Duncan Smith: 

75 Years in Journalism

For three decades Ridgefield Press readers were treated to the usually light-hearted columns of Duncan Smith, a journalist who spent 75 years turning out news and opinion, much of it for the    Chicago Daily News.

Duncan MacMillan Smith was born in Illinois in 1863, one of 10 children of farming immigrants from Scotland. He began his newspaper career while still a teenager, writing a column called “The Cornfield Philosopher” for a local weekly paper. He was eventually hired as editor of  a nearby weekly, and soon started his own in Seward, Ill., called The Blue Valley Blade.

He moved on to work for a paper in Nebraska where he met and married school teacher Grace Woodward, and then bought a weekly in Indiana. Offered a job at the Chicago Daily News, he grabbed the opportunity and wrote for that paper for 20 years, including penning a well-known column called “Hit or Miss,” which eventually became syndicated. Many columns employed verse, not surprising since among his circle of friends were poets Carl Sandburg and Edgar Guest. 

He left the newspaper business in 1912 to become a press representative for the new Populist movement in Minnesota and the Dakotas, but was soon back at the typewriter, buying the Rockford, Ill., Republican, a daily in the town in which he was born. When his wife died in 1929, he moved to Ridgefield to live with his daughter, Margaret, a novelist who wrote under the name of Peggy Shane and who was married to humorist and writer Ted Shane.

Here, he turned out a column called “A Birdseye View” almost every week for 30 years for The Press and eventually its sister publication, The Wilton Bulletin. 

Smith loved words and loved playing with them in verse. One time a group of Ridgefield Press staffers was talking about words that had no rhymes — like orange. Someone mentioned Titicus, the name of the river and neighborhood in Ridgefield, and Smith  took up the challenge, offering the following in "A Birdseye View":

I live upon the Titicus,

a river rough and raging,

where fishes to a city cuss,

will come for a simple paging.

I used to read Leviticus,

or some such ancient volume,

before I saw the Titicus

or started on this column.

And now, my dears, you might agree 

it really takes a witty cuss,

a crossword puzzler (that's me)

to rhyme with Titicus.

(It really should have said 'that's l'

to show for words I have nice sense, 

but for such slips, I alibi

with my poetic license.)

Duncan Smith died in 1956 at the age of 91.

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.

Samuel Grafton: 

He’d Rather Be Right

Samuel Grafton, who lived on Barry Avenue from 1948 until 1962, was a prolific writer who was accomplished in many genres. He wrote a nationally syndicated current affairs column,  penned several books on politics and economics, freelanced for magazines, published a popular mystery novel, scripted television dramas, and with his wife, Edith, wrote a Broadway play.

Today, one of his observations is still being frequently quoted: “A penny will hide the biggest star in the universe if you hold it close enough to your eye.” 

Born in Brooklyn in 1907, Mr. Grafton grew up in Philadelphia, and began writing for The New Republic when he was only a teenager. In 1929, the year he graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, he won a $500 prize ($7,000 in 2016 dollars) from the American Mercury magazine in a contest for an article on the faults of American higher education. 

He had planned to go to law school but was swayed by the editor of the Philadelphia Record to join his staff; Grafton became an editorial writer there from 1929 to 1934. 

He then signed on as an editor of The New York Post and in 1939 began a daily column that appeared in 120 newspapers for more than 10 years. Despite its name, “I’d Rather Be Right,” the column had a liberal bent. The name played on the old adage, “I’d rather be right than president,” but was also meant to reflect the fact that he truly believed all his opinions were absolutely correct.

Early in World War II, Mr. Grafton was the leading American journalist supporting de Gaulle and the Free French, and denouncing Vichy as a Fascist front. For this, he later received the French Legion of Honor. 

While a Ridgefielder he often wrote for major magazines, including Look, McCall’s, Saturday Evening Post, and even TV Guide. During the 1950s, he also wrote dramas for television shows, including Kraft Theatre and General Electric Theater.

In 1955, Mr. Grafton published a mystery novel, “A Most Contagious Game,”  about  a magazine reporter who joined the New York City underworld to get his story. The book got good reviews, sold well here and abroad, and was made into a television drama broadcast on Westinghouse Studio One in October of that year.

After leaving Ridgefield, he and his wife founded Grafton Publications, a small firm that produced newsletters on youth and drug addiction. He died in 1997 at the age of 90 and Edith in 2000. 

Their son, Dr. Anthony Grafton, who grew up here, became Dodge Professor of History at Princeton, and author of 10 books of history. Son John was an executive with Dover Publications and daughter Abigail, a clinical psychologist and organization consultant in Berkeley, Calif.

Westbrook Pegler: 

Caustic Columnist

Westbrook Pegler, the caustic columnist who spent years attacking “Reds,” was one of a half dozen Ridgefielders whose writings have won a Pulitzer Prize. His award-winning words weren’t about communists, however, but about labor union racketeering.

Pegler lived here from 1941 to 1948 during which time he seemed better known locally for his attack on Ridgefield’s plumbing code and his efforts to collect bumpers than as a national newspaper columnist. Both these efforts occurred during World War II. 

While expanding his home on Old Stagecoach Road, Pegler wanted to use cheaper, unlicensed plumbers but the town code, modeled after the state’s and supported by unions, required the use of licensed plumbers. Pegler called it discriminatory and tried to get the Town Meeting to abandon the code. He failed. 

He was more successful in his campaign to get people to turn in their steel automobile bumpers to help the war effort – Life magazine featured a full-page picture of him removing his own bumper in front of the Ridgefield town hall. 

Francis James Westbrook Pegler was born in 1894 in Minneapolis, Minn., a son of a newspaper editor. By his early 20s, he was working for United Press and became the youngest American correspondent covering World War I. 

After the war he worked as a sports columnist for a while but, at the Chicago Tribune, soon turned to covering politics, labor, government, and other hard-news topics in a column he called “Mister Pegler.”  By the late 1930s, the column, handled by the Scripps Howard syndicate, was carried in more than 115 newspapers and had an estimated six million readers. He was making $65,000 a year — that’s about $1.1 million in today’s dollars.

Time magazine called him “the great dissenter for the common man,” adding that “Mister Pegler is invariably irritated, inexhaustibly scornful...Pegler applies himself to presidents and peanut vendors with equal zeal and skill. Dissension is his philosophy.”

Famous for his conservative, anti-Communist writings, he “used his typewriter like a meat ax,” said one critic. He criticized virtually every president, and took special aim at Franklin

Roosevelt, whom he called “Moosejaw.” (He called Eleanor  “La boca grande” — or “the big mouth.”)

“He depicted a world where a conspiracy of criminals, corrupt union officials, Communists, and their political allies in the New Deal threatened the economic freedom of working Americans,” wrote historian David Witwe in the Journal of Social History in 2003.

Pegler probably reached his peak of popularity and power in the early 1940s when he helped expose a New York City racketeer named George Scalise, a union boss who happened to own a home in Ridgefield — what is now the St. Ignatius retreat house on Tackora Trail. An associate of mobster Dutch Schultz, Scalise was arrested in 1940 by the crusading district attorney Thomas E. Dewey, later governor of New York and almost-president, and was charged with extorting $100,000 ($1.7 million today) from hotels and contracting firms. But the arrest came only after Pegler had exposed Scalise in a series of anti-racketeering columns that won him the Pulitzer Prize for reporting in 1941. It was the same year he came in third in the voting for Time magazine’s Man of the Year, behind two of his most hated targets, President Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin.

In a 1940 piece, Pegler described how Scalise had used union funds to acquire the 27-room mansion on Tackora Trail. (He also noted that just across North Salem Road was the town poor house.)

His research on Scalise probably introduced him to Ridgefield, and in 1941, he bought the 100-acre farm on Old Stagecoach Road.   

He eventually soured on the town, however. In a 1950 column, two years after he moved to Arizona, he described Ridgefield as “an old aristocratic town of moldering white mansions on a white main street” that “has quietly become infested with wealthy Sixth Columnists” (supporters of communism).

When he was in his glory years, three books of Pegler’s columns were published: “T’ain’t Right” in 1936; “The Dissenting Opinions of Mister Westbrook Pegler” in 1938; and “George Spelvin, American, and Fireside Chats” in 1942.

By the mid-1950s Pegler fell out of favor, and his columns appeared only in the magazine of the ultra-conservative John Birch Society. 

He died in 1969 in Arizona at the age of 74.