Allan Nevins: 

Historian Who Loved Ridgefield

For a small town, Ridgefield has had a wealth of historians, with no fewer than three full-sized histories written about it, plus many shorter works. One of those brief histories was penned by one of the nation’s most prominent historians, a rare winner of two Pulitzer Prizes for historical writing. 

Allan Nevins was still a young man when he came to Ridgefield in the 1920s, perhaps to work on a thesis in graduate school or to complete one of his early books on journalism. He lived at The Elms Inn and was so taken by the town that he wrote a 50-page profile, published by The Elms as a booklet entitled “An Historical Sketch of Ridgefield.” While the book is undated, it was published in 1922 and was one of the first written by Nevins, who went on to complete 50 volumes of history and biography, including the acclaimed eight-volume story of the Civil War, called “Ordeal of the Union.”

Born on an Illinois farm in 1890, Nevins earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English at the University of Illinois and then moved to New York City where he became a reporter for the New York Evening Post. That job inspired one of his first books; combining his work with his love of history, it was called “The Evening Post: A Century of Journalism,” also  published in 1922.  He may have been working on “The American States During and After the Revolution, 1775-1789,” published in 1929, when he was living in Ridgefield. Or perhaps his time here inspired that book.

His historical research and writings led to an appointment in 1928 to the history faculty at Columbia University where he remained until his retirement in 1958. He then moved to California and continued to write; he was still working on his Civil War series when he died in 1971. His biographies “Grover Cleveland: A Study in Courage” (1933) and “Hamilton Fish: The Inner History of the Grant Administration” (1936), each won a Pulitzer.     

Professor Nevins was a friend and supporter of John F. Kennedy, and wrote the foreword to Kennedy’s “Profiles in Courage.” He also wrote the foreword to Silvio Bedini’s 1958 history of the town, “Ridgefield in Review,” in which Nevins sings Ridgefield’s praises like a chamber of commerce director:

“When I made acquaintance with Ridgefield some three decades ago, it delighted me for several reasons. The chief was that it made an ideal center for long country walks, as picturesque as those from a Cotswold or Burgundian village, and a good deal wilder…Ridgefield is set in a remarkably diversified terrain of hills, streams and woods, where no factory smoke stains the sky, and the distant train whistle seldom interrupts the cawing crows.

“My second reason for taking pleasure in the place lay in its historic memories. For it cherishes and fittingly exhibits its relics of colonial and Revolutionary days. Perhaps this filiopietistic trait has developed because Ridgefield has grown and changed but slowly. As a third reason for delight in the place, I liked its neat elegance. It is not merely shining and well improved; it has a distinct and old-fashioned gentility. Finally, it seemed to me a remarkably successful amalgam of new and old, of the provincial and the cosmopolitan.”

Bedini, incidentally, was no amateur historian himself. A Ridgefield native who became a curator at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, he went on to write more than 20 books of history after completing “Ridgefield in Review,” his first book, in only three months.  Perhaps a bit of his inspiration came from Professor Nevins, who was teaching at Columbia while Bedini was a student there before World War II.

Silvio Bedini: 

Ridgefield’s Reviewer

How did a veteran of Army intelligence who had been writing for comic books and helping run the family contracting business wind up a Smithsonian Institution curator and author of many volumes of history?

“One day, I bought a clock, the first clock I had ever owned in my life,” Silvio A. Bedini told me in 1989. It was no ordinary clock, however. Uncovered in a  crate filled with mouse nests in North Salem, N.Y., the timepiece turned out to be a priceless “Silent Night Clock,” with a quiet mechanism invented in 1656 for Pope Alexander VII “because he was an insomniac.” 

That North Salem antique inspired him to study and write about ancient clockmakers. His reputation as a specialist in the field became so widespread that the Smithsonian wooed him for five years before, in 1961, Mr. Bedini went to Washington to become a curator. “From the first day I was there, I felt that’s where I should have been all my life,” he said.  

Mr. Bedini’s interest in history started much earlier than the clock purchase, however. He was born in 1917 on North Salem Road and as a boy, he would walk to town along that road, wondering at the historical markers along the way (it was the route of the Battle of Ridgefield). His real awakening came when a librarian allowed him to visit the dank, dusty historical room in the Ridgefield Library basement where, among other things, he could view—but not touch—the sword of Sgt. Jeremiah Keeler, presented to him by the Marquis de Lafayette for heroic service in the Revolution. “It was a special treat to be allowed into the library’s ‘Holy of Holies,’ even under the librarian’s watchful eye,” he said. “I never forgot what I had seen and could recall details of the weapon for years to come. I doubt that many Ridgefielders were even aware of the room’s existence.”

During World War II, he left college to volunteer for the Army Air Corps, but wound up in G-2 intelligence at Fort Hunt, Va., a facility so secret it was blown up as the war ended. After his discharge, he returned to the family business, wrote for children’s magazines and comic books, and did freelance research for the Encyclopedia Americana and The Book of Knowledge. 

In 1958, he was asked to write a ‘brochure’ about the history of Ridgefield for the town’s 250th anniversary. In only three months under his extensive, painstaking research, the brochure turned into Ridgefield in Review, 411 pages long and the only modern history of the town. After joining the Smithsonian, his talent for careful research and his interest in the “little men” of early science led to write some 20 books of history dealing mostly with such subjects as clockmakers, navigators, mapmakers, surveyors, and “tinkers,” but including a Renaissance pope and his elephant. He won many awards for his work including, in 2000, the Leonardo da Vinci Medal, “the highest recognition from the Society of the History of Technology.” 

Though he retired in 1987 as deputy director of Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, Mr. Bedini continued to research and write books, uncovering new information on old subjects. “This is what I enjoy most,” he said, “the historical detective work.” 

He died in 2007 at the age of 90.  

Donald Moss:
The Athletes’ Artist

Donald Moss was one of the leading artists of the world of sports in the last half of the 20th Century.

Moss painted hundreds of covers and inside illustrations for Sports Illustrated, produced scores of posters of athletes, golf courses, ski slopes, and other sporting themes, and designed more than a dozen U.S. postage stamps, including the 1976 Olympics set. 

His paintings are in all the major sports halls of fame, the Society of Illustrators Museum, the National Art Museum of Sport, the U.S. Sports Academy, the U.S. Air Force Art Collection, and the U.S. Marine Corps Museum. 

Born in 1920 in Somerville, Mass. Donald Francis Moss was attending art school when World War II broke out. He joined the U.S. Marine Corps and with the 1st Marine Division,  landed at Guadalcanal in August 1942, fighting through that campaign. He eventually serving four years.

After the war, he attended Pratt Institute in New York, where he met his wife,  Virginia “Sally” Hardesty Moss. He started out painting for various ad agencies, along with Good Housekeeping, Collier's, and Esquire magazines, but soon began focusing on sports.

“I have always been impressed by athletes who give everything to their sport,”  Moss said in his biography for the Sport Artist of the Year award given to him in 1985 by the United States Sports Academy. “I admire their intensity, their ability to please others and to make a good living at the same time. I like to think that I do the same.”

He got his first assignment with Sports Illustrated in 1954, and over 30 years, painted  more covers and editorial illustrations for that magazine than any other artist, said Anne Kent Rush of the American Sport Art Museum and Archives. “Donald Moss was working on the cusp of the change from painting to the camera,” Rush told The New York Times. “His art helped change the way we visualize sports scenes and players.”

He produced Super Bowl posters, the Best 18 Golf Holes in America, and countless logos — including the art for the 1980 Lake Placid Olympics raccoon mascot.

One of his more unusual series of posters involved aerial views of golf courses and downhill ski runs. “I usually fly over each course, take hundreds of aerial photographs, and translate these in the studio to very tight 24-by-36-inch aerial paintings,” he told The Press in 1996 about his golf course series.

Why did he paint courses and ski runs when aerial photos could accomplish the same and more easily? The Times asked in 1979. “Photographic aerials cannot define fairways and traps or ski trails hidden by terrain and foliage,” he said. “Photos do not bring out the values, color, depth, length, or height that an illustration can. And they do not glamorize the majestic mountain or the dramatic pitch of a downhill trail.”

Moss designed a dozen U.S. postage stamps for the U.S. Postal Service and 48 First Day Cover envelope cachets. He painted the signature illustrations for many major sports events, such as the New York City Marathon and the U.S. Tennis Open at Forest Hills.

His paintings of Ted Williams and Jack Nicklaus are included in Champions of American Sport, published by the Smithsonian Institution, and others hang in the collections of museums and the American Sports Halls of Fame. His painting of football star and coach Don Shula is in the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery.

Over the years, his style of painting varied. “I go from pointillism to pop-art to impressionism to realism,” he told The Press in 1975. “I like surrealism because it’s a more cerebral type of painting.”

Moss was an author:  He wrote “How to Paint Watercolor,” published by Grumbacher in 1968. 

A hockey player as a boy, Moss was a lifelong skier and tennis player, and an avid golf, football, hockey, and baseball fan.

He lived on Peaceable Street for 23 years before moving to Farmington in 1999. During his years here, he often contributed his works to various local non-profits’ fundraising efforts. He died in 2010 at the age of 90. 

“He had a ready smile, innate charisma, and a gift for connecting with anyone, human or canine," said his daughter Margaret Moss Painter. “He loved his sports car, outdoor concerts with champagne and fireworks, dogs, his backyard garden, and a crisply pressed shirt.”