Romeo Petroni, 

The Friendly Judge

For many Ridgefielders, he was the tall, friendly fellow with the big smile who’d stand on the sidewalk in front of the town hall or Squash’s, selling Lions Club raffle tickets or promoting a candidate in the local election. For others throughout Connecticut, he was the distinguished, silver-haired man in black robes who presided over their trial.

After a long life of working and serving in his home town, Romeo Petroni became the first native to serve as a Connecticut Superior Court judge.

“It’s a demanding, challenging position that requires broad knowledge of the law, but at this point in my life, I’m ready for it,” Judge Petroni said in May 1990 when he received the appointment. 

Romeo Geno Petroni was born in Ridgefield in 1929, the son of immigrants from Italy. His father, a laborer, died when Petroni was nine, leaving his mother, Madalena, to bring up him and his sister. Petroni worked hard in school and became president of his Ridgefield High School graduating class in 1946. He went to Syracuse University, graduated from Fordham Law School, and served in the U.S. Army for two years. 

He returned to town in 1957, joining the law practice of  John E. Dowling, a prominent Democrat, as an associate. The same year, Petroni got his first taste of public service  when he became town attorney during the administration of his father-in-law, First Selectman Leo F. Carroll.  

Four years later, running as a Republican, Petroni was elected Ridgefield’s state representative, serving until 1967. 

In 1966, Petroni made an unsuccessful run for Congress, and was always proud of the fact that at a fundraising dinner in his honor, the speaker was Gerald R. Ford, then a congressman and minority leader of the House. Among other GOP notables who campaigned for him was Tricia Nixon, daughter of soon-to-be president Richard M. Nixon. 

His campaign platform included his belief that President Lyndon Johnson should have negotiated with the North Vietnamese leaders to try to end the Vietnam War. ”I think we should see the President personally enter into direct negotiations with the foe rather than have him assign Secretary of State Dean Rusk or Defense Secretary Robert McNamara to do the chore,” he told interviewers from the Danbury News-Times.

From 1971 to 1974, he was a state senator and in 1974 was elected Ridgefield’s probate judge, a position he held for 16 years. 

In 1986, he ran for governor, but failed to get the Republican nomination. Oddly enough, he was nominated to the Superior Court by the man he would have run against, incumbent Democratic Governor William O’Neill. 

Throughout his career in Ridgefield, Petroni was very active in the community, and among other things was chairman of Boy Scout fund drives, a director of the Boys Club and the Village Bank, and a trustee of St. Mary’s Parish. He belonged to the Lions Club, Knights of Columbus, Italian-American Club, and the Ridgefield Volunteer Fire Department. For many of these groups, he provided free legal services.

He received many honors, including Rotary Club Citizen of the Year in 1984 and a Ridgefield Old Timers award, and was listed in “Who’s Who in American Politics” for many years.

Judge Petroni called Ridgefield home for 60 years, but soon after becoming a judge, moved to the New Haven area to be closer to the courts in which he would preside.

He continued to serve as a regular judge until he turned 70 in 1999, when he was named a judge trial referee, a part-time position in which he could be selected to preside over special cases, often involving family disputes and children.

He and his wife, Catherine,  lived in Madison where he died in 2015 at the age of 86.

Petroni was always a strong family man and when local Republicans honored him at a dinner in 1982, he declared, “My good mother, my strong and righteous wife, my daughters — when you honored me tonight, you honored them, and for that I am truly happy and grateful.”

That same dinner, which also served as a GOP fundraiser, was attended by  many Democrats, including Selectman Lillian Moorhead, one of the most dedicated Democrats in town. 

“I just want you all to know how painful it was for me to write out a check to the Republican Town Committee,” she told the gathering about her ticket purchase. “I really can’t think of many people I’d do that for, and Romeo’s one of them.”

Lillian Moorhead: 

Ahead of Her Time

Men had populated the Board of Selectmen for 265 years, when, in November 1973, that all changed: Lillian Moorhead was elected the first woman ever to hold a seat on the board. 

“Womenpower” did it, she said the day after the election. “I hope my election will encourage more women to run for office.”

It may, indeed, have have helped do just that, for in the years after her election, women began winning more and more seats in town government, often holding majorities on boards and commissions. And eight years after her pioneering win, Ridgefield elected its first woman chief executive, Elizabeth Leonard, who, ironically, defeated Moorhead for the job of first selectman.

“I was in favor of a state income tax and Liz creamed me,” Moorhead said 10 years later. (In 1991, after years of debate, the income tax was finally adopted. “It takes the state a while to catch up with me,” Moorhead said afterwards with a smile.)

A native of New Jersey, Moorhead was born in 1932. She and her husband, James, had lived in the South and on the West Coast before moving to Ashbee Lane in 1963.

She was a liberal Democrat who won the 1973 election alongside First Selectman Louis J. Fossi, also a Democrat, but more of a conservative. Despite Ridgefield’s heavy Republican majority, the two Democrats controlled the board, holding two of its then three seats.

“Lou is a native, a very popular guy,” Moorhead said, explaining the win years later. “Also, there was Watergate and the beginning of the women’s movement.”

Moorhead was re-elected four times, holding her seat until 1983 when she retired. As a selectman, she was an especially strong advocate for creation of the Housing Authority that eventually built the Ballard Green senior housing project.

“There were few believers in the Housing Authority in those early days,”  Fossi told Moorhead in front of more than 200 people who gathered for her retirement party in 1984. “But you acted out of concern for people who are less fortunate than most of us.”

Fossi and Moorhead often disagreed on issues, and votes sometimes found her in the minority, despite party affiliations.

“It’s better to be ahead of the times than behind them, and Lillian, you were ahead of them,” said Judge Romeo G. Petroni, a lifelong Republican, at the retirement dinner. “You have your principles and you stood behind them, even when Lou didn’t understand.”

Moorhead later served many years on the Housing Authority she helped to create. She was also on the Youth Commission, was a trustee of Danbury Hospital, and was a board member of the NAACP, and Regional Y. She was a founding member of the Women’s Political Caucus, which was active here in the 1970s and 80s, and which successfully pressed for the conversion of the Boys Club into a Boys and Girls Club. She also belonged to Friends of the Library, Meals on Wheels and the League of Women Voters.

Professionally, she tried on several different career hats, last of which was as a Realtor. She was well-regarded at that: In 1984, Governor William O’Neill appointed her a member of the Connecticut Real Estate Commission.

When she was moving to Martha’s Vineyard in 1991, she told a Press interviewer, “I used to be a newcomer. Now I’m a townie. It happened in the blink of an eye.”

A 1984 Press editorial said of Moorhead: “One of the most independent thinkers among recent selectmen, she was not afraid to stand up for positions that may have been unpopular with the administration and even with her party. Yet always her positions were enlightened ones, well-considered and with the community’s best interest  in mind.”

When Moorhead died of cancer in 1997 at the age of 65, her daughter, Sarah, observed, “My mom was one of those individuals who truly touched the souls of everyone who was lucky enough to have met her. She embraced life with such determination and zest and tried to impart that to others.”

Julius Tulipani: 

The American Dream

In reporting the death of Julius Tulipani on New Year’s Day 1983, The Ridgefield Press observed that “he had come to the United States from his native Italy as a boy of 16, achieving thereafter positions of trust and importance in his adopted community.” 

Born in 1890 in Ripe, Tulipani arrived in New York in 1907, and made his way to Ridgefield, including walking up the three-mile hill from Branchville to the village. There, on Easter

Sunday, he joined friends for his first meal in America — he had not eaten in two days because “we didn’t have any money,” he explained later.

Tulipani went to work almost immediately, building roads and other infrastructure for H.B. Anderson’s Port of Missing Men resort on West Mountain (now Eight Lakes Estates). 

“My first home was in a camp,” he told his granddaughter, Beth Tulipani, in a 1977 interview. “I lived in a one-room shack with three or four other boys.” He earned $1.75 a day ($45 in today’s dollars).

Four years later, he began a career of working on local estates, starting out as a coachman, and soon working his way up to a superintendent, a position he held on a half dozen estates for the rest of his career. He did not retire until he was 82 years old. 

He was superintendent of Col. Louis D. Conley’s Outpost Farm in the 1920s, but his longest post, beginning in 1927, was as superintendent of B. Ogden Chisholm’s Wickopee Farm on Peaceable Street, a job which he held until Chisholm’s death in 1944. 

Chisholm was so pleased with his service that he gave his superintendent the portion of his

farm that fronted High Ridge, where Tulipani lived the rest of his life.

He later worked for other estates, including Jack B. Ward’s Ward Acres. 

For most of his life here, he was active in the community. He was president of the Italian-American Club for 30 years — longer than anyone before or since. He was commander of the American Legion three times, and was one of the last living members of the Last Man’s Club of World War I veterans from Ridgefield.

He served as one of the first directors of the Boys Club and an incorporator of the Community Center when it began operations after World War II.He was elected to the Board of Selectmen three times from 1947 to 1953, and had long been a member of the Republican Town Committee. 

An expert gardener, Tulipani was proud of the flowers he raised, once producing an Empire State dahlia measuring a foot in diameter. He began raising flowers while working for Colonel Conley, and continued gardening professionally and for fun throughout his life.

In a 1973 interview when he was retiring, Tulipani told Karl Nash of The Ridgefield Press, “The United States has been good to me in all my life here since 1907. I was out of work in all those 66 years for only a month and a half, and I never had to ask for a job. People always came to me when they needed somebody.”

In 1980, more than 500 people attended a 90th birthday party for Julius Tulipani. There, among several speakers, Judge Romeo G. Petroni described his achievements, saying they symbolized “the ideas of America, freedom and opportunity for all men. His story is the American dream fulfilled.”