The Revs. Leete:  In the Pulpit, 
Before the Class, On the Links

Two leaders in the Congregational Church — father and son — are buried together in the Ridgefield Cemetery.  Descendants of an unusual pioneer and tied to three Connecticut governors, both were accomplished ministers in different realms, and one was even a champion golfer.

William White Leete was born in Windsor, Conn., in 1854, a fifth grandson of William Leete, one of the earliest settlers in Connecticut and the only one to govern both of its colonies. Born around 1613 in Huntingdonshire, England, the progenitor William Leete became a lawyer, serving the bishop of Cambridge at a court that was investigating and prosecuting Puritans. Leete wound up agreeing with the people he was supposed to prosecute, became a Puritan himself,  emigrated to the New World in 1639, and was one of the founders of the town of Guilford, Conn. He later served as governor of the New Haven Colony and after that colony merged with the Connecticut Colony in 1664, he was elected governor of Connecticut from 1676 until his death in 1683.

Great-great-great-great-great grandson William W. Leete graduated from Amherst and like many of his ancestors, went to Yale where he earned a degree in divinity in 1880. He then continued his studies at Yale’s graduate school. In 1882, he accepted a call to the First Congregational Church in Ridgefield, his first pastorate.

Here he immediately faced a major challenge. The old “meeting house” on the green, built 80 years earlier, was falling apart and the congregation needed a new and larger church. Under his leadership, the congregation came up with a plan to build a new edifice west of the existing one — near where Jesse Lee Memorial United Methodist Church is today. Neighbors objected, however, and the plan was abandoned. 

Henry King McHarg, a wealthy parishioner and descendant of an early Ridgefield minister of the church, came to the rescue, donating land at Main Street and West Lane for the new building, which was erected in 1888 under Leete’s tenure. But on his second Sunday in the brand new church, Mr. Leete gave his farewell sermon — he had taken a pastorate in Rockford, Ill., (the third Ridgefield minister to go there). 

After a decade of pastoral work and perhaps influenced by his experiences in Ridgefield, he spent 25 years as the New England secretary for the Congregational Church Building Society, and then another 10 years as editorial and field secretary of the Congregational Church Extension Board. In both capacities, he helped local congregations build new churches.

While in Ridgefield, Rev. Leete had a rather unusual interest for a 19th Century clergyman: He played baseball. “He was considered a good baseballist,” The Ridgefield Press reported at the time. And the newspaper should have known — Leete played for the Press’s own team in the 1880s. 

Later in life, he became a champion golfer; for five consecutive years he won the Class A trophy for players 75 or older at the United States Golf Association tournament in Rye, N.Y. The New York Times reported that “he also excelled as a skater.”

During his pastorate here, Leete met and fell in love with Ann Eliza Rockwell — two of whose uncles, George and Phineas Lounsbury, became, like William’s ancestor, Connecticut governors. The marriage explains why, after he died in 1946 at the age of 91, he was buried in the Lounsbury section of the Ridgefield Cemetery. It also explains the name of their son,  the Rev. William Rockwell Leete, born in Ridgefield in 1886, who is buried alongside his parents at the Lounsbury Cemetery.

The younger Leete had a rather exotic career, including two years’ imprisonment. After graduating from Yale in 1908, he earned a degree in divinity from Union Theological Seminary and by 1912, was in China, working as a missionary. He spent much of his life there, including many years as a professor at the Nanking Theological Seminary in Shanghai. He also earned a doctorate in divinity during a sabbatical in the U.S.

In 1941, he was arrested by conquering Japanese soldiers, and held in a Shanghai prison camp until 1943 when his release was finally secured. He immediately headed home, only to learn that, while he had been imprisoned, his son, Lt. Jonathan Leete of the Army Air Force, had gone missing in action in the Middle East. Lt. Leete was never found.

After the war, Dr. Leete returned to teaching in China. He was forced back to the States when the communists began taking over the country. He died in Michigan in 1952.

Being fifth and sixth great-grandchildren of Gov. William Leete put the two ministers in some unusual company. Another fifth great-grandchild was John Brown, the abolitionist whose body lay “moldering in the grave” after being executed for his raid on Harpers Ferry.

Financier J.P. Morgan, one of the richest men in the world in his time, was a sixth great grandson. Even stars of stage and screen have been in the clan. Film actor Humphrey Bogart was a seventh great-grandson. A ninth great-grandson is TV comic/actor Ed Helms from The Daily Show and The Office, who was also the voice for animated films of the Lorax and, err, Captain Underpants (what would the Revs. Leete think of that?).

Roger Kahn: 

A Boy Of Summer

Roger Kahn’s 1972 bestselling book about the Brooklyn Dodgers was so famous that when New York Governor George Pataki created a commission in 1997 to explore bringing the Dodgers back to Brooklyn, he named Kahn a member. 

The Boys of Summer, which had led the New York Times bestseller list for weeks, told the story of the 1950s Dodgers. Called by James Michener “the finest American book on sports,” it sold hundreds of thousands of copies and is still in print. In 2002, it was ranked #2 on Sports Illustrated’s list of the best 100 sports books of all time  (A.J. Liebling’s The Sweet Science, about boxing, was #1.)

Roger Kahn was born in Brooklyn in 1927 to a trivia-loving father who provided questions for the radio quiz show, “Information Please,” and a baseball-hating mother who taught her son poetry and Shakespeare. Both were teachers.

In the early 1950s he quit New York University after three years to join The New York Herald Tribune as a copy boy (he admitted to Ridgefield Press reporter Linette Burton that he got the job “by using a clever device, which was: my father knew the managing editor.”). 

At the age of 24, he was assigned to cover the Dodgers. “It was a rich time in the game’s history, especially in New York, the undisputed center of the baseball universe, home to three teams and three perfervid fan bases,” said The New York Times.

He spent two years reporting on the Dodgers and was then assigned to cover New York Giants’ baseball.

In the mid-1950s, he left the Herald Tribune to work as a sports editor for Newsweek, and to freelance for Sports Illustrated, The Saturday Evening Post and Esquire.  By the 1960s he was writing books on religion and sociology, including The Passionate People: What It Means to Be A Jew in America. 

Then came The Boys of Summer, the first of what was to be many books about sports and sporting personalities, but clearly, the best of them all.  The Times called it “as influential a baseball book as has been written in the last 50 years,” but Sports Illustrated qualified that, terming it “A baseball book the same way ‘Moby-Dick’ is a fishing book.”

The Boys of Summer was coming out  just as Kahn was moving to 830 North Salem Road in 1971, and the promotional tours and interviews that the book prompted made writing tough. 

“Each day I keep kicking the wastebasket and beating my brains to get out one page a day,” he told Nelson Merrell of The Press in June 1972. 

During a long promotional-tour period, Kahn was twice interviewed on the TV show of future Ridgefielder Dick Cavett, but he most remembered being terrified by having to appear on Johnny Carson’s show, knowing that Carson liked clever “one-liners” from his guests. “Nervous as hell on the night of the show, I got called to go on,” he told Merrell. “After the introduction, I sat down and Carson asked, ‘How’s it feel to be an instant smash?’ Then I delivered my rehearsed reply, ‘Better than a shot in the mouth.’” 

While in Ridgefield he also did a stint as a visiting professor of creative writing at Colorado College. He moved back to the city around 1976.

Kahn went on to write more than 20 books — many still in print — including, 

• Rickey & Robinson: The True, Untold Story of the Integration of Baseball, an account of how his close friend, Jackie Robinson, got to be a Dodger.
• Memories of Summer: When Baseball Was an Art, and Writing About It a Game, with stories of his Depression-era childhood, his reporting career, and his personal acquaintances with many great ballplayers.
• October Men, about the 1978 Yankees championship season.
• The Head Game: Baseball Seen From the Pitcher’s Mound, examining the psychological battle between hitter and pitcher.
  
• Joe and Marilyn: A Memory of Love, about the marriage of Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe.
• Good Enough to Dream, covering the lives and hopes of players in the lower minor leagues 

Kahn died in February 2020 at the age of 92.

Over his years of covering the game, Roger Kahn made many friends among the old-time ballplayers but few were as close as Early Wynn, a hard-drinking, Hall of Fame pitcher who was a longtime Yankee nemesis.

In 1973 he told The Press’s Merrell that Wynn was a good writer who did a regular column for the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Editors at the Saturday Evening Post wanted Kahn to get his friend to write an article about the 1959 World Series between Chicago White Sox and the Los Angeles Dodgers (in which Wynn was 1-1). They offered Wynn $1,250.

Wynn did the piece but when the Post editors insisted on his rewriting it, the pitcher balked and told Kahn he wanted $1,500.

“I called the editors, told them Wynn wanted more money, and got him $2,000,” Kahn said. “He’s bought my drinks ever since.”

Edward Brolin:  

The Principal Who Pitched 

to ‘The Splendid Splinter’

Ed Brolin loved being a teacher and a principal. But get him talking about baseball and he sparkled. Brolin had, after all, come close to being a professional ball player and had — as a teenager — pitched to one of the greatest hitters of all time.

 A native of Boston, Edward M. Brolin was born  in 1930  and graduated from Bridgewater (Mass.) State Teachers College with a degree in biology, later earning a master's from Fairfield University. During the Korean War,  he served in the Marine Corps.

After a period of working as an insurance investigator in the Boston area, he turned to education and in 1963 took a job teaching biology at Ridgefield High School on East Ridge. 

“I came to Ridgefield because it was a good place to teach, to live and to raise my family,” he said in a 1990 interview. “I’ve never been sorry for that decision.”

In 1966,  Brolin was named the Jaycees “Outstanding Teacher of the Year.” He was elected president of the Ridgefield Teachers Association a year later. 

Brolin became chairman of the science department at Ridgefield High School in 1968.  Two years later, he was named assistant principal of the school, but only a few months after that appointment, he became principal of East Ridge Junior High School (today a middle school).

Brolin led the junior high for 13 years, including a difficult period in the 1970s when it was the most overcrowded school in the system — some 1,300 seventh and eighth graders were packed into a building designed for about 850. The school system had more than 6,000 students back then — the systemwide enrollment today is about 4,000. 

Because of his background as a teacher and administrator at the high school,   Brolin was named chairman of a committee that planned the use of the “new” high school that was about to open in 1972 on North Salem Road. He served on many other curriculum and administrative committees, and headed the Ridgefield Administrators Association for 10 years, often negotiating contracts. 

Around 1984, Brolin moved to the high school, serving as assistant principal until his retirement in 1990.

When he announced that retirement, he told an interviewer he felt the best part of his career was working with the students, parents and teachers. “Deep down,” he admitted, “I hope they’ll miss me just a little bit.”

“We’re going to miss him,”  said Guidance Counselor Arlene Heissan. Besides providing “the best advice,” she explained, “he cares about kids and the faculty.”

Ed Brolin died in 2002 at the age of 71. He and his wife Mary, a former elementary school teacher who died three years later, had lived on Walnut Grove Road where they raised three sons.

An avid sportsman and collector of sports memorabilia,  Brolin had been a top college baseball player who was once scouted by the Boston Red Sox. When he was still in high school in 1948, he was invited to a tryout with the Sox at Fenway Park. There, he was given the opportunity to pitch to Ted Williams. 

“He hit a couple that I think are still going,” Brolin said during a 1983 interview at a Ted Williams appearance in Greenwich. “But it’s something I’ll remember for the rest of his my life.”

He also remained a lifelong Sox fan.

In Ridgefield, Brolin shared with kids his love of baseball by serving as a coach in both Little League and Pony baseball. His first team, Ridgefield Savings Bank, became the undefeated Little League champion that year. 

Dino ‘Ching’ Cingolani: 

A Man of Mounds and Islands

Few today will remember his name, but time was in Ridgefield when Dino “Ching” Cingolani was almost revered among local  baseball fans. The Ridgefield native was wooed by several major league baseball teams for his pitching prowess, played in the minors, and was once praised by the New York Giants great, Carl Hubbell.

A Ridgefield native, Dino Vincent Cingolani was born in 1927, son of  Gino and Ida Pambianchi Cingolani. He grew up in the Branchville section of town and graduated in 1945 from Ridgefield High School. There, he had starred on the baseball team and helped lead it to conference championship — not only with his pitching, but with his .485 batting average.

The New York Giants, Brooklyn Dodgers and Philadelphia Nationals all offered him contracts to pitch. However, the 18-year-old chose to take a look at the Giants and, in 1946, headed off to training camp in Florida — on the train trip down, he played pinochle with stars Buddy Kerr, Mel Ott and Hal Schumacher.  

In camp he pitched against Bobby Thompson and others, with Carl Hubbell umpiring. Hubbell at one point declared that the Giants had  “another Bob Feller.”

However, after six weeks in camp, Cigolani returned to Branchville, having balked at signing a contract that the Giants had offered him. Meanwhile, Jack Barry,  coach at  Holy Cross College, offered him a scholarship to come to Worcester, Mass. Back in those days Holy Cross was a baseball powerhouse and had had more than 60 graduates who went into the majors. 

Cigolani thought it over and opted finally to sign with the Giants. He later said it was “a big mistake,” but didn’t explain why.

Starting in 1946, Cingolani played four seasons for the Giants' farm teams in such places as Erie, Springfield, Ogdensburg, and Peekskill with the likes of Hoyt Wilhelm and Bobby Thompson — taking a break to serve in the Army and then returning in 1952 to play at Knoxville. 

Over five seasons he compiled a record of 46 wins and 36 losses, with a batting average of .313. While playing for the Springfield Giants in 1947, he had his best hitting season, with a .347 average, but it was also his only losing season as a pitcher, 11-15.

In 1952, after a season with Knoxville, he decided to abandon minor league play, and return to Ridgefield where he pitched for local teams and in the Danbury City League for many years.  

When Cingolani was honored by the Ridgefield Old Timers Association in 1995, ROTA observed, “Chink would be the first to admit that he made some ill-timed and poor decisions along the way, undoubtedly blocking a sure road to the majors.” The association did not say what those decisions were.

Cingolani spent many years working as a foreman at the Perkin-Elmer Corp. in Norwalk, and then as a salesman.  In 1969 he and his wife, the former Alice Salvestrini, moved to Norwalk.  

Later in life Cingolani focused on his other favorite sport, fishing. He did a lot of it off the shore of Norwalk and he and Alice became very involved promoting public use of and camping on some of the wild Norwalk Islands — particularly Shea and Grassy Islands owned by the city. Alice Cingolani, in fact, was Norwalk’s “Island Warden.”

Adults, Dino told an interviewer in 1990, enjoy the fishing and the scenery, but it’s children who get the most out of the islands.

“You know what it does for them, to take them out, have them build a fire at night?” he said. “They can pick up a shell, dig for clams, or catch a fish. You can’t just watch life on TV.”

Dino Cingolani died in Norwalk in 2004 at the age of 76.

In May of 1946, when he was entering the minor leagues, Cingolani filled out a questionnaire for the American Baseball Bureau in Chicago. Aside from the basics, such as his height (5 foot 9 inches) and weight (160), the form asked for his “ambition in baseball.”

“To get to the top,” he replied.

And “what do you consider your most interesting or unusual experience in baseball?”

That, he replied, was “pitching a no hitter and losing.”

That rare event occurred on April 26, 1944, when the right-hander hurled the no-hitter against Wooster Prep, only to lose 3-2. He faced 23 men in six innings; six reached first — five on walks and one on a fielding error. Unfortunately for Cingolani and Ridgefield, the locals committed errors in the third and fifth innings with walked Wooster players on base, allowing three runners to score.

Daniel Adams: 

‘True Father of Baseball’

In 1857, Dr. Daniel Adams sat down, picked up a pen and wrote a document called  “Laws of Base Ball.” Nearly 150 years later, those long-forgotten sheets of paper sold at an auction for $3.3

million and added significant evidence to the belief that Doc Adams was, more than most early players, the man behind of modern-day baseball. The sale also set a new record for the highest-priced document in baseball history.

“He’s the true father of baseball and you’ve never heard of him,” said John Thorn, a noted baseball historian who was a consultant on the sale. 

In Ridgefield,  Daniel Adams was well known to most folk in the mid-19th Century as a prominent citizen who was the first president of the Ridgefield Savings Bank. The retired New York City physician came to town in 1865 and bought the former home of Col. Philip Burr Bradley — a house later owned by the Biglow and Ballard families that stood in what is now Ballard Park. 

By then, he had pretty much retired from the “national sport” he helped to establish. And few here knew of his prominence in fashioning the game.

Daniel Lucius Adams was born in a small town in New Hampshire in 1814. His father was a country doctor but unlike his Dartmouth graduate dad, Daniel went to Yale, Class of 1835. Three years later he earned his medical degree from Harvard and began practicing in New York City. 

There Dr. Adams’ interest in athletics was whetted by the formation of the New York Base Ball Club in 1840. Five years later, he joined the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club, which is said to have played the first full game of baseball as we know it today, on June 19, 1846, at the Elysian Fields in Hoboken, N.J., with a team called the New York Nine. Adams continued to play for the Knickerbockers well into his 40s. 

In “Total Baseball: The Ultimate Baseball Encyclopedia,” John Thorn has called Adams “first among the fathers of baseball.” He and other baseball historians credit Adams with setting up essentials of today’s game.

Adams was an early president of the Knickerbocker club, and served as its president six times between 1847 and 1861. While president he promoted rules changes that resulted in nine-man teams

and nine-inning games. He is said to have created the position of shortstop.

He headed the rules and regulations committee when the National Association of Base Ball Players was formed in 1858. Among the changes he instigated were that bases should be 90 feet apart.

A savvy businessman, he was also involved in manufacturing both baseballs and bats.

Adams retired as Knickerbocker president and as a physician before he moved to Ridgefield. A few years earlier, in 1861, he had married Cornelia A. Cook and the couple had four children while living here; the last, a son, Roger, was born in 1874 when Daniel was 60 years old.

Here he became active in all aspects of the community.

In 1870, he was elected a Ridgefield representative to the State House of Representatives. A year later, in 1871, he helped form and became the first president of the Ridgefield Savings Bank  — clearly it was a wise move, for the bank grew steadily and is now the Fairfield County Bank with $1.6 billion in assets. He led the bank from 1871 to 1879 and again, from 1884 to 1886. Adams’s picture hangs in the bank’s main office on Danbury Road.

In 1876 Adams served on the building committee that erected the new “town house,” a building we now call the town hall. Unfortunately but not surprisingly, the structure was built of wood, the material most buildings were made of then. Less than 20 years later, the town house burned to the ground in the great fire of 1895 that destroyed much of the village. Its replacement was fireproof brick.

In 1880, he was elected the first president of the Ridgefield Library.

Adams also helped form the Land Improvement Association of Ridgefield, serving as its

president. The 1877 Ridgefield Press article announcing the organization “did not state what improvements were to be made in Ridgefield lands,” wrote Karl S. Nash in a 1971 profile of Adams. (Nash was not a fan of baseball or other sports, and devoted relatively few words to Adams’s baseball past, but he did note that the Doc dug two cannonballs from a retaining wall on his Main Street property. “Presumably, they were fired at the Battle of Ridgefield on April 27, 1777,” Nash said.)

In 1971, one of those cannonballs was owned by Adams’s grandson, Daniel Putnam Adams, who happened to live in nearby Wilton. He himself was a retired banker, from New York City.

Doc Adams played his last formal round of “base ball” on Sept. 27, 1875, in an oldtimers game that was arranged by a longtime fellow Knickerbocker star, James Whyte Davis. However, he continued to play “backyard ball” with his sons even when he was in his 80s.

     In 1888, Adams, age 74, moved his family to New Haven, the city of his alma mater. There he died in 1899.

     Daniel Adams was an amazingly modest man who one baseball historian said “didn’t like to brag.” In 1881, Yale asked him for a biography for a historical record of the Class of 1835, and Adams wrote not a word about his leadership in creating the by-then popular sport of baseball. “The current of my life has been very quiet and uniform, neither distinguished by any great successes, or disturbed by serious reverses,” he said. “I have been content to consider myself one of the ordinary, every-day workers of the world, with no ambition to fill its high positions, and have no reason to complain of the results of my labor.”

William W. Allen: 

Sports grows up

When Bill Allen arrived at Ridgefield High School in 1947, there were 36 students in the senior class, three varsity sports,  and one coach:  Allen himself. When he retired as athletic director 32 years later, there were more than 420 students in each class and 24 different sports being played. 

“Much of the growth was in girls sports programs, which Allen was instrumental in incorporating at the high school,” said Tim Murphy, longtime Ridgefield Press sports editor.

William Walker Allen was born in 1919 in Rockland County, N.Y., graduated from Arnold College, and earned master’s from New York University. He served in the Navy during World War II and, for several summers, pitched in semi-pro baseball on Cape Cod. 

When he joined Ridgefield High School’s physical education department in 1947 (he also taught science), the only interscholastic athletics were football, basketball and baseball — and the football was six-man. “I had to teach Bill how to play six-man football,” former student Fabio “Fibber” Biagiotti said at Allen’s retirement dinner in 1979. “He only knew 11-man.”

As a coach, Allen was  very successful, especially at baseball. During the 1950s his baseball teams won five straight Fairfield County Class B League titles, with Allen using a platoon system to make sure everyone played. The 1966 baseball team went undefeated, winning 15 straight games.

While he was better known for his high school coaching, Allen was also working with younger players. He was one of the founders of Ridgefield Little League, and served as its first president.

“Baseball was his forte, absolutely,” said Bob Mark, who succeeded him as director of physical education at the high school. “He won about seven championships when we were in the WCC He was a great sportsman, great guy. An outstanding person.”

As a proponent of female sports,  such programs as girls volleyball, girls track and girls tennis were established at the high school. 

Allen gave up coaching football and basketball in the early 1960s to focus on the increasing administrative duties of the athletic director’s job. He did continue coaching baseball until 1972. “Coach Allen’s greatest contribution was in overseeing and cultivating the growth of the Ridgefield High athletic program,” Murphy said.  “During his years, RHS sports went from the minors to the majors, as the number of players and teams skyrocketed.”

Ridgefield, which had become a power in the Western Connecticut Conference, joined the Fairfield County Interscholastic Athletic Conference in the early 1970s. 

“In Coach Allen’s 30-plus years, Ridgefield High sports grew up,” Murphy said.

After he retired in 1979, Allen moved to Rhode Island, living there until shortly before his death in 1993 at the age of 74. 

An avid fly fisherman, Allen also owned property in Canada where he regularly fished with some of the best anglers in the region. His skill with a fly rod was enough to get him featured on the cover of Field and Stream magazine more than once. One of his fishing buddies was another old baseball player, named Ted Williams. 

Sidney Farrar:  

First Baseman and Opera Dad

Sidney Farrar had at least two claims to fame: A daughter and a glove. The Ridgefielder helped create one of the 20th century’s greatest opera stars and played for one of today’s major league baseball teams in its very first years.

Sidney Douglas Farrar was born in 1859 in Paris, Maine. By the 1870s, he was living in Melrose, Mass. where he was working in a box factory and playing semi-professional baseball for a local team. In 1880 he married Henrietta Barnes of Melrose, and two years later, their only child, Geraldine, was born. 

In 1883, Farrar joined the Philadelphia Quakers in the National League for the team’s very first season. A year later, they changed their name to the Philadelphia Phillies,  

The first baseman started seven years with the Phillies and was better known as a good fielder than a strong batter or runner. His last major league season, 1890, was with the Philadelphia Athletics in the short-lived and rebellious Players League. 

Farrar had a lifetime batting average of .253, with 905 hits but only 18 home runs. His best year was 1887 when he hit .282 and scored 83 runs. In 1888, he led the National League in being hit by pitches. In all, he played 943 games as a professional at a salary that ranged from $900 to $2,000 a season ($24,000 to $53,000 in 2016 dollars).

After he left Philadelphia, he played a couple of years of semi-pro ball in New Haven and Providence before retiring completely from the game to, according to The Ridgefield Press, focus on his daughter who showed “unmistakable signs of musical talent.” For a while, he operated a men’s clothing store in Melrose in partnership with Melrose native Frank G. Selee, a Hall of Famer who had managed the Boston Beaneaters (the first major league club to win 100 games in a season) and who later led the Chicago Cubs where, Baseball-Reference.com reports, he “was responsible for assembling the famous Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance double play combination.”

One baseball historian reports Farrar eventually sold his interest in the clothing store and borrowed thousands of dollars to help pay for his daughter Geraldine’s singing instruction in Europe.

Geraldine, who became a Metropolitan Opera star, owed not only her education, but at least some of her vocal talents to her parents. Both mom and dad reportedly had fine singing voices and performed a great deal in public, particularly with church choirs. “Farrar was a baritone, and it was said of him that if he was speaking in what, for him, was a conversational tone of voice on one side of a street, he could be clearly heard from the other side,” wrote Charles Paolino, a newspaper editor and historian. 

While still living in Melrose, Farrar ran for selectman of the town. “There was a great drive to defeat him,” The Press reported. “In the southern part of the town, there were some factories and Mr. Farrar had always been a friend of the factory worker. The election progressed throughout the day and at 4:30 in the afternoon, when the factories were let out, 600 men marched to the polls and swept their friend, Mr. Farrar, into office.”

Apparently to be closer to his daughter in New York after his wife died in 1923, Farrar bought a North Salem Road farmhouse and 30 acres from Joseph T. Hubbard,  calling it “Farrar’s Thirty Acres.” 

The Press said he convinced his daughter to move here and in 1924, Geraldine Farrar bought a place on West Lane. She lived in Ridgefield for the rest of her life here.

“In later life, when he had been widowed,” said historian Paolino, “Sid Farrar was a familiar figure at Geraldine’s concerts, and she said that he was often surrounded by other old ballplayers who may have looked a little out of place in the classical concert hall. It dawned on her, she said, that those old guys weren’t there to see her; they were there to see her dad.”

Farrar became active in the community, especially with the Masons, and was elected a director of the Ridgefield Savings Bank. He “was ever a booster of this town,” said his Press obituary in 1935.

 When his estate was probated, his possessions included a 1927 Locomobile sedan and 200 shares of International Telephone and Telegraph stock, then worth about $1,375.

Farrar Lane, off North Salem Road, was named for Sidney Farrar, whose farm bordered the road. The road, which existed long before Farrar moved there,  may be the old southerly end of what is now Mamanasco Road.