Rev. Hugh Shields:

A Two-Church Pastor

For most of his long career in Ridgefield, the Rev. Hugh Shields served two congregations. He also served the needs of both the church and state, and he once served as a star of the Hoosier stage. 

Born in 1890, the Indiana native helped earn his way through drama school at Butler University by giving readings of famous people like James Whitcomb Riley, the Indiana poet. Performing under the name of “The Hoosier Impersonator,” Shields even had a management bureau that booked and promoted his appearances. 

“He will, in the course of an evening, vividly bring scores of ... characters before the audience and in his own masterful way, make the audience feel that these children of the poet’s fancy are actually standing before it,” said the bureau’s promotional brochure for him. The promotion also reprinted many reviews of praise, including one from the head of the Indiana Anti-Saloon League, who called Shields  “a reader of rare ability and any community is fortunate that secures him for a series of readings.”

Despite his training and critical praise, Shields soon felt a calling to the pulpit instead of the stage. He graduated from Yale Divinity School and became minister of the First Congregational Church here in 1919. He remained its minister until 1956 after which he was pastor emeritus until his death in 1971 at the age of 80. 

Among his accomplishments was the acquisition of the old Ridgefield Club building, converted to a church hall (it burned down in 1978 and was replaced by today’s Lund Hall), and the resurrection of the failing Ridgebury Congregational Church, which had been closed for some time. He was its pastor from 1923 until 1962. 

His being pastor of two churches created a busy Sunday schedule. He had hoped that he could do First Congregational services in the morning, and Ridgebury in the afternoon, but since most members of the Ridgebury congregation were farmers, they wanted a morning service.  So on a typical Sunday, Ridgebury service was at 8 a.m., Sunday school at First Congregational at 9:30 and the service at 11. At 4 p.m., there was a junior high fellowship, and at 7, a senior high fellowship meeting. For each event, his wife, Alberta Reed Shields, was at his side. 

Shields was the only Ridgefield minister to represent the town in the Connecticut Legislature, and was elected to two terms starting in 1928. 

He was a popular speaker at community events and organizations, and belonged to Rotary, Lions and the Masons. His son, Reed, was a well-known Ridgefield attorney and probate judge for many years. 

In 1963, when he was named Rotary Citizen of the Year, Shields observed, “I love Ridgefield and its people, and find as each year goes by that I love them more.”

In 1966, The Ridgefield Press received a handwritten note, signed “Mr. and Mrs. Hugh Shields,” asking that their subscription be discontinued. “Neither of us has the eyesight to read very much,” the note said, adding that they had enjoyed the paper for much of their lives. “We have been subscribers for almost fifty years, but there surely is an end to all things.”

Karl S. Nash, Ridgefield native and Press publisher (who was 13 years old when the Rev. Shields came to town), sent a note back to the couple, expressing his thanks for their loyal patronage and offering good wishes for the future, but adding: “We cannot agree, though, that ‘there is surely an end to all things.’”  

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 

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. 

J. Mortimer Woodcock: 

The Forester Who Led Ridgefield
While most people today would assume a nature center named Woodcock celebrates the native bird, they would be wrong. The facility is in fact named for J. Mortimer Woodcock, a soft-spoken, cigar-smoking first selectman whose unusual vision led to the creation of the Woodcock Nature Center on the Ridgefield-Wilton border. Both the center and a local road recall his four-year tenure.

A forester by training and nurseryman by vocation, “Woody” Woodcock once led the huge Outpost Nurseries that provided the plantings for two World’s Fairs, and for many parks, estates and corporate headquarters in the Northeast. But he was better known as the town’s chief executive from 1967 to 1971, a period of unprecedented school construction resulting from record population growth.

Joseph Mortimer Woodcock was born on Bastille Day, July 14, 1904, in Fredonia, N.Y. In 1924, probably influenced by his years of childhood camping in Canada with the Boy Scouts, he enrolled in the College of Forestry at Syracuse University. He spent summers until graduation  as an instructor and guide at a lakeside camp for girls in the Canadian wilderness where, at night, he would often sleep in his canoe, letting it drift across the lake wherever the breeze took it.

In the early 1930s, Woodcock was a head forester with the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Depression-era service that undertook many public conservation and recreation projects.

In 1933, he came to Ridgefield to take a job with the Conley family’s Outpost Nurseries. Outpost, which claimed to be the world’s largest supplier to landscaping plants, covered nearly 2,000 acres of Ridgefield and Danbury, including most of the Limestone and much of the Farmingville Districts.

He soon became manager of Outpost and, in 1944, purchased the firm, which became Woodcock Nurseries. Early on he owned 10 acres and leased 1,000 acres for his stock.

Working for Outpost or running his own company, Woodcock was involved in landscaping portions of the 1939-40 and the 1964-65 World’s Fairs, both in New York; many fully grown trees were supplied to each. Outpost and Woodcock also did plantings for the National Art Gallery in Washington; parks along Riverside Drive and elsewhere in New York City; parts of the campuses of Harvard, Yale and Williams colleges; the grounds of Narragansett and Monmouth Raceways; and the estates of such notables as songwriter Cole Porter, explorer Lowell Thomas, columnist Walter Winchell, actor Robert Montgomery, the William F. Buckley family, New York Gov. Thomas E. Dewey, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

During World War II, he helped manage a special saw mill at Outpost that produced long, wooden keels for PT boats. The mill was located on Route 7 between Route 35 and Haviland Road, and employed many Jamaican workers brought up from the island because of labor shortages here. Woodcock also supervised the felling of huge trees at Roosevelt’s estate at Hyde Park; the trees were trucked to Ridgefield to be milled into keels.

After the war Woodcock became more interested in the community and its government. A

Republican, he was elected a member of the GOP Town Committee in the 1950s and eventually became its chairman. He also served on the Board of Finance, the Parks Commission, and on committees studying school sites and the possibility of using an incinerator instead of a town dump.

In 1967, when Leo F. Carroll announced he was retiring after 10 years as first selectman, Woodcock was nominated to run on the Republican ticket. He easily defeated Democrat Otto H. Jespersen and won re-election two years later.

It was a time of considerable stress as the local government struggled with the pressures of a population explosion in which Ridgefield grew from a sleepy town of 8,600 in 1960 to a bustling bedroom community of 18,000 in 1970. The town had just finished building East Ridge Junior High School (now the middle school), construction of Scotland School was nearing completion, Branchville School was underway, and the town still needed a bigger high school and yet another elementary school.

During the Woodcock administration, townspeople battled for a year over what to do about the burgeoning high school enrollment — either expand the old high school on East Ridge or build a new 1,800-student school on land the town bought a few years earlier on North Salem Road. In a 1968 referendum at which more than 3,000 people voted, the North Salem Road site won by a margin of a mere 63 votes.

Around the same time, the town voted without much fuss to build Barlow Mountain School.  (However, after another blistering battle in early 1970s, voters defeated a plan to build a seventh elementary school on West Mountain.)

Woodcock took such controversies in stride and never seemed rattled or upset — not even when the Planning and Zoning Commission threatened to arrest him. The zoners served him with a “cease and desist order” for storing highway department snow removal equipment at a town-owned barn in Ridgebury, charging it violated zoning regulations. If he didn’t comply, the order said, the commission would have him arrested.

“Let them arrest me!” he said with a laugh to a young reporter in his office as he lit one of his ever-present cigars. “Now wouldn’t that make a great story for your paper!”

In the end the commission backed off on its threat.

Woodcock was probably the last of the old-time first selectmen who seemed more a neighbor than an official. His office was on the first floor of the town hall, near the front door, and to make himself accessible, he often left his door to the hallway wide open so that anyone needing help could walk right in — no appointment or secretary needed.

He believed in customer service and satisfaction — the customer being the voter. In 1971

when a resident wrote complaining about some regulation at Martin Park, Woodcock replied in a letter that began diplomatically: “I am always glad to receive a letter questioning our town regulations. As a member of our town, you have every right to question town rules which affect you.”

He would often deal with complaints himself rather than pass them on. One afternoon after a big snowstorm, he got a call from an irate citizen, complaining that the town plow crew had moved his mailbox to the opposite side of the road. Woodcock didn’t think that was likely, and he drove to the scene to find out what had happened. It turned out that a young highway department driver, new to the job, could not see exactly where the pavement was and wound up   plowing a path across the complainant’s front lawn, thinking it was the road. 

It was the “highway” that had moved, not the mailbox.

There were limits to how far he would go, however. One night at home, he received a call from a woman who demanded that he send someone to remove a dead cat from the roadside in front of her house. Woodcock said it would be rather expensive to call out a town crewman and pay him the union-required time-and-a-half for a minimum of four hours, and that the dead cat  would be removed first thing in the morning. The woman continued to demand immediate action, but finally slammed down the phone. 

The next morning a road crewman could not find the cat. That night, as Woodcock was presiding over a Board of Finance meeting, in came the complaining woman, carrying  a cloth bag. She dropped the bag on the table in front of Woodcock. 

“There’s your cat,” she said. She turned around and walked out.

During the Woodcock administration, the town made one of its most useful purchases: the 26-acre Holy Ghost Novitiate on Prospect Ridge. The main building became the school board headquarters for many years and is now the congregate housing for the elderly. The novitiate land is now used for town playing fields, for affordable housing, and for a dog park, and the outbuildings today house the Ridgefield Guild of Artists, the Ridgefield Theater Barn, and the Marine Corps League.

 Perhaps Woodcock’s least expensive acquisition was the one for which he will be remembered longest. During his administration, the state was buying up large tracts of land for the Norwalk River Flood Control Project. One section contained more than 140 acres and a house on the Ridgefield-Wilton line. Despite the fact that all but a small portion of this property was in the town of Wilton, Woodcock arranged to have the Town of Ridgefield lease it at $1 a year from the state to establish a nature center. It was probably one of the few times in Connecticut history that one town leased parkland in another.

At his retirement dinner as first selectman in 1971, it was announced that the new operation had been named the Woodcock Nature Center in his honor.

In 1989, when he was 85, he paid his last visit to the then-thriving nature center and expressed pleasure at how well it was doing. “I only wish I was 40 years younger and could be helping you,” he said. “It makes me glad to see somebody interested in the same thing I was and doing something with it.”

Woodcock was also deeply involved in other aspects of the community. In 1942, he joined the recently created Ridgefield Rotary Club; he became its seventh president five years later. He was named Rotary Citizen of the Year in 1966.

Though he and his wife had no children, he was active in programs that helped young people. He was treasurer of the Ridgefield Boys’ Club, a director of the Branchville Fresh Air Association which brought city kids to Ridgefield in the summer, and served as a director of the Great Pond Holding Corporation, predecessor of Martin Park, providing Ridgefielders with their first public first beach. 

He also served on the board of the Ridgefield Savings Bank, now Fairfield County Bank, and was a director of the First Congregational Church. He volunteered with the Keeler Tavern, Danbury Hospital and the Ridgefield Cemetery Association, and was active in local and regional Masonic organizations.

Three years after he retired from office, Marcelino Lavin subdivided some land off Barry Avenue and named the dead-end road serving it “Woodcock Lane” in honor of the former first selectman. It is one of only three roads in town named specifically for Ridgefield chief executives; the others are Tanton Hill Road, honoring Harvey Tanton — who himself voted to approve the name (Tanton also worked for Outpost Nurseries), and Hull Place, named for Harry E. Hull.

Woodcock and his wife, the former Anne Pomroy, lived for many years on Farmingville Road in a house that stood behind the Shell gas station (where  a car wash now operates). They later moved to Huckleberry Lane. He died in January 1993 at the age of 88 and she, seven months later. They had marked their 60th wedding anniversary in 1991.

Among the speakers at his 1971 retirement dinner was Connecticut Gov. Thomas Meskill. The governor helped present Woodcock with a clock, engraved, “To a grand guy who contributed unselfishly and faithfully so others may enjoy Ridgefield’s future.”

“I never watched a clock in my life, but now that I’m not going anyplace, I’ve got a beautiful one to watch,” he said.

When he visited the nature center in 1989, Woody Woodcock gave his last press interview. As he chatted, he was holding his legendary cigar, although both his doctor and Anne had long ago forbidden his smoking. 

“I haven’t lit one in years,” he said with a big smile. “I just need something to play with.”  

Irving B. Conklin: 

A Symbol of Change

In a way, Irving Conklin symbolized the changing nature of Ridgefield in the 20th Century – from a farming town, to a haven for estates, and then to a bedroom community for commuters. Conklin participated in all three levels of the community, and was a leading participant in all three.

Born in 1899 in Hyde Park, N.Y., Irving B. Conklin Sr. came to Ridgefield as a young man and became superintendent of Dr. George G. Shelton’s estate along West Lane at the Ridgefield-Lewisboro line. 

From 1928 till the early 1940s, he owned Conklin’s Dairy on Ramapoo Road, Ridgefield’s largest and last major dairy farm. Over those years he had supplied most of Ridgefield with milk. 

“That was a time when the per capita consumption of milk in Ridgefield actually exceeded the per capita consumption of alcoholic beverages,” former town historian Dick Venus once observed, perhaps with a wink of an eye. As a young man Venus had delivered milk for Conklin, usually by horse and cart, and later had his own dairy.

In the 1950s, as more and more commuters were eyeing Ridgefield as a place to live, the Conklin farm was subdivided; it includes today’s neighborhoods of Farm Hill Road, Overlook Drive and Nutmeg Court.

In 1944 Irving Conklin and Leo Pambianchi started Ridgefield Motors, which grew into Conklin Motors, then became Village Pontiac-Cadillac on Danbury Road; the building now houses Party Depot.

In 1941, he acquired  Stonecrest, the large estate on North Street, and had his home there. During the war he and Joseph Young raised beef, pigs and sheep on the Stonecrest Farm.

In the 1950s he and his wife, Ethel, subdivided much of the property into the Stonecrest Road and Dowling Drive neighborhoods and around 1953 also established a riding stable on the old estate that is still in business today. 

Ethel, incidentally, was famed for her homemade ice cream.  “There can be no other

delightful repast that conveys such a pleasant taste, along with the urge for a second helping,”  Dick Venus wrote in a 1984 column in The Ridgefield Press. “A host will really enjoy the plaudits of the guests when serving ice cream made with Mrs. Conklin’s renowned recipe. It is a sure way to put everyone in a good mood.”

Irving Conklin was a president of the Lions Club, a member of the Rotary Club, and belonged to the Odd Fellows.

He retired to Florida where he died in 1966 at the age of 66. Ethel died in 1991 at the age of 94.

Conklin’s Dairy Farm was a huge operation and had so many cows that Conklin at one point was ordering freight-car loads of peanut shells from the Planter’s factory in Virginia to use as bedding for the livestock. Venus recalled that the light but bulky shells cost $11 a ton to buy, but $15 a ton to transport. They were packed in sacks “that were almost large enough to hold a Volkswagen.”

However, Conklin eventually found that, even though the shells had no particular food value, the cows would on occasion eat them. 

When he finally discontinued using peanut-shell bedding, Venus asked him why. “Because the milk was beginning to taste like peanut butter,” Conklin replied.

David Weingast: 

Superintendent and Scholar

A few days after he accepted the job of Ridgefield superintendent of schools in 1967, Dr. David Weingast was offered a college presidency. 

“I have often wondered what would have happened if I had accepted that instead,” said Weingast in a 1977 interview. But, he added, running a college was “no bed of roses” then, and “I have no regrets. Ridgefield has been a tough superintendency, but you have to remember that I became superintendent at a time when the academic world was a very tough place to be.” 

Weingast, the second longest-serving of the town’s 20 or so superintendents, had indeed worked through tough times, a decade of turmoil with one crisis seeming to come on the heels of another: school building debates, problems with overcrowding, book burning controversies,  budget battles, a very unhappy teachers’ union, and many lesser issues. 

But, he said, it was also a period of accomplishment: the creation of a modern, balanced program of studies, the introduction of greater emphasis on writing, the expansion of fine arts offerings, the increasing use of community resources, the hiring of capable staff, rewriting the whole curriculum from kindergarten through 12th grade using teams of teachers, and the improved management of money. 

“I think we’ve achieved a good balance between teaching the basics and promoting student creativity,” Weingast said. 

The most scholarly of Ridgefield’s superintendents — he wrote four books — and the only one to settle permanently in town,  David Elliott Weingast was born in 1912 in Newark, N.J., and began teaching elementary school there in 1931 at $1,300 a year. 

He received his master’s from Columbia in 1936 and moved to teaching history at Newark’s prestigious Weequahic High School. He got a Columbia doctorate in 1948, was made department chairman, and in 1961, became assistant superintendent for secondary schools in Newark, responsible for nine high schools and six junior highs. 

Meanwhile, he was writing four books: “Walter Lippmann: A Study in Personal Journalism”

(1949), “Franklin D. Roosevelt: Man of Destiny” (1952), “This Is Communism” (1959), and “We Elect A President” (1962). The last two have appeared in several editions, and the Roosevelt book was once chosen one of The New York Times best books for young people.

Before coming to Ridgefield, he received a Ford Foundation grant for study in Europe, concentrating on political systems and the rising tide of communism in Italy. 

In 1975,  Dr. Weingast spent a month visiting Russia, Switzerland and England as one of 25 school superintendents on a trip sponsored by the American Association of School Administrators. He admired the rigor, though not necessarily the approach, of the Russian schools. 

“The program is academically strong, the spirit competitive,” he wrote  after returning. “Academic offerings in the secondary school are compulsory and there are no electives. The Russians would, I think, be bewildered by our system of electives and of our effort to fit a program to every child.”

He retired here when he reached 65, and became a consultant on education, working out of his Main Street home. Like his wife, Bea, he was an active citizen, participated in Rotary and other organizations,  but seemed content to remain on sidelines of Ridgefield politics. 

Occasionally he wrote letters to The Press on issues that interested him — opposing condominiums on north Main Street, supporting expansion of the library.  In 1981, with characteristic thoughtfulness, he opposed a zoning variance to allow an expansion of hotel uses on West Lane. 

“The people who ask for exceptions to the zoning rules mean Ridgefield no harm,” he wrote. “But each applicant wants what he wants. The sum of their wants is more cars, more blacktop, more congestion, more noise, more dirt, more pollution... Beautiful towns don’t decline overnight; they surrender, one building at a time.”

In retirement he had been researching and writing a new book, “The President’s Choice: The Story of the Presidential Cabinet,” but the book had not been completed when Weingast died in 2007 at the age of 94.

His longtime home on Main Street is now the residence of First Selectman and Mrs. Rudy Marconi.

Over his tenure here, his employer, the school board, had caused Weingast much aggravation — at one point the board even voted to fire him, then changed its mind and gave him a new contract. 

When Weingast retired, he was asked if he might ever run for a seat on the school board. 

He laughed loudly.  

“Never!” he said. “I couldn’t be dragooned or seduced or bought!”  

Albert Tramer: 

The Last Outpost

From the 1920s until 1962, one of the most popular — and most beautiful — places to dine or spend a weekend in southwestern Connecticut was the Outpost Inn on Danbury Road. Guests seeking an escape in the country included Marilyn Monroe and her then husband, playwright Arthur Miller; Walt Disney and his family; and Broadway star Ethel Merman.

First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt drove herself over to have lunch there one day.

The Outpost Inn began life in 1928 when Col. Louis D. Conley, who owned nearly 2,000 acres of northeastern Ridgefield and nearby Danbury as part of his Outpost Nurseries, decided to create a

country inn on a piece of his property along Danbury Road just north of the village.

The main inn building was a house built in 1816 by Albin Jennings, a popular Ridgefield carpenter in the early 19th Century. Jennings had waited four years to gain permission from the parents of Polly Dauchy to marry his sweetheart, and once the parents acquiesced, he built this house

for his new bride. It had a number of features that demonstrated his skill as a fine builder, including a spiral staircase near the front entrance.

Over the years, the inn had had several managers or owners. The last owner was Albert Tramer, a Swiss-born and -trained chef who had held positions in some of New York City’s top restaurants, and his wife, Gloria, who helped run the inn.

Born in 1905, Albert D. Tramer came to the United States in 1924. By the late 1930s, he

owned and operated La Petite Swiss, The Swiss Chalet, and the Tramer Restaurant in the city, taking time out during World War II to serve as a Navy chief petty officer in the South Pacific.

In 1953, the Tramers bought what was then called the Hearthstone Outpost Inn. They lived on the inn grounds with their three daughters; he commuted between Outpost and his New York restaurants for a couple of years before deciding to devote his full time to the Ridgefield operation.

Outpost attracted not only celebrities, but local organizations, such as Rotary and the Jaycees,

who would meet there — Rotary was so pleased with the accommodations the Tramers provided that the club gave them a silver bowl in appreciation. Major magazines used its elegant setting and gardens for photo shoots. And townspeople enjoyed not only the food, but Outpost Pond.

“The pond along Route 35 was always open to the townspeople for ice skating during the

winter and was hugely popular,” said Tramer’s daughter, Diane Wilush. “Often Albert would serve hot chocolate to the skaters.”

In 1962, Tramer sold the place to Carl Shapley, son of Harvard astronomer Harlow Shapley

and brother of Nobel economist Lloyd Shapley. Carl operated The Shapley School, a prep school, which soon got into financial troubles and closed in 1967.

Soon after, David Paul — who was building Casagmo at the time — bought the property at a

public auction, and developed Fox Hill, the town’s first condominiums. Plans were to turn the main inn building into a community center, but the building caught fire in 1968 and was eventually razed.

Tramer worked for a while as director of the restaurant at The Westport Inn. He retired and moved to Florida in 1973 where he died in 1994 at the age of 88. Gloria Tramer died 10 years later.

Dr. Peter Yanity: 

Making Things Happen

Few people have been more involved in Ridgefield’s public life than Dr. Peter Yanity, who was a community leader for a half century. Today, the gym at the old high school — used both for  athletics and as a voting place — recalls his name and symbolizes his immense involvement in youth sports and local government. 

“We named Yanity Gym after him because of all the efforts and work that heʼs done with kids over the years,” said Parks and Recreation Director Paul Roche. “Pop Warner, Boys & Girls Club, Parks and Recreation, baseball, basketball. He really had the kids in mind throughout his whole life, and really was committed to making things happen for them.”

Peter Vincent Yanity was born in 1927 in Homer City, Pa., and grew up there and in Athens, Ohio. He entered Ohio University, but — still a teenager — dropped out in 1945 to join the Army Air Corps. He hoped to become a pilot, but the training program was full and the war was winding down. So instead, he volunteered to go overseas with the Manhattan Project, to work with the atomic bomb testing on Bikini Atoll. However, his athletic skills won him a different assignment: traveling throughout the Pacific Islands and Japan, playing baseball and football on Army teams.

“He was an outfielder and a pretty good hitter,” said daughter Kathleen Yanity Duffy. “In football he was a lineman.” 

Yanity was good enough that he was invited by the Cleveland Indians to try out for their farm team, but he opted instead for an education, returning to Ohio University, where he played varsity baseball and graduated in 1949.

While at Georgetown School of Dentistry, he met Elizabeth Scileppi from Long Island, a recent graduate of Trinity College in Washington. They were married 10 days after he finished dental school. After a year of his working for the U.S. Public Health Service, they came to Ridgefield in 1955, living at first on New Street. 

Richard E. Venus was one of five milk dealers in town back then.

“We followed the moving vans so that we could be first to their door to get their business,” said Venus recalled. “Little did I know he would turn out to be such a great milk customer.” Beth and Peter Yanity were to have seven children.

In 1960, Yanity moved to a Main Street house just north of Gilbert Street and set up his practice there. “He was a hard worker,” Ms. Duffy said. “Heʼd get in there at 8 in the morning and usually finish at 6. He worked half days on Saturdays for many years.”

There he and Beth raised their six girls and one boy. “He was strong and opinionated and preached that we all do the right thing, but he was also very kind and gentle,” Duffy said. “He was a sweet, gentle guy.

“He was probably the perfect father to be raising women in the 60s and 70s, when there was all the societal tumult and the roles of women were changing. Where some people from his generation might have resisted some of the opportunities that were opening up for women, he just always encouraged us to pursue careers.”

From his first years in town until his last, Yanity participated in countless community programs, an involvement his obituary called “legendary.”

He served 18 years on the Board of Selectmen, followed by 16 years on the Parks and Recreation Commission — 10 as its chairman. 

He was a past president of the Lions Club, a director and past president of the Boys and Girls Club, a director of the Chamber of Commerce, an incorporator and past president of the Community Center, and a pillar of the Republican Party. He belonged to the Friends of the Library, Keeler Tavern, and the Italian-American Mutual Aid Society — his grandfather came from a little town near Salerno, Italy. 

He was also an active member of St. Maryʼs Church for 53 years, serving on its parish council and many committees. He and Beth received the 1993 Fairfield Foundation Award for volunteerism to church and community, presented by Bishop Edward M. Egan on behalf of the Diocese of Bridgeport.

He received many other honors, including the Old Timers Club Civic Award in 1998 — Beth was so honored previously. He and Beth were also the only husband and wife ever independently named Rotary Citizen of the Year — he in 1988, she in 2000. He was the Chamber of Commerce’s Volunteer of the Year in 2006.

“He always instilled in us a great sense of civic responsibility and community service,” daughter Kathleen said. “You gave back to your community because it offered us a great place to live, and the only way a community was successful was when its citizens were engaged and involved — not just in the political arena but in serving the town.”

Of all his many interests, sports may have been closest to his heart.

In the late 1950s, Yanity was a founder of the Pop Warner Football program — the first one in Connecticut — which he then coached many years. He was also Connecticut’s representative to the national Pop Warner organization.

“I grew up with Doc Yanity as my coach,” said First Selectman Rudy Marconi. The Ridgefield team on which Marconi played under Yanity was so good, it went to Florida in 1958 to play in the Orange Bowl.

Decades later, Yanity and Marconi would serve together on the Board of Selectmen.

For many years he was an alumni recruiter for Ohio University, attending high school games throughout the state to look for talent. Legendary North Carolina Coach Dean Smith was interested in a couple of players that Yanity landed for Ohio University over the years, and Yanity long suspected that this had led Coach Smithʼs lobbying for an NCAA rule change excluding alumni recruiters.

While his allegiance was to Ohio University, Yanity was also focused on helping young players in general. “If he found a kid who maybe wasnʼt, talent-wise, able to play Division I basketball, he had friends from his high school days or Ohio contacts who were coaches at other schools,”  Kathleen Duffy said. “There are several Connecticut schoolboy players who went out on full

scholarships to Ohio colleges. I think he was quite proud of the fact that there were kids who maybe never thought about going to college and were able to go to college on full scholarship.”

Yanity was also an accomplished golfer and a founding member of the Salem Golf Club in North Salem, N.Y.

He retired from his dental practice in 2005 and from service in town government a year later, but continued to be active in the Chamber of Commerce, the Boys and Girls Club (he was a member of its board for more than 40 years), and the Lions Club.

He died in 2008 at the age of 81. 

If there was one activity Yanity may have loved as much as sports, it was dancing. 

Longtime friend Maureen Kiernan, former town treasurer, said some of her fondest memories of Peter Yanity were of watching him dance with Beth.

“They were such a great couple,” she said. “I loved to see them dance. Oh, Lord, did they love to dance together — never got off the dance floor,” she said.

“He was just such a dear man,” she added. “He was such a gentleman in everything he did.” 

Charles Spire:
The Music Man

“Before he arrived,” former high school Principal Joseph Ellis said of Charles Spire, “the music program was practically non-existent. With Charlie’s leadership it became one of the finest music programs of any school district, anywhere.” 

In 1973, when Spire became supervision of music, excellent programs that Dr. Robert Rowe had started in the 1940s were long gone; music education had taken the brunt of budget cuts as enrollments exploded in the 60s. 

By the time Spire retired in 1990, music was flourishing in the schools and Ridgefield students were performing both here and across Europe. 

“My master plan is to see that every child, K through 12, is touched by culture,” he once said. Charles A. Spire was born in 1929 in Gowanda, N.Y., where, during the Depression, music was one of the few diversions and outdoor band concerts were regular community events. “I saw what music did for the small town where I grew up,” he said. 

As a boy he performed on any instrument he was given with any group he could. He studied music at Boston University, and with the likes of Arthur Fiedler and Paul Hindemith. 

He made his concert piano debut with the Boston Pops and also performed at Tanglewood with the Boston Symphony. 

But after serving as an Army major during the Korean War,  Spire decided he wanted to work with children. He taught music in New York state from 1955 until coming to Ridgebury School as a music teacher in 1967. In 1971, he established the Ridgefield Youth Orchestra, which became so proficient it was invited to give concert tours in Europe in 1979, 1984, 1989 and 1991. 

Recalling the performances he’d heard or been a part of as a small-town child, Spire staged 73 concerts in Ballard Park between 1973 and 1990, showcasing hundreds of student musicians. 

A member of the board of Opera New England, he brought opera stars to the schools and took many students to Lincoln Center for great performances. In 1975, he began spring Broadway musicals at the high school. 

A year later, he staged a huge, all-day school Art and Music Festival in Ballard Park to celebrate the Bicentennial. More than 2,000 students — from kindergarten through high school — performed. “Youngsters were dipping candles, weaving baskets, working leather, and compounding medicines, much like Ridgefielders two hundred years earlier,” wrote Lois Street in a 1990 Ridgefield Press profile of Spire.

The same day, “the polls were open for balloting on the school budget,” Street wrote. “The townspeople voted it down.”

To Spire, she said, that day symbolized “23 years of teaching in a town which is enthusiastic about strong programs — and equally enthusiastic about bashing the budgets that provide them.”

For his accomplishments, Spire was named Kiwanis Citizen of the Year in 1976 and Rotary Citizen of the Year in 1993. A longtime member, he had twice served as president of Rotary.

In his spare time, he wrote for Symphony Magazine and served on the board of the Charles Ives Center in Danbury. He lived for many years on Cherry Lane where he maintained a water garden in a pond on his property. He eventually moved to Florida where he died in 2011 at the age of 82.

On his retirement in 1990, Spire reflected on the countless students he had taught and led over the years.

“Today’s children are described as self-centered, as wanting everything given to them or else they’ll drink and do drugs,” he said. “Well, not the ones I see.” Describing a recent rehearsal, he said, “the kids were doing their best, showing respect for each other and pride. I walked away with such a joy. It was so wonderful — and it’s a feeling no different than 40 years ago.”

When he retired, he received a letter complimenting him for inspiring students “to strive for excellence in all things so that, in working hard and displaying individual initiative, they will know they can make a difference in the world.” The letter was signed by President George H.W. Bush.

Spire hoped that in retirement he would be able to find time to return to composing. One of his plans was to take a march he once sold to MGM and rewrite it for orchestra. MGM used the march as the theme in the movie, “The Great Escape,” starring Steve McQueen.

When he sold the piece, Spire had not expected the film to become a classic.

“Boy, I wish I’d kept the rights,” he said with a grin.

Clifford A. Holleran:
Beloved Principal

For 36 years,  Kip Holleran was principal of Ridgefield High School and over all that time, he could knew each and every student by name. 

“Whenever a graduate would return to the halls of his secondary school learning, he or she would first stop at Mr. Holleran’s office, not because he had to, but  because he wanted to,” The Ridgefield Press said in an editorial about the principal. 

Born in 1895,  Clifford Ambrose Holleran grew up in Watertown, Conn., and graduated from Bucknell in 1920. A year later, he was hired as both a principal and a teacher at Hamilton High School, the original Ridgefield High School, then located on Bailey Avenue. 

The late Dick Venus, town historian, told this story of Holleran’s first day in a classroom in Ridgefield: 

“He wanted the names of each of his pupils. He asked that each one arise and give his or her last name as they were called on. 

“My brother Joe sat in one of the front seats and when Mr. Holleran pointed to him, Joe dutifully arose and said his name was Venus. The new principal blinked at the rather unusual name and then called on the next student, who declared his name was Romeo (probably Fred Romeo). 

“With that, Mr. Holleran called a halt to the proceedings as he had a feeling that he was being taken advantage of. In a loud voice, he said, ‘Some of you think you are pretty smart but if the next one who gets up tells me his name is Juliet, there will be trouble.’ 

“When the two boys were able to prove that their names were actually Venus and Romeo, Mr. Holleran had a big laugh over it.”

In his early years, he spent more time teaching than principaling — he taught geometry, trigonometry, science, chemistry, physics, and mechanical drawing. 

When he arrived at the school, there were no organized athletic teams, and he created baseball and basketball squads. For 20 years, he coached both, transporting them to out-of-town games, running magazine drives to pay for them, and sometimes winning championships.

Occasionally he’d even referee the games — because of his reputation for fairness, opposing teams didn't mind. 

After World War II, when the school grew large enough to hire an athletic director to take over, football was finally added and Holleran became a full-time principal — and twice was acting superintendent of schools.

“Mr. Holleran [was] a very kindly man,”  Elsa Hartmann, longtime teacher of history and German at RHS, recalled in 1983. “Even so, he was a strict disciplinarian and woe betide any student who got out of line. 

“On one occasion he heard a noise in the hallway and opened the door to see what was going on. Jim Sullivan had been sent to a window at the rear of the hall to clap the chalk dust out of some blackboard erasers. Lawrence Brundage opened a door at the other  end of the hallway and Jim promptly threw an eraser at him. Of course, the eraser was returned with gusto and soon the air was flying erasers. 

“As the door between the two combatants opened, a balding head appeared and caught the full force of an airborne eraser. When Jim saw what he had done, he clambered out the window and ran as fast as his legs could carry him.”

Holleran retired in 1957, but like many educators of the first half of the 20th Century, he lived here, was active in the non-school community, and remained so in retirement. 

He was a founder and the first president of the Rotary Club, served on the Ration Board during the war, and was a director of the Boys Club for 14 years. He loved golf, and his favorite partner was Tabby Carboni. 

In 1947, he married his longtime sweetheart, Grace C. White, after her retirement following 44 years of teaching here. She died in 1963 at the age of 79, he in 1971, age 78.