Marthe Krueger: 
Dancing with Nature

The small town of Ridgefield in the 1940s was home to many writers, artists, actors, composers, and dancers  who found here not only fellowship, but the peace and beauty of the countryside. Concert dancer, choreographer and photographer Marthe Krueger of New York City felt that the “fluidity and lyrical qualities of dance” were close to many of the qualities found in nature. In 1942, to be closer to the natural world, she set up a home and studio in The Coach House on Branchville Road, a building that would later house another dancer, an actor and a world-class art collection.

Born in Mulhouse, Alsace-Lorraine, France, in 1910,  Krueger began ballet training at the age of eight  in Strasbourg,   and went on to study in Paris and London with several dance luminaries.

She appeared on stages  throughout Europe, and upon coming to America at the age of 23 in 1933, made her debut at New York City’s Town Hall.  During the Depression, Krueger not only performed, but taught at several of New York’s finest dance schools, where she became close friends with the legendary ballerina Muriel Stuart. 

She also began working with two notable composers. Classical composer Stefan Wolpe (1902-1972) wrote “Suite for Marthe Krueger,” a work for two pianos, in 1940 while  Alex North (1910-1991), a rising young composer who would become one of Hollywood’s top creators of movie scores, wrote several dance pieces for her in 1941 and 1942, including “Prelude,” “Will-O’-Wisp,” and “Trineke.”  

She and North became such good friends that she invited him to teach at the school she had just established at her Ridgefield home. (A few years later, North bought himself a house in Ridgefield, using it as a weekend retreat for many years.) 

“Ridgefield was selected for the establishment of a school to perpetuate her art because Marthe Krueger feels that in the hills of Connecticut, spiritual as well as bodily strength  may be developed through the appreciation, practice and understanding of beauty of movement,” said The Ridgefield Press in reporting her arrival in 1942.

 

The year after she moved to town, Krueger staged Alex North’s new musical for children, “The Hither and Thither of Danny Dither.” On Aug. 28, 1942 North himself played the piano as the children of the new Marthe Krueger dance school performed the musical  in a PTA benefit at the East Ridge School auditorium — now the Ridgefield Playhouse. (North went on to compose the music for many of the 20th Century’s top movies, including “Death of A Salesman,”   “The Sound and the Fury,”  “Spartacus,”  “Cleopatra,” “The Agony and the Ecstasy,” “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,  “2001: A Space Odyssey,”  “Dragonslayer,”  and “Good Morning, Vietnam.” He also wrote the pop hit, Unchained Melody, and was a mentor of the young and promising film composer, John Williams.)

During World War II, Krueger   toured with a U.S.O. unit, entertaining troops. She also worked as a professional photographer, opening her own studio in New York. Her photographic work ranged from artistic shots of dance productions to engagement announcement portraits for young ladies  — a number of them appeared in The New York Times in the 1940s.

Later she served as ballet mistress at the Silvermine Guild. She had been married in 1938 to importer Adolph Mayer, a widower twice her age, who died three years later.

In the late 1940s, she moved to Wilton where, in 1960, she opened the  Marthe Krueger School of Dance in a studio that was aimed at taking advantage of its natural setting. Former student Christine Leventhal said Krueger “surrounded her lovely glass-walled studio with the best of nature: a tree-encircled pond complete with swans Sigy and Odette (whose elegant necks and movement inspired those within); all sizes, colors and kinds of birds; mallards, wood ducks and geese; deer; muskrats; raccoons; and most thrilling of all — the great blue heron. Marthe loved her animals and birds. She was a gifted gardener as well, and bright swatches and drifts of color surrounded her property.”

“She was a pioneer of dance in Fairfield County,” Leventhal added, calling her “devoted to her students surely, but even more, devoted to the art of dance and a never-ending pursuit of excellence in her art.”

Marthe Krueger taught her last class on the day before she fell ill in 2002 and was sent to the hospital, where she died at the age of 92.  

 After Krueger left the Coach House around 1948, she leased the place to Paul Draper,  an international tap dancing star. Draper was accused of being a communist and was under attack by followers of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Disturbed at his treatment, he left the U.S. in 1951, moving to Switzerland, but eventually returned to teach and perform.

Chinese art collector Abel Bahr lived there from 1951 until his death in 1959; many works from his collection are now in major museums. A later occupant was Broadway actor and singer Don McKay, who was known for his parties featuring celebrities in the arts.

Geno Polverari: 

His Smile and His Sacrifice

On March 9, 1945, Private First Class Geno Polverari wrote to his wife, Marguerite, from Europe, saying that he was doing fine. Four days later, he was dead, the result of wounds suffered in combat in northern Italy.

He was one of three members of Ridgefield’s Italian-American community to sacrifice their lives in World War II.

Geno Joseph Polverari was born in Ridgefield in 1916 to Michael and Maria Polverari, immigrants from Italy. His mother died when he was two years old. As a teenager, to help support the family, Geno went to work for James “Jimmy Joe” Joseph at his well-known Joe’s Store at Main Street and Danbury Road. 

Aldo Biagiotti remembered Polverari as a clerk at Joe’s Store. “One day mother brought my brother Fabio (“Fibber”) and me into Joe’s Store to purchase some groceries,” Biagiotti wrote in his book, Impact: The Historical Account of the Italian Immigrants of Ridgefield, Connecticut. “Naturally, we both made mother aware that we wanted an ice cream.

“Geno Polverari, the clerk, came over and waited upon mother. My vivid recollection of Geno is his smile. He had a warm, friendly smile on his face at all times.

“Although it was during the depths of the Depression and our family could hardly afford the luxury of spending money on ice cream, mother ordered two vanilla cones.

“Geno Polverari was very generous in scooping out the vanilla ice cream that tottered on the top of each cone.”

Around this time, Polverari proposed to another Ridgefield native, Marguerite Mary Maddock, and the two were married in Katonah, N.Y., where Marguerite and her family were living. They soon had a son, John.

In 1943, Polverari was drafted into the U.S. Army and volunteered for the Ski Troops, joining the infantry’s 10th Mountain Division training at Camp Hale in Denver, Colo. By January 1945, he was in combat in Italy, the land of his roots. Two months later, he was

serving with a motor corps unit at Anzio, attacking the fleeing German troops in some of the war’s most bitter fighting.

He was wounded and died there March 13. 

Geno Polverari is buried at the American Cemetery and Memorial at Florence, Italy. He posthumously received the Purple Heart.

In 1946, his widow, Marguerite, married  Willis A. “Pop” Goodrow, who was chief of the Bedford Hills Fire Department. They had two daughters and lived in Katonah and later in Mahopac, N.Y., where son John still lives. She died in 2004 at the age of 81.

While few people in Ridgefield today remember Geno Polverari, he has not been forgotten. In 2019, members of the American World War II Orphans Network honored him as a “Fallen Father,” placing a rose on his monument at the cemetery in Florence.

Harvey J. Webster: 

Lost in the Bitterest Battle

November 1944 was a nightmarish month for Richard and Isabelle Webster of West Lane. On Nov. 8, they received news that their son, Sgt. George Webster, had been seriously wounded in France. A few days later, word came that another son, Harvey, had been blown up Sept. 15 in an amphibious tank involved in the invasion of Peleliu Island in the Pacific.

Private Harvey James Webster was only 19 years old when he died.

A native of South Salem, N.Y., Webster was born in 1925 and moved to Ridgefield with his family in 1941. He left school at 17 to join the Marine Corps.

According to one of Webster’s fellow Marines who took part in the same landing, Webster and the rest of the crew in the tank off the shore of the island were lost when a Japanese bomb scored a direct hit. 

“He wrote that he was a sad witness to the sinking of the tank,” The Ridgefield Press said in early 1945. It was then that Mr. and Mrs. Webster received news that their late son

had been awarded a Purple Heart.

Their son’s remains were never found.

The battle was one of the bloodiest of the war. The 1st Marines suffered over 6,500 casualties during one month of fighting, more than a third of their entire division. The infantry had another 3,300 casualties. The casualty rate was higher than in any amphibious operation during the Pacific War and has been called “the bitterest battle of the war for the

Marines” by the National Museum of the Marine Corps.

 “A touching bit of irony was the return of 15 letters written to Harvey from his family, which had not reached him, together with Christmas presents mailed to him,” The Press reported. “Harvey was moving too fast  to receive his mail and the last letters from him begged for mail from home.”

At about the same time, a second Purple Heart award arrived at the Webster home for their son, George, for the wounds he received on the German-French front. George was still recuperating  in late January, months after he was wounded.

Meanwhile, a third son, Charles R. Webster, was in Army training at Fort Knox, Kentucky. 

George and Charles Webster survived the war — George died in California in 1996 and Charles in Danbury in 1972.

Their mother, the former Isabelle Hawley of Redding, died in 1949. Their father, Richard, committed suicide in Danbury in 1970 at the age of 76.

Robert Blume: 

A Hero with Roots

Ridgefield was in Robert Blume’s blood. But the boy whose ancestors helped found the town had too few years to enjoy the community.

In 1708, Jonathan Rockwell joined two dozen other men from Norwalk and Milford in founding  Ridgefield, building his house on Main Street a little north of today’s  Keeler Tavern.   After the Revolution, some of Jonathan’s family joined many other New Englanders in moving to western New York state in search of more open and less rocky land to farm. 

A century and a half later, a great great great great great great grandson of Jonathan Rockwell was born in Ithaca, N.Y.  Happenstance would lead him to the town of his ancestors. Tragically, it would be his last home, for Private First Class Blume was among some 20 Ridgefielders who lost their lives in World War II.

Robert Nichols Bloom was born in 1925, a son of Adrian F. and Jeannette Nichols Blume. His mother was a direct descendant of Jonathan Rockwell; his father, a World War I Army veteran, was a college-educated landscape engineer. The family came to Ridgefield in the mid-1930s when Adrian took a job as a foreman with the huge Outpost Nurseries operation here.

Young Robert was a Boy Scout and a member of the Fellowship Group at the First Congregational Church. He graduated from Ridgefield High School in June 1943 and the very same month, joined the Army.

He was sent to Iowa State University for a specialized Army training program there — his name appears on a plaque at the Iowa State Memorial Union, honoring students who died in the war. 

Private Blume became a radio operator and was sent to Europe with the Fifth Infantry Division of General George S. Patton’s Third Army. He fought in the Battle of the Bulge  and was in Luxembourg when, on Feb. 10, 1945, he was killed in action. He was only 19 years old.

Blume was posthumously awarded the  Bronze Star with One Oak Leaf Cluster and the Purple Heart. According to his Bronze Star citation, “Private Blume, a radio operator, volunteered to go forward over exposed terrain which was under enemy artillery and mortar fire to clear an enemy machine gun emplacement which was bringing devastating fire on our troops. Despite the danger involved, Private Blume succeeded in making his way forward and silencing the weapon. On his return he was fired upon by an enemy sniper. While in search of the sniper he was killed by another sniper. His courage and devotion to duty was a great inspiration to all men of his company and reflects greatly upon himself and our armed forces.” 

PFC Robert Blume is buried in the 17-acre Luxembourg American Cemetery and Memorial alongside 5,000 other American soldiers, including his commander, General George S. Patton. 

His parents were also buried in a military cemetery — Adrian, who died in 1963, is interred along with his wife at the Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery in San Antonio, Texas. 

Capt. Everett Roberts, 

Lifetime in Defense of His Country

Ridgefield had many heroes in World War II, but among the native sons who seem to have been forgotten is Everett Roberts, a naval officer who once was adrift for more than a day in the

South Pacific after his destroyer was sunk in a major battle. 

Roberts went on to spend a long career working on the defense of his country, both in the Navy and in civilian life.

Often called Bob, Everett Earl Roberts Jr. was born in Ridgefield in 1916, son of E. Earl and Alice May Stevens Roberts. His dad was a longtime electrician and local businessman who was also Ridgefield’s dealer in the once famous Locke mowers. His sister was Marion Roberts Haight, wife of the town’s second police chief, John F. Haight Jr.

Roberts was accepted at the U.S. Naval Academy where he became known for his abilities at tennis and sailing. After graduating in 1940 as an ensign, he was assigned as gunnery officer on the USS Indianapolis, based in Pearl Harbor. Fortunately for the Indianapolis and for Ens. Roberts, the heavy cruiser was conducting Marine landing drills 800 miles away at Johnston Atoll when Pearl Harbor was attacked on Dec. 7, 1941.

While stationed in Hawaii, he met Dorothy Ida Bechert whom he married in 1942. 

After his tour on the Indianapolis,  Roberts was promoted to lieutenant commander and assigned as the executive officer on the destroyer escort USS Samuel B. Roberts — its namesake, not a relation, was Navy Coxswain Samuel Booker Roberts Jr, who posthumously received the Navy Cross for rescuing stranded Marines from Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands earlier in the war. The ship participated in the Battle of Samar, a part of the Battle of Leyte Gulf, which has been described as “The U.S. Navy’s finest hour.” The U.S. forces lost 3,500 people, and six ships while 10,000 Japanese were killed, and 27 of their ships sunk, including four aircraft carriers.

After it made repeated torpedo runs against a Japanese cruiser, the Samuel B. Roberts was sunk on Oct. 25, 1944.  

Everett Roberts made it to a life raft. A U.S. Navy historical account of the Samuel B. Roberts says  that for those aboard the raft, “The long ordeal, marked by sporadic shark attacks and lack of food and water, lasted for 18 hours. Nearly every survivor was covered head-to-toe in thick black oil. Rubbing one’s eyes only made them burn more and many, accidentally ingesting it, began retching and vomiting. One sailor removed his oil-smeared clothes in order to help him swim easier, but in doing so, exposed the lower portion of his pale white skin not covered with oil. An attentive shark swam up to the naked survivor and nudged the exposed portion. The man quickly put his clothes back on.”

Lt. Cmdr. Roberts’s raft that drifted three days in the oil slick. On the third day they were spotted by a rescue ship that was on its way back to base after giving up hope of finding more survivors. The rescuers were wary, “worried the men in the water might actually be Japanese, known to play possum before attempting to kill any U.S. sailors trying to rescue them from the sea.”

As the rescue boat approached, “the sailors on board, with guns drawn, were ready to fire. One of the rescuers on the bridge yelled out, ‘Who won the World Series?’ Several survivors shouted back, ‘The St. Louis Cardinals!’” The Cardinals had played their cross-town rival St. Louis Browns, winning the series in six games only 16 days before Samuel B. Roberts went down. 

In all, 120 men of Samuel B. Roberts’s crew of 220 survived the sinking.

Back in Ridgefield  Roberts’s wife and parents waited weeks to learn his fate. By mid-November 1944, they knew that his ship had been sunk in what news reports were calling “the Second Battle of the Philippines.” Then, The Ridgefield Press reported Nov. 30, “Mr. and Mrs. E. Earl Roberts and Mrs. Everett Roberts enjoyed a belated Thanksgiving dinner last Sunday at the Roberts home on Mountain View Avenue following receipt of a letter on Friday from Lt. Everett Roberts which stated that he was safe and well and hoped to be home on furlough sometime in December, preferably for Christmas.”

Roberts received the Legion of Merit  for “exceptional meritorious conduct in the performance of outstanding services” during and after the battle.

After the war ended,  Roberts remained in the Navy and eventually became the commanding officer of the destroyer escort USS Marsh and then commanded the destroyer USS Porterfield.

Meanwhile, he was promoted to captain and  in 1954 earned a master’s degree in bioradiology from the University of California, Berkeley. Captain Roberts was working with the Military Liaison Committee to the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission at the time of his retirement from the Navy in 1958. (The AEC eventually became part of the U.S. Department of Energy.)

After his retirement from the Navy, Capt. Roberts worked for 24 years for RCA in Moorestown, N.J. where he was involved in the development of the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS) and the U.S. Navy’s AEGIS Combat System used for guided missiles. After his retirement from RCA, he was active in various civic service organizations in the Moorestown area.

Captain Roberts died in 2007 at the age of 91 and is buried in Lewistown, Pa., next to his wife, who died in 1999.

Evelyn Wisner: 

A Hero At 7,000 Feet

War heroes always seem to be men. Not so with Evelyn Schretenthaler Wisner.

The World War II flight nurse landed in war zones, located seriously wounded Marines, loaded them on an airplane, and treated them while flying high over the Pacific Ocean. How many lives she may have saved or help save will never be known.

“Those young Marines were so glad to get on that plane — all they wanted was a drink of water,” Wisner told Kate Czaplinski of The Ridgefield Press in 2010.

Near the war’s end, she recalled, many of the wounded soldiers looked so young she wanted to hold them on her lap like children. “They were beat-up kids,” she said. 

Evelyn Schretenthaler was born in 1920 and grew in a small North Dakota town.  She graduated from nursing school and, as a 22-year-old RN, decided to help the war effort by becoming

a Navy nurse. She underwent training at Great Lakes Naval Station where she was the only member of 200 in her class who met the tough requirements for becoming a flight nurse, including being in top physical condition and having the ability to swim.

Lt. Schretenthaler then wound up being one of only a dozen nurses, based in Guam, who flew into combat zones in the Pacific to rescue the seriously wounded.

Flights would take off at midnight and land at dawn on islands such as Iwo Jima. There she spent only enough time on the ground needed to screen the patients who required the most urgent care and get them loaded onto the aircraft.

It was dangerous work. “There was shelling,” she told James Brady for his book, Why Marines Fight. “We could see it and hear it. I was young and frightened.”

She flew on C-47 cargo planes that were converted into flying hospitals — except that there were no doctors on board. “We were on our own over all that water,”  Wisner said. “Me, the pilots and a medical corpsman,” treating 18 to 20 soldiers, mostly Marines from the fighting on Iwo Jima and later, Okinawa. The patients were headed for treatment at hospitals in Guam, Hawaii or in the States.

Treating wounded patients at 7,000 feet had special hazards. The cabins were not pressurized and at high altitudes bleeding was exacerbated. On her very first flight, “I almost lost a patient because, at 7,000 feet, he started to bleed, and I got the pilot to drop down to 3,000, even though it was bumpy.” The soldier survived.

The flights also carried food and supplies to combat zones. “We had our hands full,” she said.

In her interview with Czaplinski, Wisner recalled being asked to take a soldier home on the plane, even though he seemed uninjured.

“I looked at him and said, ‘Well, what’s wrong?’ I was told, ‘Nothing, he’s 16 — take him home.’ 

“A lot of young men lied then [about their age] but it was rare for them to make it that far,” she said. “Usually they got caught in boot camp.”

Wisner missed the announcement that the war was over. “When the war ended, I didn't know — I was up in the air,” she said with a smile.

Back in the U.S. she continued to treat soldiers including former prisoners of war. She also met

her future husband, a Navy dentist named Edwin J. Wisner. He died in 1985.

After her discharge in 1946, Wisner continued her nursing career, working for years as a  neonatal special care nurse at a Michigan hospital. In 1990, she moved to Ridgefield to be closer to her daughter.

In 2012, she was named a “Hero of Western Connecticut” by the American Red Cross.

She died in 2018 at the age of 98. She was survived by three brothers who all fought in World War II and all came home. 

 Although she and her siblings all survived the conflict, she did not look back fondly on her war experiences and disagreed with those who might call World War II a “good war.”  

“Wars are pretty nasty stuff,” she said. “I always said if a woman ran the country, there wouldn’t be as many wars because women have children and women have sons.”

But Wisner was also not without a sense of humor about the experience. “No one goes through a war without feeling it somehow,” the 89-year-old said. “I tell my daughter that I wouldn’t look so old if I hadn’t been in a war.”

Frank Gibney:

Our Man In Asia

If Frank Gibney were still alive, he would hardly be surprised by the economic battles being waged today between the United States and China. He warned of them long ago.

Back in 1992, his book, “The Pacific Century,” predicted the rising economic power of  eastern Asian nations in the then-coming century. It was a companion to a 10-part PBS series, produced by his son, documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney. Few saw the series, however, because PBS scheduled it at one of the least-watched time slots of the week: 6 p.m. on Saturdays. Nonetheless, it won an Emmy for documentaries that year.

In the book Frank Gibney predicted that in the 21st Century, Pacific Rim nations like China, Japan, and Korea would become economic powerhouses, much more important to the United States than Europe. And how the U.S. handled relations with those nations would be critical.

“Gibney points out that, by the mid-1990s, our trade with the Pacific nations will be more than double our trade with Europe,” said Ray Cushing in a review of the book. “And yet, lack of understanding, even outright ignorance of these countries, is still all too prevalent in the United States.”

The book was written by a man who spent much of his boyhood in Ridgefield, the son of the couple who owned and operated the Outpost Inn on Danbury Road, now the site of Fox Hill condominiums.

And Gibney knew what he was talking about: He had spent his early career interrogating Japanese prisoners of war, devoted much of his later life covering Asia as a journalist living in Tokyo, and became a founder of the Pacific Basin Institute.

Frank Bray Gibney was born in 1924 in Scranton, Pa., and came to Ridgefield as an 11-year-

old when his parents, Joseph and Edna Gibney, took over the Outpost Inn. A former singer, his dad was a veteran of Longchamps and other prestigious restaurant operations, and turned Outpost into dining destination for many Ridgefielders as well as celebrities, including Lily Pons, Lawrence Tibbett, Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt, Clare Boothe Luce, and Eleanor Roosevelt (who, as first lady, drove herself there for lunch).

A bright boy, Frank Gibney commuted to Fordham Prep in the Bronx where he graduated as valedictorian of his class in 1941. He won a scholarship to Yale, but the war forced him to leave for service in the military. He was sent to the Navy’s elite Japanese Language School at the University of Colorado and became a naval intelligence officer. 

Gibney was assigned to a post in Hawaii where he interviewed many Japanese prisoners of war.  His dad, who had also entered the Navy after the war broke out, was working as a supply officer at the time. “When I became an intelligence officer,” Frank said in a 1992 interview, “I was assigned to interrogate Japanese POWs at a secret location in Hawaii. And who was in charge of supplying that secret location? My father.”

Later he was stationed in Japan during the postwar occupation. There he maintained contact with some of the prisoners he had once interviewed “through reunions at a sushi restaurant,” he said. “I was a small human bridge between Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s conquering army and a puzzled but receptive Japanese public.”

In 1947 Gibney came home and was looking for a job. While he was staying with his parents, “there was a gentleman who used to spend a lot of time at the Outpost Inn, who heard me talking about my situation,” Gibney recalled. The gentleman was Westbrook Pegler, a Pulitzer Prize-

winning syndicated columnist, who lived in Ridgefield. Pegler was impressed with the young man and called the Associated Press, which immediately hired him. Soon afterward he joined Time magazine as a correspondent  in both Europe and Asia. By 1949, he was Time-Life bureau chief in Tokyo.

In June 1950, while covering the Korean War, he was injured when an explosion wrecked the Han River Bridge, south of Seoul, Korea, as he was crossing it with two other journalists. “The three were fleeing from Seoul ahead of advancing Communist forces from the north,” the Associated Press reported. “The bridge was blown by the southern forces to slow the Red advance.” He was flown to Japan for treatment for relatively minor injuries.

Gibney later became a senior editor at Newsweek and a staff writer for Life Magazine. 

He also wrote a dozen books including “The Khrushchev Pattern,” “Korea’s Quiet Revolution,” and in 1960, “The Operators,” which was not about international politics, but about corporate criminals. “They’re Living It Up At Our Expense,” said the headline in The New York Times Book Review, adding in a smaller headline, “White-Collar Chiselers Thrive in the U.S. As Never Before, a Reporter’s Study Finds.”  It sounds like the 21st Century.

In 1979, he co-founded the Pacific Basin Institute in California “to further understanding, on both sides of the Pacific, of the tremendous importance of their relationship and their shared responsibilities,” the institute says. The organization moved to Pomona College in 1997. 

Frank Gibney died in 2006 at the age of 81. Among his survivors besides Alex were six other children, including  James Gibney, who became deputy op-ed page editor at The New York Times, features editor at The Atlantic Monthly, and is now an editorial writer at Bloomberg Opinion.

One of James Gibney’s toughest projects was a six-year stint overseeing the publication of the Encyclopaedia Britannica in Chinese, Japanese and Korean editions — “a task,” said  Times reporter Margarlit Fox, “that required him to be a scholar, editor and diplomat in equal measure.”

“One of Mr. Gibney’s most daunting tasks was to publish a Chinese edition, released in 1986,”  Fox said. “A six-year undertaking, it ran to 10 volumes and contained newly commissioned articles by Chinese scholars that dealt, however gingerly, with sensitive subjects like Stalin, the Korean War and Taiwan.”

War Horses

This odd scene recalls the era of World War II when Ridgefielders, trying to do their part in the war effort, went out of their way to collect scrap — what we today would call “recycling.” 

The horse-drawn wagon is loaded with metal contributions in what was later called “Ridgefield’s greatest wartime scrap drive.” We believe the snapshot was taken Oct. 17, 1942, when hundreds of local volunteers collected more than 133 tons of metal in a huge, one-day scrap drive. (That total, by the way, equalled 166 pounds per resident of Ridgefield at that time.)

The use of the horse-drawn transportation was probably designed both to entertain and to emphasize the need to conserve gasoline.

Scrap drives — wartime versions of today’s “recycling” — were important sources of metal and other materials to be melted and reformed into ships, tanks, guns, ammunition, and other pieces of weaponry. 

During the last three years of World War II, Ridgefielders collected 539,262 pounds of iron and steel — nearly 270 tons. They also donated 12,644 pounds of waste fats from kitchens; 48,925 pounds of tin (mostly cans); 4,000 pounds of rags; and 292,975 pounds of paper.

According to a Ridgefield Press account, “great piles of scrap metal began to appear in George G. Scott’s lot at the rear of the town hall (about where Colby’s is today). People put out piles of metal in front of their homes and it was picked up and transported to the main collection points by Irv Conklin’s horses, Ray Keeler’s trucks and a Dodge truck that belonged on the Swords estate on West Lane.  (In 1975, 50 years after the war, Ralph Deli-Bovi, then owner of the former Swords estate, still had that truck.)

As noted in an earlier posting on Old Ridgefield, the town’s scrap metal-collecting efforts gained national attention when the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Westbrook Pegler, who lived on Old Stagecoach Road, was photographed in Life magazine, removing his car’s bumper in front of town hall to contribute to the war effort. 

A bumper is nice, but nothing compared to Mrs. B. Ogden Chisholm’s donation: She gave her entire 1933 Cadillac roadster.  The car was shown in The Press (and on Old Ridgefield) being dismantled and turned into “scrap.”

Charles Coles, He Loved The Bank

Charlie Coles had many interests, but his two favorites were banking and local history. A man who rose from teller to  president of the Ridgefield Savings Bank (now the Fairfield County Bank), he had a love of and faith in banking that was demonstrated in many ways, but few quite as intensely as when he chewed out a Ridgefield Press editor for a half hour after the newspaper ran a humorous quotation over the front page flag, saying: “A penny saved is a penny getting smaller.”

He was fascinated by Ridgefield history and memorabilia, collecting and studying items ranging from candlesticks made here in the 1800s to hundreds of antique Ridgefield postcards. He was also a collector of and expert on antique clocks, many of which he had exhibited at the bank's several offices. 

Though many people thought of him as a native, Charles H. Coles Jr. was born in Oakville, Toronto, Ontario, in 1922. His parents, Charles Sr. and Elizabeth Evans Coles, were natives of England who immigrated to Canada and in 1925, moved to the United States. By 1928, they were in Ridgefield, where Charles Sr. became a gardener on the Maynard estate on High Ridge. Charles Jr. attended Ridgefield schools and graduated from Ridgefield High School in 1941. 

During his high school years, he was active in athletics, especially baseball, and earned the nickname of “Slugger Coles” because of his hitting abilities. He was a member of an RHS team that nearly won the state championship for little Ridgefield in 1940. 

Coles was a student at Danbury State Teachers College in 1943 when he joined the U.S. Army and was assigned to the 193rd tank battalion. Sent to New Hebrides in the Pacific, he took part in the invasion of Okinawa in April 1945. He was a tank machine gunner and driver.

On April 19, his unit lost 22 of its 30 tanks in the assault on Kakazu Ridge, the greatest tank loss of the campaign. Only an hour after Private Coles was transferred from a tank that morning, its entire five-member crew was killed. 

After the war Sgt. Coles served in the Army Reserves and was on active reserve status during the Korean War. 

Back home in 1946, he joined the Ridgefield Savings Bank as a teller and bookkeeper. He became assistant treasurer in 1956, an incorporator in 1958, a director in 1970, and president in 1971. He served as president, chairman of the board, and chief operating officer at various times through the 1970s until his retirement in 1987. He remained a director until 1993. 

Ridgefield Savings Bank became “the fastest-growing savings bank in the state” in the 1980s, Coles reported at the 1984 annual meeting. Under his leadership, the bank acquired land at the corner of Danbury and Farmingville Roads to build its new headquarters, now the main office of Fairfield County Bank. 

Over the years he completed the Graduate School of Banking at Rutgers University, and graduating from the American Institute of Banking (of which he was later a board member) and from various schools sponsored by the national Association of Mutual Savings Banks. He served as

president of the Fairfield County Bankers Association, was on the Conference of State Bank Supervisors in 1985, and had been a member of the Legislative Committee of the Savings Bank Association of Connecticut. 

“His whole life was the bank,” said Paul S. McNamara, longtime chairman of the Fairfield County Bank board of directors. “He loved the bank — he loved going to work. 

“Charlie really believed very strongly in the value of the customer,”  Mr. McNamara added. “His focus was always on the customer.” 

Coles had a way with not only money, but also words.  For a while in the 1950s, he was the part-time sports editor for The Ridgefield Press. 

In 1971, on the occasion of the bank’s 100th anniversary,  Coles teamed up with Karl Nash, editor and publisher of The Press, on a history of the Ridgefield Savings Bank.  Coles did the bulk of the research for the publication, which appeared as a special supplement to The Press and chronicled the history of the bank, its leaders, and the community they served. The 36-page section was based on many hours of interviews with longtime residents and from research into old documents, and included dozens of old photos of the town, many from  Coles’s postcard collection. 

Twenty years later,  Coles was one of the lead writers on another history section in The Press, describing the town’s participation in World War II. He spent months researching the 49 members of the Ridgefield High School Class of 1941 and their contributions to the war effort. His long article was entitled “Class of ’41: First to Go.” (Two classmates, George Vetter and Charles Cogswell, never returned.) 

Coles had a great interest in antiques and especially antique clocks, a subject on which he became known as a local expert. He was especially interested in Ridgefield antiques and ephemera and had dealers all over the country helping him locate Ridgefield-related items. In 1983, for the town's 275th anniversary celebration, he put together a large display of old postcards, which he exhibited at the bank’s Main Street office. 

He loved athletics. In the late 1940s and 1950s, Coles played softball in leagues in Westchester and Ridgefield. In his first game in the newly formed Townies Softball League in Ridgefield in 1953, he hit a home run and pitched Hyde’s Liquors to a 10-6 win over Martin’s Jewelry Store. 

He also became active in youth sports. He was one of the organizers of Ridgefield Little League, and later served as its president. He managed Babe Ruth League baseball teams, had been a coach in the Red Raider football league, and managed boys teams in the Townies Basketball League. 

In 1999, the Ridgefield Old Timers honored him with its Civic Award, citing his “dedication and hard work  in the various youth programs... Charlie spent many hours helping young athletes improve their skills.”

Coles was also fond of golf and invariably had a set of clubs in his car trunk, along with some of his latest antiques acquisitions. 

He was active in Boy Scouts, serving as committee chairman of Troop 47. He had been a member of the Rotary Club for many years, an incorporator of the Ridgefield Boys’ Club, a treasurer of the Community Center, and treasurer for the local Red Cross. In 1967, he was given the Ridgefield Jaycees Distinguished Service Award. 

When he retired after 42 years with the bank, he received testimonials for his service to  community from many leaders, including President Ronald Reagan.

Coles died in 2003 at the age of 80.

“Something about Charlie that a lot of people are not aware of,”  Paul McNamara said after Coles had died. “He was very helpful to people in town in a very quiet way. If someone came to Charlie with a financial problem, he found a way to solve it. And he did that over and over again.”

George Vetter: 

Betrayed Navigator

George Vetter survived Japanese anti-aircraft fire, ditching with his bomber in the South Pacific and hiding in an island jungle. But he could not survive the treachery of an island native, and lost his life less than three months before World War II ended. 

George Otto Vetter Jr. was born in 1923 in New York City. His parents moved to Picketts Ridge Road just across the Ridgefield line in Redding in 1932. George Vetter Sr., a World War I Navy veteran, was the longtime meat manager for the A&P on Main Street in Ridgefield. Because Redding had no high school and the Vetters were so close to Ridgefield (their mailing address was actually “Ridgefield”), George Jr. went to Ridgefield High School, graduating in 1941.

He joined the Army Air Corps in 1943 and became a navigator in the Pacific Theatre, flying B-24s. 

On May 9, 1945, his bomber, nicknamed the “Woody Woodpecker” and bearing nose art of the Warner Brothers cartoon character, took off from Pitu Airfield in what’s now eastern Indonesia to attack Japanese ships near the island of Borneo. The B-24 found its targets in the Makassar Strait.

However, while the crew was dropping bombs, the four-engine plane was hit with anti-aircraft fire. Its No. 4 engine lost its oil and fuel pressure and had to be feathered. No. 1 engine was smoking, but still working. Second Lt. Lee R. Dukes, the pilot, managed to keep the aircraft flying at 10,000 feet as crew members jettisoned the remaining bombs, plus every piece of equipment they could get their hands on to lighten the load.

However, engine No. 1 shut down, and over the Gulf of Tomini, engine No. 2 began to smoke. Dukes gave the order to abandon the aircraft and all 11 men bailed out at 9,000 feet near the Celebes. All made it safely to either Togian Island or Batoedaka Island.

The next day, the Army began searching for the downed airmen, using an OA-10A Catalina, a large amphibious aircraft piloted by Capt. Lloyd Humphreys. 

According to a contemporary military account, “Spotting two parachute flares, the Catalina landed and three of the crew went ashore, rescuing one of the crew and informing natives to search for the other crew members. Taking off again in the afternoon, Humphreys spotted a signal mirror and dropped a message directing the survivors to a pickup point on the west coast. Returning on May 11, 1945, the same Catalina rescued five more of the crew.”

The remaining five men had gathered together on a nearby island where they were rescued by natives, who brought them to their village. However, one of the natives apparently told the Japanese about the airmen. The Japanese attacked the village, killing four Americans — including Flight Officer Vetter — and wounding and capturing the fifth.

Friendly natives buried the dead Americans in a mass grave. 

Back home, Vetter’s parents had no idea what had happened to their son, who was listed as missing in action. They would not give up hope, however, and tried every way they could to find information about their son’s fate. They finally contacted a Catholic missionary in the Celebes, who interviewed natives and uncovered the details.

Flight Officer Vetter’s remains were eventually found, identified and returned to the United States. He was buried in 1949 in the family plot in a Lutheran cemetery in Queens, N.Y., where his parents are also buried.

Paul Ullman: 

Artist and Patriot

A Ridgefield-based artist-turned-underground fighter died in the service of both his native and adopted countries.  

Born in Paris in 1906, Paul Ullman was the son of French artist Eugene-Paul Ullman and American writer Alice Woods. He first came to America as a child in 1914 when war in Europe broke out. While he became a U.S. citizen, he returned to France after the war for his college studies and decided to establish a studio in Paris, painting there from 1928 until 1939. 

“He was one of the outstanding young painters of France, belonging to an important group of exhibitors in Paris,” The Ridgefield Press said in 1944. Several books about him and his work have been published, and he has been exhibited at major museums in both the United States and Europe.

After Paris fell, Ullman served in the American Field Service as an ambulance driver. But he, his wife, Babette, and son Jacques were still based in France, and the dangers to Ullman, a Jew, were increasing. 

The Ullmans decided to move to the United States and eventually came to Ridgefield to live with his uncle, George Ullman, who, in 1942, bought the large Main Street house (114)  just south of

the Keeler Tavern and opposite the fountain. George was the head of General Printing Ink Corporation in New York City, which, in 1945, became Sun Chemical, today the world’s largest producer of printing inks.

A nephew of his father was involved in helping British Intelligence track the activities of German sympathizers and suspected agents in this country, and encouraged  Ullman to join the U.S. Army’s Office of Strategic Services (OSS) soon after it formed in 1942. 

Ullman jumped at the opportunity. During his more than a year of training, he was able to occasionally visit his wife and son in Ridgefield.

Because he was fluent in both French and English, the OSS loaned Paul to the Special Operations Executive (SOE), a highly secret British espionage unit. There he underwent extensive training as an underground agent who would serve in France.

Meanwhile, in Ridgefield, his wife Babette became involved in efforts to help her native country. She packed hundreds of boxes of food and clothing for war relief efforts in France and hosted French sailors and other French visitors at the Ullman home. 

In the summer of 1944,  she and a family friend, Michael Wills, organized a Quatorze Juillet — Bastille Day — celebration to publicize and support the French war relief effort, reports Constance Crawford, who wrote the biography, “Babette.” They got permission to close off Main Street in the center of town, set out tables with checkered cloths in front of the stores to simulate

Parisian cafes, and had various celebrities perform — among them was the noted harpsichordist Wanda Landowska. There was dancing in the streets, The Press reported.

While the celebrating was going on, Babette was unaware that her husband had been killed by the Nazis.

In April of 1944 Paul Ullman was parachuted into France near Dijon on a mission to blow up a railroad bridge near Montbeliard.  He was taken to a supposedly safe house belonging to a man named Jean-Pierre Barbier in the village of Valentigney. 

On his second night there, the house was surrounded and raided by the Germans.

“Waking, Ullman pulled an overcoat and trousers on over his pajamas and while Madame Barbier was being questioned by the Germans, he jumped from a window,” reports British military historian Paul McCue. “As he made a run for it down the street, however, he was spotted and fired upon, a burst of automatic gunfire from the enemy hitting him from behind in the head. 

“Gravely wounded, he was taken to the German military hospital where two bullet wounds to his head were treated and dressed, but Ullman did not recover and died shortly after admission. 

“The Germans — reported to be the Gestapo from Belfort — were said to have been looking for the Barbiers' son (the family was very active in the Resistance, but the son was not then at home), rather than an Allied agent. If so, it was remarkably bad fortune that Ullman was spending only his second night in the field in the suspect house.”

The Germans never knew who Ullman was and his body, labeled “unknown,” was quickly released for burial in a local cemetery.  “A positive identification of Ullman was made post-liberation by the American Graves Registration Service from the morgue’s records and photographs and the body was subsequently re-interred in the American Military Cemetery at Epinal,” McCue said.

Ullman was 38 years old when he was killed. He was posthumously awarded the Bronze Star by the U.S. Army, and the Croix de guerre and Legion of Honor by the French government.  At the OSS Memorial Wall at Central Intelligence Agency headquarters in McLean, Va., he is included in the Book of Honor, which lists OSS operatives killed in action.

He died “fighting for the peace of the world and for the love of two countries,” The Press said at his death. 

Because of the secrecy surrounding his mission and the agency he worked for, Babette did not learn of her husband’s death until November, seven months later. Devastated, she attempted suicide by drinking a belladonna mixture, which severely sickened but did not kill her. 

She eventually married Michael Wills and moved to California. The Wills’s home in Portola Valley was called “Willy Nilly” and became a gathering place for artists, intellectuals and activists, including Nobel laureate Linus Pauling, United Farm Workers leader Cesar Chavez, filmmaker Felix Greene, and author Wallace Stegner.

Babette Ullman Wills died in 2009 at the age of 97. 

While she and Michael Wills were happily married until he died in 1994, she told   biographer Crawford that it took her 20 years to get over the loss of Paul Ullman. 

Dr. James Sheehan: 

The First Pediatrician

The day has long gone when doctors made house calls. One of the last of Ridgefield’s “old-fashioned physicians” was Dr. James Sheehan, Ridgefield’s first pediatrician, who ministered to the health needs of countless young Ridgefielders over a 43-year career.

James Ennis Sheehan was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., in 1922, one of 14 children — his father was a physician and a brother, Dr. George Sheehan, was a marathoner who wrote eight books on running and fitness. He grew up in Brooklyn, graduated from Manhattan College and joined the U.S. Navy, which sent him to medical school. He served as a physician in the Navy at the end of World War II and during the Korean War. 

After completing service and interning in New York, Dr. Sheehan and his wife, artist Patricia Sheehan, came to Ridgefield in 1955, drawn by the recommendation of fellow naval officer, Dr. Theodore Safford, who had come here in 1951. There were only four doctors in town then; now there are dozens. 

He set up his practice in his home on Main Street,  just north of the Ridgefield Library, where the Sheehans also raised 11 children. (In 1978, he sold the homestead to the library which tore it down to make way for its 1980 expansion; the footprint of the house is now under the parking lot, lawn and the north end of the new library.)

When he came to town, Dr. Sheehan was Ridgefield’s first and only pediatrician. But Ridgefield’s population was growing quickly, and with it the number of children. In 1965, Dr. Sheehan took on Dr. Christine Guigui as a partner to help handle the increasing need for pediatric care. 

“He was very happy when I came,” Dr. Guigui recalled later. “He was overworked.  At one point he had practically all of Ridgefield. There were a few general practitioners who saw children, but he practically had them all.” 

Before she arrived, Dr. Guigui said, “he must have seen 40 patients a day.”

At that time, Dr. Sheehan was charging $7 for an office visit and $12 for a house call. “He didn’t care about money.” Dr Guigui said. “One of his most famous sayings was ‘as long as I have a roof over my head.’ ”

While he may have been overworked and underpaid, he never neglected his patients. Far from it. Attorney Rex Gustafson remembers that, as a child of six or seven, he was hospitalized with pneumonia in the days before hospitals had TVs in the rooms. “I was staring at the four walls,” he said — until Dr. Sheehan showed up with his own family’s portable TV set for him to watch.

Dr. Sheehan was affiliated with both Danbury and Norwalk Hospitals, and at the latter, was a founder of the Pediatric Unit and served as director of pediatrics. For several decades, he was also Ridgefield’s school physician.

He retired in 1996. For his last years of practicing, he was a partner in Ridgefield Pediatric Associates. 

Over his four decades practicing medicine, “the biggest change is that doctors don’t set up on their own anymore,” he said in the 1996 interview. “Everyone goes into a group.” 

A physician could no longer afford to start out solo, seeing a handful of patients a day, because of the costs of maintaining a modern office, he said. “It’s a loss to patients in that they don’t always see the same doctor. On the other hand, there’s always a doctor for a patient to see.”

He also observed that 40 years before, “doctors were always on call — not like policemen or firemen, who are on duty in shifts. We had one shift that lasted forever.” 

“Doctors refuse to do that any more. Now there are more doctors in a group so nights and weekends can be covered.”

He died in 2003 at the age of 80.