Marian Cox: 
‘Lady of the Orchids’

 “New York’s Famous ‘Lady of the Orchids’ Bares the Hidden Story of Her Fabulous Society Life.”

The headline stretched across the top of two pages of the San Francisco Examiner’s Sunday magazine in 1934 for two weeks in a row. In the two-part article, Marian Cox explained why she “seeks to bury her ‘Parasite Past’” by selling almost all of her possessions, including Stonecrest, her estate-farm along North Street in Ridgefield.

Cox, an author and feminist who was considered both talented and beautiful, may also have been one of the wealthiest women to live in Ridgefield. Married to a multimillionaire, she rubbed shoulders with the literati and the “400” in the city and entertained the likes of presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan both at both her Manhattan and Stonecrest mansions.

A daughter of a well-to-do Southern family from St. Louis, Mabel Marian Metcalfe gave her birth year as 1882, although there is some evidence she was born in 1878. In 1899, when she said she was only 16 years old, she married  Dr. John Watson Cox, a wealthy New York City chemical manufacturer who was 43.

“There was I,” she told the Examiner, “a child of 16 thrown into the mad whirl of New York society, straight from a sheltered, quiet home in the old South. Immediately I must play hostess to distinguished guests and be mistress of a 20-room mansion and 14 servants.”

She succeeded, it seems, and her mansion — which stretched from East 38th to 39th Streets in the fashionable Murray Hill section of Manhattan — became a destination. “The foremost statesmen, leaders from the field of literature and most of the social greats, frequented the Cox mansion, which was as impressive and grandiose as any in the New York of its day,” said the Examiner, which shared the story with many Hearst newspapers across the country.

In between a life of hosting parties and managing a household of 14 servants, Marian Cox started to write. She turned out several books, the first of which was The Crowds and The Veiled Woman, published in 1910 by Funk and Wagnalls. Her stories were considered feminist, featuring strong women. The San Francisco Chronicle said the book “sounded the most distinctive and ambitious note in recent American fiction.”

When her book, The Dry Rot of Society, was published in 1919, a male reviewer in The New York Sun called Cox “one of the few great feminine writers of English. She has a lucid style [and] she has that rare gift among women — irony. She has vision. She mocks, she scorns, she pities. She thinks without sinking into mere philosophizing...She has beautiful wisdom.”  

However, Cox confessed in the 1934 article that, at Murray Hill and Stonecrest, she grew addicted to her possessions, which, she explained, gave her a sense of identity. As she became an increasingly popular hostess, they served as anchors in a sea of social events. 

“I delighted in showing off my wonderful home and champagne goblets with the longest stems in New York (so I was told), jeweled Bohemian glasses, Royal Crown Leighton and Copeland china — all sorts of superlative things to make a grace of the mere animal functions of eating and drinking,” she wrote.

At least one guest did not seem to impress her. A devoted Democrat, Dr. Cox was treasurer of the Democratic National Committee and two-time presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan would often stop by their home on his visits to New York. Bryan was the famous orator, who would later add to his notoriety by opposing Darwinism in the Scopes trial.

“From my long-stemmed champagne goblets, he always drank grape juice while the rest of us drank wine, and he preached prohibition while manifesting such a Gargantuan appetite for food that he was the first person who impressed me with the truth of the adage:

“We compound for sins we are inclined to,

“By condemning those we have no mind to.”

“Bryan never drank himself into life,” she added, “but he ate himself unto death, in my inconsequential opinion.”

Dr. Cox died in 1928 and six years later, Marian Cox decided she had had enough of being saddled with millions of dollars in possessions and the responsibilities — and guilt — that came with them. She auctioned off virtually all of her furnishings and art, as well as Stonecrest.

“We possessed this city home of 20 rooms and a country home of 30 rooms and now I am wondering if I have ever had a home at all,” she said in 1934. At Murray Hill, “my salon was like frozen music, Louis 15th in style, with all its furniture reproductions of historic pieces at the palace of Versailles, Fontainebleau and Museum of the Louvre. My bedroom was a copy, even to the silk upon the walls, of the bedroom of Marie Antoinette.”

Of Stonecrest, which the Coxes bought around 1908, she said she emulated Marie Antoinette and attempted to convert the farm into a prosperous dairy. However, she admitted, she was unable to transform herself into a successful business woman.

After she left both homes  and their furnishings, Cox lived in various places until late 1940, when she returned to Ridgefield, acquiring the former home of artist George Stengel on lower Main Street.  “It seems I am only following the instinctive lure of the past in returning to Ridgefield to find the home for which I have been vainly seeking ever since I left there,” she wrote in a long essay in The Ridgefield Press about returning to town.

However, her stay was not long. During the war she met James Fay Logan, the captain of a Liberty Ship that was transporting war supplies in the North and South Atlantic, and Indian Oceans.  Captain Logan was at least 17 years younger than she. They were married in 1943 and later moved to New York City.

 Although she spent much of her life in the limelight and seemed to thrive on publicity, Marian Cox Logan faded from the scene late in life. She apparently died in the early 1970s — her exact date and place of death has not been discovered. Captain Logan died in 1981.

In 1967, still using the name Marian Cox, she self-published her memoirs, The Sphinx Wore An Orchid. The title was a reference to her reputation decades earlier as an orchid lover. In fact, she confessed at the time she was selling her Ridgefield home, “At my country estate, ‘Stonecrest,’ in Connecticut, there was a conservatory and a gardener for the sole purpose of raising rare orchids for me. Twice a week I received a huge box of flowers for the house and orchids for myself. I was then, truly, a Lady of the Orchids.”

She found symbolism in her love of “such strange orchids raised solely for me. As strange as those I had seen in the botanical gardens of Buitenzorg, Java. Orchids like little tarantulas pinned to my heart. Spotted orchids like blooms corrupted by the sun. Pure orchids so white they seemed innocent of every touch of the sun. My young life in its flowery grave of solitude and splendor!”

But, she added, “this is what made me write — in a superb sublimation of sex and humanity. Four books of mine were published during this gala period, books strange as Java orchids for an American girl to write.”

Arthur and Teddy Edelman: 

Fine Hides and An Old Barn 

When Arthur and Teddy Edelman came to Ridgefield a half century ago, they wanted a home that reflected their many and varied interests and talents that ranged from being leaders in the world  of luxury leathers and modern design, to their love of antiques and fine art, including the Old Masters.

So they bought a barn, took it apart, moved it five miles, and put it back together in a much glassier form. And there they lived the rest of their creative lives.

The Edelmans spent their long careers in the field of fine leathers and fashionable things crafted from them, working with people like Andy Warhol, who was their graphic designer for six years. The company they founded, Edelman Leather, supplies top designers today.

 Born in the Bronx in 1925, Arthur Jay Edelman was a son of Russian immigrants. His father was a leather tanner, but that’s not what the young Arthur wanted to be: After serving in the U.S. Navy in World War II, he studied acting at Sarah Lawrence College, which had been a well-known women’s school.

“He went there when it was the first year they allowed men in,” said a co-worker. “He figured his odds were pretty good to meet a girl!” 

He did just that, meeting Theodora “Teddy” Joffe, a Brooklyn native born in 1928. Four days

after graduating, they were married and, 66 years later, they became the longest married couple to have met at Sarah Lawrence.

After deciding acting was not his forte, Arthur joined Teddy in creating pieces of art from leathers. That didn’t produce enough money to survive on so the two went to work for Teddy’s family business, Fleming-Joffe, in New York, which was to become a leading supplier of high-fashion leathers and reptile skins. The two eventually took over the company’s management. 

Andy Warhol joined Fleming-Joffe as a graphic designer,  producing many posters and advertising art pieces.  In 2016 Arthur Edelman told The Guardian how he first met and hired the artist in 1957. 

“One day I was calling on one of our most important customers...in the Empire State Building,”

he said. “I was waiting in a darkened hallway when a very peculiar-looking man walked in and joined me. He had a white face, hair that was the brightest white — it just didn’t belong to a human being. His suit looked like it had been pressed under his bed overnight, his shoes were paint-splattered with all the colors of the rainbow. And he was holding a portfolio. 

“Now, I’m a big man — six feet six inches — and I was scared.”

It turned out the specter was a struggling artist, there to show some proposed commercial work to Edelman’s customer. Edelman looked at the pictures, which involved snakeskin shoes. They were “most extraordinary,” he said.

The Edelmans had been looking for a promotional designer and Warhol was looking for a full-time job, and thus began a six-year relationship. “He came back to our offices a few blocks over and

shocked our receptionist with his appearance,” Arthur said. “He and Teddy immediately took a huge liking to one another. Teddy was very motherly to him, which I think he liked.”

Warhol and the Edelmans remained friends until the artist’s death in 1987.

In 1971 the Edelmans sold Fleming-Joffe and exactly 10 years later launched Edelman Leather, which today provides luxury upholstery to architects and interior designers for high-end residential, office, hotel, aviation, and marine projects. “We are in the business of art,” the company says.  “Our art is leather.”

     For his old friends in a new business, Warhol created what has become a well-known poster in art circles,  “This is a chair...”

In between their two careers running leather companies, the Edelmans decided to move to the “country,” buying around 30 acres of old farmland on Spring Valley Road. They wanted a custom-designed house with lots of views of the beautiful Mopus Valley, but they both loved antiques and wanted it to have a flavor of the old.

     They decided to fashion a new house from an old barn and

found the barn they liked on North Street, part of the old Stonecrest estate owned by the Conklin family. In November 1968, the huge, 6,800-square-foot structure was carefully dismantled and each piece

labeled before being moved to Spring Valley Road to create a new barn-like house. 

The result is an 8,500 square-foot, seven bedroom home that became the center of their estate. The barnwood walls displayed their collection of paintings by the Old Masters and new talents — from Paul de Vos to, of course, Andy Warhol. They also had many fine antiques that included

priceless Tiffany lamps.

The estate’s name? Something one wouldn’t expect in Ridgefield but would expect from the Edelmans: “Alligator Farm.”

Teddy Edelman died in 2016 at the age of 88, Arthur two years later at 92.

Among their five children, at least two have become leaders in fields related to design.  John, their youngest son, is president and CEO of the contemporary furniture company, Design Within Reach, which has three dozen stores in the United States, Canada and Mexico. The oldest son, Sam, founded Sam Edelman high-fashion footwear.

Irene Kampen: 

Life without Owen

Irene Kampen’s divorce led not only to a new career, but a popular TV series starring another recent divorcee, Lucille Ball. 

Kampen and her husband, Owen, moved to Ridgefield in 1954 and almost immediately, their 15-year marriage fell apart. 

“I was brought up to believe that if you cooked, dusted and baked blueberry muffins for your husband, you would both live happily ever after,” Kampen said. “Well, I dusted, I baked and one day I looked around our house, high on a Ridgefield hill, and ‘George’ was gone. 

“Now the advice I give to all young brides is ‘Don’t dust! Light a lot of candles. They’re much more romantic.”

Forced to support herself after the divorce, she was soon exhausted commuting to work at her father’s New York City flower shop, and turned to writing. A few years later, she produced the light-hearted “Life Without George,” published by Doubleday in 1961, based on her new life as a single mom. The book became the inspiration for The Lucy Show, a comedy about a divorced woman starring Miss Ball, who had recently divorced Desi Arnaz. 

Kampen and her then 17-year-old daughter Christine used to watch the show every Monday night. “It’s our lives we’re seeing,” Kampen told Associated Press. “They’ve changed specific incidents, but the characters are recognizable and so are the situations.”

Many changes were made from book to sit-com script, including the elimination of Kampen’s two cats — “Cats are untrainable and impossible to use in a show filmed before a live audience as is ‘The Lucy Show,’ ” explained AP TV-radio writer Cynthia Lowry.

“But,” added Kampen, “they’ve left the house pretty much the way it was — they even have the location right, only instead of Ridgefield and Danbury, they call the towns Ridgebury and Danfield.”

Ball won two Emmy Awards during the show's seven-year run.

Although she wanted to, Kampen never did get to meet Lucille Ball. She probably did meet Vivian Vance, who played Ethel Mertz on both I Love Lucy and The Lucy Show — Vance lived on Route 116 in nearby North Salem.

Kampen went on to write 10 humorous novels, often based on her own experiences, with such titles as “Here Comes the Bride, There Goes the Mother” (based on the 1966 wedding of her daughter, Christine, to Ridgefielder Stephen Guthrie), “Fear Without Childbirth,” “Due to A Lack of Interest, Tomorrow Has Been Cancelled,” and “Nobody Calls at This Hour Just to Say Hello.” 

Irene Trepel Kampen was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., in 1922 — her father, Jack, who later lived in Ridgefield, owned a flower shop in Rockefeller Center, was an amateur magician, and was president of the American Society of Magicians for 12 years. Her mother Mary co-starred in Trepel’s magic shows, including on USO tours in World War II.

Kampen attended the University of Wisconsin where she was editor of the campus humor magazine and graduated in 1943. She worked for a while at The New York Journal-American and after her marriage, moved to brand-new Levittown, Long Island, where she worked for the local weekly newspaper as a reporter and gossip columnist.

Living in Ridgefield for more than 30 years, Kampen had homes on Stonecrest Road, Lookout Drive, and finally Rockwell Road. She was active in the Women’s Town Club and the Ridgefield Woman's Club, helped with Red Cross fund drives, and was a frequent luncheon speaker

Soon after her divorce, she began writing pieces for The Ridgefield Press, including a column  under the pseudonym, H. Loomis Fenstermacher. 

“I poked fun at local subjects such as the Southern New England Telephone Company, CL&P and the Ridgefield police department,” she told an interviewer about her column. “I thought the column was funny, my mother thought it was funny, and the publisher, Karl Nash, thought it was funny. However, the people I wrote about did not think I was funny, and I was let go.”

So, instead of the column, she sat down and wrote “Life without George.”

The way to become a writer, she said years later, was: “Get divorced. And also, if you want to write books, get fired.”

Kampen enjoyed pulling off stunts, as well. One time, to draw attention to how long it took to get a walk light on Main Street, she set up a typing stand with typewriter on the sidewalk by town hall  to suggest she had enough time to work on a novel while waiting for the walk light.

Irene Kampen moved to California in 1988 and died 10 years later at the age of 75.

How did Owen Kampen feel about becoming “George” to millions of readers and viewers? In a 1961 letter to The Press, Owen, a commercial artist who did many pulp fiction covers and taught at Famous Artists School, said he had picked up a copy of his ex-wife’s book soon after it came out and began reading it with trepidation. 

“There is nothing funny about divorce, but Irene’s book is; from the flyleaf on, I smiled and finally laughed. In retrospect, it’s a little rewarding to know you had some part in bringing a long-stilled and genuine talent to the fore, for all to enjoy.”

And if that praise from an ex-husband wasn’t surprising enough, consider who selected Kampen’s book as the model for Ball’s new show: The head of Desilu Productions, Desi Arnaz.

Israel Grossfeld: 

The Crusading Father

Nineteen-year-old Fred Grossfeld was a quiet, scholarly student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was a sophomore majoring in mathematics. Slight in build, the Ridgefielder loved books and spent many hours in libraries. 

 One November night in 1965, Fred played bridge with three friends in a dormitory where his

own room was located. After the game ended, he said goodnight and left. He was never seen alive again.

The tragic case of Fred Grossfeld, which made headlines locally and nationally for weeks, sparked his father, Ridgefield merchant Israel Grossfeld, to undertake a campaign that eventually helped change how law enforcement officials in the United States deal with missing persons. 

Fred Grossfeld vanished on the evening of Nov. 30, 1965, but it was two days before MIT campus police learned he was missing. Campus police then spent several days either waiting for news or looking into his whereabouts before finally notifying his parents on Dec. 6, nearly a week later.

“We found the delays shocking; the university found them routine,”  Israel Grossfeld told MIT’s president eight months later. Indeed, when Israel Grossfeld had earlier approached an MIT spokesman about publicizing his missing son in the Boston newspapers, he was told, “It isn’t a story. Kids disappear every day. This isn’t news.”

“Then I’ll make it a story,” Grossfeld shot back.

In the weeks that followed, Israel Grossfeld undertook a tireless campaign to publicize the disappearance of his son who he believed had been accosted by robbers or was suffering from amnesia. He knocked on doors of police stations, politicians’ offices, and media newsrooms. Headlines began appearing across the country — The New York Times carried at least four stories.

Fred Grossfeld’s disappearance was mysterious. There was no sign of anything amiss. His room was found in perfect condition. Except for an olive-green raincoat, nothing was missing; even his watch was still sitting on his desk.

The young man was described as a “very quiet, studious boy, who spent most of his time reading and studying,” The Ridgefield Press reported Dec. 9. “He rarely left the MIT campus. He played chess and Ping Pong in addition to bridge.” 

His father discounted rumors that he was having trouble in school, noting his son had a 4.8 grade point average of a possible 5. “His only weak subject was physical education,” Israel Grossfeld told The Times.

The FBI briefly investigated in December after Israel received a ransom call from someone, demanding $3,000 for Fred’s return and telling the father to wait the next day near five pay phones at the corner of Tremont and Boylston Streets in Boston. Grossfeld called authorities, and the next day, Boston police and the FBI staked out the area as Grossfeld waited at the corner. No call came.

Grossfeld said at the time that he believed the caller never contacted him because news of the call and stakeout appeared in Boston media the night before. “I fear that because I did not follow the caller’s advice to not contact the authorities, they might have killed Fred,” he said.

When nothing materialized, the FBI dropped out of the case. 

However, national law enforcement officials began to take more notice after Grossfeld pursued politicians like U.S. Senators Abraham Ribicoff (D-Connecticut) and Ted Kennedy (D-Massachusetts), who in turn pressured U.S. Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach to personally review the merits of the case. In early February, Katzenbach wound up ordering the FBI to resume the search for the boy.

A native of Poland who was persecuted as a Jew by the Nazis, Israel Grossfeld had come to this country in 1949 with only $8 to his name. He eventually opened I. Grossfeld Ltd., a top-drawer men’s clothing store on Main Street. 

As he worked to find his son, he virtually walked away from the business — many people in the community, including an airline pilot and the owner of a competing store — volunteered to work at Grossfeld’s shop while the father searched for his son. Scores of Ridgefielders also helped him send thousands of missing-person flyers all over the county — even to hundreds of libraries, because Fred had been such a book-lover. 

“If it takes all of my life, this is my No. 1 job — to find the boy, nothing else,” he told The Times. 

The search came to an end on Feb. 8, 1966. A Beacon Street woman was walking her dog along the Esplanade of the Charles River in Boston, when the pet broke loose, ran about 15 feet out onto the frozen river and began barking. Embedded in the ice was the body of Fred Grossfeld. 

Boston police reported that, except for his olive-green raincoat, he was clad entirely in black clothing, including a black shirt and black tie. Investigators found no evidence of foul play.

His father was crushed. He could barely do more than nod his head when he came to the police mortuary to identify the body. He had been in Boston to meet with Cardinal Richard Cushing to enlist his aid in the search campaign.

How did Fred Grossfeld wind up frozen in the Charles River? An autopsy found that the boy had drowned. There was speculation that he had committed suicide by jumping off a bridge over the Charles River, but in a letter to The Press on Feb. 15, Israel Grossfeld and his wife, Mina, wrote: “We are sure to our innermost soul that Freddie was not a suicide. He once expressed himself specifically on the subject, saying that only ‘sick’ people did such a thing. He could not inflict pain on anyone or anything, and certainly not on himself.”

Instead, the Grossfelds said, “we believe that Freddie met with foul play, whether from a gang of delinquents roaming the streets or from someone out of the vast hate world we shall probably never know.” 

The week after the discovery, Israel Grossfeld told The Press, “I am not going to let the files be closed. If the police don’t care to pursue the case, I will pursue it myself. This is something that I feel I must do for the memory of my boy and for my own peace of mind.”

Grossfeld returned to the MIT campus to try to determine whether school and police officials were making any effort to solve the mystery. He was accompanied by author Max Gunther and photographer Joseph Consentino, both Ridgefielders, who had been assigned by the Saturday Evening Post magazine to cover the story. 

Gunther, who had already spent three days interviewing Fred’s dormitory neighbors as well as campus officials, told The Press on Feb. 16 that he “found no evidence that Fred was unhappy or worried in the weeks before his disappearance. Furthermore, Fred’s friends recalled that the brilliant young scholar had always shunned physical violence and was extremely sensitive to pain, cold and other discomfort.

“If Fred was going to commit suicide,” Gunther said, “it seemed unlikely to his friends that he would choose such an agonizing method as jumping into an icy river and drowning.”

By the spring of 1966, Israel Grossfeld had recovered enough to focus on a new campaign: The creation of a federal agency handling missing persons.

“We need what a number of other countries already have: A federal bureau for missing persons, under the FBI,” Grossfeld wrote Senator Ribicoff in July. “In the areas of taxation, water control, education, and movement of traffic, we have gained immeasurably by the unity and coordination of federal control. Why not in personal safety?”

He had already complained to the MIT president, “It is unfortunate that disappearances of college students are each treated as a common, routine matter. In most cases they probably do present no cause for concern, but this results in tragedy for the few exceptions that do occur.” 

He felt that MIT should have been more diligent in dealing with Fred’s disappearance and should have notified area police and the parents immediately. “We shall probably never know whether this entirely usual lack of communication made the difference between life and death,” he told the MIT president.

Grossfeld found a supporter in Senator Ribicoff, who had earlier been governor of the Connecticut. In 1967, Ribicoff introduced a bill to create a federal office to help local police departments to find missing persons. It would, as The Times reported, “set up a separate investigative staff within the Justice Department concerned solely with missing persons…. The staff would assist directly in investigations if requested to do so by local policemen…The office would also serve as a national clearinghouse for information on missing persons, using modern computer technology to collect and store information from all over the country.”

Such an agency would no doubt be overloaded, unless it had thousands of staff members. But the federal government did institute the National Crime Information Center, or NCIC, whose huge databases include not only criminals, but also missing and unidentified persons. Today, up to 12 million searches a day are done by law enforcement agencies, using NCIC. Many of those are for missing persons.

But as a result of the efforts of Israel Grossfeld and others, significant improvements in dealing with missing persons have been made. “Many police departments used to wait 24 to 48 hours before accepting a missing persons report,” said current Ridgefield Police Chief John Roche. “No more.”

Grossfeld had argued that any delay in searching for the missing makes the job tougher. Chief Roche agreed. In Ridgefield and in Connecticut in general, missing persons now get instant attention. 

“The longer you wait, the less you have the ability to find the person,” Chief Roche said. While many missing persons cases may involve miscommunications or domestic spats, “you just don’t know,” he said.

Ridgefield police even plan for missing persons. One of the more frequent types of missing persons is an Alzheimer’s patient, who may wander off and get lost. The department maintains a database of dementia victims, with information voluntarily supplied by caregivers, so that such vital details as photos, physical descriptions, and habits can be quickly called up at headquarters.

Israel Grossfeld was active in the 1970s in supporting youth programs, particularly the Ridgefield Boys’ Club. For many years the Fred Grossfeld Memorial Fund provided scholarships for Ridgefield High School graduates. 

Grossfeld sold his store and his Stonecrest Road home in 1980, the same year his wife, Mina, a teacher of Russian, died. He remarried, eventually moved to Israel, and then to Florida, where he became active in the state chapter of the Friends of Israeli Disabled Veterans. 

He died in 2013 at the age of 91.

Ralph Edwards: 

A Man of Consequences

Anyone who owned a radio in the 1940s or a television in the 1950s knew Ralph Edwards. He created and starred in shows with titles that became so familiar that even a town took one as its name. One of his shows — The People’s Court — is still running today, 78 years after his first success — Truth Or Consequences — went on the air.

 For all his fame, however, few people knew that Ralph Edwards and his wife, Barbara,  had a home in Ridgefield — a town he had earlier visited as part of his $500-million bond-selling efforts in World War II.

 Ralph Livingston Edwards was born in 1913 on a Colorado farm. When he was 13, his family moved to Oakland, Calif., where as a teenager he combined his ability as a writer with his love of radio to create skits for the local station, KROW.  While studying at the University of California at Berkeley, where he earned a degree in English, Edwards worked at Oakland’s KTAB, now KSFO, doing nearly every job from janitor to producer. After graduating in 1935, he   worked for a while at KFRC in San Francisco, but the mecca for radio in the 30s was New York  so in 1936 he hitchhiked across the country to Manhattan where, he said, “I ate ten-cent meals and slept on park benches.” He landed some part-time announcing work, but his big break came when CBS hired him as a full-time announcer (among his young cohorts was Mel Allen).

By 1939 he was doing 45 programs a week, including The Fred Allen Show, Major Bowes’s Amateur Hour, and the Lucky Strike Hit Parade — all among the most popular shows on radio at the time.

A year later Edwards sold NBC his idea for a game show, called Truth Or Consequences, in which contestants were asked a ridiculously hard or nonsensical question and if they failed to answer correctly — as most people invariably did — they had to undergo some sort of silly task or stunt in order to win the prize. “They had to do such things as bark, crawl on their bellies, push a walnut with the nose, bathe an elephant, get into a doghouse and, in one instance, sell an icebox to an Eskimo,” The New York Times reported.

The show began on NBC radio in 1940, with Mel Allen as host. A year later, a special edition of Truth Or Consequences was aired on the first day of commercial television in the United States. Back then TV was in its infancy — only 7,000 television sets were sold in 1941 (compared to 15 million 10 years later). The show continued on radio until 1957, but in 1950 also became a regular on television; for many years, an Edwards discovery, Bob Barker, hosted Truth Or Consequences. It lasted until 1988, one of the longest running game shows in TV history.

During World War II, Truth Or Consequences went on the road as part of an effort to sell war bonds. On Dec. 14, 1944, Edwards and his crew staged a show at the Ridgefield Playhouse on Prospect Street (now the site of the Prospector) during the Sixth War Loan Drive. With the show’s

help Ridgefield topped $1 million in bond sales in that drive, a record for the town (it was equivalent to about $14 million in 2018 dollars). In all during the war, Edward was credited with selling more than $500-million in war bonds — about $7 billion today! 

In 1948, Edwards started an equally popular radio show, This Is Your Life, in which guests,  both famous and unknown, were surprised and then profiled through reminiscences of family and friends. Considered a pioneer of today’s reality TV, This Is Your Life switched to television in 1952 and continued until 1984. Edwards himself hosted this show most of its run (Ronald Reagan filled in twice for him).

Edwards, who won two Emmies for This Is Your Life and one for Truth Or Consequences, also created a dozen other programs including such long-running shows as   Name That Tune and The People’s Court — the latter is still being broadcast. 

In 1958, Edwards and his wife, Barbara, bought a house on the corner of North Street and Stonecrest Road, and used it off and on until 1971 — probably mostly on visits from the West where they had a home in Hollywood. Barbara died in 1993 and Ralph in 2005 at the age of 92.

Truth Or Consequences was so popular that in 1950,  Edwards announced he would broadcast his 10th anniversary program from the first town in the United State to change its name to Truth Or Consequences. Hot Springs, N. Mex., did just that, and the community of about 6,000 people now also has a Ralph Edwards Park.  Edwards made a point of personally visiting the town at least once each year for the next 50 years.