Dick’s Dispatch #84

A History of A Little Dog

By Richard E. Venus

Economic laws can be very interesting when used to compare one era with another, or comparative prices in volume purchasing. The fact that coffee may cost $2 per pound does not mean that two pounds will cost $4 or less. Sometimes the two-pound can will cost more per pound.

Something like that applies to the barber trade. In the 20’s, when the population of Ridgefield was about 2,700, our tonsorial needs were administered by seven or eight barbers, working out of four or five barber shops. Since our population today is in the neighborhood of 22,000 to 23,000, it may be assumed that it would require more than 30 barber shops and some 60 barbers to keep us well trimmed. The last time I looked, there were less now than there were in the 20’s. Perhaps visits to the barber shop have become less frequent.

In the mid 20’s, a Mexican, whose name was Mike, opened a shop where the Candlelight Shoppe is now. He had two barbers working for him and one of them had a marked resemblance to the reigning cowboy movie star and was promptly dubbed “Hoot Gibson.”

At the time “Baldy” had his barbershop in the large three-story building where the Ridgefield Savings Bank in now. The venerable Conrad Rockelein had his shop across the street, over S. D. Keeler’s Store. 

Con moved his shop around quite a bit. He was a very good barber but it always seemed like you had to go looking for him. He was still cutting hair in his 80’s, at his home on the corner of Mountain View Avenue, and Danbury Road.

Mike Massamino had his shop at 3½ Catoonah Street where J. R. Interiors is now. Mike had a Charlie Chaplin-type mustache. He even looked very much like the “Little Tramp,” but no one ever called him Charlie.

Mike was a nice little guy and a good barber. However, he was the victim of hard times and experienced great difficulty in keeping his bills paid. I had a rather extensive newspaper and magazine route at the time and he was one of my customers. One time his bill got to be what was considered a rather large amount by the standards of the time. Mike offered to give me a dog in payment of the bill. Further negotiations looked hopeless and I reluctantly agreed to the settlement.

I had never seen the dog and did not know what to expect. The next time I went to the shop, Mike had a little white poodle waiting for me.

Daisy was a rather forlorn little bundle of white curls that were heavily infiltrated with burrs and nettles of all kinds. She was the albino type and her little pink eyes always seemed to be running. Mike had her tied with a rope that could have moored the Queen Elizabeth II.

In those days, a toy poodle was not considered the proper dog for a boy and I was thinking that I would be the butt of considerable kidding. All of this, plus her bedraggled appearance made me want to reconsider our agreement and I felt like backing out of the deal. However, it looked like my only opportunity to settle the bill so I finally left the shop with Daisy in tow.

When Daisy and I finished the route and arrived home, there was a lot of explaining to do. The first order of business was to make Daisy a little more presentable. My father was experienced in removing burrs from horses’ tails by using kerosene to make them slip along the hair. He helped me and we finally got the last one off the little dog, though the tight curls made it difficult.

After a bath that Daisy seemed to fully appreciate, we started the business of becoming friends. She followed me around each time, on my route and got to be a well-known fixture.

A year or so later, my brother Gus got married and I had nothing else to give him and Stella for a wedding present, so I presented them with Daisy. They lived on Market Street in a garage apartment at the rear of the Main Street home of Dr. William H. Allee (now the office of the D.N.A.) The building has since been moved further down Market Street and converted into a large home.

A year or so later, Daisy had four, very cute, little brown and white pups. Gus gave one of them to George G. Scott, who was then both town clerk and judge of probate. “Tippy” probably became one of the best known dogs in Ridgefield. She used to accompany Judge Scott each day to the town hall. They fixed a little window box for Tippy and she sat in the front window of the town clerk’s office for years and never missed a day. She yelped each time that someone came to the door and then would jump down to meet the visitor. She was a very friendly little thing and I guess you could say she was the official greeter.

In the meantime, Ridgefield’s dog population increased much more rapidly that did that of the humans, as Daisy continued to have puppies and her puppies began to have puppies. By now they began to increase in size and came in various colors.

In the 30’s Eddie Schmidt had one of the pups and in the 40’s Peter Edel had another of the offspring. Peter lived with his mother in the Ashland Cottage, at 321 Main Street, where the Hess family now makes their home.

By now the dogs, through the generations, had increased in size to that of a large springer spaniel. When Peter’s dog, Queenie, decided to join the production line, she had a litter under the kitchen floor. The year was 1948 and there was no basement under the kitchen at that time.

Queenie would crawl out to eat, but never brought the pups with her. They must have been about two weeks old when I brought them out to face the world. They were a nice shiny black and you could see they were going to be big dogs.

A couple of months later, the Knights of Columbus was having a carnival and a crisis developed when they ran out of prizes. I remembered the puppies and mentioned them to John Bacchiochi. Johnny took off for the Edel’s home and bought the litter. When he returned with the puppies, there was a great joy among young and old alike, and the games went on with renewed interest.

When our family moved to its Olmstead Lane home in 1951, we found that the John Moore family next door had one of these puppies. It was now as big as a small black pony. Peter Carboni had one and so did Joe Sheehy. They must have all been males so the lineage that started with a little white poodle, some 30 years before, had come to an end, as far as we know.

Mike Massamino sold that barber shop to Andrew Geria. Andy’s wife was a beautician and was herself, a beauty. They were great dancers and it was a great pleasure to see them glide over the floor at the many dances we used to have. After a few years they moved to Croton Falls, N.Y., and in 1937,  invented a therapeutic device for use in beauty shops and by chiropractors. Andy and Mary had the gadget patented and I guess it is still in use today.

The Gerias sold their business to Paul Laszig, who did his barbering there for many years. Paul made a sizable fortune in the stock market, by listening to advice from his customers; one of which was Philip D. Wagoner [head of the Underwood typewriter company].

Mrs. Laszig, who died only a few years ago, was kind enough to leave a portion of that fortune, in trust, for worthwhile organizations like Meals on Wheels.

(NOTE: Dick Venus, who became Ridgefield’s first town historian, wrote 365 “Dick’s Dispatch” columns for the Ridgefield Press, telling about life in Ridgefield during the first half of the 20th Century. This column appeared Jan. 5, 1984. We plan to publish many of them on Old Ridgefield in the coming months — and, probably, years.)

The Mugavero Family: 

A Tonsorial Dynasty

Theirs is a dynasty of haircutting expertise. For nearly a century, members of the Mugavero family have been cutting the hair of Ridgefielders. But their tonsorial tradition goes back long before they came to Ridgefield.

In 1891, a young man named Pietro Mugavero came to this country from Italy and soon established his own barber shop in Brooklyn, N.Y., and soon a second shop in Manhattan.

There is a belief in the family that Pietro’s father back in Italy may have been a barber and perhaps even earlier generations practiced the profession.

In 1900 Pietro or “Peter” married Agatha Vitali, also from Italy, and two years later, Vincent was born. In 1904, Jerome “Jerry” Mugavero arrived. 

Vincent graduated from Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute in 1924 and decided to enter the profession of his father. He eventually moved to Norwalk where he had relatives, and then, in 1931, he bought the Ridgefield Tonsorial Parlor on the east side of Main Street north of Bailey Avenue. He was soon joined by his younger brother, Jerry.

In 1938, Vincent decided on a change of careers. He left barbering and, with his wife Bernice,  eventually opened the B-V Ranch restaurant on Route 7, just north of Topstone Road. (After he retired around 1962, the restaurant became The Alibi, which burned down in the 1970s. The site is now an empty, reforested lot.)

Vincent was active in the community, serving on the Board of Assessors, the Republican Town Committee, and as a volunteer fireman for more than a half century. He lived in Ridgefield for 37 years and then moved to Redding where he was also involved in community service. 

Vincent died in 1987 at the age of 84. Bernice had died in 1961; his second wife, Mary Kovacs, survived him.

Meanwhile, after Vincent left the business, Jerry Mugavero continued the Ridgefield Tonsorial Parlor with Francis Sansevieri, but in 1950, the two split up and Jerry opened his own business, Jerry’s Barber Shop in the Masonic Building. He eventually took on a partner, Mike Pontello — Mike was married to Jerry’s daughter, Agatha, better known as “Tina” (the flagpole in front of town hall is a memorial to Tina Mugavero Pontello, a gift to the town from her husband.)  Mike Pontello took over the Main Street shop when Jerry retired in 1970 after 50 years as a barber. 

Although he worked in the center of town, Jerry lived in Branchville (his house at 25 Ethan Allen Highway is still standing, used today as offices for American Irrigation Systems). Active in the Branchville community, Jerry was a founding member of the Branchville Civic Association, which built the ballfield on Playground Road; served as an auxiliary state policeman; was a member of the Board of Assessors and the Branchville School Building Committee; and was a president of the Italian-American Mutual Aid Society. He died in 1988 at the age of 83.

Jerry’s son, Peter, began barbering with his dad in the late 1950s, but in 1961, he established his own Peter’s Barber Shop in the Ancona shopping plaza. He then moved to nearby 33 Ethan Allen Highway — just north of his parents’ house. There, he renamed the business, “Peter’s Mane Concern.” Peter retired in 2005 and with his wife, Leslie, moved to Florida where they live today.

But that’s hardly the end of the Mugavero tonsorial dynasty. In the 1990s, Peter’s daughter, Linda Mugavero Morganti, began working alongside her dad at Peter’s Mane Concern. When her father retired, Linda took over the business and today operates the  shop, appropriately named “The Barber’s Daughter,” at 723 Branchville Road.

She is the fourth generation in America and the third generation in Ridgefield to practice the profession.

Conrad Rockelein,

90-Hour Weeks

Conrad Rockelein was the epitome of the hard-working immigrant, a man who spent years of 90-hour weeks at his craft of haircutting. But his legacy to Ridgefield is not old pictures of ancestors who are well-coiffed, but one of Ridgefield’s first “neighborhoods.”

Rockelein was born in Germany in 1867, came to this country at the age of 14, and spent most of his life in Ridgefield.

On April 22, 1889, when Rockelein put up his first barber’s pole on Main Street, old “Doc” Reynolds was operating the only other barber shop in Ridgefield. But, according to newsman and historian Karl S. Nash, “Doc liked to go fishing and he closed his shop most any time he thought the fish would be biting. So his new competitor wasn’t long in getting his shop on a good paying basis.”

“Back in 1889, I opened my shop at 7 a.m. and stayed at my chair until 9 p.m. every day except Saturday when the shop was open till midnight,” he told The Ridgefield Press in 1940. “And then I was on the job also from 7 a.m. to noon on Sunday. 

“The price of a haircut in those days was 25 cents. A shave cost 10 cents, or 15 cents with bay rum.”

His business grew quickly and was prospering when the Great Fire of 1895 burned down most of the commercial section of town, including Rockelein’s shop. “But the embers had hardly cooled before he was temporarily set up for business again in the back room of Will Benedict’s Store,” Nash wrote.

Soon he had a shop running over where Deborah Ann’s Sweet Shoppe is now and in the years that followed, he moved to various locations around the village, including his own home  (from 1900 to 1908, he was in ill health — possibly due to those 90-plus hour weeks of work —  and mostly retired from barbering).

In 1938 when he observed his 50th year in business, Rockelein estimated he had performed 20,000 haircuts, but he would not venture a guess on the number of shaves. He finally retired in 1945.

Rockelein lived on Mountain View Avenue, in a sizable neighborhood he himself subdivided. In fact, he could be considered one of Ridgefield’s first developers. 

By 1910, he had acquired 19.4 acres of hayfield which he laid out into 75-by-250 foot lots.  A new subdivision plan, filed in 1927, called the neighborhood Mountain View Park and named its three roads Island Hill Avenue, Hillsdale "Street" and Mountain View Avenue.
He felt his development would serve many of the immigrant Italian, German and Irish families that had been coming to town and were becoming prosperous enough to build houses of their own. 

He named the development for its views of Titicus Mountain to the west and Copps Mountain to the north — views obscured today by trees that have been planted and have matured since Rockelein bought the treeless hayfield.

Despite all his work, Rockelein found time to be active in the Jesse Lee Methodist Church, where he was a steward, trustee and treasurer. He also belonged to the Masons.

He died in 1954 at the age of 87.

Michael Pontello: 

In Love with Ridgefield

"I love my life," Mike Pontello told a friend one day in 1999. "I love what I'm doing. I love Ridgefield. To me, Ridgefield is a romance." 

And to Ridgefield, Pontello was for years a one-man cheering squad, a smiling face who daily to promote the village —- right down to building dozens of storefront flower boxes and trash-can housings that used to line the street. 

"I'll do all I can to keep Main Street afloat," he said when times for the business district were tougher than they are now. 

Michael R. Pontello was born in 1931 but was orphaned as a boy and grew up with a family in Norwalk. He served with the Army in Korea (where he was injured by shrapnel). 

In 1955 he met Ridgefield native Agatha Mugavero and they were married a year later. 

Pontello attended barber school in New York City, and went to work for his father-in-law, Jerry Mugavero, at Jerry's Barber Shop on Main Street. He took over the business in 1970 when  Mugavero retired. 

An avid fisherman, he wrote a fishing column for The Ridgefield Press in the 1960s, always ending it, “Take a kid fishing.” In the 1980s, he began making colorful wooden toys and signs at the shop, and many of his creations have been donated to beautification efforts and for fund-raising campaigns. 

Active in town, he was a member of the Ridgefield Downtown Council and volunteered to maintain the flowers and greens within downtown Ridgefield. He was a member of the Ridgefield Volunteer Fire Department and the fire police, belonged to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, Italian American Mutual Aid Society, and the Masons, and was a volunteer with Meals on Wheels. "Volunteering, it's very important," he once said. "Without volunteers you'd have nothing."

In 1990, he contributed the new town hall flagpole in memory of his wife, who had just died. 

He received many honors, among them the Chamber of Commerce Public Service Award in the 1980s. In 1991, Rotary named him Citizen of the Year. "The achievements and deeds of Mike are to known to anyone who has any appreciation of the aesthetic side of the community," said Dr. David E. Weingast, former school superintendent, at the Rotary awards banquet. "Artifice and phoniness are alien to Mike (who) has a very great love of other human beings. He's impelled to conduct good deeds." 

He also loved to talk. "Knowing Mike for five minutes meant you knew where Michael stood on damn near everything that's important,” said John Katz, who conversed with Pontello nearly every morning at the Early Bird Cafe.

In 2000, recognizing a need and seeing the right person for it, the town hired Pontello as the part-time caretaker of the village sidewalks. He continued in that job even when he began dealing with the cancer that would kill him.

To help with the costs of his illness, friends and business neighbors of his Main Street barbershop organized a ‘We Like Mike' benefit chicken dinner at the Italian Club that drew so many people it ran out of chicken. Even as he was in chemotherapy he could be seen out weeding and watering flowers on the Main Street that for years he'd cared for as if it were his own garden.

In an interview shortly before his death in 2003, when he knew his days were numbered, he told a reporter, “You roll with the punches. You know what? You’ve got to take what you’ve got.  You can’t feel sorry for yourself.” 

As for the years of cancer treatment he had endured, “The doctors are doctors — they’re not God,” he said, adding, “Enjoy what’s above ground, because some day you’ll be under it."

The outpouring of support had touched him. "People are wonderful," he said. "I never realized how much I was liked, what an impact I had."

Mike Pontello added, "I'm going to miss this town when I go.” 

Paul and Johanna Laszig: 

Surprise Philanthropists

A man who listened to advice and a woman who was grateful for help were behind a generous philanthropic effort. Since the early 1980s, the Paul and Johanna Laszig Fund for the Elderly has distributed more than one million dollars to help Ridgefield’s seniors.

 Paul Laszig was born in Gonswen, East Prussia (now Poland), in 1900. After learning the trade of a barber, he emigrated to Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1923. After only three years there, he decided to come to the United States, arriving in 1926 and living in New York City. There, in 1932, he married Irmgard Johanna Heine, who had been born in 1892 in Dresden, Saxony, which was later part of East Germany. She had come to the United States two years earlier to work as a maid. 

The same year they were married, the Laszigs moved to Ridgefield.

For 33 years Paul Laszig operated The Modern Barber Shop on Catoonah Street, about opposite where the telephone building is today. The couple rented on Gilbert Street for many years before building a house at 245 West Lane (torn down around 2007 to make way for a more elaborate house).

On Wednesdays, when his shop was closed, Paul Laszig would visit the homes of some of

the area’s wealthy and powerful men to cut their hair. In the process, he’d pick up their advice on smart investments, in stocks or real estate. Among his clients were former U.S. Vice President Henry Wallace of South Salem, Ingersoll-Rand Chairman George Doubleday of Ridgefield, Underwood typewriter chief Philip Wagoner of Ridgefield, and pollster Elmo Roper of Redding. “Paul, like most barbers, was a good conversationalist, but more important, he was a good listener,” said town historian Dick Venus.

Laszig retired in 1965 after 51 years of cutting hair. He died in 1974 at the age of 74. 

After Johanna died in 1980 at the age of 87, it was revealed that she had left an estate worth around $1.4 million, most of which was investments her husband had made thanks to his Wednesday clippings.

In her will Johanna bequeathed a share of her estate to create a fund to benefit the elderly. In her later years, she had had difficulty walking and was eventually wheelchair-bound. Friends speculated that the assistance she received from organizations such as Meals on Wheels and the District Nursing Association (now Visiting Nurse Association) helped inspire her to create the fund.

The will specified that the trust fund would aid elderly Ridgefielders “including, but not limited to, providing them with housing, medical assistance, transportation, food, or other  services for their general welfare in order that they may live out the remainder of their lives in dignity.”

The estate took more than two years to settle, delayed partly because the main portion of the bequests was left to five of Mrs. Laszig’s relatives in East Germany including a cousin and a nephew. Since East Germany was a communist country,  the will stipulated that if  “for any reason whatsoever, including but not limited to the law or policy of the government of East Germany,” the German beneficiaries would not receive the money left to them, that money would go to the fund for the elderly.

Union Trust Company, the bank that through several mergers is now Wells Fargo, was in charge of the trust. Attorney John E. Dowling, representing the bank and the trust, questioned whether the money should be sent to East Germany because most of it would wind up in the hands of the communist government there.

Dowling and the bank’s senior trust officer flew to West Germany to meet with a lawyer the East German heirs had hired. They negotiated an agreement in which the East Germans would receive 65% of the investments instead of all of it. The Laszig Fund would get the remaining 35% plus the $100,000 from the sale of the house. Thus, the fund was set up with around $371,000 instead of $100,000. In today’s dollars, that’s $935,000 vs. $252,000 — well worth the trip to Germany.

 Each year the fund provides an average of six grants to nonprofit organizations and efforts helping Ridgefielders who are 62 years old or older. Grants range from $1,000 to $25,000, and total around $50,000 — although some years, as much as $59,000 has been distributed.

Among the efforts the fund has recently help support  are the fitness program at Founders Hall, the work of the town’s Commission on Aging, and buying large-print and audio books for the Ridgefield Library. Groups getting aid also include the Ridgefield Community Center, the town’s Social Services Department, Meals on Wheels, and the Ridgefield Visiting Nurse Association.

In 1983, the fund gave out $25,000 in grants — equivalent to about $61,000 in today’s money. So far over the years, it has distributed more than $1 million to aid the elderly of Ridgefield. The fund itself, which began at $371,000, has grown over the years and now has assets worth just over $1 million.

“I think Mrs. Laszig will be remembered for a long time for her generosity to agencies like Meals on Wheels,” said Romeo G. Petroni, who had been Mrs. Laszig’s attorney when her will was draw up. “Her memory and Paul’s memory will long survive — after we’re all gone — for the good they’ve done.”