Paul Baker: 

Multi-media Man of Words

Paul Baker was a remarkably versatile man of many media. He was best known as a radio broadcaster but was also a local TV personality as well as the voice of the Danbury Racearena, the stock-car track at the old Danbury Fairgrounds (now the mall).

His deep, rich voice was readily recognized, whether it was coming out of a radio, a TV set, or a public address system.

Born Paul V. Baldaserini in 1920 in Ridgefield, he grew up in town and graduated from Ridgefield High School in 1937 at the age of 16.

His distinctive voice was probably a factor in his entering radio, but his career began with a different kind of broadcasting. Mr. Baker was an air traffic controller in the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II, and later, in the Korean War.

While stationed at an air base in Belim, Brazil, during World War II, he met a fellow airman who’d been a well-known West Coast radio announcer, and who was working at the Armed Forces Radio Service station in Belim. (AFRS provided news and entertainment to American troops.)

Recognizing Baker’s potential on-the-air talent, the friend invited him to do shows at the AFRS station in his spare time.

After  Baker returned to civilian life, he decided he wanted to write. He approached Ridgefield Press publisher Karl Nash in 1947 and got a job as a reporter.

However, his AFRS experiences in Brazil had sparked a fascination with radio so that when an opening occurred at WLAD in Danbury, he grabbed it. 

His military experience also inspired his “new” name. When he arrived at WLAD, “the program director asked me what name I was going to use on the air — since I was going on in about five minutes,” he said in an interview. “Since I had dealt with code in the service — it was A-Able, B-Baker, etc. — I said I’d use Baker for now.” And it was Baker ever after.

He was both a newsman and an announcer, and for many years his morning show was probably the most listened to radio program in the Danbury area. 

In 1977, he and Abe Najamy took over local cable TV Channel 10, and among other things, produced the only local TV news show ever devoted to this area.

Among the people who got their start in TV during the Baker years at Channel 10 were Ridgefielder Chip Dean, now an ESPN director, and Paul’s own son, Joe, another director at ESPN.

After leaving WLAD, Baker had a weekly interview show on WREF in Ridgefield.

Baker, who had lived in Southbury for many years, served as toastmaster for many area functions, mostly charitable in nature, and was a member of many clubs and organizations. He had a 24-year association with the Southern New York Racing Association — on countless Saturdays in summer, he was the announcer at the stock car races at the Danbury Fair grounds, now the Danbury Fair Mall.

A longtime sports enthusiast, he was a founding member of the Danbury and Ridgefield Old Timers Associations. As a golfer, he carded four holes-in-one — his last at the age of 90.

But for all his vocal and athletic talents, Paul Baker never forgot his first love — writing. Late in life, he produced four books, as well as countless newspaper columns, all focusing on a local history and personalities of the past.

“I would rather write  ... than do all the broadcasting in the world,” he said in 1999.

He died in 2014 at the age of 94. 

Bart Salerno: 

Big Shop’s Savior

“He was a character beyond imagination,” said business associate Thomas Quinn after the 1988 death of Bart Salerno, an entrepreneur who started WREF, fed Olympic athletes, renovated old buildings, and enjoyed talking to anyone who struck his fancy. 

Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., in 1923, Bartholomew T. Salerno grew up in New York City. He served as a sergeant in a U.S. Marine Corps bomber squadron during World War II and won the Distinguished Fly Cross “for extraordinary achievement while participating in aerial flight, in actions against enemy Japanese forces in the Pacific Theater of Operations.”

After the war, he graduated from Springfield College and became a teacher. He moved to town in 1954 when he was teaching art at Ridgefield High School after earning a master’s degree at  Danbury Teachers College. A year later, he bought the  carriage house of opera singer Geraldine Farrar and converted it to a home off Silver Spring Road.

He operated Bart Associates, a real estate and insurance firm, which for many years operated out of a converted freezer building on Danbury Road. But he had many other interests. For instance, he spent 15 years getting licensing and antenna approval for WREF, Ridgefield’s AM radio station. In its early years under Salerno's ownership, WREF broadcast local news and programming but has since become a totally automated, computer-operated, oldies rock station with no local coverage at all.

He was a small-scale developer who also owned apartment buildings and other properties. His largest development was the subdivision of the former Firestone estate in the northwestern corner of Wilton.

Perhaps his most important contribution to Ridgefield was his renovation of the Big Shop, the early 1800s hall and factory that Hannibal Hamlin, as vice president under Abraham Lincoln, spoke in, and that had been a center of Ridgefield industry in the 1800s. The large building had stood at West Lane and Main Streets but when the “new” First Congregational Church was about to be built in 1888, the Big Shop was moved to the center of the village. By the 1970s, it had become a run-down tenement and had reached the point where the town condemned it as unsafe for human occupancy. Salerno bought it, carefully restored and remodeled it, and now the handsome Big Shop holds restaurants, shops and offices at the north end of the Bailey Avenue parking lot. 

Salerno had an eye for a winner, as demonstrated in 1977 when he sponsored Karen Kopins  in a Miss Ridgefield pageant. She went on to become Miss Connecticut, competed in Miss America, and wound up an actress who appeared in movies and TV series. 

He part-owned the company that fed the athletes at the 1980 Olympics in Lake Placid and then supplied food to the American team at Sarajevo in 1984. 

“He was happiest around peasants and poor people,” said Quinn, another partner in the food service company. Instead of hanging around formal functions in Sarajevo, Salerno could often be found playing cards with the locals. 

When he did join in the formalities, he was sometimes lost. “I can remember him sitting next to John Denver and Kirk Douglas and calling John Denver Kirk Douglas and Kirk Douglas John Denver,” Quinn said with a smile.

“He told John Denver he enjoyed him in Spartacus.”

Salerno was 64 when he died while on a visit to Florida.