Marthe Krueger: 
Dancing with Nature

The small town of Ridgefield in the 1940s was home to many writers, artists, actors, composers, and dancers  who found here not only fellowship, but the peace and beauty of the countryside. Concert dancer, choreographer and photographer Marthe Krueger of New York City felt that the “fluidity and lyrical qualities of dance” were close to many of the qualities found in nature. In 1942, to be closer to the natural world, she set up a home and studio in The Coach House on Branchville Road, a building that would later house another dancer, an actor and a world-class art collection.

Born in Mulhouse, Alsace-Lorraine, France, in 1910,  Krueger began ballet training at the age of eight  in Strasbourg,   and went on to study in Paris and London with several dance luminaries.

She appeared on stages  throughout Europe, and upon coming to America at the age of 23 in 1933, made her debut at New York City’s Town Hall.  During the Depression, Krueger not only performed, but taught at several of New York’s finest dance schools, where she became close friends with the legendary ballerina Muriel Stuart. 

She also began working with two notable composers. Classical composer Stefan Wolpe (1902-1972) wrote “Suite for Marthe Krueger,” a work for two pianos, in 1940 while  Alex North (1910-1991), a rising young composer who would become one of Hollywood’s top creators of movie scores, wrote several dance pieces for her in 1941 and 1942, including “Prelude,” “Will-O’-Wisp,” and “Trineke.”  

She and North became such good friends that she invited him to teach at the school she had just established at her Ridgefield home. (A few years later, North bought himself a house in Ridgefield, using it as a weekend retreat for many years.) 

“Ridgefield was selected for the establishment of a school to perpetuate her art because Marthe Krueger feels that in the hills of Connecticut, spiritual as well as bodily strength  may be developed through the appreciation, practice and understanding of beauty of movement,” said The Ridgefield Press in reporting her arrival in 1942.

 

The year after she moved to town, Krueger staged Alex North’s new musical for children, “The Hither and Thither of Danny Dither.” On Aug. 28, 1942 North himself played the piano as the children of the new Marthe Krueger dance school performed the musical  in a PTA benefit at the East Ridge School auditorium — now the Ridgefield Playhouse. (North went on to compose the music for many of the 20th Century’s top movies, including “Death of A Salesman,”   “The Sound and the Fury,”  “Spartacus,”  “Cleopatra,” “The Agony and the Ecstasy,” “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,  “2001: A Space Odyssey,”  “Dragonslayer,”  and “Good Morning, Vietnam.” He also wrote the pop hit, Unchained Melody, and was a mentor of the young and promising film composer, John Williams.)

During World War II, Krueger   toured with a U.S.O. unit, entertaining troops. She also worked as a professional photographer, opening her own studio in New York. Her photographic work ranged from artistic shots of dance productions to engagement announcement portraits for young ladies  — a number of them appeared in The New York Times in the 1940s.

Later she served as ballet mistress at the Silvermine Guild. She had been married in 1938 to importer Adolph Mayer, a widower twice her age, who died three years later.

In the late 1940s, she moved to Wilton where, in 1960, she opened the  Marthe Krueger School of Dance in a studio that was aimed at taking advantage of its natural setting. Former student Christine Leventhal said Krueger “surrounded her lovely glass-walled studio with the best of nature: a tree-encircled pond complete with swans Sigy and Odette (whose elegant necks and movement inspired those within); all sizes, colors and kinds of birds; mallards, wood ducks and geese; deer; muskrats; raccoons; and most thrilling of all — the great blue heron. Marthe loved her animals and birds. She was a gifted gardener as well, and bright swatches and drifts of color surrounded her property.”

“She was a pioneer of dance in Fairfield County,” Leventhal added, calling her “devoted to her students surely, but even more, devoted to the art of dance and a never-ending pursuit of excellence in her art.”

Marthe Krueger taught her last class on the day before she fell ill in 2002 and was sent to the hospital, where she died at the age of 92.  

 After Krueger left the Coach House around 1948, she leased the place to Paul Draper,  an international tap dancing star. Draper was accused of being a communist and was under attack by followers of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Disturbed at his treatment, he left the U.S. in 1951, moving to Switzerland, but eventually returned to teach and perform.

Chinese art collector Abel Bahr lived there from 1951 until his death in 1959; many works from his collection are now in major museums. A later occupant was Broadway actor and singer Don McKay, who was known for his parties featuring celebrities in the arts.

The First Movies

Bioscope Pictures of 1899 Were

Far Cry from Today’s Films

The Ridgefield Press, 1950 — The “new marvels of animated pictures” made their appearance in Ridgefield around the turn of the century. An advertisement in The Press of 1899 so referred to the American Bioscope Company movies augmenting Billy Lester’s new show of  “8 great artists 8.”

Three years later The Press reported that “A large and enthusiastic audience greeted the Edison Projectoscope Company on their second appearance in Ridgefield at the Town Hall Monday evening. The program was opened by piano overture. Mr. Forrest gave a few short stories and parodies on popular songs. His jokes were witty and new, and were well-received by the audience.

Then Mr. Plant, the manager, announced the moving pictures which were thrown on the screen, interspersed with illustrated songs, sung by Mr. Plant, who has a very pleasing voice, and stereopticon pictures of noted men.

“'The first moving picture, our late president’s (McKinley’s) funeral, was very impressive. After a short intermission more moving pictures were shown and nearly all of a laughable nature. The other scenes, those of noted cities and places in our own and in foreign parts, were explained by Mr. Plant. The pianist played selections appropriate to the scenes and accompanied the singers.”

The “large and enthusiastic audience” was evidently large and enthusiastic enough to support a permanent movie theater, for in the next few years several companies came in and out of business.

Town Hall Photoplays, an enterprise run by Julius Ficken and Mr. and Mrs. Arthur J. Ferry, was not as successful as it might have been, for some reason. But the hour long trip to Danbury by horse and buggy, though just right for spooning, was too tedious a drive to make for a mere movie, unless it happened to be “The Birth of A Nation.”

In 1915 The Press reported that “Mr. Ferry announces that he will start a series of excellent comedy and dramatic pictures,” which didn't speak too well of the quality of the previous pictures.

About 1920 at the parish house of St. Stephen’s Church, the pillars were removed and movies were booked by Arthur Carnall, the moving spirit behind many of Ridgefield’s cinematic enterprises. The parish house movies were of the better sort, and although no admission was charged (a hat was passed after the performance for voluntary contributions), there was never a deficit.

However, the trustees of the church objected to showing movies in the parish house, and the entertainment there was stopped.

At about this time the American Legion Post found itself in straitened circumstance and Arthur Carnall thought of showing movies for the benefit of the Legion. The post purchased the machinery the Ferry enterprises had used and began showing photo-plays in the Town Hall on Wednesdays and Saturdays. The Wednesday shows were the better or “cultural” shows and the Saturday shows were more run of the mill,  the theory behind this being that people went to the movies on Saturday night in any case. Interestingly enough, the Wednesday night movies made more money.

When St. Stephen’s gave the Legion their projection machine, the booth at the town hall was enlarged so that Jack Cranston, the operator, and his two machines would fit in. Up until this time slides had been shown during intermission while the reels were rewound.

All of these enterprises had musical accompaniment, furnished at one time or another by Mr. and Mrs. Willis G. Boyce, violin and piano respectively, and by Arthur Ferry, piano. Charles Stannard further enlivened Ridgefield evenings by selling popcorn and peanuts on the steps of the town hall. During this period there was sometimes dancing after the movies, too.

The Legion enterprise was successful, and the veterans enjoyed a steady income from it until the advent of the talkies, which made the machinery obsolete. This soon found its way to some corner

of South America, where talkies were unknown, so all in all, the Legion came out ahead on its movie venture. This proved to Arthur Carnall that Ridgefield would support a movie house that presented good features and did not show any “B” films.

It was not until 1938, however, that Irwin Wheeler, of the New Canaan Playhouse, became interested in opening a branch of the chain owned by Casey and Wheeler in New York (later the Prudential chain) and he and Mr. Carnall picked a site at the rear of the library as a likely spot for a Ridgefield Playhouse. The library was willing to sell the property, though a provision in the deed of the library property required title action in Superior Court before it could be sold.

The next problem faced by Mr. Carnall was the job of selling the public a $40,000 first mortgage bond issue. The library agreed to invest $6,000 of the receipts from the sale of the property and a public announcement was made that if $40,000 was raised, the new theater would be built. At the same time a lengthy prospectus of the plans of the theater company was drawn up and appeals were mailed to one hundred possible investors. In the next year this amount was raised, oversubscribed, and placed in escrow.

Construction would have begun immediately, as plans of the theater had been completed, and printed in the Press, but the contractors estimated that the cost of the building according to the plans would make the total investment too high. The plan for the present building was prepared by John Eberson of New York, architect. John McNeill of Floral Park, Long Island, was contractor. The building was completed and ready for the first performance on March 26, 1940.

Under the present manager, William Johns, the Playhouse is still sticking to the original formula of presenting good single-feature attractions and short subjects, which has proved so successful in the ten years it has been followed in Ridgefield. 

In addition the Playhouse has presented art exhibitions from the start and many prominent local artists have there shown their work to the community. Some Ridgefield artists who have exhibited at the Playhouse in the past few years include Herb Olsen, with his own and his students paintings; Elizabeth O'Brien, with her “table-toppers”; J. Clark Work, the portrait  painter; Photographer Richard Marks; Mrs. Wognar, with her embossed pictures and boxes; Mrs. Nicholas Lefore, the landscape artist.

Other exhibitors have been Mrs. Elizabeth Schleussner, with her California desert scenes; Photographer Alexander Alland of North Salem; landscape artist Bernice Webster; watercolorist Hazel Tobias, director of art at Danbury Teachers College; watercolorist Thomas De’Stasio, of the Walt Disney advertising department; Jeanne Melin, of New Canaan, whose specialty is painting horses; Ralph Jaeger, watercolorist of Armonk; photographer Janet Arem, of Croton Falls; and Mrs. Charles E. Wegmann, who has exhibited her own and her students’ work in oil painting.

During World War II the Playhouse held food fairs and several bond rallies. At one rally, September 1943, $524,013 worth of bonds were sold in little over an hour. The auction by which the bonds were sold was broadcast over NBC, with Francis D. Martin serving as auctioneer. Volunteered services and articles auctioned off included a speech by Walter Hampden, nylon stockings, a pig, a calf, and cartoons by Wood Cowan and Paul Webb.

Stephen Zvonkovic, the chief projection operator, is the only remaining member of the original staff of ten years ago. Except for his two years in the Army he has been with the Playhouse since its beginning. Adolpho Casagrande, custodian, has been on the staff for nine years without missing a day. Other members of the staff are Mr. and Mrs. Allen W. H. Sterry, Lois Sterry, Mrs. Marion B. Redman, H. E. Todd, John A. Hayes, David Clapp, Harold T. Scott, and Jack Yelinek.

[Note: This article, written by Karl S. Nash, appeared in The Ridgefield Press’s Jubilee Edition, a special 100-plus page tabloid publication marking the newspaper’s 75th anniversary in 1950]

Cass Gilbert: 

A Most Remarkable Architect

In New York, his Woolworth Building — once the tallest building in the world — still graces the Manhattan skyline.  

In Washington, his Supreme Court building stands strong, despite battles over whom it houses. 

In Ridgefield, while it has too often fallen to the failings of drivers, his fountain has greeted visitors for more than a century.

Cass Gilbert, who bought the Keeler Tavern as his country home and gave us our fountain, was one of the most acclaimed architects of the 20th Century. He designed dozens of important buildings including the U.S. Custom House in New York, the state capitols of Minnesota, Arkansas

and West Virginia, the main libraries of St. Louis and Detroit, and parts of the campuses of the Universities of Texas and Minnesota.

A native of Zanesville, Ohio, Gilbert was born in 1859, and named for Lewis Cass, a U.S. senator from Michigan who served in the cabinets of Presidents Jackson and Buchanan, and was a distant relative of his surveyor father. 

Gilbert quit studies at Macalester College and at the age of 17 went to work for an architect in St. Paul, Minn., then spent 1878 studying at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After some time in Europe, he joined the prestigious New York firm of McKim, Mead, and White — White being the famous Stanford White, shot and killed by a jealous husband in 1906. 

By 1882 Gilbert had set up his own architectural business in St. Paul, Minn., with James Knox Taylor, a fellow student from MIT. They turned out many local houses, churches and commercial buildings as well as the Minnesota State Capitol. 

In 1880, while still in New York, he met his future wife, Julia Finch, a finishing school student. She was 18; he, 21. But it was not until 1886 when Julia was vacationing at Lake Minnetonka in Minnesota that they again met and struck up what became a serious relationship. He was living in St. Paul with his mother and she in Milwaukee with her parents, and most of their courting took place via the U.S. mail. They were married in 1887.

In 1899, Gilbert won a competition to design the U.S. Custom House in lower Manhattan — with a little help from his by-now former partner, James Taylor, who had become a federal Treasury Department design official; Taylor cast the deciding vote in Gilbert’s favor. Virtually an unknown on the national scene, Gilbert won out over many well-known firms and soon gained a wider reputation and many jobs in New York City, to which he moved in 1900. 

Among his New York City projects over the years were a tall neo-Gothic building at 90 West Street (heavily damaged on 9/11); the U.S. Courthouse at Foley Square; the New York Life Building; and many train stations on the Harlem branch of what is now Metro North.

In 1913, his most famous project, the Woolworth Building, opened in Manhattan. At 790 feet, it was the tallest building in the world at the time. One contemporary observer — a minister — called it Gilbert’s “Cathedral of Commerce.” 

With many more words and much more poetry, Paul Goldberger, the architectural critic of The New York Times, described it in 1981 as “one of the great icons of 20th Century architecture. It has a mix of delicacy and strength that is almost Mozartian, a sense of light, graceful detail applied to a firm and self-assured structure that no later building has ever quite equalled….It was pure, graceful composition — the serene ordering of well-proportioned parts.”

Although the Woolworth Building was one of Gilbert’s most famous accomplishments, he was not the first choice to design it. Frank W. Woolworth, owner of the huge chain of “dime stores,” first approached McKim, Mead, and White, where Gilbert had earlier worked. Among the staff architects there was Harris Hunnewell Murdock of Spring Valley Road in Ridgefield. Murdock later revealed that Woolworth had called on the telephone to ask the firm about designing his new headquarters.  After Woolworth hung up, one of the firm’s partners told his secretary to give a polite brush-off to the “five-and-dime man.”

While some of his buildings were among the tallest of their time, Gilbert grew pessimistic about the future of skyscrapers, revealing in 1931 that he was uncertain that form of architecture was “here to stay,” The Ridgefield Press reported at the time. In fact, he didn’t seem happy about the tall, light-hogging buildings he’d done.

 “When I see the long shadows cast even at noon on a winter’s day,” he said, “I sometimes

wonder if the light and air their occupants enjoy compensate for the sunlight their neighbors lose.”

Among Gilbert’s less lofty Connecticut projects were the New Haven train station, New Haven (Ives Memorial) Library and the Waterbury City Hall. 

And, of course, a little fountain in Ridgefield.

Cass and Julia Gilbert came to Ridgefield in 1907, buying what had been the Ressiguie's Hotel, earlier known as the Keeler Tavern. (The Press in 1907 indicated Julia was a descendant of Timothy Keeler, the 18th Century innkeeper, but we have been unable to find evidence of that.)

The Gilberts called their home the Cannonball House because of the cannonball — actually, a defused grenade — lodged in one of the beams on the north side of the building; it was fired from a British cannon during the Battle of Ridgefield in 1777 and can be seen by visitors today.

Gilbert immediately set about enlarging the building by adding a wing to the rear that included a dining room and then-modern kitchen, with additional rooms upstairs. Around 1915, he built the formal, brick-walled gardens and Garden House, now used for many weddings and special events. But he avoided changing the lines and historic features of the old tavern building itself.

His best known work in Ridgefield, however, is the fountain that he donated to the community in 1916 at the intersection of Main Street and West Lane. When it was installed, the

intersection looked much different from today’s heavily trafficked junction — it was a simple triangle that included a tree, and the fountain itself was much lower, with its base almost flush with the ground. The fountain was made of Italian marble — the same material used on his U.S. Supreme Court building.

The fountain was not only a welcoming symbol for people arriving from the west or south, it had a practical purpose. The lower, ground-level bowl served as a watering trough for horses that had just made long climbs to reach Ridgefield; the fountain is some 800 feet above sea level.

After being hit by many automobiles over the ensuing century, including a Hummer driven by a drunk in 2003 that shattered much of the structure, the fountain has been raised a couple feet and surrounded by planters designed to absorb the shock of a crash. A truck that hit the fountain in 2018 did hardly any damage, thanks to these precautions. 

The landmark has also survived numerous attempts by the State of Connecticut to move it elsewhere so that a more traffic-friendly intersection could be created. Ridgefielders, of course, have fought each and every move-the-fountain proposal, refusing to sacrifice a landmark that sits in a prominent location at the main southern entrances to the village.

Cass Gilbert died in 1934 while on one of his frequent trips to England. There he was held in

such high esteem that he had been elected to the Royal Academy of Arts, the only American since John Singer Sargent, the painter, to be so honored. (Gilbert had earlier been president of the National Academy of Design for eight years and was appointed to the Council of Fine Arts by Presidents Roosevelt, Taft and Wilson.) 

The London Times wrote after he died, “The list of his most important buildings would only be long enough to prove him the most remarkable architect of his generation in America.”

Since his death, more than a dozen books have been written about Cass Gilbert and his work. 

Only a year after he died, his architect son Cass Gilbert Jr. of Wilton (he designed what’s now the Ridgefield Playhouse) created a brick building at 152 Main Street as a museum to hold his father’s sketches, drawings, paintings, and papers. Located just north of the Gilberts’ Keeler Tavern home and part of the original Keeler Tavern lot, the Cass Gilbert Memorial was dedicated in October 1937 in a ceremony at which Gov. Wilbur Cross spoke.

“I am proud...to have known him, for he was one of the highest ranking architects of the country,” Governor Cross said. “He was a man who could see beauty in the tall building. You cannot prize too highly Cass Gilbert.”

However, the memorial building turned out to be too small to house the large collection of Gilbert material, which was eventually turned over to the Smithsonian Institution, Library of Congress, Minnesota Historical Society, and other archives. The memorial building was sold as a residence and eventually became the home and dental offices of Dr. Robert Mead.

Quite appropriately, Bob Mead turned into an expert at repairing Cass Gilbert’s auto-

damaged fountain, and often was called upon to do so — using, also appropriately enough, dental epoxy. Dr. Mead even had copies of the fountain’s spouting turtles made so they could be replaced after periodically being stolen by vandals.

Dr. Mead died in 2015 and a year later, his family sold the homestead to the Keeler Tavern Museum, which now uses the building for its offices. Thus, two properties that were one in the 1700s and 1800s were back together again.

Cass Gilbert and many members of his family are buried in a large plot at Fairlawn Cemetery. Oddly enough, only a few dozen feet away is the grave of Ralph Thomas Walker (1889–1973),  designer of dozens of famous skyscrapers whom The New York Times called the “architect of the century.”

Thus, in a small rural cemetery on North Salem Road, containing about 625 graves,  the remains of two of the 20th Century’s greatest city architects rest in peace, each beneath relatively modest stones.

Patricia Schuster, 

Dancer, Teacher, Founder

More than 5,000 children learned dance from Patricia Schuster, a professional ballet dancer who brought the art of fine dance to Ridgefield in 1965 and whose legacy is alive — and dancing — today.

Born in 1937, the Ohio native grew up in New York City, Schuster studied at the American Ballet Theater School and with teachers from the Royal Ballet and the Kirov Ballet. She danced professionally with the Brooklyn Opera Company, the Boris Goldovsky New England Opera Theater, and other companies. 

In 1964 she moved to Ridgefield and a year later opened the Patricia Schuster School of Dance in the Community Center. Later, she renamed the school the Ridgefield Studio of Classical Ballet. In 1978 she also founded the Ridgefield Civic Ballet, which staged many productions with local students and international stars. 

A number of her students have gone on to professional ballet, including James Fayette, who was a leading dancer with the New York City Ballet and is now a director, with his wife, of a school in Los Angeles. 

Many who did not become dancers also benefited from the experience. “My daughter took ballet lessons from Pat for years and the poise and self-confidence she gained was immeasurable,” said Nancy Pinkerton. “She later became Connecticut Junior Miss using ballet dancing as her talent. The scholarship money was a big aid in college expenses.” 

Schuster died in 1999 and in May 2000, it was revealed that she had bequeathed her Ridgefield Studio of Classical Ballet to the Friends of the Ridgefield Playhouse, the organization that was renovating the old high school auditorium into a performing arts center. In its early years the Ridgefield Playhouse provided a venue for both classes and performances, and still is a stage for performances under its new management, the Ridgefield Conservatory of Dance. 

“The Playhouse embraced the school as its dance school in residence and, recognizing that the school needed and deserved its own management structure, acted as a bridge to its new life as a non-profit with its own board and management,” said the Conservatory, which now has its school at 440 Main Street. Schuster’s bequest included funds to support the project.

“Miss Schuster never had any biological children of her own, but in reality, and far better, she actually had thousands of adoring ‘children,’ ” Susan Consentino, who’d studied under her for 17 years, said at her Schuster’s memorial service in 1999. “She helped shape and influence every one of us, and not just while we were her students. She gave each of us skills to carry with us in life that consciously or unconsciously are part of us to this day.” 

Arthur J. Carnall: 

A Shropshire Lad

Arthur J. Carnall was a boy of nine, fresh off the boat from England, when he arrived in Ridgefield in 1904. He made the town his home for the next 67 years and helped change the face and function of the community in many ways. 

A native of Shropshire, England, Arthur James Carnall was born in 1895. His family sailed to Boston and immediately came to Ridgefield; they chose the town on the recommendation of William Harrison Bradley of Ridgefield, who was then serving with the American consulate in England and lived across the road from the Carnalls. 

He graduated from the old Center School on Bailey Avenue and attended a preparatory school in Virginia. (His sister, Marjorie Agnes Carnall, married John W. “Jack” Smith, the well-known Ridgefield orchid grower and estate superintendent, who was also born in England and who is also profiled in Who Was Who). 

During World War I, Arthur Carnall served in the U.S. Navy.

In 1922, he joined the real estate and insurance business of Thaddeus Crane, located about where Dr. George Amatuzzi’s office is on Main Street. Crane (who will be profiled in a future “Who Was Who”) died in a spectacular car-vs.-train accident in 1928 and two years later, Carnall took over the business, renaming it A.J. Carnall Inc. It became Ridgefield’s largest insurance business and, in 1965, moved into the second floor of a new office building at the corner of Main and Catoonah Streets — what became popularly known as “the Carnall Building.”

Throughout his life here, Carnall was involved in efforts to improve the community.  “Mr. Carnall’s love of Ridgefield and devotion to its welfare marked his public life,” The Ridgefield Press said when he died. 

One of his first big projects was amassing 270 acres in the late 1920s to create the Silver Spring Country Club, which opened in 1932. Throughout his life he was an active member of the club and at his death in 1972, was its treasurer and a governor. He was, needless to say, an ardent golfer, but was also a good one, winning a number of tournaments in the region over the years.

In the late 1930s, he almost single-handedly conducted a bond-selling drive that, in 1940, created Ridgefield’s first movie theater, the Ridgefield Playhouse, on the site of today’s Prospector Theater. Before then, Ridgefielders had to travel to one of three theaters in Danbury to see a movie. The Playhouse was also used for various stage productions.

A few years later his enthusiasm and salesmanship resulted in the town’s buying the Lounsbury block, now Veterans Park, along with its mansion, now the Community Center. He also helped organize the Community Center operations.

He also dabbled in development – the “car” of Marcardon Avenue is he, partners with Francis D. Martin and Joseph H. Donnelly (Martin, then also a boy, was one of the first people Carnell met when he came to Ridgefield in 1904, and they became lifelong friends.

For 15 years starting in 1941, Carnall was the town tax collector. He was a founder of the Lions Club and of the Danbury and Ridgefield Boards of Realtors, belonged to the Ridgefield Grange and Danbury Elks, was on the Wadsworth R. Lewis Fund advisory committee, and volunteered on countless boards and committees — including serving on the Ration Board during World War II.

He and and Agnes Kelly were married in 1930 and lived on Gilbert Street for their entire   life together. Both took pride in their beautiful gardens. He was 76 years old when he died at his winter home in Florida in 1972. She died in 1996 at the age of 92 in Florida where she had moved after her husband’s death.

In 1999, Ridgefield Bank, now Fairfield County Bank, bought A.J. Carnall Inc., and 10 years later renamed it Fairfield County Bank Insurance Services. It still operates out of the “Carnall Building.” Carnall, incidentally, had held several offices in the old Ridgefield Savings Bank, predecessor of Fairfield County Bank, starting as an incorporator in 1941 and ending as vice president at the time of his death.

Joseph Knapp: 

Overcoming Adversity

As a young man, Joe Knapp had two strikes against him: poverty and a severe war injury. He overcame both to become a successful local businessman and a nationally recognized antique car collector.

Joseph Lewis Knapp was born in 1929, the sixth of 10 children, and grew up during the Depression. His family was poor and, to earn money to help with their support, he dropped out of Ridgefield High School in the 10th grade. Only 16 years old, he lied about his age and enlisted in the Merchant Marine for some guaranteed pay and “so he could be assured of three meals a day,” son Darin said. When his age was discovered, he was sent home.

He then worked as a caretaker on large estates and also as a janitor at the Ridgefield Playhouse on Prospect Street; he had to walk three miles each way to that job. In 1974, he was a founder and member of Board of Directors of Village Bank and Trust Company, located in the old Playhouse building whose floors he used to sweep. When the Village Bank board decided to sell to Webster Bank in 1998, Knapp was opposed. He wanted it to remain a hometown bank. (In 2012, the old Playhouse/bank building was demolished to make way for the Prospector, a theater imitating the old Playhouse’s design.)

When the Korean War broke out, Knapp joined the Army. He won two Bronze Stars as a combat engineer. He was severely injured when a large Army truck crashed into his tent, running over his legs and killing a fellow soldier while they were sleeping. Although the doctor treating him thought he might never walk again, Knapp overcame the injuries and wound up being able to walk with only a slight limp.

After the war, he and his brother, Bob, started a lawn care, landscaping and tree care business, which grew into one of the region’s largest tree companies. In 1954, they had one tree crew. By 1980, Knapp Bros. Inc. tree surgeons had two dozen crews working throughout  southwestern Connecticut, often on jobs for CL&P or SNET.  

Both his business success and some smart investments — such as turning $3,000 invested in commodities into $100,000 in 1971 — allowed Knapp to pursue his favorite hobby: Antique automobiles. By the 1990s, he had four garages filled with old cars. A specialty was Stanley Steamers and he owned a 1908 Stanley Steamer Model M, which was one of only two now in existence. He also restored a 1914 Model 606 Roadster. 

The Stanleys were capable of traveling more than 60 mph and Knapp would take his onto I-84 for rides — much to the amazement and sometimes concern of other motorists who thought his very old car was on fire. “These people don’t realize what a steam car does,” he said. “It’s a very tricky ordeal to get it going, but it rolls along so nicely with just a ‘puff puff.’ It’s so effortless.

Other favorites in his collection were a 1936 Buick Special convertible, and a 1957 Thunderbird, which he would drive to Florida. “It can do 130 mph,” he told an interviewer in 1990. “It has a 312 dressed up engine and is weighted, balanced and blueprinted. I use it all the time and have a picture of it in front of Disneyworld.”

He loved old cars. “What I see when I look at a car is the preservation of our heritage,” he said. “If collectors didn’t feel this way, these cars would be pieces of junk under the earth.”

Knapp was active in the Lions Club — which for years sponsored an antique car show in town — and other community organizations.

During his life, Knapp battled not only his war injuries, but cancer. At 60, he was diagnosed with colon cancer and had to undergo chemotherapy and radiation. He also used homeopathic medicines. “He was an advocate of natural medicine and believed in the power of mind over body,” said a profile of him in 2000, the year he died. At 66, he was found to have prostate cancer, but “he did not die of cancer,” said his son, Darin. “He died of a heart attack.” He was 71 years old.

Joe Knapp and his wife, June, had six children, all with five-letter names beginning with D: David, Daryl, Darin, Dayle, Darcy and Dawne. “My mother just wanted it that way, and she was great with names,” Darin said.

Sereno Jacob:
Fighter Pilot, Playhouse Fighter

A pilot who won the Croix de Guerre for shooting down German fighters in World War I and who was among the earliest to fly commercial airliners may have been largely responsible for the venue that is now the Ridgefield Playhouse.

Born in Brooklyn in 1896, Sereno Thorpe Jacob grew up in Westport. He became a carpenter, but soon ran away from home and joined the Merchant Marine.

Early in World War I, he volunteered as an ambulance driver for the American Field Service in France. While there he became interested in aviation, trained as a pilot, and wound up joining the Lafayette Flying Corps, a group of American volunteer pilots who flew in the French Air Force before the U.S. entered the war. 

He piloted Nieuport 27 and SPAD S.XIII fighters against the Germans from October 1916 through January 1918. He earned the Croix de Guerre with Palm for exceptional bravery after a battle in which he and another pilot shot down a German observation balloon and were then attacked by five German planes. “The American aviators succeeded in sending two of the German planes to earth and drove off the three others,” said a contemporary account.

A record of his service in France reported that “most pilots are glad of an occasional rest from flying, but Jacob, according to his comrades, was always ‘gonfle’ [“pumped up”] — three patrols a day were nothing out of the ordinary for him. The habits of the local Boches [Germans] formed a study of never-failing interest; it was his delight to lie in wait for the wary Rumpler [a German plane] which so often made its photographic reconnaissance at noon, heralded by tracery of white shrapnel puffs across the sky. Though he has three official victories to his credit, Jacob had had bad luck in getting confirmation, and among the chalky hills of the Champagne, ... there are without doubt several fast-disappearing heaps of wreckage which are rightfully his.”

Jacob later served briefly in the U.S. Army at the end of the war..

When the conflict was over, Jacob worked for a while for an American automobile company selling Cadillacs in Belgium, but returned to the states in 1921, when he married Marion Couch Wakeman of Westport. Soon after, the couple moved to Ridgefield to a house on the corner of High Ridge and Barry Avenue (behind the big stone wall built by Joe Knoche) that had belonged to Jacob’s grandfather, Sereno Allen. Their arrival was almost legendary. 

“My father’s greatest public relations coup was arriving in Ridgefield with his beautiful bride, wearing two raccoon coats, in a Stutz Bearcat,” son Merritt Jacob said.  “People were always ready to tell me about their ride in the Stutz — which had an exhaust cutout so that the roar of the engine could be heard miles off.”

For a brief period Jacob flew Ford Trimotors for a regional airline providing service to such cities as Bridgeport, Newark, N.J., Albany, N.Y., and Springfield, Mass., but he left around 1930 when the airline lost its mail contract and went belly-up. Capt. Eddie Rickenbacker, a World War I flying ace who founded Eastern Airlines in 1926, knew him, hired him and Jacob flew Eastern’s Curtiss Condor airliners for seven years.

“He was a very early member of the airline pilots union and wrote a paper defending the union, which did not please Captain Eddie,” said Merritt Jacob. “And so they parted ways.”

Jacob’s new career was very land-based: real estate. He worked with Harold E. Finch, a prominent oldtimer and owner of what became Squash’s New Store and is now Ridgefield Office Supply.  However, though he wasn’t flying, he often spoke to clubs and organizations about his years as a pilot, both in World War I and with the airlines. The challenges were many and the instruments few. “Flying blind is like walking a tightrope in a dark closet blindfolded,” he told a First Congregational Church club in 1938 about piloting a plane in overcast weather.

Jacob served three years as chairman of the Board of Assessors and, according to The Press, “devoted his talents to putting that office on a more business-like basis.”

He also served on the building committee that expanded the “old high school” on East Ridge in the late 1930s. Merritt Jacob reports that, “according to my mother, he fought very hard for a separate gym and auditorium — which put Ridgefield way ahead of any of the neighboring towns facilitywise and gave us the auditorium that is still in use” — the Ridgefield Playhouse. “I myself got to see Toscanini conduct in that auditorium. My father could be very forward-looking.”  

During World War II, Jacob was chairman of the Ridgefield Defense Council and worked to bring about greater public appreciation of the danger of the war reaching this country. He was not always successful. In March 1942, he asked the town for $25,000 for civilian defense projects; the Town Meeting later authorized $2,500. 

He was a member of the Republican Town Committee, the Lions Club, and the American Legion. He also belonged to the Last Man’s Club, a group of World War I veterans who met annually to remember their comrades  until the last man died. When Jacob died in 1947 at the age of 51, he was only the second of 31 members to pass away. 

Sereno Jacob loved traveling not only on land and in the air, but also on the sea. He was an expert yachtsman, and had owned 40 and 50 foot sailing vessels that took part in many major racing events. But he also loved a good ride in that Stutz.

One day he was parked in front of town hall when Joe Zwierlein happened by. (A local house painter, Zwierlein was well-known in town; he was a volunteer fireman for 60 years and dog warden for 30.)

“My father asked Joe if he wanted to go for a ride,” Merritt Jacob said. “Well, Joe jumped at the chance. After about 30 minutes of driving, Joe asked my father where they were headed, and my father said, ‘Montreal.’”

It took Zwierlein a bit of time to recover from the shock and figure out what he would tell his wife.