Rev. Richard E. Shortell: 

A Beloved Pastor

When he died in October 1934, The Ridgefield Press called the Rev. Richard Edward Shortell “one of the most beloved priests in the State of Connecticut.” The St. Mary’s pastor was so popular that, for years, babies were named Richard Edward in his honor — among them, former selectman, postmaster and town historian, Richard E. Venus.

Born in 1860, Father Shortell came to Ridgefield in 1893 and led St. Mary’s Parish for 41 years.  It was in the days when a clergyman could spend nearly an entire career at one parish.

“With his coming to Ridgefield, St. Mary’s Church seemed to grow and prosper,” The Press said. 

When he arrived, the parish had only 200 members and was still using a tiny church — a

building later became the Ridgefield Thrift Shop. He built the current church in 1896, a rectory (since torn down) and clubhouse across from the church. The clubhouse was for many years the headquarters of the local chapter of the Knights of Columbus, which he also founded. 

But he was not just a pastor, but also an influential citizen of the town who served for many years on the Board of Education, “contributing incalculable services to the public school system here,” The Press said.

     As early as 1927, he was promoting the benefits of zoning (which wasn’t adopted until 1946). 

      Town officials, whether Catholic or not, would often seek his advice, and the newspaper once reported that early in the 20th Century, the three men considered the “powers” of the town used to meet regularly in the back of Bissell’s Drug Store to discuss town affairs: H.P. Bissell himself, Dr. R.W. Lowe, the town doctor, and Father Shortell. 

     In 1918, Father Shortell quashed efforts to give him a 25th anniversary party. But when he reached 30 years in 1923, parishioners took matters into their own hands and had a surprise party at which “the largest crowd of Catholics ever seen in St. Mary’s Hall assembled” and gave him not only a grand party, but a brand new Cadillac Coupe.

     Father Shortell died in 1934 and is buried in St. Mary Cemetery, next to his mother.

Cyril Ritchard: 

‘Captain Hook’

Millions knew him, not by his name but by his character. For Cyril Ritchard played Captain Hook alongside Mary Martin when the acclaimed Broadway production of “Peter Pan” was staged live for television March 7, 1955, making TV history with its huge audience and high quality production. 

His face and his voice were famous and he enjoyed telling of the time he was spotted by a rough-looking gang of teenagers who surrounded him. 

“I thought they were going to attack me, but instead they stared and exclaimed: ‘You're Captain Hook!’ I'm glad the reason for their attention was curiosity, not animosity.”

The witty actor from Australia starred in countless stage and screen productions around the world and over a career that started before World War I and ended in 1977 when he collapsed on stage of a heart attack. 

Born Cyril Trimnell-Ritchard (a name he shortened to fit on marquees) in 1898,  Ritchard was

the son of a hotel manager father who wanted him to become a doctor. However, he quit medical school at the age of 19 and took to the stage, making his debut in the chorus of a Sydney musical. Three months later, he was performing the lead.

From there he went on to appear over the next half century in innumerable comedies, Shakespearean plays, musicals, and even operas.

“I have four notes, two of them good,” he said of his singing abilities. 

Ritchard also made six movies, including “Half A Sixpence” in 1967.

Shakespearean comedy fascinated Ritchard, who often performed at the American Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford, Conn., and worked to raise money for its survival. In an effort typical of both his

energy and his versatility, he directed the play and performed two parts (Oberon and Bottom) in a 1967 production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” at Stratford.

“It’s really a mental feat,” he said at the time. “The changes would be quite impossible if my mind panicked...But I like the challenge.”

Throughout his career he was known for his smile and his sense of humor. He once told Leonard Lyons of The New York Post That he was unaffected by small audiences in theaters. “Fortunately,” he said, “my sight is bad, so I can’t even see the empty seats.”

“He was a very funny and witty fellow,” said actress Kathleen Eason, a longtime friend and fellow Ridgefielder. “His stories and anecdotes of happenings to him on and off stage were

hysterically funny. Once, when he was very young and just starting to be successful, a fan asked for his autograph at a movie premiere. Cyril brightened right up and with his pencil poised, began laboriously to write: ‘Best wishes and good luck, Cyril Ritchard’ The irate fan said: ‘Come on, hurry up, don’t write a book. Here comes Greta Garbo!’ ”

He maintained that he developed his abilities at comedy as a child. “As I was taken to my room to be spanked by my father, I had to think of something to make him laugh,” he said. “If I could, it was a pretty weak spanking.”

He bought his Danbury Road home, which he called “Lone Rock,” in 1960, and “absolutely loved Ridgefield and that little house,” Eason said. “He couldn’t wait to get out of New York and to his Shangri-La, as he called it.”

Ritchard frequently entertained guests from New York at Lone Rock. One Sunday in the summer of 1965, he bused up the entire cast and crew from “The Roar of the Greasepaint — The Smell of the Crowd,” in which he played one of his best-known roles. He had planned to serve them

beefsteak and kidney pies, but changed his mind. “I remembered about Americans and kidneys, and substituted the beef Wellington,” he said, adding that Americans are likely to find kidneys appealing only when they denote the shape of swimming pools.

He was often seen about town with his poodle, Trim (a trimmed version of his trimmed name). “He got to know a great many people in the town,” Mrs. Eason said. “He always raised his hat, helped old ladies across the road, and stopped to talk to people.”

Ritchard contributed to many local organizations including the Ridgefield Workshop for the Performing Arts. He read the Declaration of Independence at a 1976 Bicentennial ceremony at the Community Center. “I was shocked when they asked me to do this,” he told the crowd. “I'm not an American. I'm a citizen of Australia. And I love the British. So there!”

Despite his age — he had turned 79 a couple weeks before his death — and warnings from his doctor, Ritchard maintained a work schedule that would tire a much younger man. In 1974, when he was hospitalized after collapsing at work in California, he admitted that “the doctor here says in the future I should be a little less enthusiastic in my work. I had been under pressure for six weeks. I was directing (“Sugar”), but nine other people thought they were, and kept screaming.”

   A few months later the 76-year-old appeared in three concerts of  “La Perichole” in Miami and a short time after that, gave 22 performances of 11 different programs during a 2½ week Theatre Guild at Sea cruise in the Caribbean.

   “I never worked so hard in my life,” he admitted afterward.

   A devout Catholic who attended  Mass almost daily, he was a benefactor of St. Mary's Parish. His funeral in 1977 was at St. Mary’s, with the Mass celebrated by longtime friend and TV celebrity, Bishop Fulton J. Sheen. 

   Cyril Ritchard is buried at St. Mary’s Cemetery next to his beloved wife, actress Madge Elliott, who had died five years before he moved to Ridgefield — he loved the town so much he had had her remains moved here from New York.

Under his name, Cyril Trimnell-Ritchard, on the gravestone, it says, “Captain Hook.”

Phyllis Paccadolmi, 

The Face of the Library

When Phyllis Paccadolmi retired in 1999 after 53 years with the Ridgefield Library, The Ridgefield Press described her as “the friendly face, the kind voice, the hometown touch that made the Ridgefield Library more than a place of books and research.” 

The Ridgefield native was born in 1929. Two months after her birth, her father died, leaving her mother to raise five children. Phyllis Paccadolmi grew up here and while at Ridgefield High School, she was already pursuing her interest in libraries: She had permission to leave study hall early to assist school librarian May Boland with typing cards and mending books. 

She joined the Ridgefield Library after graduating from RHS in 1946. That was before several additions that enlarged the building. “Stacks were in the back,” Paccadolmi said. “Fiction on one side, non-fiction on the other. History was downstairs.”

“Generations of Ridgefield’s mothers and children, students and senior citizens came to know the library under Ms. Paccadolmi’s presiding spirit,” The Press said. “And in a world sometimes indifferent, sometimes too busy, they found a refuge of kindness, warmth and humanity.”

“She was the face of the library — she was the Ridgefield Library to generations of kids,” said reference librarian Lesley-Anne Read, who worked with Paccadolmi for more than a decade. Mary Rindfleisch, assistant librarian, said that “over her 53 years of service, ‘Miss P’ had a hand in literally every aspect of library operations. More importantly, however, she was a warm and welcoming presence who belied all the stereotypes of grim, scowling librarians and made the institution a true home for so many staff and patrons.”

Traditionally, the Ridgefield Library had been the object of the generosity of some famous and wealthy people. Paccadolmi knew them all — and sometimes even worried about them.  In a profile of Paccadolmi on her 30th anniversary at the library, Elizabeth Stolper told of the time the sizable Broadway actor  Zero Mostel came in with his leg in a cast. “Miss Paccadolmi hastily offered to get him anything he wanted from downstairs, but he insisted on negotiating the [steep, circular] staircase himself. She held her breath, aghast at the possibility of lifting that large object if it stumbled. Fortunately, all went well.”

During her career the library began the long process of computerizing its catalogues and other systems as well as expanded the building. When she started, she was one of two staff members. She was named head librarian in 1955 but it was not until three years later that the staff was increased to three people. When she retired in 1999, there were 18.

Paccadolmi’s other love was St. Mary’s Church where she and her sister, Gelsina, cared for the the church linens or “altar cloths,” washing them weekly with cakes of  brown soap that they made themselves. They also cleaned  and polished the church brass, especially candlesticks, and often supplied flowers for the altar from their own garden.

She also enjoyed travel. “In 1956 I started traveling — name it, and I’ve been there,” she told The Press in 1996. “I don’t go on tours. I don’t mind traveling by myself. When I went to Taiwan, I was on the plane for 24 hours.”

And what did she do in retirement? She became a volunteer with the Friends of the Ridgefield Library.

“I loved the library — I spent more hours there than at my own house,” Ms. Paccadolmi said  a few months after retiring, as she accepted the Ridgefield Lions Club’s first Citizen of the Year award. “I miss the people — the staff and the patrons.”

She died in 2006 at the age of 76.

Fr. Francis Medynski,

A Pioneer Pastor

Father Francis Medynski seemed to have built St. Elizabeth Seton literally from the ground up. In the early days of the new parish, he did almost everything himself — painting, mowing the lawn, planting  the grass and trees. 

When the church building was erected, he hand-made the wooden stations of the cross. 

Though a bit of a carpenter and handyman, Father Medynski was first a priest and second a musician. These two vocations combined when he went looking for a baptismal font for the new church: He used the kettle of a kettle drum. 

A native of New Jersey, Father Medynski was born in 1921, the son of Eastern European immigrants. His parents died in a flu epidemic when he was a baby and he grew up in an orphanage. He graduated from Catholic University of America, got a master's degree in education from the University of Detroit, and also studied music for many years. His specialty was choral music.

Over his career as a parish priest, he started 11 boys choirs. “Every time the bishop moved me to another parish, I started up another choir,” he told an interviewer.

In 1973, when he came to St. Mary’s as pastor, he founded The Little Singers, a choir that less than  two years later sang at the Vatican. Singer Francesco Morales had lunch with Pope Paul VI and personally delivered a message from The Little Singers.

“Ridgefield was little bit different back then. It was less affluent,” said State Rep. John Frey,

one of the Little Singers. “In order to raise money for our trips, we'd be out there with our red blazers and red-painted coffee cans, collecting change in front of the Grand Union.”

In June 1976, the choir flew to London to sing at Westminster Cathedral and Royal Albert Hall. It was to be their last major appearance, however; that summer, Father Medynski was given the huge task of creating a new parish in Ridgefield, and had to suspend his work with the choir. 

“I would like to think that we are putting them to sleep for a while,” Father Medynski told The Ridgefield Press at the time. “It is not easy for me or the boys. They had dedicated themselves to good music, and not just sacred music, but secular music.”

In 1976, as the town's population grew, Bishop Walter Curtis had asked Father Medynski to start the new parish honoring St. Elizabeth Seton, the first U.S. native to be canonized.  

The parish was created later that year, with first masses in Ridgebury School. The church opened in December 1978, and Father Medynski continued as leader of the flock until 1996 when he reached 75, the church's mandatory retirement age. 

"It's been a fantastic, marvelous experience and tremendous to be with the best people in the world for 20 years," he told The Press at his retirement. 

Father Medynski continued his priestly work, serving in temporary assignments in many parishes in the diocese. He died in 2008 at the age of 86.

“He was an incredibly smart, most of the time very patient, very humble man,” Frey said. “Looking back, I didn't realize it then, he was a man who was born into unfortunate circumstances, with his parents dying young, who was of strong character, and was just a humble and good man and was a good role model for hundreds of young boys, not just me.” 

Frederick Shrady: 

Artist Who Rescued Art

A well-taught painter turned self-taught sculptor, Frederick Shrady became  internationally famous for his art, especially on religious subjects. But as he was gaining fame as an artist, he was also helping retrieve thousands of priceless art treasures, stolen by the Nazis.

Born in East View, N.Y., in 1907,  Frederick Charles Shrady was a son of American sculptor Henry Merwin Shrady, who created the Grant Memorial on the Mall near the Capitol in Washington. He got his first taste of Connecticut when he attended the Choate School in Wallingford, graduating in 1928. He studied painting at the Art Students’ League in New York City, and then went to Oxford University in England where he graduated in 1931. 

That year, he moved to Paris  to paint and to study painting. Over nine years there, he gained

esteem as an artist and earned a medal at the 1937 Paris Exposition. His paintings are in museums in Paris, Lyons, Grenoble, Belgrade, and Zagreb. Before was 33, he had had solo exhibitions in Dublin, Paris, Belgrade, London, and New York.

Early in World War II, Shrady worked with the French underground — he was later awarded the Legion of Honor by the French government.

 In July 1943 as war raged on, he enlisted in the U.S. Army, serving at first in the Model Making Division that created elaborate decoys. But he soon became involved in even more fascinating work:  As the war was ending, Lieutenant Shrady joined the Army’s Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives (MFAA) division (celebrated in the 2014 film, “The Monuments Men,” starring George Clooney and Cate Blanchett).

According to the Monuments Men Foundation,  in June 1945 he was one of the team  that removed thousands of stolen art works, stored by the Nazis in a mine at Altaussee, Austria. Hitler had

collect them there for his planned “Fuhrermuseum” in Linz, Austria, a huge complex to showcase his plunder.  The Monuments Men were racing to rescue the art before the arrival of Russian troops who eventually took control of Austria. 

“Together, they carefully packed Michelangelo’s ‘Bruges Madonna,’ Vermeer’s ‘The Artist’s Studio,’ and the Ghent Altarpiece by Jan van Eyck,” the foundation said. “Shrady and the Monuments Men evacuated these great works of art, along with over 15,000 other works of art and cultural objects, to the Munich Central Collecting Point. In the following months, Shrady conducted inspections of churches, castles, and museums in Wiesbaden, Germany.”

It was while serving in Austria that he met his future wife, Maria Louise Likar-Waltersdorff, who had grown up in Vienna and was working as an interpreter for the Monuments Men. They married in 1946.

Back in the United States after the war, Shrady continued to paint and was turning more to religious subjects. In 1945, though he was an American Episcopalian, he had created a 14-foot high painting, “Descent from the Cross,” for St. Stephen’s Cathedral (‘Stephansdom’) in Vienna, as a gift from the U.S. Armed Forces to the church. He became the only American to have his art in this and several other major churches in Europe including a mural of St. Francis in the chapel of St. Francis in Paris and a painting of St. Christopher in the Dublin Cathedral.

     “I have a feeling for spiritual work,” Shrady once said in an interview.

     After he moved to Ridgefield in 1948 and converted to Catholicism, Shrady turned to the

medium of his father, taking up sculpture as virtually his only medium. His very first work, a bust of noted Jesuit philosopher Martin D’Arcy created in 1949, was so good, the Metropolitan Museum of Art purchased it. (Father D’Arcy later wrote the introduction to Maria Shrady’s first book, “Come, Southwind,” written in Ridgefield and published in 1957.)

      Having the Met buy a “beginner’s” work would be a tremendous boost for any artist, and Shady quickly immersed himself in sculpture.

Around 1954, he created the altar statuary, 28 stained-glass windows, 14 painted stations of the cross, and many small windows symbolizing various saints for the new St. Lawrence O’Toole Church in Hartford. The altar art included a nine-foot figure of Jesus on a 16-foot high cross. Shrady said the only way he could see for himself how the figure would look was to have himself tied to a beam and then photographed, which he did.

Frederick and Maria lived on  the northern corner of Route 7 and New Road and belonged to St. Mary’s Parish. In 1956, as St. Mary’s was building its new Catholic school, Shrady set about creating 53 sculptures for the new building. His two youngest children were among the early St. Mary students.

In 1959 he and Maria and their children moved to Easton where Shrady had purchased a large stone mansion, built in the late 1930s by the American author Edna Ferber (his daughter Mary Louise Shrady Smith lives there today). 

Shrady had become a friend of many leaders in the Catholic church and among the guests at his Easton home in 1976 was Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, secretary of state of the Vatican. The cardinal admired Shrady’s work and suggested he create a statue for the Vatican Gardens, a 16th Century papal retreat behind St. Peter’s Basilica that is usually closed to the public. Shrady liked the idea and five years later, when Cardinal Casaroli was again staying at his home, Shrady showed him a model for a statue of “Our Lady of Fatima” that he thought would be appropriate for the gardens. The model was shown to Pope John Paul II who approved the work, the first time an American artist had received a papal commission.

The 10-foot bronze statue was unveiled before the Pope in 1983 on the 66th anniversary of the apparition of Mary to three children at Fatima, Portugal. That date, May 13, was also the anniversary of two attempts to assassinate the Pope, in 1981 in Rome and 1982 at Fatima. “He is convinced that our lady of Fatima interceded for him,” Shrady told a reporter in 1984.

Among the handful of guests for the Pope’s blessing of the statue were Louise and Dan McKeon of Ridgefield, friends the Shradys and supporters of  Frederick’s work. “There we were, a small group, standing in the Vatican gardens with the Holy Father, and something we had all cared about and been involved in was finally being realized,” Louise McKeon said later. “It has been beautifully placed, under a well-pruned cedar of Lebanon.”

When the ceremony was over, “the Pope went up to the sculpture again and spoke with Mr. Shrady, bringing tears to the artist’s eyes,” McKeon recalled.

Among Shrady’s major works are:

• a statue of St. Elizabeth Seton in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York;
  
• a sculpture for the FBI headquarters in Washington that portrays fidelity, bravery and integrity;
  
• the 18-foot bronze Human Rights statue for the U.S. Mission at the United Nations;
  
• St. Peter the Fisherman casting his net, located at Lincoln Center in Manhattan.
  
• 12 bas-relief panels, depicting “The Life of Mary,” for the doors of the Basilica of the Annunciation in Nazareth, Israel.
  
• 14 Stations of the Cross in Georgetown University's Dahlgren Chapel (among the few paintings he did after becoming a sculptor).
  
• An 18-foot-high statue of St. Benedict the Moor, a black saint, erected atop a church tower on a hill overlooking a black neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pa., and aimed at being a symbol of racial “healing and progress.” (Although the 3,000-pound statue is made of aluminum, it is so big that it required a large helicopter to lift it into place and it is so high that its stand had to be designed “like a bridge” to withstand hurricane-strength winds.)
  
• A statue of St. Francis at the Egan Chapel of Fairfield University.
  
• Three works, including “The Good Samaritan” and “Flame,” in the sculpture collection of the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum.
  

One of his more unusual works was a huge bronze sculpture on the facade of St. Ann Chapel, an Anglican church near Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif. The chapel was built by Ridgefielder Clare Boothe Luce in memory of her 19-year-old daughter, Ann Clare Brokaw, a student at Stanford killed in a 1944 automobile accident. Shrady’s sculpture on the building’s facade portrays Saint Ann and the Virgin Mary, with the mother (St. Ann) teaching her young daughter (the Virgin Mary) how to read.

Frederick Shrady died in 1990 at the age of 82. Maria, who died in 2002, was the author several books. In 1961 she won the Christopher Book Award for “In the Spirit of Wonder”; other works included “Moments of Insight” and “The Mother Teresa Story,” and translations of various religious writings. 

Francis H. McGlynn: 

Theologian and Leader

Ridgefield in the 20th Century was home to several novitiates, schools operated by religious congregations that trained future priests, sisters or brothers. The largest and longest-lived novitiate belonged to the Congregation of the Holy Ghost,  then commonly called the Holy Ghost Fathers. Now officially known as the Congregation of the Holy Spirit, or the Spiritans, the missionary order bought the former Cheesman estate on Prospect Ridge and trained novices there from 1922 to 1971.

Not surprisingly, the operation of a novitiate in the center of town attracted a number of young Ridgefield Catholic men. One of them was Francis McGlynn, who wanted to become a missionary in Africa. He wound up, however, spending most of his career within 20 miles of his birthplace, not as a parish priest but as a leader and scholar of national reputation, a theologian and professor of theology who taught decades of future missionaries.

Francis Hennelly McGlynn was born in Ridgefield in 1897, attended grammar schools here and graduated from Danbury High School (in the days before Ridgefield had its own high school). In 1918, he entered the Holy Ghost Novitiate on Prospect Ridge, studied at the congregation’s major seminary at Ferndale in Norwalk and at St. Thomas Seminary in Hartford. He was ordained in 1924 and celebrated his first mass at his old parish church of St. Mary.

Within three years, he was named master of novices at Prospect Ridge and a professor of sacred scriptures. Clearly seen as a rising talent in the order, McGlynn in 1929 was sent to the Gregorian University at Rome to earn a doctorate of sacred theology.

For the next 20 years he was a professor of moral theology at Ferndale, serving also a head of a retreat program for lay Catholics.

Not only his scholarship but his leadership skills were recognized by the congregation, which named him superior — the head — of the seminary in 1947 and two years later, the provincial — the head — of the congregation’s entire United States province. During his eight years as provincial, he led more than 100 of the congregation’s operations in the United States, Puerto Rico, and East Africa from the headquarters in Washington, D.C.

But it was teaching that Father McGlynn liked best and after his term in Washington ended, he returned to Ferndale, where he taught and worked on retreats. 

He died in 1965 at the age of 68 and is buried in the cemetery at Ferndale.

The Holy Ghost Novitiate, purchased by the town in 1971, became the Board of Education offices until the late 1980s, and was converted to the town’s congregate housing for the elderly, which opened in 1991. Ferndale was sold in 1979 and is now a 66-acre hotel and conference center called Dolce. 

Incidentally, although it has closed and consolidated many of its past facilities, the congregation still operates Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, considered one of the nation’s top Catholic colleges.