Walt Ryba:

Good Sport & Good Business

Fellow students at Ridgefield High School knew that Walt Ryba would be a future leader. After all, the recently arrived Ridgefielder  had, by his graduation in 1959, been president of his sophomore, junior and senior classes, and co-captain of the football, baseball and basketball teams.

In fact, the Class Will gave “Walt Ryba’s many abilities and class leadership to future senior class presidents.”

It also gave his “oinky Studebaker to anyone who doesn’t like fast cars.”

His abilities and class leadership — not car choices — led to a lot more, and 40 years later, Dr. Walter George Ryba Jr., was dean of the School of Business at Fairfield University, where he was also professor of business law. 

Dr. Ryba (pronounced Ree-ba) was born in Stamford in 1941. His family moved to Craigmoor Road when he was a freshman. Learning that he had been active in youth sports in Stamford, RHS Principal Kip Holleran quickly signed up Ryba  for the baseball, football and basketball teams. He played end on the school’s first 11-man football team, was a basketball forward known for his “stylistic jump shot,” and as catcher for baseball, was “a mainstay of the team.” He was a leading hitter in the Housatonic League and named the high school's MVP in 1959.

Ryba went on to Dartmouth where he played baseball and football until a severe injury ended his college athletic career, but not his educational pursuits. After graduating from Dartmouth in 1963, he earned a master’s degree in economics at Trinity College in Hartford in 1971 and a law degree from the University of Connecticut in 1975.

Dr. Ryba began teaching at Fairfield University in 1982. He specialized in business law and regulation, focusing on antitrust regulated environments and international regulation, and his research appeared in many professional journals.

In 1994, what had been an academic department at the university became a separate school, offering a master of business administration (MBA) program. Three years later Ryba was named acting dean and the following year, dean.

He and his wife, the former Geraldine Pannozza — his high school sweetheart from the Class of ’59 — had been living in Lyme for two decades. As Ryba’s workload increased, the commute to Fairfield — as much as three hours coming home — became too much and the couple bought a house on New Street in their old home town.

At the school, now called Charles F. Dolan School of Business, Dr. Ryba made many changes. Under his leadership, the university added concentrations to the MBA in e-business and health care management, introduced a master’s in management of technology — offered jointly with the School of Engineering — and joined a consortium of Jesuit universities offering an MBA program at Peking University in China. He opened sites for MBA courses in Greenwich and Stamford and  added an “Executive MBA in Community Banking,” the first of its kind in the nation.

Dr. Ryba also oversaw the school’s final approval of accreditation and its move to the former campus Conference Center, which was completely renovated to accommodate the school’s expanding programs.

All the time, he continued to teach at least one course a year to maintain close contact with the students. 

“His door was always open to students and faculty,” said his wife. “As a result, he brought home a lot of work. He used to stay up till 1 o’clock in the morning doing work. But he loved it, he absolutely loved it. And he had so many plans.”

Dr. Ryba’s energetic leadership was tragically cut short. In August of 2000, he was stricken ill at his home and died shortly afterward at Danbury Hospital. He was only 59.

 “Walt Ryba was honest, straightforward and always used good judgment,” said Dr. Orin Grossman, academic vice president of the university at the time of his death. “His contributions to Fairfield University and particularly the School of Business will have a lasting impact.”

A year later, the Walter G. Ryba, Jr. Scholarship was established   to honor him by benefiting  multicultural students who have shown significant leadership in academics, student activities and athletics in high school. The same year, the Ridgefield Old Timers Association honored him posthumously for his excellence in athletics and education.

While much of his life was devoted to work in education, Walt Ryba also had more than a passing interest in rock and roll music. He particularly enjoyed Creedence Clearwater Revival, Fleetwood Mac, and Buddy Holly — he saw productions of “Buddy” in London and on several stages in the United States.

He had also never lost his interest in athletics, and was Fairfield University’s faculty representative to the NCAA.

Tony Wilmot: 

Mr. Baseball

If anyone could be called Mr. Baseball in Ridgefield during the last quarter of the 20th Century, it was Anthony “Tony” Wilmot. He not only starred on the local and collegiate diamonds, but coached winning Ridgefield High School teams.

Wilmot was born in Greenwich in 1963, the sixth and last child of Clifford and Jeremy Wilmot — his mother was a former Ridgefield selectman who was active in efforts to document Ridgefield history and save its historic buildings.

He came to Ridgefield as a child and “exhibited many talents at an early age,” his family said. “He was an acclaimed tennis player and an ardent golfer. But it was when he discovered baseball that he’d found the activity at which he would excel and that would consume him for the rest of his life — first as a player, then a coach and always as a passionate promoter of fair play and healthy competition.”

His talent began being recognized in Little League where he was a top pitcher and once hurled a perfect game.  He was captain of the varsity baseball team at Ridgefield High School, where he graduated in 1982. He earned a scholarship to Texas Christian University, where he was captain of the NCAA Division I baseball team and where he earned his bachelor’s degree in 1986. 

“Tony set the school single-season record for total hits and extra base hits,” Tom Belote said when Wilmot was honored by the Ridgefield Old Timers in 2010. “These accomplishments were achieved when TCU was part of the Southwest Conference, a conference considered by many to be the best college baseball conference in the country.”

Wilmot later served as head coach of the RHS varsity baseball team for six years, amassing a 77-43 record. He was also an assistant coach for the Western Connecticut State University Colonials. In addition, he gave his time and talent to the special needs kids who played in the Holland Division of Ridgefield Little League.

After college Wilmot went to work for Anheuser Busch in New York City, but eventually joined with his sister, Jessica, and learned the restaurant business at her Ancient Mariner.

In 2009, Tony and his wife, Kristina Traynor, also a restaurateur, opened their own restaurant, the Bar & Grille on Route 7. It was a sports-oriented establishment, where fans could gather to watch the games on 11 wall-mounted TVs and enjoy food prepared by two graduates of the Culinary Institute of America.

“I didn't want to be a typical sports bar,”  Wilmot said when Bar and Grille opened. “When I think of a sports bar, I think of deep-fried food, banners all over the place, waitresses in referee tops. This restaurant’s nicer than that.”

Tony Wilmot died in 2014 from influenza-related complications. He was 50 years old. 

Erland Van Lidth de Jeude: 

A Large Talent

Erland Van Lidth de Jeude was one of the most colorful, talented and fascinating people to grow up in town. 

Born in the Netherlands in 1953, Van Lidth de Jeude became a giant of a man, standing six foot six and weighing at times more than 400 pounds. He lived here from 1962 to 1970 and while at Ridgefield High School was a champion shot-putter. 

He turned down a football scholarship to Harvard and went to MIT where he took up Greco-Roman wrestling – “I found it more fun to throw people; they came back,” the shot-putter  joked in a 1978 Ridgefield Press interview. 

By that year he was ranked third in his class in the world, based on his performance during the World Cup competition in Teheran, Iran (the year before the Islamic Revolution there).

He was to compete in the 1980 Olympics in Moscow, but  the U.S. boycotted the games.

While still an undergraduate at MIT, he was a teaching assistant, a rare honor. After college, he became a systems and computer analyst for Citibank, but also studied opera and sang with companies in three states (siblings, Philip, a tenor, and Philine, a soprano, are both classical  singers). 

In 1978 Warner Brothers cast Van Lidth de Jeude as “Terror,” a member of  the Fordham Baldies street gang, in “The Wanderers.” Using the name Erland Van Lidth, he went on to play a prisoner in the 1980 film, “Stir Crazy,” with Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder. He appeared  a horror movie, “Alone in the Dark,” starring Jack Palance, that has become a sort of cult film. 

Van Lidth de Jeude’s last film was “Running Man” with Arnold Schwarzenegger, completed shortly before his death from heart failure in 1987 when he was only 34 years old.

Elmer Q. Oliphant: 

An Early All-American

Who was the greatest athlete ever to have lived in Ridgefield? Quite possibly Elmer Q. Oliphant, a name almost forgotten today but known to almost every sports fan of the first third of the 20th Century. 

An Indiana native, Ollie Oliphant was born in 1892 and attended Purdue from 1911 to 1913. Although he was there only two years, he is today one of 17 members of the school’s Football Hall of Fame. Among the records he still holds are most points scored in a game (43) and most touchdowns scored in a game (5)

In 1914, he transferred to West Point. When he arrived, he was greeted by an upper-class cadet named Dwight D. Eisenhower.

“Who are you?” demanded Eisenhower 

“Oliphant,” grinned the newcomer.

“Oliphant WHAT?” roared Eisenhower.

“Oliphant, Elmer Quillen” replied the new cadet.

“You mean — ‘Oliphant, SIR,’ ” Eisenhower responded, adding, “Wipe that smile off your face. Put it in your pocket. Untack those pants. Now, forward march, up to the Guard House.”

Oliphant told the story to a newspaper columnist after he had gotten a letter from Eisenhower while the general was in Africa during World War II.

At the U.S. Military Academy, Oliphant became the first cadet ever to letter in seven sports (football, baseball, basketball, track, boxing, swimming, and hockey). 

In 1916, as an Army back, he was a football All-American; Knute Rockne later included him on his own all-time All-American team. In his college football career, he was credited with  435 points – 135 at Purdue and 300 at Army.

His abilities were legend. The New York Times once reported that “Mr. Oliphant’s most notable field goal was kicked after he had suffered a broken ankle in a game against Illinois. His kick accounted for a 3-0 victory. While playing basketball for Purdue against Wisconsin, he shot the winning basket while seated on the floor.” 

After graduating from West Point, Oliphant became a small-arms instructor at Fort Benning, Ga. In 1920 he returned to the military academy to establish the first college intramurals program in the nation — “you’re talking to the daddy of intramural athletics,” he told a Ridgefield Press reporter in 1950. The idea was copied by the Naval Academy and was soon used in colleges and universities across the country.   

He also became West Point’s first full-time coach.

After his service in the Army, he played in 1921 for the Buffalo All-Americans in the early years of what is now the National Football League. While he led the league with 47 points that year (including throwing seven touchdowns, and kicking five field goals and 26 point after touchdowns), he retired from playing after that season. He joined the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, became an executive there and retired in 1957.

In 1955, Mr. Oliphant was elected to the National Football Hall of Fame. 

He and his wife Barbara moved to Wilton Road West in the 1940s, and both — especially Barbara — were active in the Ridgefield community. They moved to New Canaan in 1952, but after Mr. Oliphant died in 1975 at the age of 82, he was buried at St. Mary's Cemetery in Ridgefield.

“The greatest value of athletics is found in the realm of character building,” Oliphant once said. “Sound hearts, strong bodies, clear minds, and high ideals in life are the objectives.”

Margaret O’Sullivan: 

Boosting Sports for Women

In 1965,  the senior class at Ridgefield High School dedicated its yearbook to Margaret O’Sullivan who, by then, was a guidance counselor at the school. Few students at the time knew of the role “Miss O” played in helping young women be a part of interscholastic athletics.

     “Before girls sports at Ridgefield High School received an equality boost from Title IX legislation in the early 1970s, they got a formative hand from Margaret O’Sullivan some 30 years earlier,” said longtime Ridgefield Press sports editor Tim Murphy.

     Margaret Claire O’Sullivan was born in 1911 in South Boston, Mass., and graduated from Boston University with a degree in physical education. She later earned a master’s degree at the University of Bridgeport.

     When she joined the high school faculty as a physical education teacher in 1943, there were no interscholastic girls sports teams at RHS. Not one. 

     O’Sullivan quickly changed that, organizing varsity and junior varsity girls teams for one sport each season: field hockey in the fall, basketball in the winter, and softball in the spring. She later started a club team for girls tennis. 

     While turnout for the programs was good, conditions were not. The girls had limited equipment and shared fields with boys’ sports teams — mostly, they practiced and played when the boys were at away games.  But O’Sullivan always fought for more time and attention to girls’ athletics and well-being.

     She served as head of the girls physical education department at the high school until 1962, when she became a guidance counselor. 

“All of us have seen the kind of person she is,” said the staff of the 1965 yearbook. “Loyal, sincere, self-sacrificing, dedicated — these are part of Miss O’s personality. Friendly, helpful, generous, devoted — these, too, describe Miss O. This list is endless. She is the manifestation of many of our ideals.”

O’Sullivan retired in 1973 and moved to Shrewsbury, Mass., to live with a sister. When she died in 1993 at the age of 81, she had been all but forgotten locally. The Ridgefield Press had only a brief, three-paragraph obituary, provided by the sister (but did run a picture of her, smiling).

Seven years later, the Ridgefield Old Timers Association remembered O’Sullivan, giving her a Posthumous Award for her work with girls at Ridgefield High School. ROTA said she had died “with much deserved praise left unsaid.”

Olinto Carboni:  

‘Battling Bones’

Olinto “Lynce” Carboni must have held some sort of record for an active life. He did not retire from working until he was 91, would hit the dance floor at 95, and was still mowing his lawn well into his 90s.  “Why should I pay someone when I can do it myself?” he told an interviewer

A Ridgefield native, Olinto P. Carboni was born in 1909, a son of Benvenuto and Assunta Carboni (Benvenuto is already profiled in Who Was Who). He had four brothers, Adrian (“Ade”), Octavius (“Tabby”), Navio (“Pete”), and Reno (“Renz”), and a sister, Mary Carboni Michell, who all became well known in town.

As a boy he got his first job carrying water to thirsty workers building Branchville Road into one of the region’s first paved highways. He also caddied at Silver Spring Country Club, when carrying two bags for 18 holes would earn $2. “I had to give the money to my mother and she let me keep 10 cents,” he recalled in 2004.

While he was attending Ridgefield High School, he worked before and after school doing bookkeeping and deliveries for “Jimmy Joe” Joseph’s store at the intersection of Main Street and North Salem Road (“Joe’s Corner”).

He was a star athlete at RHS, captaining the baseball and basketball teams and playing football. After he graduated in 1927,  he played for Ridgefield’s baseball and football Spartans and its basketball team, The Millionaires, in the region’s popular inter-town sports leagues. 

Town historian Dick Venus wrote in 1983 that Lynce Carboni “was probably one of the very best all-around athletes that Ridgefield ever had. Though he was good at baseball, like his brother Pete, Lynce excelled in basketball and was very exciting to watch. Many of us thought he could have played with any of the professional teams” — even though he was not very tall and “would probably not stand much above the belts on some of the gigantic basketball players of today.”

For many years he served as a high school basketball referee, with legs strong enough to work two games in one night.

As “Battling Bones,” Carboni was also a successful boxer, fighting in his late teens as a featherweight in bouts in throughout the area. He never lost a fight.

He, his father and his brothers all conspired to keep his boxing a secret from his mother, who opposed her son’s participation in the sport. 

Charles “Chip” Bliss, his nephew,  told how Carboni’s undefeated boxing career came to an end.  “His mother didn’t want him to box — he never told her,” Bliss said. “He used to sneak out the windows from home. One day the iceman came early, and he had a big fight that night, and his mother asked the iceman why’d he’d come early, and he told her, ‘I’ve got to get through my route early so I can go see Lynce box tonight.’”

Assunta Carboni threw all of Lynce’s clothes out the window and said “You’re not going anywhere.” “And that,” said Bliss, “was the end of his boxing career.”

In the late 1920s Carboni began courting Dorothy “Dot” Bennett,  whose brother, artist Harry Bennett, had been a close friend. “He was my brother, he was my father,” Harry Bennett said. “I had no father, he died before I was born, so I had Lynce. I leaned on him,” 

Bennett was about 12 and Carboni 22 when Bennett’s dog Duke was killed by a car.  “Lynce came, helped that dog up, picked him up, brought him into the yard, called the vet, had him declared dead, got a shovel, made a box, and buried him, then made a tombstone,”  Bennett said. “He found a piece of rock and chiseled it so it had a semblance of a tombstone and then chiseled the word ‘Duke’ into it. He could do anything.”

Carboni and Dot Bennett eloped in 1931. Both loved to dance and were famous throughout their lives for their prowess on the dance floor. When they were courting, Lynce would take her dancing at Peach Lake, in Danbury, Bridgeport and even New York in his Model A Ford. They marked their 65th wedding anniversary in 1996, the year she died.

Carboni began his career as a plumber. “He was a great plumber — marvelous,” said brother-in-law Bennett. “Anything he did was like brand new, just perfect. He was meticulous, he was reliable, and he had lots of knowledge. And anybody could call him, and he’d just rush to help them.”

“He was a hard worker,” said Chip Bliss. “He single-handedly built the foundation on his house — dug it out. He had it all done and a terrible rainstorm caved in two walls and he had to rebuild it. That just shows the persistence he had.” That house on Pound Street was his home for some six decades, but in his last years, he lived on Prospect Street.

Carboni served in the Navy during World War II aboard the U.S.S. Astoria, a light cruiser, in the Pacific. He thought his knowledge of pumps would land him a job in damage control, but he could also type and was made yeoman to the executive officer, the ship’s second-in-command.

He was on the Astoria in the China Sea in December 1944 when it survived a huge typhoon that capsized and sank three U.S. Navy destroyers. “They ran out of fuel and were at the mercy of the sea,” he reminisced in 2000.

His ship was the target of kamikaze pilots during the invasion of Okinawa, and he recalled one crashing so close it shook the entire ship. He was on the Astoria in Tokyo Harbor when the Japanese surrender was signed aboard the U.S.S. Missouri.

After the war Carboni joined John Tulipani in forming a plumbing business. In 1959, he did a plumbing job at the Board of Education offices in what is now St. Stephen’s South Hall, and his work caught the eye of school administrators. He was offered the job as the only “maintenance mechanic” for the Ridgefield Public Schools, which then had only two buildings, Veterans Park and the old high school. When he retired in 1976, the district had grown to eight school buildings and he headed a crew of five men who kept them all in repair.

But he didn’t really retire that year. He continued to work as the schools’ “courier,” ferrying documents and other deliveries among the various schools and administrative headquarters. He continued courier services until finally retiring in 2000, nearly 92 years old. And he continued driving until he was 95. 

Over the years, Carboni encouraged and inspired many young athletes and coached Little League baseball for many seasons. 

He was a life member of the Ridgefield Volunteer Fire Department and the Italian American Mutual Aid Society — he continued to serve at the club’s monthly men’s and women’s dinner nights into his  90s. He was also a founding member of the Ridgefield Old Timers Association and was honored by the Danbury Old Timers.

Lynce Carboni died in 2006 at the age of 97 and is buried beside his wife in the Bennett family plot in Fairview Cemetery.

“He was a man of few words,” Chip Bliss said. “He never had a bad thing to say about anybody. He was always upbeat. Everybody liked him — didn’t have an enemy in the world.”