Marian Cox: 
‘Lady of the Orchids’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“We compound for sins we are inclined to,

“By condemning those we have no mind to.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mary Hewitt Stebbins: 
A Poet Poe Liked

They say that fame is  fleeting. That was especially true in the era before the media became mass, and it seemed to be the case with Mary E. Hewitt, once called “one of the most charming of the ‘Poetesses of America.’” 

The poet and editor, who produced a half dozen books in the mid-19th Century and who counted Edgar Allen Poe among her friends, died virtually forgotten in a Ridgefield farmhouse. Forgotten, that is, except by a novelist editor of The Ridgefield Press.

“In character she is sincere, fervent, benevolent, with a heart full of the truest charity — sensitive to praise and to blame,” Poe described her in 1846. “In temperament, melancholy (although this is not precisely the term); in manner, subdued, gentle, yet with grace and dignity; converses impressively, earnestly, yet quietly and in a low tone. In person she is tall and slender, with black hair and large gray eyes; complexion also dark; the general expression of the countenance singularly interesting and agreeable.”

Mary Elizabeth Morse was born in 1807 in Malden, Mass. Her farming father, Joseph, died when she was a child and her mother, Betsey Moore, moved the family to Boston where Mary grew up. Little is known about her youth, but she must have received an excellent education and been exposed to people in the arts. In 1827, she married James Lang Hewitt, who was to become a prominent music publisher, and by 1829 they were living in New York City.

By the early 1840s, Mary Hewitt was writing poetry that was appearing in such magazines as The Knickerbocker, sometimes under the pseudonyms of “Ione” or “Jane.” Her first book, The Songs of Our Land, and Other Poems,  was published in 1845 by W.D. Ticknor, a major publisher of the era. The book consists mostly of her poems that had appeared in magazines. 

In a lengthy review of The Songs of Our Land appearing in Godey’s Lady’s Book magazine,  Edgar Allan Poe said her “compositions evince poetic fervor, classicism, and keen appreciation of both moral and physical beauty. No one of them, perhaps, can be judiciously commended as a whole; but no one of them is without merit.” He concluded that the writer has talent that needs to develop. “Mrs. Hewitt has, upon the whole, given indication rather than immediate evidence of poetic power. If not discouraged, she will undoubtedly achieve, hereafter, a very desirable triumph.”

Nine years later, her second collection, Poems, Sacred, Passionate, and Legendary appeared, but Poe was unable to review this book — he had died in 1849 at the age of 40. Her poems also appeared in several anthologies published in the 19th and 20th Centuries.

Hewitt was the editor of four books, often contributing prose pieces to each: The Gem of the Western World (1850), The Memorial: Written by Friends of the Late Mrs. Osgood (1851), Heroines of History (1852), and Lives of Illustrious Women of All Ages (1860). “Mrs. Osgood” was Frances Sargent Osgood (1811-1850), a close friend of both Poe and Hewitt.

James Hewitt died in 1853. Two years later, Mary Hewitt married widower Russell W. Stebbins Sr., a wealthy New York cotton merchant and native of Ridgefield, who was 14 years her senior. Mary continued to write and edit under the name of  Mary E. Hewitt.

 

Russell and Mary lived in New York City but Russell also had a farm on North Salem Road, inherited from Stebbins ancestors, that the couple used as a summer home. Russell Stebbins’s close relations with The South in connection with his cotton dealings may have prompted him to retire to the Ridgefield farm in 1861, the year the Civil War broke out.   According to Barbara Wardenburg, who once owned the farmhouse at 180 North Salem Road, the place dates back to the 1700s. A past owner may have been a Stebbins who was a Loyalist and fled during the Revolution, only to later return and reclaim the property.

Once Russell retired to Ridgefield, Mary seems to have retired from writing. No more books by her were published and no poems seemed to appear in magazines.

By 1870, the household included Mary, then 64 years old; Russell, 78;  Delia Moore Osgood, 66, Mary’s widowed sister; Carlotta Moore, 25,  probably a niece; Delia Stebbins, 67, sister of Russell; and Abigail Stebbins, 57,  daughter of Russell by his first wife.  With five “senior citizens” in the household, it’s not surprising they also had two young Irish maids plus a 19-year-old “laborer” to help out.

Russell died in 1878 and is buried in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn — the same cemetery where Mary’s first husband, James Hewitt, is interred. Mary, who died in 1894, is buried with neither spouse, but in Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, Mass., next to her sister Delia Moore Osgood. Nearby is the grave of Mary’s good friend, Frances Sargent Osgood, whose husband, artist Samuel Stillman Osgood, had painted a portrait of her now owned by the New-York Historical Society. (Osgood also painted Edgar Allen Poe. He was not closely related to Delia.)

By the time she died in her 87th year, Mary Moore Hewitt Stebbins had been all but forgotten in literary circles.  While her husband’s death 16 years earlier had gotten substantial mention in the New York press, including a 190-word obituary in The New York Times, Mary received only a 21-word notice in the New York Tribune, which mentioned nothing of her career as an editor and poet and cited only her function as a wife of Russell Stebbins. (Russell’s Times obituary said only that he was survived by an unnamed wife; his Tribune obituary did not even mention he had a wife.)

The Ridgefield Press  had barely covered Russell’s passing, giving him 40 words, but  the newspaper was effusive at Mary’s death, turning out more than 250 words about her. 

“There died in the northern part of Ridgefield Tuesday a very intellectual woman, one whose personality was stamped with the higher thought and whose character withal was sympathetic, full of love and tenderness,”  the account began.

“Mrs. Russell Stebbins died at her home in North Ridgefield at 4 o’clock Tuesday morning. She had been confined to her home but a week, but during the past two years since the death of her sister, a most lovable companion, Mrs. Delia M. Osgood, she had gradually declined.” 

After briefly describing the funeral at St. Stephen’s, The Press noted that Mrs. Stebbins would be buried in Mt. Auburn Cemetery “where her friend, the venerable poet-physician, Oliver Wendell Holmes, has also been laid this week.”

The obituary goes on to tell something of her life, noting that “Mrs. Stebbins had numerous warm friends high in art and literature, and her own writings in prose and verse were by no means of an inferior order. Her contributions to the better periodicals were choice gems at the time when Emerson, Whittier, Holmes, Hawthorne, and Lowell were making American literature of a superior standard. 

“Her life was thrown into a rare literary channel indeed. The atmosphere she breathed during her active life was one long day of higher pleasure. Her Songs of Our Land breathe a sentiment of earnestness, a desire to reach a higher plane of living. Innately refined, she craved those associations which could not fail to mellow her life into a very ideal of early existence...

“She is not dead. She lives in a realm unfettered by finite uncertainties. Let her past be an inspiration to those who read her beautiful words left on printed pages.”

The obituary was undoubtedly written by Press editor Edgar Bross who himself turned out two novels around this time, and who probably knew many of the local literati. 

• • • 

Thirty years after Mary Hewitt Stebbins died, a “holocaust of letters that had accumulated in the attic” of an old house took place on Governor Street. 

“As one heaped basket after another was carried down and its contents emptied upon the bonfire in the backyard, a bystander casually picked up a letter, and opening it looked at the signature, Sarah H. Whitman, then glancing over the pages saw references to Mr. Poe,” reported Edith Dickson of the Edgar Allan Poe Society in 1925.  Sarah Whitman was once slated to marry Poe, and the breakup of their engagement sparked lurid newspaper accounts of what had happened. In the rescued letter, Whitman debunks the sensational stories the media told, and relates what actually happened. Dated Oct. 4, 1850,  the letter was addressed to Whitman’s good friend, Mary E. Hewitt. 

So were several other letters rescued from the fire that are now in the archives of the Poe society in Baltimore. Who knows how many  priceless historical letters to Mary Hewitt were destroyed that day, but to offer a hint of their monetary value: An 1845 letter from Poe to Mary Hewitt — in which Poe admits he was an autograph collector — sold at an auction in 1972 for $3,300. That’s about $20,000 today.

Be careful what you burn.

Winifred Carriere:
Quotable on Cats

When it came to cats, Winifred Carriere was quite quotable. Just Google her name and you’ll find scores of websites recalling her observations. Probably her most repeated pronouncement is: “Cats always know whether people like or dislike them. They do not always care enough to do anything about it.”

Carriere loved cats, enough to write a book, Cats, 24 Hours A Day, published in 1967 and again in 1975. “There is no doubt that Winifred Carriere is ‘possessed’ by her cats,” said Kirkus Reviews,  “and for 20 years she has been happily ‘without a catless moment.’”

However, her interests extended beyond the feline to the floral.

Winifred Osborn Carriere was born in Ridgefield on April 20, 1912,  the daughter of Richard C. Osborn and Beulah Sanford. Her father, who worked for the family-owned lumber yard that is now Ridgefield Supply, died when she was seven  Her mother went off to Manhattan to become a nurse, married one of her Columbia University professors named Harry Clinton France,  and eventually became a leading authority on child care. She wrote articles for more than 100 magazines, was editorial director of American Baby magazine, appeared often on TV, and wrote two books, How to Have a Happy Child (1952) and How to Have a Happy, Healthy Baby (1964).

 Young Winifred stayed in Ridgefield with her great-aunts, Annie Tallman Osborn and Carolyn Winifred Osborn, at the Osborn homestead at Main and Prospect Streets.

 She graduated from Syracuse University, where she met and married Albert Carriere, an aspiring playwright and actor. They had a daughter and were later divorced.

After the divorce she moved to New York City, and began a career in editing. She worked

at Prentice Hall, McGraw-Hill and the Institute of Radio Engineers before turning to magazines. For many years she published and edited Professional Florist Magazine, a trade magazine. 

Her interest in flowers led her to join with Vernon Johnson in 1964 in writing An Easy Guide to Artificial Light Gardening for Pleasure and Profit. A New York Times reviewer with a sense of the pun said the book “provides illuminating answers to questions about equipment, construction and care of light-gardens.” 

She retired to a house on Wooster Street in the 1960s and 1970s,  working for a while as office manager for Buck Argenio’s Buck Realty. She died in an assisted care home in Sharon in 2002 at the age of 90.

While flowers were her profession for many years, it is cats that keep Win Carriere’s name alive today. Other of her observations that are often quoted include:

• If a cat did not put a firm paw down now and then, how could his human remain possessed?
• I suspect that many an ailurophobe hates cats only because he feels they are better than he is — more honest, more secure, more loved, more whatever he is not.
• The cat is the mirror of his human’s mind. The dog mirrors his human’s physical appearance.

Dr. John Norman: 

Professor, Poet And Secret Agent

Dr. John Norman was as comfortable writing poetry as he was working for the OSS. In his long life, he associated with secret agents and a Nobel Prize-winning author, loved and probed propaganda, taught at many universities, wrote books, and took part in the workings of Ridgefield government.

A native of Syracuse, N.Y., John Norman was born in 1912. He did his undergraduate work at Syracuse University, earned his doctorate at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., and began teaching in colleges. 

Early in his career, Norman became a noted expert on fascism and several of his articles drew the attention of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency, which recruited him during World War II. 

There he served as a field representative, debriefing refugees from Nazi Germany and others who had fled fascism in Europe before and during the war. Among the people he interviewed were Thomas Mann, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist; Don Luigi Sturzo, the founder of Italy’s Christian Democratic Party; and Lion Feuchtwanger, the German Jewish writer — whose escape from the Nazis was engineered by another Ridgefielder, Varian Fry (q.v.). What information refugees reported to him was turned over to the State Department, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and intelligence officers.

“They were walking encyclopedias on names, dates, places, and politics of their respective countries,”  Norman said about the refugees years afterward.

He later worked as section chief of the Italian Desk of the State Department’s Office of

Intelligence Research, and was a historian on Sino-Soviet affairs for the State Department. He also served with the American delegation to the United Nations Conference in San Francisco in 1945 that led to the founding of the UN.

He subsequently became one of the first professors to create and teach a college course in U.S. intelligence and espionage, and a number of his students went on to work for the CIA.

Over the years,  Norman taught history, political science and government at Syracuse, Carnegie Institute of Technology, Chatham College, Fairfield University, and finally at Pace University in Pleasantville, retiring in 1987. He was included in the Outstanding Educators of America in the 1970s.

A public lecturer and author of many articles including contributions to the Encyclopedia Britannica, American Encyclopedia and to the Funk and Wagnalls Encyclopedia Yearbooks,  Norman wrote two books, “Edward Gibbon Wakefield, A Political Reappraisal” (1963) and “Labor and Politics in Libya and Arab Africa” (1965). 

In 1954, his essays on the rise of fascism in Italy before World War II led to a knighthood from the government of Italy with the Order of Al Merito Della Repubblica. 

He was a voracious reader of publications from around the world, even propaganda. “Propaganda lets you know what that country wants you to believe, and that’s important,” he told Ridgefield Republicans in 1980.

  An expert at interviewing, Norman served as a fact-finder for the Connecticut Board of Mediation and Arbitration for 12 years; Gov. William A. O’Neill commended him in 1984 for his “record of integrity and professionalism.”

He and his wife Mary Lynott met at Chatham College in Pittsburgh, Pa., when he was the chairman of the political science department and she was a student. They were married for more than 50 years. The couple moved to Ridgefield in 1968 where he became active in the Democratic Party,

serving on the Democratic Town Committee many years and working on the campaigns of a number of candidates.

Norman frequently spoke on national and international government and politics before local clubs and organizations, often wrote letters to The Press on local and national political and education issues, and spoke out at town meetings.

 He also wrote many poems that appeared in Arcadia Poetry Anthology, Our World’s Most Treasured Poems, and the National Library of Poetry. “Life Lines,” a collection of his work, came out in 1997 on the occasion of his 85th birthday. 

After his retirement from Pace in 1987, the Normans traveled to many places in the world that had been subjects of his classes, including the sites of Homer’s Odyssey in Greece. (In the 1960s, he had written the script for a movie entitled “Brother Anne,” which was filmed in Greece.) They also traveled to Mexico to pursue a mutual interest in the Mayan and Aztec civilizations. 

He died in 2002 at the age of 89 and is buried in St. Mary’s Cemetery.

John Norman shared many of his often light-hearted poems with the readers of The Ridgefield Press. Here’s one he wrote for a pre-Christmas issue in 1985, called “Gifts for Santa”:

Dear Santa Claus, you always give
And never get. How can we live
In wait each year when we all know
Your gifts are more than we should owe?
It's time we showed appreciation
For all your Christmas recreation.
It’s now our turn to try to guess
Your needs and wants, Oh, more or less.
 
Let’s see if we can get a belt
That fits; or buy a cap that’s felt;
A tie that matches; underwear
To cover what’s so big and bare;
A book about your losing weight;
A watch to keep from being late;
A larger sack to carry more —
Oh no, your back’s already sore!
In short, let’s see your features glow
As we all laugh, ‘Hoho, Hoho!’
From this, do we indeed believe:

’Tis better to give than to receive?

Mildred Gilman Wohlforth: 

An Original Sob Sister

“I didn’t invent the title ‘sob sister,’ but I’m the first gal reporter who ever used it,” Mildred Gilman Wohlforth told an interviewer in the 1980s. 

The term described Roaring 20s reporters who specialized in heart-rending stories of personal tragedies, and Mildred Gilman was one of the originals as well as one of the highest paid in New York. Her subjects ranged from sordid crimes to White House society, interviewing murderers and heads of state with equal expertise. 

But Mildred Gilman was prolific writer who did much more sophisticated work over her career.  She wrote eight novels;  “Sob Sister,” first published in 1931, came out in several editions,  and was turned into a movie the same year,  starring  James Dunn and Linda Watkins.

She also wrote many magazine articles. One piece in The New Yorker in 1928, which could be as appropriate today was it was in the ’20s, was about a mother and son being interviewed for a place in an upper-crusty New York City nursery school. 

The Chicago native wrote her first story when she was 12 and began selling them when she was at the University of Wisconsin. After graduation she got a job as secretary to noted New York World columnist Heywood Broun, and frequented parties with the likes of Dorothy Parker, Alexander Wollcott, Robert Benchley, Harpo Marx, Bennett Cerf, Sinclair Lewis, Paul Robeson, and Harold Ross (she wrote one of the first profiles, on Robeson, for Ross’s then-new New Yorker).

While working for Hearst’s New York Evening Journal, she met Robert Wohlforth, a reporter for the competing Morning Telegraph. They were married in 1930, and later bought a 1730 home on Rockwell Road. 

She continued to write throughout her life and among the many celebrities she interviewed were Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Shirley Temple, Amelia Earhart, Gene Kelly, and Jimmy Durante. She was also supposed to interview Hitler in 1933, but the Gestapo, distressed at probing questions she had already asked Hermann Goering, threw her out of Germany. 

In Ridgefield, she was the first chairman of the Historic District Commission, promoted planning and zoning, and penned scores of letters to The Ridgefield Press aimed at the betterment of the town. 

Well into her 90s, she rode her bicycle three miles a day. 

She died in 1994 at the age of 97.

Paul Draper: 

Targeted Tap Dancer

Paul Draper was yet another target of McCarthy-era attacks who found a brief refuge in Ridgefield. An international dancing star who was called “the aristocrat of tap,” Draper danced on the major stages of Europe and the United States with top stars of the 1930s and 40s.

He wound up in exile in Europe but unlike his close friend, harmonica virtuoso and fellow Ridgefielder and McCarthy victim, Larry Adler,  Draper returned to the United States to teach, dance and choreograph new works. 

“Draper brought cool intellectualism and playful wit to the dance form,” said The New York Times. “He performed everything from jazz to the bossa nova to Brahms and Scarlatti, establishing a style very different from that of Bill (Bojangles) Robinson, Fred Astaire and the Nicholas Brothers.”

Paul Draper was born in 1909 in Florence, Italy, into an artistic, socially prominent New York City family. His mother Muriel Draper was a writer and lecturer whose later home in London hosted such guests as Pablo Picasso, Henry James and Arthur Rubinstein. Novelist Norman Douglas promised a young Paul a penny every time he was naughty.

From a young age he loved to dance and mostly self-taught himself tap — he reportedly took only six lessons in his life. 

After teaching briefly at an Arthur Murray studio in Manhattan as a teenager, Draper moved to London, hoping to find work in tap dancing. “He scraped together a living performing flashy routines in Europe and the United States, then enrolled in the School of American Ballet and realized the possibilities of combining tap and classical ballet,” said entertainment historian David Lobosco. Draper got into the school with the help of his mother’s friend, George Balanchine.

He made his solo debut in London in 1932, introducing his new “ballet-tap” technique.  His career blossomed in the 1930s as he performed in Europe and the U.S. with his combination of tap dancing and ballet. He headlined at famous night spots like the Rainbow Room and Plaza Hotel’s Persian Room, danced at Carnegie Hall, and appeared in the 1948 film “Time of Your Life.” His greatest fame was perhaps as part of a two-man act formed in 1940 with harmonica  virtuoso Larry Adler, who also lived in Ridgefield around the same time Draper did.

Draper began coming to Ridgefield in late 1940s. A note in the May 5, 1949, Press said, “Mr. and Mrs. Paul Draper and family of New York City have leased ‘The Coach House’ on Branchville Road for a year from Miss Marthe Krueger... Mr. Draper is a well-known dancer in New York. The family spent a summer here recently in the guest cottage at the former Paul Palmer estate on Wilton Road East.” (Marthe Krueger was an international concert dance star and choreographer who had a teaching studio on Branchville Road in the “Old Coach House” of the former Hawk estate.)

Draper’s career hit the same rocks that sank many artistic talents of the era: anti-communist blacklisting. Two other local notables of the day — a leftist presidential candidate and a right-wing newspaper columnist — were involved.

Draper’s leftist leanings were no secret, and he publicly supported the 1948 presidential campaign of Progressive Party candidate Henry Wallace, a former vice president under Franklin D. Roosevelt. Wallace lived just across the line in South Salem and attended St. Stephen’s Church here.

Draper was active in liberal or progressive causes. He served as a spokesman for a committee of actors, producers and writers who opposed an inquiry by the House Committee on Un-American Activities into Communist infiltration of the film industry, The New York Times said. “Mr. Draper had performed in benefits to raise money for groups and causes labeled as subversive by the committee.” 

A Los Angeles Times report noted that “Mr. Draper said he was a supporter of several organizations which had been called subversive by the U.S. Attorney General’s office, but steadfastly denied any communist affiliations.”

Then there was the “Draper-McCullough case,” which drew national attention in the early 1950s. It was later described by The Press: “A woman in Greenwich [Mrs. John T. McCullough] called dancer Paul Draper a Communist and Mr. Draper, who lived in Ridgefield, sued the woman for libel and — in line with Connecticut’s attachment law of that day — attached the property of Mrs. McCullough. This latter move aroused the ire of the Right Wing to an almost eerie extent, those espousing Mrs. McCullough’s cause appearing not to be prepared to recognize what Mrs. McCullough’s charges had done to Mr. Draper’s career.” 

The power of the anti-communist blacklisting of the era was described in the L.A. Times obituary: “In 1950, Mr. Draper’s dance routine was snipped out of a CBS segment from Ed Sullivan’s  Toast of the Town’ because the network received protests. His bookings were also canceled on other TV programs and at several upscale hotels around the country.”

Among those brandishing Mrs. McCullough’s banner was nationally syndicated columnist Westbrook Pegler, who also lived in Ridgefield. The Press didn’t like Pegler and a 1950 editorial supporting Draper began: “We dislike mentioning the name of Westbrook Pegler in the Press because we have a certain pride in keeping our paper free of evil things. But now and then there is a tide which must be taken at the flood.”

The trial ended in a hung jury and, dejected, Draper left Ridgefield in 1951 to live in Switzerland. Soon after, his friend and frequent partner Larry Adler, also subjected to anti-communist attacks, moved from Ridgefield to England where he died in 2001. 

 Unlike Adler, however, Draper returned to the States and became a professor at the Carnegie-Mellon Institute in the 1970s. In the words of The New York Times, he “continued to be recognized as an important, if seldom seen, figure in concert dance.” His career never recovered from the blacklisting, though he did continue to occasionally perform. He also wrote the 1978 book, “On Tap Dancing.”

He died in 1996 at his home in Woodstock, N.Y., at the age of 86.

Paul Draper never denied belonging to the leftist organizations that the right accused him of supporting. “I did do the things and belong to the organizations they said,” The New York Times quoted him as saying in 1980. “I was happy to and am still proud of it.”

But he always denied ever having been a communist.

Alvin Toffler: 

Future Shocker

It’s not many people who can invent a phrase that becomes part of the language. Alvin Toffler did just that. “Future Shock,” the title of his 1970 book, is now in every dictionary, defined as the inability to cope with the many, fast-paced changes of modern society. 

Toffler was once the nation’s leading “futurist,” a person who studies where we’re going. “Future Shock,” published when he lived on Deer Hill Drive, discussed what happens “when too much change hits too fast for people to absorb.” 

It sold millions of copies and has been translated into dozens of languages.

In his sequel 1980 best seller, “The Third Wave,” he predicted that a worldwide technological revolution, like the agricultural and industrial revolutions before it, would change the way in which the world lives and works. 

The New York Times reported that Prime Minister Zhao Ziyang of China convened conferences to discuss “The Third Wave” in the early 1980s, and in 1985 the book was the No. 2 best seller in China. Only the speeches of the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping sold more copies.

Toffler was born in New York in 1928, the only son of Polish immigrants. He was writing poetry by the time he was 7. Though he admitted he was hardly a scholar in college and more interested in political activism, he managed to graduate from New York University with a degree in English and, there, met his wife, Adelaide Elizabeth “Heidi” Farrell. 

He began his writing career as a reporter for a trade magazine called “Industry and Welding” in 1954, primarily because he was experienced in mechanics.

“The editor told me, ‘You’re getting this job because you know how to weld,” Toffler once recalled. “Now show me you know how to write.’”

He eventually got a job at Fortune magazine, and wrote many free-lance articles for both scholarly and popular magazines. The Times said his 1964 Playboy interview with Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov was considered one of Playboy’s best.

Heidi Toffler, who survives him, helped in writing all his books, including “Powershift” (1990), the final volume in their trilogy, and War and Anti-War (1995).  In all, he wrote 13 books. The Tofflers lived here from 1967 to 1974. He died June 27, 2016, in Los Angeles where he had lived for many years. He was 87 years old. 

Cornelius Ryan:

'Reporter'

Cornelius J. Ryan died in 1974 just months after completing “A Bridge Too Far,” the third of his meticulously researched books on World War II. 

“He had struggled valiantly against the cancer that finally claimed his life, almost forcing himself to stay alive until his book that chronicled the battles and the men who fought them was completed,” Linette Burton wrote later in The Ridgefield Press. 

Mr. Ryan’s trilogy, which included “The Longest Day” and “The Last Battle,” is famous throughout the world, and his abilities as a historian of World War II were legendary. For “The Longest Day” alone, he interviewed more than 1,000 Americans, Frenchmen, Germans, and others who took part in the battles.  

Born in 1920 in Dublin, Ireland,  Ryan as a young man studied the violin at the Irish Academy of Music in Dublin. However, he soon switched his interest to writing, becoming a reporter covering the war in Europe for Reuters and the London Daily Telegraph. 

He flew on 14 bombing missions with U.S. Army Air Force and was embedded in General

George S. Patton's Third Army, covering its actions until the end of the European war. He then went to the Pacific, covering the final months of war there.

In 1947 Ryan moved to the United States, writing for Time, Newsweek and Collier’s magazines. He married writer Kathryn Morgan in 1950 and became a U.S. citizen.

It is Ryan’s coverage of Operation Overlord, the Battle of Normandy, for which he is best known. It is the subject of “The Longest Day,” which he spent 10 years researching. The book has sold well over 25 million copies and has appeared in 18 languages. It was also made into a movie that featured dozens of Hollywood stars. 

Ryan was at Normandy twice on D-Day — aboard a bomber that flew over the beaches, and then, after he landed in England, on a patrol boat that took him back. He had just turned 24. 

The book appeared in 1959 and he devoted the remainder of his life to the rest of the trilogy. 

He was a master of research. “I have no less than 7,000 books on every aspect of World War II,” he once wrote a friend. “My files contain some 16,000 different interviews with Germans, British, French, etc. 

“Then there is the chronology of each battle, 5x7 cards, detailing each movement by hour for the particular work I’m engaged in. You may think this is all a kind of madness, an obsession. I suppose it is.”

The work was not only painstaking but also grueling. Ryan told The New York Times in 1966 that “the actual writing of ‘The Last Battle,’ quite apart from its research preparations, took me 29 months. At one point I destroyed 35,000 words and started over.  When I handed in the manuscript last December, I was exhausted. In fact, I was limp.” 

A few days later he became ill and spent nearly a month in bed. When he recovered, he said, he began spending more time “with the people I real enjoy working for — my family.”

While he completed three books on the war, Ryan had said he had planned five.

Among the many commendations he received was the French Legion of Honor. In 1973, at

his home on Old Branchville Road and amid much security, a French delegation of more than 30 people, including the French ambassador to the United States, presented him with the award for his work chronicling the Battle of Normandy. 

“I was not telling a lie in my little speech to the ambassador when I said that I did not think that there had been this many French in Ridgefield since de Rochambeau,” he later told Press publisher Karl S. Nash.

Much of the work on his second two books was done at his Old Branchville Road home with the research help of his wife, Kathryn. 

Four years after his death, his struggle with cancer was detailed in “A Private Battle,” written by Kathryn Morgan Ryan from notes he had secretly left behind for that purpose.

Ryan was only 54 when he died. Many dignitaries and soldiers from around the world attended his funeral in St. Mary’s Church; a eulogy was delivered by Walter Cronkite, the CBS news anchorman.

Ryan is buried at Ridgebury Cemetery, beneath a gravestone that says simply, “Cornelius Ryan, 1920 - 1974, Reporter.”

“In a sense, Cornelius Ryan started reporting ‘The Longest Day’ on June 6, 1944, and never really stopped,” said Columbia Journalism School professor Michael Shapiro. “That day, that war, was his story.”

Donald I. Rogers:

Economic Conservative

In a 1966 talk to the Ridgefield Republican Women’s Club, Donald I. Rogers disclosed that President Kennedy cancelled his subscription to The New York Herald-Tribune because of Rogers’ column.

“I am worse than a Republican, I am an economic conservative,” he told the group. “I’m not a John Bircher and I’m not a true right-winger, but I am a conservative when it comes to economics.” 

A Connecticut native, Donald Irwin Rogers was born in 1918 in New Hartford, where he grew up and, at the age of 12, created a “news bureau” that covered area towns for several  newspapers. He continued the bureau until he was 18 when he went to work for The Providence Journal. 

Rogers joined The Herald-Tribune in 1950 and was its business and financial news editor until 1963. From 1950 until 1966, he wrote a widely read, syndicated business-affairs column — the one Kennedy disliked.

He was a frequent panelist on the Longines Chronoscope, an early television talk show that aired from 1951 to 1955. Among the people he interviewed was Senator Joseph McCarthy, during the height of the McCarthyism turmoil.

Rogers was the author of 14 books, including “Teach Your Wife to Be A Widow,” “How to Beat Inflation Using It,” and “The Day the Market Crashed.”

In “The End of Free Enterprise: A Manifesto for Capitalists” (Doubleday, 1966), he observed that “what the business world needs is a decision about the principles it stands for. It needs a credo, a manifesto, a set of guides and goals behind which harried and hard-working executives can rally. Lacking this, the enterprise system will be whittled away by the voting strength of those who don’t understand it or who, understanding it, are opposed to it.” 

In 1962, the Conservative Party in New York State attempted to get Rogers to run for governor, but he declined. Years later, he told The New York Times that he had “little in common with organized Conservatives” and considered himself a “moderate liberal who believes in the competitive enterprise system, free markets and the prudent handling of other people’s money by Government as well as by thrift institutions and others in the private sector.”

Rogers moved to Mimosa in 1964 when he was publisher of the once popular Bridgeport Sunday Herald, a conservative Sunday-only newspaper that served all of Fairfield County. Around 1975, he tried to do what no one else has done: He produced a daily newspaper aimed at all of Fairfield County. He was editor and publisher of the short-lived attempt, called The Fairfield County Courier. 

He moved to Manhattan in 1976 and died four years later at the age of 61. His daughter, the late Lynn Wallrapp, a longtime Ridgefielder, was a novelist.

Robert Kraus: 

Cartoons and Kids

Robert Kraus was an author, illustrator, New Yorker cartoonist, and publisher who produced dozens of popular books for children.

 "I write books to console myself, to encourage myself, to encourage others," he said in a 1979 interview. By then he had written and illustrated more than 60 books, had created dozens of covers for The New Yorker, and had become a publisher whose titles won several Caldecott Medals. 

A native of Milwaukee, Wisc., he was born in 1925. While still a boy, he decided he wanted to become a cartoonist and sold his first work — to a barbershop — when he was 10. "The greatest compliment anyone can give you is to buy your stuff," he said. 

By the time he was a teenager, he was selling to magazines like Esquire and Saturday Evening Post. 

He studied at the Art Students League in New York, where in 1944 he met his wife, Pamela Vivienne Evan Wong, who was also a student. A year later, he joined the staff of The New Yorker, where he worked for 20 years and created more than 40 covers and hundreds of cartoons. 

While at The New Yorker, he also wrote and illustrated more than two dozen children's books — many reflecting happenings in his own life. “I wrote ‘Leo the Late Bloomer’ when I was having business problems,” he said. “I tend to write about problems — ‘Miranda's Beautiful Dream' was inspired by Martin Luther King.”

He wrote "Junior" and the "Spoiled Cat" to keep himself calm when his wife, Pamela, was in labor and he couldn't reach the doctor. 

He left The New Yorker in 1966 and founded Windmill Books, which published not only his own titles but also the work of such illustrators and authors as Jacob Lawrence, Whitney Darrow Jr., Edward Koren, Norman Rockwell, Mickey Spillane, William Steig, and Charles Addams. Within a year, the house had won a Caldecott Medal and over the years, published more than 200 titles on three continents. 

Kraus was known for his sense of humor. In the early 1980s, he wrote "101 Reasons Not to Have Sex Tonight" under the name, I.M. Potent, M.D., whom Simon & Schuster touted as "one of the leading authorities in the world today on not having sex." 

In 1983 he began a syndicated Sunday comic feature, called "Zap! The Video Chap," that was aimed at children addicted to the then-new phenomenon of video games. 

However, his main interest was always in children's books. "I never slant my books to children," he said in 1979. "My books are not sickening, cloyingly sweet, and they have a point. I'm not a person who likes to write a lot, and children's books are the ideal forum for my ideas." 

Among his last titles were "Mouse in Love," published by Orchard Books, and "Little Louis,

The Baby Bloomer," published by Harper Collins, both in 2000. Many of his books are still in print in 2016. 

The Krauses moved to Ridgefield in 1965, owning the 1896 Colonial Revival house at the southeast corner of Main Street and Branchville Road. Walking his pug named Hoover and carrying a shillelagh, he was a familiar sight along Main Street sidewalks for many years. 

He and his wife moved to New York City in the late 1980s, but "he always considered Ridgefield his home," one of his sons said. 

He died 2001 at a nursing home in Kent, Conn., at the age of 76. He is buried in Fairlawn Cemetery in Ridgefield beneath a stone that includes an illustration from his series of books about a character named Spider, with such titles as "How Spider Saved Santa Bug" and "How Spider Stopped the Litterbugs."

Maurice Sendak: 

The Wild Things

When he moved to Ridgefield in 1972, Maurice Sendak had lived in New York City all his life, and had never needed a car.

“I’m a 44-year-old neurotic who just learned to drive,” he told a Ridgefield Press reporter sent to interview him that year. “Maybe you should warn them that I drive a green Plymouth.”

Six years later, as another reporter arrived to interview him, he asked apprehensively: “You’re not going to take pictures, are you? That means I’m going to have to shave. The guy who writes the kiddie books can’t have his picture taken if he doesn’t shave first.”

They were examples of the dry sense of humor of a man whose visions of fanged but eventually friendly monsters sparked a revolution in children’s literature. 

For more than 60 years — 40 of them in Ridgefield, Maurice Sendak wrote and illustrated books that have entertained children and adults alike, and challenged established ideas about what children’s books should be. The New York Times once said  Sendak’s work “has brought a new dimension to the American children's book and helped change how people visualize childhood.”

His more than 80 titles had sold over seven million copies worldwide in a dozen languages

by the year 2000. They included such classics as “In the Night Kitchen,” “Outside Over There,” and his most famous work, “Where the Wild Things Are.”

Maurice Bernard Sendak was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., in 1928 to Eastern European immigrants. He spent much of his childhood in bed, suffering from a variety of illnesses.
The family didn’t have much money and he didn’t have many friends besides his brother and sister. “He was an outsider at birth, as Christians nearby would remind him, throwing dirt and rocks at him as he left Hebrew school,” the Associated Press reported.

A gifted storyteller, his father entertained the children with often disturbing tales of the old country that frequently ended unhappily.

“These were the stories he told us before we went to bed,”  Sendak said. “No wonder I’m an insomniac. I didn’t know these stories were considered intensely inappropriate for children until I repeated them in school and was sent home to have my mouth washed out.

“Up until my generation, there was a soft innocence, a sweetness in books for children, which I thought was inappropriate. It had nothing to do with my childhood or other people’s as I saw it.”

Sendak’s experience growing up as a poor Jew in Brooklyn during the Holocaust profoundly influenced his life and work. The monsters in “Where the Wild Things Are” were inspired by relatives who’d fled the Nazis and come to live with his family in New York.
“They are my uncles and aunts, who poked us, pinched us, said absurd, patronizing things to us, took up all the room, ate up all the food,” he said.

As a boy Sendak read extensively, drew comic strips, and illustrated his older brother’s stories. He didn’t go to college and worked at a variety of odd jobs until he was hired in 1948 by the famous toy store, FAO Schwarz, as a window dresser. 

He studied at the Art Students League and was only 19 when he illustrated his first book, “Atomics for the Millions,” in 1947 (he did the book for his physics teacher in exchange for a passing grade and a small fee). However, later in life, Sendak confessed, “I was a very late bloomer as an artist. My students, at age 21, are much better technically than I was at their age.”

His break came in 1951 when he was commissioned to do the art for “Wonderful Farm” by Marcel Ayme. By 1957 he was writing his own books.

His many awards include the 1964 Caldecott Medal for the most notable picture book of the year. In 1970, he became the only 20th Century American to receive the Hans Christian Andersen Award in recognition of his entire body of work. In 1997, President Clinton awarded him a National Medal of the Arts in recognition of his contribution to the arts in America.

In 2009 President Obama read “Where the Wild Things Are” for the White House Easter Egg Roll. Yet, when it first appeared in 1963, “Wild Things” was greeted with as much controversy as acclaim. Many parents, teachers and librarians considered the story and artwork too scary for children. Some even thought the book could be psychologically damaging because young Max’s mother deserts him and he’s sent to bed to confront his nightmares alone.

But many child psychologists said the book helped express hidden childhood fears. 

The traditional Dick and Jane were no match for Sendak’s naughty Max, an AP writer said. “His kids misbehaved and didn’t regret it, and in their dreams and nightmares fled to the most unimaginable places.” Monstrous creatures were devised from his studio, but none more frightening than the grownups in his stories. 

“From their earliest years, children live on familiar terms with disrupting emotions — fear and anxiety are an intrinsic part of their everyday lives, they continually cope with frustrations as best they can,”  Sendak said when he received the Caldecott Medal in 1964. “And it is through fantasy that children achieve catharsis. It is the best means they have for taming wild things.”

In 1978, his curmudgeonly side came out a bit as he told Burt Kearns of The Ridgefield Press: “I love as few children as I do adults. I don’t feel that I write for kids. I happen to write books that are seen as being meant for kids because I create talking animals and things like that. But my books are not children’s books any more than any other book is. I just can’t write in any other vein.”

He described his simple style as “a poetic book form. That’s the only form I’m interested in. There is a beauty in the short text poem. I try to keep it potent, short, and full of energy. The reason that children understand it is because they have no fear of symbolic language — they can grasp things. They never feel lost in something unless it’s meaningless, and then they just throw it off into a corner. Adults are afraid to do that because they have too many self doubts in enjoyment when they should be going by instinct.”

“There is a magic in childhood,” he said, “but I like to think that there is the possibility of something magical in every human being. We just allow it more in childhood.”

He added that he didn’t take a condescending approach to children, nor did he attempt to moralize. “Who am I to teach or preach?” he asked. “I aid and assist.”

He bought his 18th Century house on Chestnut Hill Road in an out-of-the-way part of Ridgebury because “I wanted the experience of working in a different place,” he said six years later. 

“My first experience of really being in the country was when I spent a wonderful summer  in Wales. That was very fruitful for me. When I was in my twenties, most of my vacations were spent in Cornwall. They were the best summers of my life. So when I was looking for a place to live, my first indication was to look around here. But I was really attracted to the house, and the house was attached to Ridgefield.”

He said “I don’t think that living in Ridgefield has actually influenced my art, but I guess that as I get older, my work will become more pastoral.”

Over the years his work expanded into the worlds of opera and ballet; he’s designed sets and costumes for several successful productions, including an opera of “Where the Wild Things Are,” which was also made into a movie.

He believed his art had always been deeply connected to the music he enjoyed. 

“Designing for operas is as close as I can get to pretending that I’m a musician,” he said at the time.

Sendak was a mentor to many.  Jamison Odone, a former Ridgefielder, was among the illustrators who felt his mentoring, inspirational influence. 

“I don’t think there are many people made like him anymore,” said Odone, who is now a university professor as well as a children’s book author and illustrator. “There were so many times he’d say to me, ‘I don't even know what I’m teaching you, if anything at all.’ But he didn’t have to be teaching. Just talking to him, and looking at his work — he moved so many.” 

Lynn Caponera, his longtime assistant, helper and friend, said years with  Sendak shaped her way of looking at the world. “Maurice has a way of mentoring people,” she said. “You couldn’t do anything without seeing an artistic side to it, with Maurice. He made sure you felt good about everything you did. If you were painting a wall or weeding — anything you were doing, whether you’d think it was a mundane task — he had a way of making you see it wasn’t mundane.”

Sendak established a program for children’s book authors and illustrators, published or unpublished, in which selected artists would live next door to his house and he would mentor their work. 

“It’s a very low key, loose relationship,” Caponera said in 2012. “That was really Maurice’s legacy of the last few years. He wanted to foster children’s book authors to keep doing what they do.”

In his final years, Sendak would often say he didn’t mind being old because the young were under so much pressure. He would speak about death and missing his late siblings and his longtime partner, Dr. Eugene Glynn, a children’s psychiatrist who died in 2009.

When he was 50 years old, Sendak told interviewer Kearns that he never planned to retire from writing and illustrating. “I’ll stop when I die,” he said. “But who knows? Maybe when I’m 65, the publishing world will decide to retire me and give me a Mickey Mouse watch. I’d like that, but I already have one.”

A few months before he died, he said, “I want to be alone and work until the day my head hits the drawing table and I’m dead — kaput.”  

Death, he said, meant “everything is over. Everything that I called living is over ... I don’t believe in heaven or hell or any of those things. I feel very much like I want to be with my brother and sister again. They’re nowhere. I know they’re nowhere and they don’t exist, but if nowhere means that’s where they are, that’s where I want to be.”

Sendak, who had been in poor health for several years, died of a stroke in 2012. He was 83 and had never stopped working. 

After his death the Maurice Sendak Foundation, which handles his estate, announced plans for a Sendak museum somewhere in Ridgefield. In 2015, there was talk of locating the museum in a former Schlumberger Research Center building on Sunset Lane that had been designed by the noted architect Philip Johnson. 

However, in January 2016, the foundation decided not to use the Johnson building and said it

would look elsewhere. In July it got zoning approval for an art storage building on Sendak’s 17-acre homesite. It allows the foundation to host up to six visitors once a week to do research. The building, holding Sendak’s drawings and artwork, was to be attached to the existing house.

A month later, a stretch of Route 35, Danbury Road, from Limestone Road north to Route 7, was officially designated the Maurice Sendak Memorial Highway. The designation was the result of efforts started by Jake Madeson when he was a sophomore at Ridgefield High School and fostered by State Rep. John Frey. 

“I wanted something that told every traveler who passes through town how much he meant to our town,”  said Madeson, a Sendak fan since he was a small child reading “Where the Wild Things Are.”

“That book was everything to me growing up,” he said.