Isabel M. O’Shea: 
A Compassionate Principal

The plaque outside the library at Veterans Park School reads: “An innate compassion and deep understanding of human beings, coupled with a keen mind and fine administrative talents, make her an outstanding personality.” 

The plaque honors Isabel M. O’Shea, the first principal of Veterans Park School. The school’s library is named for her; so is the auditorium of East Ridge Middle School, a building she helped to design. 

Isabel Margaret O’Shea was born in Ridgefield in 1905, daughter of a popular chauffeur. After graduating from Ridgefield’s Hamilton High School in 1923, she studied education in normal school and two years later became a teacher at the old Benjamin Franklin Grammar School (which soon became the East Ridge School and then Ridgefield High School). Both she and her sister Elizabeth (Mrs. Harvey Lown) were teachers. Both women, said historian Dick Venus, “were the old-fashioned type of teacher who insisted on getting some knowledge into the heads of even the poorest students.” 

Isabel O’Shea was named principal of the town’s elementary level in 1944, when those grades were housed both at the East Ridge School and at the Garden School on Bailey Avenue.

When Veterans Park opened in 1955, she became its principal, serving till her retirement in 1960. 

Though O’Shea left her job with the schools, she didn’t leave community service. In 1961, she became a member of the building committee that erected Farmingville School and then served on the East Ridge Junior High’s building committee. 

She was chairman of a town study committee on recreation needs, and was active in the District Nursing Association, now the RVNA. In 1960, she was named Rotary Club Citizen of the Year, the first woman so honored. Rotarians noted that O’Shea was chosen for “contributing a great deal to the educational system and devoting to it more hours and actual labor than her duties called for.”

In 1965, the year she died, the Veterans Park library was dedicated to her. When the school was built, the space devoted to the library turned out considerably smaller than what O’Shea had requested. In the years that followed, she pressed administrators to enlarge the library, which was finally accomplished a short time before her death. 

The bronze plaque outside the library notes that “she devoted her life to the community, its people, to her family and to her God,” adding that, through the dedication of the library to her, “It is hoped that her devotion to education will thus be remembered and serve as a constant inspiration to all people who visit this library.”

Both the plaque and an artist’s portrait commissioned by former student Louis Ridolfi would help keep her memory alive, said George Stromberg, her successor as principal of Veterans Park. 

“To forget her and to permit her memory to fade into oblivion would be unthinkable,” Stromberg said. “Her life has touched all of us in one form or another. Future generations should be made aware of her interest in their welfare.”

Laura Curie Allee Shields:

Flowers in Her Footsteps

It was a steaming July day in 1920 when Laura Curie Allee got a call from the headquarters of the National American Woman’s Suffrage Association, soon to be the League of Women Voters, asking her for help in getting the 36th and last state, Tennessee, to ratify the 19th amendment. 

Mrs. Allee had been a leader in the suffrage movement regionally.  Among the people she frequently worked with was Katharine Houghton Hepburn

Soon, she, Miss Mary Olcott and Mrs. James Stokes headed for Ohio to convince U.S. Senator Warren G. Harding, who was running for president, to get neighboring Tennessee to vote for the amendment. 

At Harding’s office, Miss Olcott was their spokesman and her strong personality apparently led to a clash with a Harding aide, who soon told them to leave the office. But after they had departed, Mrs. Allee realized she had forgotten her gloves and went back to retrieve them. The aide, who had apparently calmed down, looked at her and asked why they had come to see the candidate. Mrs. Allee explained. 

“Why didn’t you just say so?” the aide said, adding that she should never have let Miss Olcott do the speaking.  

The three were then ushered into the office of the senator who, when he learned where the women came from, said: “I have an aunt who lives in Ridgefield. Do you know her? Mrs. Northrop.” Mrs. Allee knew her well – both belonged to the Congregational church. “That was open sesame,”

Mrs. Allee said later. The group explained their mission convincingly and, on July 21, Senator Harding announced that he was urging Tennessee to ratify the Amendment. Tennessee did so Aug. 26, and three months later, Mr. Harding was elected president of the United States – with a plurality that no doubt included three newly enfranchised Ridgefield women. 

Mrs. Allee  and her husband, Dr. William H. Allee, moved to town in 1906 and lived in the house they called Homeland at the corner of Main and Market Streets. The place had been the Hurlbutt homestead and included Hurlbutt’s meat market on Market Street. 

Dr. Allee, who practiced in Wilton, was a leader in improving Ridgefield schools. He was also active in procuring the vote for women (one clever example of which will be described in his profile). He died in 1929. 

In 1933, Laura married James Van Allen Shields (1871-1954), a patent lawyer who was involved in the music recording industry in its early days.

Throughout her life Laura Shields was active in the support of schools, the League of Women Voters, and other community organizations, and helped in the effort to acquire the Keeler Tavern. 

She also wrote a 353-page autobiography, called “Memories,” self-published in 1940.

In 1953, The Press reported a comment about Mrs. Shields on the occasion of her 20th wedding anniversary: “It is said that a good woman does not always find flowers in her footpath, but they are always growing in her footsteps.”

She died in 1968 at the age of 97 and is buried in Paterson, N.J., alongside her first husband.  

Dr. Theodore Safford: 

Dedicated Family Physician

When Dr. Theodore Safford was named Connecticut Family Doctor of the Year in 1985, the president of the state Academy of Family Physicians called him “a dedicated family physician, an outstanding family man, and an involved community resident. Family practice in the United States

has scaled virtually unattainable heights as a result of 30 years of extraordinary effort expended by Dr. Safford.” 

Dr. Safford went on to become the sole runner-up for Family Doctor of the Year for the whole nation. 

A native of Ohio who was born in 1923, he graduated from Dartmouth and Long Island College of Medicine. He came to Ridgefield in 1951 after service in the Navy, and practiced  for 42 years. 

The national academy praised his work in training doctors through Norwalk Hospital, noting in 1985 that he was the only family physician in the state to be a director of continuing medical education at a major teaching hospital. He’d also been a member of the Board of  Editors of Patient Care magazine. 

First appointed a medical examiner in 1961, he served in that capacity more than 40 years. 

Locally, he was better known as the family doctor. As the late John Tower expressed it in 1987 when Dr. Safford was named Rotary Citizen of the Year, “Ted’s career has always been marked by the caring and compassion with which he served those of us who depended on him. No matter how busy or tired or otherwise engaged he was, his patients came first.” 

Dr. Safford has worked closely with the Visiting Nurse Association in improving and expanding its services. He is, said Mr. Tower, “a man of stature in his own community with a reach far beyond the borders of our town.” 

After retiring Dr. Safford and his wife, Jean, moved to Massachusetts to be closer to family. He died there in 2015 at the age of 91 

Irene Hoyt:

Our Florence Nightingale on Wheels

Irene Smith Hoyt was a nurse – for most of her career, THE nurse – at the District Nursing Association, where she worked from 1927 until her death in 1972. But she was more than a nurse. “When Irene Hoyt came into a sick room,” Linette Burton wrote in a Ridgefield Press editorial, “the patient’s spirits rose as she crossed the threshold.”   

The Wilton native grew up in Ridgefield.  and graduated from the high school in 1925. After two years of nursing school, Hoyt joined the DNA, now the Ridgefield Visiting Nurse Association. 

During her 45-year career, she ministered to literally thousands of Ridgefielders. She was called Ridgefield’s “Florence Nightingale on Wheels,” and for decades her name was synonymous with the District Nursing Association — and a helping hand.

For most of her career, she was the only employee of the District Nursing Association, working out of a one-room office on Catoonah Street. As an example of what that meant, in 1956,

● She handled 933 cases. Those cases entailed 4,823 visits.
● At the same time, she provided health checks, including weighing and measuring, for 1,182 school children.
● She did 1,139 vision and hearing tests for students.
● She assisted the school physician with 596 physical exams of students.
● She performed 990 individual health inspections “for emergency care and dressings to prevent spread of contagious diseases”

During that time, the DNA was governed by seven volunteer officers including a first vice president and a second vice president, and 19 volunteer members of a board of directors. All, to see that Irene Hoyt and her patients got the support they needed.

Today there are more than 100 paid staff members of the Ridgefield Visiting Nurse Association, the modern version of the DNA. Instead of a one-room office on Catoonah Street, the RVNA has a multimillion dollar headquarters which just opened on Governor Street. 

In 1964, when Philanthropist Jack B. Ward gave Hoyt a brand-new Studebaker Commander,

he observed that she “was all by herself and she had a tiny little dilapidated car – it was almost like in the old-fashioned days when a nurse got on a horse and went up into the mountains.That little lady worked so hard that I decided to buy her a proper car.”

The building Hoyt worked in “looked so run down inside” that Ward  once paid to have the association headquarters completely renovated.

Her devotion to the welfare of Ridgefielders led to her being named Rotary Citizen of the Year in 1962.

(An accidental fall from her high chair as an infant resulted in a broken chin so damaged that doctors were unable to properly repair it. It left her with a chin that was very recessed and she appeared to have no chin at all.)  

It was in her office, doing the work she loved so much, that Miss Hoyt died suddenly one Sunday in 1972 at the age of 63.

“She devoted her talents to helping people who were in trouble – physical, mental or emotional – and her success can be gauged by the number of people who will miss her gentle ministrations,” Linette Burton wrote.