The Colts of High Ridge

This handsome family portrait shows Harris Dunscombe Colt Jr. and his wife, Teresa Strickland Colt, with their son Harris George Strickland Colt, at their High Ridge home around 1937. Little Harris became  a memorable character on the New York City bookselling scene, the subject of a biography flatteringly reviewed by The New York Times.

H. Dunscomb Colt was an internationally known archaeologist who specialized in Middle Eastern deserts. Also an expert on Rudyard Kipling and a noted collector of old engraved views of New York City, he is profiled in a Who Was Who biography posted here (search “Dunscomb” to find it).

The Colts lived at 15 High Ridge, the Peter Parley House. This picture was taken by the then well-known Kaiden-Kazanjian Studios from New York.  

Teresa Colt died in 1955 and two years later Dunscomb married Armida Maria-Theresa Bologna Walsh, a native of Trieste. After his death she donated thousands of items in her husband’s archaeological, engraving and Kipling collections to museums and libraries in the U.S. and Europe. Many ancient pieces were given to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Armida died in Washington, D.C., in 2011 at the age of 99.

Little Harris, born in 1935, went on to graduate from Princeton and become a financial analyst on Wall Street with J.P. Morgan, Dean Witter and Auerbach Pollok & Richardson.  He lost his Wall Street job in 1975 and decided that was the chance to follow his dream. An avid student of history who read many books about Napoleon in French, he opened The Military Bookman, a New York City store specializing in military books and items related to the military.

His wife, Margaretta, “joined him in this endeavor, even though it meant wrangling with a predominately male customer base, including ‘Soldier of Fortune’ types and even some with ‘SS tendencies,’” wrote the New York Times’s Dwight Garner, reviewing her book, “Martial Bliss, The Story of the Military Bookman,” in 2015.

A “pleasure of Ms. Colt’s book is feasting on details about the store’s offbeat band of customers: the regulars, the cranks, the autodidacts, the dandies, the lurkers, the charmers, the cheats, the mouth-breathing Soldier of Fortune types,”   Garner said.

“Historians and journalists were devoted to the store, and leaned on it for their research. ... George C. Scott was a patron of the store. So were Paul Newman, Robin Williams, Bette Midler, and James Gandolfini. Richard Nixon’s office rang for books. The talent agent Michael Ovitz dropped in to buy a pile of gifts for Tom Clancy. The store became a hangout, a bookish ‘Cheers.’ ”

Garner was disappointed that the book did not have more about Harris Colt or the author herself. “We don’t learn a great deal about her or her husband’s lives before they wed in middle age,” he wrote. “She was tall and willowy; he was short and alert. In photographs, they put you in mind of Julia Child and her husband, Paul. What information there is about Mr. Colt arrives only haphazardly. He coxed crew at Princeton, for example, and collected Napoleonic sabers. Nor do we learn from this book the sad news that this man, who cuts such a warm and witty figure here, died in 2004.”

The Military Bookman closed in 2003, although today there is a store of the same name in Manhattan, operated by Chartwell Booksellers.

Joseph Jay Deiss: 

Knight of Italian Solidarity

When Jay Deiss lived in Ridgefield in the 1940s, he was itching to write his first book.  After years of working in Washington and New York, at first for the government, and later for Big Pharma, he sat down and turned out a novel that sold well enough to let him buy an “oysterman’s cottage” on Cape Cod, to which he eventually moved.

Its success also helped enable him to quit writing PR and instead delve into subjects he cared about, especially Italian history.

Joseph Jay Deiss was born in 1912 on a ranch in Idaho, but grew up in Texas. He earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the University of Texas, but it was the Depression and he spent his early life, as he described it, “as a pots-and-pans salesman, truck farmer, seaman and gravel-shoveler on a road gang.”

He started out his writing career as a reporter in Texas, wound up in Washington working for a New Deal farm agency, and then became a public relations writer for pharmaceutical companies, especially Pfizer, in New York City. One afternoon in the 1940s, according to his own third person account, “he walked out, headed for the country, and settled down to write the novel which came to be ‘A Washington Story.’”

The “country” was New Street in Ridgefield, where he lived with his wife and two children. 

Set during the period of the anti-communist “witch hunts” of the late 1940s, “A Washington Story” centers around Faith Vance, who had worked for the government for eight  years in a job she liked, but she was unhappily married to Thatcher Vance. Suddenly and without any cause she is

subpoenaed by the House Investigating Committee, which has been told she may be a subversive and which, because she cannot find her birth certificate, questions her citizenship. Her husband walks out, taking their young child, she is hauled off to Ellis Island for deportation, and she is left with no friends or support — except for a young attorney named Dave Chandler, who tries to come to her rescue. “There’s a high pulse beat here, and more than a little fictional glamour, but there’s also a definite basis in fact,” said Kirkus Reviews.

The novel’s dust jacket described it as “a story so strange that its counterpart can be found only in the newspaper headlines of today.”

Years later, The New York Times reported that “A Washington Story” was on the Moscow City Library’s list of 19 books described as “the most important literary products of the U.S.A. published after the Second World War.” The list included novels by Ray Bradbury, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Langston Hughes, Sinclair Lewis, William Saroyan, and John Steinbeck. 

Deiss continued to write fiction. In 1957, “The Blue Chips” was published by Simon and Schuster. It delved into the ethical drug business and, said Kirkus, was “the first to treat the world behind the wonder drug prescription ... it traces the discovery, exploitation and down-grading of multicilin, a broad-range antibiotic.”

The same year, Deiss moved to Positano, Italy, became vice director of the American Academy in Rome, and began studying and visiting the nearby ancient cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii. This led to an interest in many aspects of Italian history.

In 1963, he produced “The Great Infidel,” a biographical novel about Frederic the Second

(1194-1250), a Holy Roman emperor and king of Sicily. While it is a work of fiction, largely because Deiss imagined the dialogue for the characters, Orville Prescott wrote in The New York Times that the book’s “fidelity to history is sufficiently great so that it can be read as an able account of Frederic and the spectacular drama of his life.”

He turned to non-fiction, with books like “Herculaneum: Italy’s Buried Treasure” (1966), “Captains of Fortune, Profiles of Six Italian Condottieri” (medieval soldiers of fortune) (1966), “The Roman Years of Margaret Fuller” (1969), and “The Town of Hercules, A Buried Treasure Trove” (1995).

His writings and lectures on Italian history so impressed the Italian government that in 1971 it knighted him in the Ordine della Stella Solidarita Italiana (Order of the Star of Italian Solidarity), which honors expatriates or foreigners who made an outstanding contribution to the reconstruction of Italy after World War II.

Deiss spent his later years living in Wellfleet on Cape Cod and in Florida where he taught in the Classics Department at the University of Florida and where he died in 1999 at the age of 84.

Today, his love of Italy is reflected in the Joseph Jay Deiss Memorial Scholarship  for Summer Study in Italy, awarded annually by the University of Florida.

H. Dunscombe Colt: 

Archaeologist of the Desert

The historic Peter Parley house on High Ridge was home to not only its namesake author and his minister father, but another man who shared with them an interest in history, literature and religion.

H. Dunscombe Colt was an internationally known archaeologist and an expert on Rudyard Kipling. Together with his father he lived in the 1920s, 30s and 40s where S.G. Goodrich (Peter Parley), son of the third minister of the First Congregational Church, grew up. 

Harris Dunscombe Colt II was born in 1901 in New York City, son of Harris Dunscomb and Elizabeth Bowne Colt. (Unlike his father, he ended his middle name with an E.) 

His dad, a Yale-educated lawyer, and his mother,  great-granddaughter of a New York City mayor, came here in the late 1910s and for a while, owned the Bluebird Apartments, located across the street from the West Lane Inn (though they never lived there).

The Peter Parley property was much bigger when they bought it and around 1920, the Colts sold a triangular piece at High Ridge and Shadow Lane to the Hyde sisters from New Jersey, who then built the English-style cottages and cobblestone courtyard, surrounded by high stone walls, that are a landmark at the south end of High Ridge today.

The Colts sent their son to England for his schooling. He studied at St. Paul’s and Oxford University, which he did not complete but at which he became interested in archaeology, the focus of his future career. 

His first dig was in 1922, excavating an ancient Roman site in Kent, England, with a team from London’s Society of Antiquaries. He then worked in Egypt under the noted British Egyptologist, W. M. Flinders Petrie, and took part in excavations on Malta. 

 From 1929 through 1935, he directed digs at Auja el Hafir and other locations in the Negev desert. According to a three-volume report on his archaeological excavations in Palestine published years later by Princeton University Press, the expedition “uncovered the remains of an ancient village in the Negeb. Among the ruins was found a hoard of Greek papyrus documents  dating from A.D. 500 to A.D. 700, which are a welcome addition to the mere handful of such documents found outside of Egypt and are the first to come out of Palestine.”

The excavation found that “the little Palestinian town went in heavily for religious literature but, what is more surprising, that at least some of the people in this Greek-speaking community had copies of Virgil and glossaries to help them read him. Among the finds is a Latin-Greek glossary of the Aeneid, to be dated in the 6th Century, which is by far more extensive than any similar Latin-Greek glossary thus far published.”

Also found were fragments of the Gospel of John. “These show that even at a late date in a comparatively obscure place, an astonishingly pure text of the New Testament was in common use.”

Colt ended his field work around 1940,  “I think a contributory factor may have been a realization that his personality prevented him from having some of the toughness which directing excavations needs,” wrote Crystal-Marie Bennett, a pioneering woman archaeologist and friend of Colt. Bennett said Colt later admitted to her “that the rigours of field archaeology were not for him and that he had preferred to use his talents in other ways to help archaeology.”

To that end he established the Colt Archaeological Institute, which financed archaeological digs but especially focused on publication of archaeological findings.  “To be published by Colt was a sought after honour among archaeologists,” Bennett wrote in a 1974 tribute to her friend.

Colt also inherited a love of collecting from his father, who had assembled an extensive series of engraved, historical views of New York City. For years he worked on updating an encyclopedia of American engravers. The work was done in cooperation with the American Antiquarian Society, of which he was a longtime member.

For much of his life, Colt would spend the warmer half of the year in London and the colder six months in the United States. Here he would usually focus on researching engravers while in London, it would be archaeology and Kipling. Besides Ridgefield, he had homes in New York and Washington.

“Colt may have been shy and diffident, almost retiring, but he was completely cosmopolitan, equally at home on both sides of the Atlantic, with a truly global approach to life and a breadth of vision which brooked no limitations, particularly in archaeology,” Crystal-Marie Bennett wrote.

His first wife, Theresa Strickland Colt, died in 1955. In 1957 he married Armida Maria-Theresa

Bologna Walsh, a native of Trieste, who later donated thousands of items in her husband’s archaeological, engraving and Kipling collections to museums and libraries in the U.S. and Europe. Many ancient pieces were given to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

In 1984 and 1987, she donated 2,500 Kipling items to the Library of Congress which established the H. Dunscombe Colt Kipling Collection.  It includes Kipling first editions, periodicals, books about Kipling, books Kipling owned,  photographs of Kipling and his family, and drawings, manuscripts, letters, and clippings.

Colt died in 1973 in London at the age of 72 and is buried in an old country churchyard in Sussex, overlooking the South Downs in England. 

Armida died in Washington, D.C., in 2011 at the age of 99. According to her obituary, she “loved entertaining both in Georgetown and in London, where she lived part of the year.”