   to honor him by benefiting  multicultural students who have shown significant leadership in academics, student activities and athletics in high school. The same year, the Ridgefield Old Timers Association honored him posthumously for his excellence in athletics and education.

While much of his life was devoted to work in education, Walt Ryba also had more than a passing interest in rock and roll music. He particularly enjoyed Creedence Clearwater Revival, Fleetwood Mac, and Buddy Holly — he saw productions of “Buddy” in London and on several stages in the United States.

He had also never lost his interest in athletics, and was Fairfield University’s faculty representative to the NCAA.

John P. Cooke: 

Outspoken Olympian

John Cooke accomplished at least two things that no other Ridgefielder has: He won a gold medal in the Olympics and he was the only member of a third-party ever elected to local public office, at least in the 20th Century.

Cooke also led the committee that oversaw the construction and fine-tuning of the Ridgefield High School on North Salem Road.

John Patrick Cooke was born in Ansonia in 1937, starred at high school football, and entered Yale University where he expected to continue to play football. As part of efforts for footballers to stay in shape over the winter, he rowed in the tanks at the university’s gymnasium. 

He fell in love with rowing. “I’m a short stocky fellow, not usually the type that rows,” he admitted in an 2001 interview.

Just 20 months later, he was rowing in the 1956 Olympic Games in Melbourne on what has been described as “the most successful U.S. rowing team ever to compete in the Olympics.” The team won two gold medals, three silver medals and a bronze.

Torrey Cooke, his wife, recalled meeting him for the first time at a wedding in Philadelphia. Though he was an Olympics medalist — and, later events would show, was interested in making an impression on her — he didn’t even mention the Olympics.

“Never said a word — he never bragged about it,”  she told The Press’s Macklin Reid. “Somebody else said, ‘Do you know that guy has an Olympic gold medal?’” 

He rowed in an eight-man shell. “He was the number three man, and that’s usually the steam engine,” Mrs. Cooke said. “He was a powerhouse. He was a terribly strong young man.”

He went on to coach at Yale and stayed active in rowing throughout his life, refereeing, judging, and being involved in various rowing associations. He was a referee for the Head of the Charles race in Boston for 20 years, and officiated at many other competitions in the eastern United States.

In 2001 he earned the United States Rowing Association’s Jack Kelly Award for “superior achievements in rowing, service to amateur athletics, and success in their chosen profession, thereby serving as an inspiration to American rowers.”

As a sign of his love of the sport, Cooke hung a rowing shell — more than 20 feet long — from his living room ceiling.

After graduating from Yale in 1959  with a bachelor’s degree in industrial

administration, Cooke enlisted in the Marine Corps and was commissioned a second lieutenant  in 1960. Two years later, he planned the loading and initial combat array for a secret mission — the 1962 invasion of Thailand — that was one of the early involvements of U.S. troops in what became the Vietnam War.

Later on,  he helped found the detachment of the Marine Corps League in Ridgefield.

During a 28-year career with Emery Air Freight, he oversaw the construction of buildings all over the world, including Emery’s “hub” in Dayton, Ohio, a project that occupied him for seven years.

His expertise in construction proved useful to Ridgefield  in 1967 when he became chairman of the Ridgefield High School Building Committee.

“We completed the new high school on time and under budget, the only school in Ridgefield that was under budget,” he said. 

A resident since 1965, Cooke had been outspoken on many issues over the years. He was a pioneer member of the Independent Party and in 1993, was elected to the Zoning Board of Appeals on the Independent ticket — and continued to serve on the board until a year before his death. 

In 1995, he ran for first selectman as an Independent because “I’ve become disenchanted and upset, like many other people, with the self-appointed, elitist group which runs the town.” Though he came in third behind Sue Manning and Barbara Manners, he collected a respectable 1,578 votes. 

He died of cancer in 2005.

John Cooke’s causes over the years included outspoken opposition to a variety of government endeavors including the Super 7 expressway,  the building of an elaborate visitor’s center at the Weir Farm National Historic Site, and what he felt in later life had become excessive school construction in town.

“It never scared him to get up and say his piece at a town meeting,” Torrey Cooke said. “He said, ‘You know, when you believe in what you’re talking about, it doesn’t bother you.’ He was encouraging to me, always, to be able to do that.”

Dino ‘Ching’ Cingolani: 

A Man of Mounds and Islands

Few today will remember his name, but time was in Ridgefield when Dino “Ching” Cingolani was almost revered among local  baseball fans. The Ridgefield native was wooed by several major league baseball teams for his pitching prowess, played in the minors, and was once praised by the New York Giants great, Carl Hubbell.

A Ridgefield native, Dino Vincent Cingolani was born in 1927, son of  Gino and Ida Pambianchi Cingolani. He grew up in the Branchville section of town and graduated in 1945 from Ridgefield High School. There, he had starred on the baseball team and helped lead it to conference championship — not only with his pitching, but with his .485 batting average.

The New York Giants, Brooklyn Dodgers and Philadelphia Nationals all offered him contracts to pitch. However, the 18-year-old chose to take a look at the Giants and, in 1946, headed off to training camp in Florida — on the train trip down, he played pinochle with stars Buddy Kerr, Mel Ott and Hal Schumacher.  

In camp he pitched against Bobby Thompson and others, with Carl Hubbell umpiring. Hubbell at one point declared that the Giants had  “another Bob Feller.”

However, after six weeks in camp, Cigolani returned to Branchville, having balked at signing a contract that the Giants had offered him. Meanwhile, Jack Barry,  coach at  Holy Cross College, offered him a scholarship to come to Worcester, Mass. Back in those days Holy Cross was a baseball powerhouse and had had more than 60 graduates who went into the majors. 

Cigolani thought it over and opted finally to sign with the Giants. He later said it was “a big mistake,” but didn’t explain why.

Starting in 1946, Cingolani played four seasons for the Giants' farm teams in such places as Erie, Springfield, Ogdensburg, and Peekskill with the likes of Hoyt Wilhelm and Bobby Thompson — taking a break to serve in the Army and then returning in 1952 to play at Knoxville. 

Over five seasons he compiled a record of 46 wins and 36 losses, with a batting average of .313. While playing for the Springfield Giants in 1947, he had his best hitting season, with a .347 average, but it was also his only losing season as a pitcher, 11-15.

In 1952, after a season with Knoxville, he decided to abandon minor league play, and return to Ridgefield where he pitched for local teams and in the Danbury City League for many years.  

When Cingolani was honored by the Ridgefield Old Timers Association in 1995, ROTA observed, “Chink would be the first to admit that he made some ill-timed and poor decisions along the way, undoubtedly blocking a sure road to the majors.” The association did not say what those decisions were.

Cingolani spent many years working as a foreman at the Perkin-Elmer Corp. in Norwalk, and then as a salesman.  In 1969 he and his wife, the former Alice Salvestrini, moved to Norwalk.  

Later in life Cingolani focused on his other favorite sport, fishing. He did a lot of it off the shore of Norwalk and he and Alice became very involved promoting public use of and camping on some of the wild Norwalk Islands — particularly Shea and Grassy Islands owned by the city. Alice Cingolani, in fact, was Norwalk’s “Island Warden.”

Adults, Dino told an interviewer in 1990, enjoy the fishing and the scenery, but it’s children who get the most out of the islands.

“You know what it does for them, to take them out, have them build a fire at night?” he said. “They can pick up a shell, dig for clams, or catch a fish. You can’t just watch life on TV.”

Dino Cingolani died in Norwalk in 2004 at the age of 76.

In May of 1946, when he was entering the minor leagues, Cingolani filled out a questionnaire for the American Baseball Bureau in Chicago. Aside from the basics, such as his height (5 foot 9 inches) and weight (160), the form asked for his “ambition in baseball.”

“To get to the top,” he replied.

And “what do you consider your most interesting or unusual experience in baseball?”

That, he replied, was “pitching a no hitter and losing.”

That rare event occurred on April 26, 1944, when the right-hander hurled the no-hitter against Wooster Prep, only to lose 3-2. He faced 23 men in six innings; six reached first — five on walks and one on a fielding error. Unfortunately for Cingolani and Ridgefield, the locals committed errors in the third and fifth innings with walked Wooster players on base, allowing three runners to score.

Sylvia Hodge: 

A Life of Music

Among the most popular of the many 20th Century teachers at Ridgefield High School was a woman who had to commute 85 miles round trip to get to her classes. But Sylvia Hodge apparently liked teaching in Ridgefield and also liked living in her native New Haven.

And her students certainly liked her.

“What an amazing woman and teacher she was,” said Barbara Asketh Amaral. 

When she arrived at Ridgefield High School in 1964, she was known as Sylvia Randall and taught in the then tiny music department. Her name changed after her marriage to Cullen Hodge, who taught mathematics in New Haven.

She was born in 1920, a daughter of parents who had immigrated from the island of Nevis in the West Indies. Both a pianist and a singer, she studied at Yale School of Music and Columbia University and was a graduate of both the Juilliard School of Music and Albertus Magnus College.

During her 25 years at Ridgefield High School, she taught music and led choral groups (by the late 1970s, RHS had singing courses in A Capella Choir, Mixed Chorus, Choir, Voice, and Madrigal Singers). Her choral groups gave countless concerts both in school and in the community — even at Yale University, and in New York, Chicago and Philadelphia. After she led students in a concert for three Ridgefield senior citizen groups in 1973, Eddie Olsen of the OWLS said, “Sylvia Hodge certainly deserves an award as music director of the year.”

He wasn’t alone in his respect for Hodge. Dozens of her students have sung her praises on Old Ridgefield.

“She was an amazing person,” said Stacy Acon in a 2017 remembrance. “I was privileged to have her as my chorus teacher for four years.”

“She was such a kind lady,” said Tracy Skelly Brooks.

“Many wonderful memories of this lovely lady who let me sing even though I couldn’t carry a tune,” said Ellen Cole Tim. “She was the best!”

“Loved Momma Hodge!” said Tracy Petry. “My best memories of RHS are of being in her class.”

“Mrs. Hodge was my mentor — all my inspiration in music came from her, and also life in general,” said James Edighoffer. “She always encouraged me in everything I did.”

“Only woman in the world that could get me to sing in the choir,” said Guy Rossini.

“She used to have a sign up in the chorus room that said, ‘When you sing, you pray twice,’” said Patrice Sarath. “I always liked that.”

“Loved her,” said Deborah Karably. “She taught me how to sing the right way, and if she noticed that one’s diaphragm was not moving the right way to get enough air in your lungs, she had a ‘hands on’ technique that made sure you never made that mistake again!”

“Mrs. Hodge was one of a kind,” said Elizabeth Capalbo. “Juilliard-trained and should have been teaching at a much higher level than RHS. She was extremely talented musically and so very kind to me personally.  I was forced to audition for her in my sophomore year because I kept singing in Study Hall and the only way to not get detentions was to audition...so I did, of course.  When I had nodules on my vocal chords a year or so later, Mrs. Hodge found two doctors for me to see in Hamden and at NYU... When I was unable to sing for a short period, she would give me an excuse note and send me to Peach Lake Deli to buy her a shrimp salad grinder (best shrimp salad ever) and then have me organize the sheet music closet … Fond memories of a great woman who was a safe haven in a tough time.”

Hodge continued to teach into her late 60s, retiring around 1988. In New Haven, however, she continued to be active in music. She was the organist and choir director for many churches — including her own, St. Luke’s Episcopal. Over the years she served as a musical director for organizations in both Connecticut and the Virgin Islands.  

“She graced many stages here and abroad with her gift and love for the piano,” her family said at the time of her death.

Sylvia Hodge died in late October 2008 at the age of 88.

Perhaps the most touching tribute to her as a teacher came from Allison Staudacher, RHS 1974. “We had this great chorus that Sylvia hoodwinked us into,” she said. “Lots of us were drawn by her charm and effervescent humor. 

“I did not have the picture-perfect upbringing, and once I made the mistake of having so much enthusiasm and pride that I pleaded with my mother to attend a concert. She showed up drunk — badly, sloppy drunk. We all knew the norms, the acceptable; I was mortified. 

“I went to the girls room to wallow in tears. Sylvia came to my rescue. How many were there in her chorus — 50,  75? There were a bunch of us — but she knew each and every one. I won’t get into specifics, but the words she said to me changed my life. Sylvia Hodges saved my life.  

“I am 60 years of age; I will continue to pay it forward. I would not feel I gave her justice if I did not try to live her words.”

Old Students Teach Young Students

We had an unusual problem: We knew the names of everyone in these four pictures but we didn’t know for sure just where they were and exactly what they were doing.

Could it be the preschool that operated at Ridgefield High School back in the 1980s? Or was it some new private preschool that used RHS students? According to several members of the Old Ridgefield group on Facebook, the answer was definitely the former.

The RHS preschool operated to the advantage of big students who wanted to learn child care, little students who wanted to begin school, and parents who were looking for an inexpensive preschool — probably free!

Shown are, at upper left, Kira Skorpen and Michelle Bellagamba, student teachers and  high school students, with a girl named Murphy and a boy, Jonathan Henry; upper right: student teacher Kira Skorpen with Rebecca Pawlik, Edward Keane, and Chris Hornyak; lower left: Terri Garofalo, Ryan Williams and probably Ryan’s mom, Joan Williams; lower right: Lisa Besse and Tracy Geary with Tom Cofone in the “housekeeping corner.”

The Ridgefield High School alumni directory says Kira Skorpen was a 1986 graduate, and that  Lisa Besse, Michelle Bellagamba, Terri Garofalo, and Tracy Geary were in the Class of 1985, so that pretty much places the pictures in the mid-1980s.

Charles Coles, He Loved The Bank

Charlie Coles had many interests, but his two favorites were banking and local history. A man who rose from teller to  president of the Ridgefield Savings Bank (now the Fairfield County Bank), he had a love of and faith in banking that was demonstrated in many ways, but few quite as intensely as when he chewed out a Ridgefield Press editor for a half hour after the newspaper ran a humorous quotation over the front page flag, saying: “A penny saved is a penny getting smaller.”

He was fascinated by Ridgefield history and memorabilia, collecting and studying items ranging from candlesticks made here in the 1800s to hundreds of antique Ridgefield postcards. He was also a collector of and expert on antique clocks, many of which he had exhibited at the bank's several offices. 

Though many people thought of him as a native, Charles H. Coles Jr. was born in Oakville, Toronto, Ontario, in 1922. His parents, Charles Sr. and Elizabeth Evans Coles, were natives of England who immigrated to Canada and in 1925, moved to the United States. By 1928, they were in Ridgefield, where Charles Sr. became a gardener on the Maynard estate on High Ridge. Charles Jr. attended Ridgefield schools and graduated from Ridgefield High School in 1941. 

During his high school years, he was active in athletics, especially baseball, and earned the nickname of “Slugger Coles” because of his hitting abilities. He was a member of an RHS team that nearly won the state championship for little Ridgefield in 1940. 

Coles was a student at Danbury State Teachers College in 1943 when he joined the U.S. Army and was assigned to the 193rd tank battalion. Sent to New Hebrides in the Pacific, he took part in the invasion of Okinawa in April 1945. He was a tank machine gunner and driver.

On April 19, his unit lost 22 of its 30 tanks in the assault on Kakazu Ridge, the greatest tank loss of the campaign. Only an hour after Private Coles was transferred from a tank that morning, its entire five-member crew was killed. 

After the war Sgt. Coles served in the Army Reserves and was on active reserve status during the Korean War. 

Back home in 1946, he joined the Ridgefield Savings Bank as a teller and bookkeeper. He became assistant treasurer in 1956, an incorporator in 1958, a director in 1970, and president in 1971. He served as president, chairman of the board, and chief operating officer at various times through the 1970s until his retirement in 1987. He remained a director until 1993. 

Ridgefield Savings Bank became “the fastest-growing savings bank in the state” in the 1980s, Coles reported at the 1984 annual meeting. Under his leadership, the bank acquired land at the corner of Danbury and Farmingville Roads to build its new headquarters, now the main office of Fairfield County Bank. 

Over the years he completed the Graduate School of Banking at Rutgers University, and graduating from the American Institute of Banking (of which he was later a board member) and from various schools sponsored by the national Association of Mutual Savings Banks. He served as

president of the Fairfield County Bankers Association, was on the Conference of State Bank Supervisors in 1985, and had been a member of the Legislative Committee of the Savings Bank Association of Connecticut. 

“His whole life was the bank,” said Paul S. McNamara, longtime chairman of the Fairfield County Bank board of directors. “He loved the bank — he loved going to work. 

“Charlie really believed very strongly in the value of the customer,”  Mr. McNamara added. “His focus was always on the customer.” 

Coles had a way with not only money, but also words.  For a while in the 1950s, he was the part-time sports editor for The Ridgefield Press. 

In 1971, on the occasion of the bank’s 100th anniversary,  Coles teamed up with Karl Nash, editor and publisher of The Press, on a history of the Ridgefield Savings Bank.  Coles did the bulk of the research for the publication, which appeared as a special supplement to The Press and chronicled the history of the bank, its leaders, and the community they served. The 36-page section was based on many hours of interviews with longtime residents and from research into old documents, and included dozens of old photos of the town, many from  Coles’s postcard collection. 

Twenty years later,  Coles was one of the lead writers on another history section in The Press, describing the town’s participation in World War II. He spent months researching the 49 members of the Ridgefield High School Class of 1941 and their contributions to the war effort. His long article was entitled “Class of ’41: First to Go.” (Two classmates, George Vetter and Charles Cogswell, never returned.) 

Coles had a great interest in antiques and especially antique clocks, a subject on which he became known as a local expert. He was especially interested in Ridgefield antiques and ephemera and had dealers all over the country helping him locate Ridgefield-related items. In 1983, for the town's 275th anniversary celebration, he put together a large display of old postcards, which he exhibited at the bank’s Main Street office. 

He loved athletics. In the late 1940s and 1950s, Coles played softball in leagues in Westchester and Ridgefield. In his first game in the newly formed Townies Softball League in Ridgefield in 1953, he hit a home run and pitched Hyde’s Liquors to a 10-6 win over Martin’s Jewelry Store. 

He also became active in youth sports. He was one of the organizers of Ridgefield Little League, and later served as its president. He managed Babe Ruth League baseball teams, had been a coach in the Red Raider football league, and managed boys teams in the Townies Basketball League. 

In 1999, the Ridgefield Old Timers honored him with its Civic Award, citing his “dedication and hard work  in the various youth programs... Charlie spent many hours helping young athletes improve their skills.”

Coles was also fond of golf and invariably had a set of clubs in his car trunk, along with some of his latest antiques acquisitions. 

He was active in Boy Scouts, serving as committee chairman of Troop 47. He had been a member of the Rotary Club for many years, an incorporator of the Ridgefield Boys’ Club, a treasurer of the Community Center, and treasurer for the local Red Cross. In 1967, he was given the Ridgefield Jaycees Distinguished Service Award. 

When he retired after 42 years with the bank, he received testimonials for his service to  community from many leaders, including President Ronald Reagan.

Coles died in 2003 at the age of 80.

“Something about Charlie that a lot of people are not aware of,”  Paul McNamara said after Coles had died. “He was very helpful to people in town in a very quiet way. If someone came to Charlie with a financial problem, he found a way to solve it. And he did that over and over again.”

Dirk Bollenback: 

Saintly Inspiration

Some teachers are respected. Others are beloved.  Dirk Bollenback was both.

A history teacher for 38 years, Bollenback chaired the Social Studies Department at Ridgefield High School, fought local “book burners” in the 1970’s, and inspired countless students.

He was also a singer, leader, and historian at St. Stephen’s Church.

A native of Evanston, Ill., Dirk Floyd Bollenback was born in 1931, graduated from the Deerfield Academy and received a bachelor’s degree in 1953 from Wesleyan University (where, for a

year, he was a member of the Pre-Ministerial Club). He earned a master’s degree from the School of Advanced International Studies at John Hopkins and then served in the U.S. Army as a research analyst and instructor in the Army’s Psychological Warfare School at Fort Bragg, N.C. After the Army, he earned a second master’s at Wesleyan University.

With his wife Beverly, he moved  to Ridgefield  in 1958 when he took a job as a social studies teacher at the high school. He soon became department chair, a post he held for 32 years, a period of tremendous growth in the town. The Class of 1959, his first graduating class at the “old” high school on East Ridge, had only 60 students; just over dozen years later, more than 400 were graduating from the “new” school on North Salem Road.

Over the years he revamped and improved the Social Studies Department’s courses with such success that in 1991, he earned a John F. Kennedy Library Teacher Award for “developing creative and effective curriculum and demonstrating instructional excellence.”

In the 1970s, Bollenback was at the center of the book-banning controversies that involved the high school’s Social Studies and English Departments and some of their book selections, including Eldridge Cleaver’s “Soul on Ice” and Mike Royko’s “Boss.” — both of which some school board members and parents wanted removed from elective courses as inappropriate for high school seniors. In the end both books were retained, but not without bitter confrontations that resulted in national media coverage.

“We were under a lot of pressure,” he told The Ridgefield Press a quarter century later. “It was the hardest time I went through in Ridgefield. It all got very personal and I remember being called a Communist at one meeting. In retrospect it was really farcical; I’m a very conservative guy.”

He was, in fact, a member of the Republican Town Committee for four years.

Over the years countless students sang his praises as an inspiring teacher. 

“Mr. Bollenback was simply the best among that group of exemplary career educators,” said Dave Jenny, Class of 1968. “I will always cherish the climactic conclusion to his lecture about Hitler’s manipulation of the German people into World War II. He stepped from chair to desk-top, stood and sang just the first stanza of ‘Deutschland, Deutschland Über Alles’ as the Nazis had done over and over to hijack the national anthem and the German nation. It was dramatic but yet natural, seemingly unstaged and therefore totally effective. He gave us goosebumps. He made us feel what the German people must have felt.”

Patrick Wahl, another student in the 1960s, recalled a quotation from a Bollenback essay in the high school’s Chieftain newspaper. “Your life can matter, if you care to make it, if you care,” Bollenback had written. “I kept that essay on my wall, well into the 1980’s, until it became a part of me,” Wahl said. “Dirk Bollenback taught us to become citizens of the republic, for democracy is not a spectator sport.”

The senior class in 1961 dedicated its yearbook to Bollenback, citing “his fairness in dealings with his students; his sympathy and helpfulness with their problems; his honesty and sincerity in his teaching.”

Before retiring in 1996, Bollenback was pushing for a curriculum that focused on citizenship and civility. “Kids today are bombarded with so many different messages from so many different directions that I don’t know how they become civil,” he said in the 2000s.

He won many honors throughout his career. In 1963-64 he was a John Hay Fellow at the Chicago University and won an outstanding teacher award from Tufts University. The League of Women Voters honored him in 1996 for service to school and community and, in 2013, he was the first teacher to receive the Ridgefield Old Timers Association’s annual Distinguished Educator award. 

In the community, Bollenback volunteered as a patient’s representative at Danbury Hospital and for more than 25 years sang in the choir of St. Stephen’s Church, where he was a member of the vestry and served in other posts.

He was also the church’s historian, which sparked a “second career” as a writer. To mark St. Stephens’ 275th birthday in 2000, he spent nearly three years researching and writing a book that picked up where Robert Haight’s 1975 history had stopped.

“He has done a marvelous job of incorporating the history of the parish with the national events that were unfolding,”  Rector Richard Gilchrist said at the time.

Bollenback died in 2017 at the age of 86. His wife, Beverly, who had been active in the Ridgefield Visiting Nurse Association and had been president of its predecessor District Nursing Association, had died in 2004. Artist/illustrator Jean McPherson, who became his partner in 2009, died in 2016.

Teachers should instill values by example, not by preaching, Bollenback once said. “We don’t overtly teach values. We have to set an example, be people for [students] to look up to.” 

For Stephan Cheney, who graduated in 1970, “Dirk was, by far my favorite teacher. I think I was taught more in his class than any of my high school classes.” 

Cheney said in a 2012 remembrance that Bollenback was better than any other high school teacher or college professor he’d ever had.

“If I had the authority to canonize,” he said, “Dirk Bollenback would be my first.”

Ruth Wills: 

Legendary Latin Teacher

Ruth Wills was a scholarly woman whose advanced Latin students often excelled statewide. The five-foot-tall teacher was also tough: She had no problem grabbing a hulking, misbehaving football player and dragging him to the principal’s office.

“When Ruth let you have both barrels, it didn’t matter if you were a 245-pound tackle on the football team, you quaked,” recalled a former colleague, Dirk Bollenback, former chairman of the Social Studies Department. 

“She was a very, very special person,” added Bollenback. “I never met anyone on the Ridgefield High School staff who didn’t have the highest respect for Ruth Wills.”

Ruth Ella Wills was born in Monson, Mass., in 1897. She graduated from Colby College in 1920 and that September, came to Ridgefield’s Hamilton High School a few years after the town’s first secondary school had opened. The two-story frame building stood on Bailey Avenue where  there’s now a municipal parking lot. When the school moved to East Ridge and took the name Ridgefield High School, Wills continued to work there until her retirement in 1965.

Over her 45-year career, she taught Latin, French, German, and English. In later years, however, she taught only Latin. “Year after year her advanced students would score the highest in the state of Connecticut in the Latin Achievement tests,” Bollenback said.

She was famous as a strict disciplinarian. Although diminutive in size, Wills “scared some of the biggest guys in Ridgefield,” recalled Town Clerk Barbara Serfilippi, a 1960 graduate of the high school. “She was a little lady but, boy, you didn’t mess with her."
Despite that reputation for discipline, she was also known for her quiet sense of humor. Among her favorite stories was one about a Latin II test in which her student, in answer to a question about the second periphrastic conjugation, wrote, “This construction is known as the second pair of elastics.” 

Wills was a woman of many interests. She spoke several languages fluently, followed foreign affairs closely, collected antique foreign coins, knitted, did crossword puzzles, read extensively, and was an avid fan of the New York Rangers, the New York Knicks, and  — in their day — the Brooklyn Dodgers. She also surprised many ex-students by being sighted at the old Danbury fairgrounds race track  — she was an avid fan of midget class auto racing. 

When, in a 1954 interview, Wills was asked what she liked most about teaching, she replied in one sentence: “It is very gratifying to know that perhaps in some small way I have been able to help various students to attain and achieve their goal toward a happy, democratic way of life.”

Her work and her interests couldn’t have hurt her health: When she died in 2000 (the same day as her longtime colleague Linda Davies), she was 102 years old.

Adam Salvo: 

A Huge Inspiration

Teachers are among the most memorable people we meet in life. And a Ridgefield teacher who produced many great memories — and great students — was Adam Salvo, who taught art at RHS for nearly 40 years.

“He was one of my all time favorite teachers in high school,” said alumnus David C. Selwitz, Class of 1973. “Such an inspiration to so many young adults. I loved him.”

Michael Adam Salvo was born in New Haven in 1935 and graduated from what is now Southern Connecticut State University. He went on to earn a master’s degree at Columbia University,  received a degree in art from the Ecole des Beaux-arts at the Palais de Fontainebleau in France, and studied at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

He began teaching at Southern Connecticut State in 1957, but two years later came to Ridgefield High School where he soon created and taught the school’s first art history course. He also taught painting and other fine arts, became chairman of the Art Department, and over the years he fostered many young artists. 

When news of his death in 2012 was posted on Old Ridgefield, there was an outpouring of praise, including:

“He was a huge inspiration and just the encouraging voice I always needed at the time,” said Terry L. Britton. “He sure went to bat for me on several occasions — I'm grateful that I had someone like him in my life.”

“He truly made me believe I could enjoy and participate in art,” said Cynthia Glasbrenner. “I was never talented, but he told me no one could match my enthusiasm.”

“He was a patient man; I gave him a little bit of holy hell in my senior year,” recalled Tom Bennett.  “I had scored straight A's in art class for 3 1/2 straight years and in the last term of my final year, he gave me a B. It was like receiving an F in anything else for me. I discovered it as a good kick in the pants and I went on to become a painter and illustrator.”

Rob Kinnaird called him “a great man who saw my potential and changed my life.”

“His class opened many doors,” wrote Maren Sirine. “He opened his heart and home to many. A favorite teacher who inspired and encouraged me to go to art school, too. I survived high school with his help!”

Salvo was active in the Aldrich Museum, and was a founder in 1993 of the museum’s Student Docent Program, which began with just two schools in Ridgefield and 10 years later involved 45 schools in 16 towns. The program trains and provides students to serve as docents at the museum.

In 2006, the Aldrich staged a show, called “Homecoming.” Exhibiting artists Damian Loeb, Sarah Bostwick and Doug Wada, all with studios in New York, shared what The New York Times called “a seminal experience”: They each had studied art under Salvo at Ridgefield High School.  

“The artists remember him as the rare teacher who treated them as adults and complained about the school administration,” The Times said. “The instructor remembers his former students, too, and regularly treks to their shows.”

Salvo was a longtime Ridgefield resident, living first on Rockwell Road and then on Oscaleta Road. He retired from teaching in 1996.

He was a member of the National Committee on Art Education of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the American Association of University Professors, and many arts-oriented organizations. He was listed in “Who’s Who in American Education.”

Over the years he had many shows of his own works, including at Silvermine Guild of Artists, Yale University,  and, of course, the Ridgefield Library.

Salvo was 77 years old and living in Guilford when he died.

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. 

Margaret O’Sullivan: 

Boosting Sports for Women

In 1965,  the senior class at Ridgefield High School dedicated its yearbook to Margaret O’Sullivan who, by then, was a guidance counselor at the school. Few students at the time knew of the role “Miss O” played in helping young women be a part of interscholastic athletics.

     “Before girls sports at Ridgefield High School received an equality boost from Title IX legislation in the early 1970s, they got a formative hand from Margaret O’Sullivan some 30 years earlier,” said longtime Ridgefield Press sports editor Tim Murphy.

     Margaret Claire O’Sullivan was born in 1911 in South Boston, Mass., and graduated from Boston University with a degree in physical education. She later earned a master’s degree at the University of Bridgeport.

     When she joined the high school faculty as a physical education teacher in 1943, there were no interscholastic girls sports teams at RHS. Not one. 

     O’Sullivan quickly changed that, organizing varsity and junior varsity girls teams for one sport each season: field hockey in the fall, basketball in the winter, and softball in the spring. She later started a club team for girls tennis. 

     While turnout for the programs was good, conditions were not. The girls had limited equipment and shared fields with boys’ sports teams — mostly, they practiced and played when the boys were at away games.  But O’Sullivan always fought for more time and attention to girls’ athletics and well-being.

     She served as head of the girls physical education department at the high school until 1962, when she became a guidance counselor. 

“All of us have seen the kind of person she is,” said the staff of the 1965 yearbook. “Loyal, sincere, self-sacrificing, dedicated — these are part of Miss O’s personality. Friendly, helpful, generous, devoted — these, too, describe Miss O. This list is endless. She is the manifestation of many of our ideals.”

O’Sullivan retired in 1973 and moved to Shrewsbury, Mass., to live with a sister. When she died in 1993 at the age of 81, she had been all but forgotten locally. The Ridgefield Press had only a brief, three-paragraph obituary, provided by the sister (but did run a picture of her, smiling).

Seven years later, the Ridgefield Old Timers Association remembered O’Sullivan, giving her a Posthumous Award for her work with girls at Ridgefield High School. ROTA said she had died “with much deserved praise left unsaid.”

Michael Chekhov: 

An Actor’s Actor

Ridgefield has had its place in theatrical history. Since 2009, the town has had an annual Chekhov Festival, featuring professional performances of plays both new and old. But the Chekhov honored is not the Russian playwright.

Mikhail “Michael” Alexandrovich Chekhov, nephew of Anton Chekhov, was born in Russia in 1891 and by the age of 21 was already a noted actor in his homeland. By 1923, he was a director at the Moscow Art Theatre, but his innovative methods eventually led the Communists to label him “alien and reactionary” and a “sick artist.” So Michael Chekhov emigrated to Germany and then England, establishing a well-respected method of training actors. In 1939, as war was breaking out, he moved his Chekhov Theatre Studio from England to the old Ridgefield School for Boys at the north end of Lake Mamanasco on North Salem Road.

A brochure published in 1940 described the studio as “both a school for the theatre and the theatre itself.” Students learned acting techniques and also staged public performances, often including their teacher. 

While here, Mr. Chekhov made his first appearance in an English-speaking role on the public stage—a Russian War Relief benefit program in the old high school auditorium on East Ridge, where he performed in each of the three short plays presented. 

The studio had its first major production in the fall of 1939, staging Anton Chekhov’s “The Possessed,” at the Lyceum Theater on Broadway. “It has a genius of theatricalism,” wrote Brooks

Atkinson in The New York Times. Burns Mantle of The New York Daily News said, “Michael Chekhov, working from Moscow Art Theatre standards, has created a series of amazingly picturesque scenes and groupings and taught his players a great deal about acting and concentration in character portraiture….They have evidently given much study to body control and facial expression, and there is not a mumbler among them—which could profitably be noted by many Broadway players and their directors.”

Students at the Chekhov Theatre Studio were offered a wide range of courses that included speech formation, eurhythmy (expressive movement), stage design and lighting, makeup, improvisations, and even fencing.

By 1945 Mr. Chekhov had decided to move to Hollywood, where he not only taught and but also acted in films— his portrayal of the psychoanalyst in Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound won him an Academy Award nomination. 

Among his students were Marilyn Monroe, Jack Palance, Anthony Quinn, Yul Brynner, Gregory Peck, and Akim Tamiroff.  

He died in 1955, but his school lives on as the acclaimed Chekhov Theatre Ensemble in New York City.

The site of Chekhov’s school later became the farm of Francis D. Martin. A portion of the main building is now a house while much of the rest of the school property is now occupied by modern homes. However, the stage on which Michael Chekhov made his American debut is still alive and well—the home of the Ridgefield Playhouse. —from “Ridgefield Chronicles”

Robert W. McGlynn: 

Beloved Man

Many of us often forget the impact that teachers have had on us. Pulitzer Prize-winning writer John McPhee never forgot a Ridgefield native who had a major influence on his life.

    Robert William McGlynn was born in 1921 into a working class family who lived on Fairview Avenue. His father, J. Edward McGlynn, was a house painter who late in life became an acting postmaster of Ridgefield.

    McGlynn attended Ridgefield schools and excelled at Ridgefield High School. In his senior year he was editor of The Hilltop Dispatch, the school newspaper, which that year won high praise in the Columbia University scholastic press competition. He was ranked second in his class of 37 students  (behind Stata Norton, who went on to become an acclaimed professor of pharmacology and dean of the University of Kansas School of Health Professions).

    As #2 in his class, McGlynn became salutatorian at the 1939 graduation. His speech, called “Through the Rough,” likened life to a game of golf, in which a group of men play the 18th hole. One player gets a hole in one while others, running into obstacles with their shots, struggle to

reach the cup. The strugglers are gaining more from the game — or from life, he suggests. “It is always wisest and best to seek that goal by the more difficult pass, for with the dumps and the knocks come the care and experience demanded by the importance of the position to be attained,” he says. “Those same bumps and knocks mold the character of the individual and the more intricately molded the character, the more capable the individual.”

One sentence in his talk, describing stronger vs. weaker players, perhaps hinted at one of his own struggles: “Determination, education and competency are ready and willing to back up the weaker.” In his senior year, his physician told McGlynn his health was too fragile for him to attend college and that he might not live beyond the age of 21.

McGlynn ignored the doctor’s advice and went to Wesleyan University where, in 1942, he was chosen a member of Wesleyan’s Honors College. Early on in his college years, he had planned to become a psychologist, “an outgrowth of my profound interest in human nature and all its intricacies,” he once told Karl Nash, editor of The Ridgefield Press.

However, McGlynn apparently found literature more rewarding than psychology. After he graduated in 1943 he was immediately hired as an English instructor at Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts, where he eventually became a legend.

At Deerfield, around 1948, McGlynn met a new student named John McPhee, who had transferred for a post-graduate senior year after completing Princeton High School and before entering Princeton University. Though McPhee never actually had him as a classroom teacher, McGlynn became both a mentor and a lifelong friend. 

In a 1996 essay McPhee recalled one of his first encounters with McGlynn — on a football practice field.

 “Attendance was taken exactly 17 times a day,” McPhee wrote, remarking on how closely

Deerfield students were watched. “In fall, attendance was taken on the Lower Level by Robert McGlynn with a clipboard. Relying on recognition alone, he checked off names. In the ranks and files of lightweight football calisthenics, he failed to see me. He walked around behind my jumping and flapping teammates, and found me lying on the ground looking at the sky. He liked that. He checked me off. In the extended indolence on the grass, he recognized essence of writer.”

    McPhee biographer Norman Sims describes McGlynn as “a voracious reader with an Irish background and a babbling, fluid way of talking.” He got McPhee excited about literature in a way his classroom teachers never had. One day he’d hand McPhee a book and later McPhee would go back and discuss it with him. “He was willing to talk about them, that was the thing,” McPhee said. “Like the students, he lived there the whole time and the school was his life.” 

And talk he did. McGlynn was famous for his amazing outpourings. As McPhee put it in 1984, his words “come in cloudbursts, in flooded rivers, braided cataracts, foaming white cascades. Kick him in the leg and words pour out his ears.”

In the foreword to McGlynn’s only novel, Ten Trial Street, McPhee wrote that McGlynn “became, among other things, a student of his students, exposing their innards with rays of humor that went to the bone but cut nothing. He led us up the hill to Joyce and Conrad, and down the other side to meet ourselves. He was prodigal with his talent — that brook he was babbling wherever he might be. It was for anyone. It was for me. As a writer now, I am forever grateful to him. And, as it happens, I was never in his class.”

McPhee biographer Michael Pearson put it simply: “McGlynn sparked in McPhee a deeper love of reading than he had ever experienced.”

During his years at Deerfield, McGlynn became widely known for inspiring many young writers and teachers, and for his interest in the literature of Ireland, birthplace of his grandmother and his great-great grandfather. He brought several Irish poets to the campus to speak and work with with students — one, Peter Fallon, spent a year at Deerfield. These visits helped spark McGlynn’s interest in publishing the works of Fallon and others by creating the Deerfield Press, a publishing house

described in its day as “important in the worlds of letters and small presses.”

In 1984, the year he retired, Deerfield Press published the small book, The Little Brown House: A Garland for Robert McGlynn. Among its contributors were poets Seamus Heaney and Robert Creeley. And, of course, John McPhee.

Three years later, alumni and friends donated $850,000 toward establishing the Robert W. McGlynn Chair in the Humanities at Deerfield Academy.

After his retirement Bob McGlynn moved to a log cabin in Warrenton, Va. He read  four to five books a week, gave readings of Irish poetry in the area and maintained a sizable correspondence with former students around the world. (More than two dozen of those students became school, college or university English teachers.)

McGlynn also eschewed technology of almost any kind. “I know nothing of faxes, word processors and computers,” he told a friend around 1990. “I don’t even own a telephone.”

He was only 72 when he died in 1993 — but he was long past 21. His ashes are buried in St. Mary’s Cemetery. 

Among the new friends he made in Virginia was newspaper publisher Arthur Arundel, who greatly admired the retired teacher. “There are so few like McGlynn who so completely earn and define the appellation of ‘Beloved Man,’” Arundel wrote after McGlynn’s death.