Irving B. Conklin: 

A Symbol of Change

In a way, Irving Conklin symbolized the changing nature of Ridgefield in the 20th Century – from a farming town, to a haven for estates, and then to a bedroom community for commuters. Conklin participated in all three levels of the community, and was a leading participant in all three.

Born in 1899 in Hyde Park, N.Y., Irving B. Conklin Sr. came to Ridgefield as a young man and became superintendent of Dr. George G. Shelton’s estate along West Lane at the Ridgefield-Lewisboro line. 

From 1928 till the early 1940s, he owned Conklin’s Dairy on Ramapoo Road, Ridgefield’s largest and last major dairy farm. Over those years he had supplied most of Ridgefield with milk. 

“That was a time when the per capita consumption of milk in Ridgefield actually exceeded the per capita consumption of alcoholic beverages,” former town historian Dick Venus once observed, perhaps with a wink of an eye. As a young man Venus had delivered milk for Conklin, usually by horse and cart, and later had his own dairy.

In the 1950s, as more and more commuters were eyeing Ridgefield as a place to live, the Conklin farm was subdivided; it includes today’s neighborhoods of Farm Hill Road, Overlook Drive and Nutmeg Court.

In 1944 Irving Conklin and Leo Pambianchi started Ridgefield Motors, which grew into Conklin Motors, then became Village Pontiac-Cadillac on Danbury Road; the building now houses Party Depot.

In 1941, he acquired  Stonecrest, the large estate on North Street, and had his home there. During the war he and Joseph Young raised beef, pigs and sheep on the Stonecrest Farm.

In the 1950s he and his wife, Ethel, subdivided much of the property into the Stonecrest Road and Dowling Drive neighborhoods and around 1953 also established a riding stable on the old estate that is still in business today. 

Ethel, incidentally, was famed for her homemade ice cream.  “There can be no other

delightful repast that conveys such a pleasant taste, along with the urge for a second helping,”  Dick Venus wrote in a 1984 column in The Ridgefield Press. “A host will really enjoy the plaudits of the guests when serving ice cream made with Mrs. Conklin’s renowned recipe. It is a sure way to put everyone in a good mood.”

Irving Conklin was a president of the Lions Club, a member of the Rotary Club, and belonged to the Odd Fellows.

He retired to Florida where he died in 1966 at the age of 66. Ethel died in 1991 at the age of 94.

Conklin’s Dairy Farm was a huge operation and had so many cows that Conklin at one point was ordering freight-car loads of peanut shells from the Planter’s factory in Virginia to use as bedding for the livestock. Venus recalled that the light but bulky shells cost $11 a ton to buy, but $15 a ton to transport. They were packed in sacks “that were almost large enough to hold a Volkswagen.”

However, Conklin eventually found that, even though the shells had no particular food value, the cows would on occasion eat them. 

When he finally discontinued using peanut-shell bedding, Venus asked him why. “Because the milk was beginning to taste like peanut butter,” Conklin replied.

Richard E. Venus: 

Historian and Storyteller

Every era has its grand storyteller, and for the last third of the 20th Century, Ridgefield’s was surely Dick Venus, historian, postmaster, town official, dairyman, and raconteur extraordinaire. 

Venus came to epitomize the way Ridgefield was during most of its 300 years — a small town of mostly kind and gentle people who participated in all aspects of their community, who enjoyed their fellow townspeople, and who loved a good story and knew how to tell it. 

Born in 1915 in a Main Street house still standing at the north edge of Casagmo, Richard Edward Venus was named for Father Richard E. Shortell, the longstanding and popular pastor of St. Mary Church. 

He grew up listening to the many stories of adults, tales told in an era before radio or TV and tales he never forgot. He became a master storyteller, enchanting countless people with his recollections of the days when Ridgefield was dotted with the summer estates of wealthy New Yorkers and of the many fascinating people who worked as their servants, gardeners, and chauffeurs. 

Many of those anecdotes are recorded in his monumental series, Dick’s Dispatch, 366 columns published in The Ridgefield Press between March 1982 and November 1988 (which have been collected, bound and indexed, and which are available at the Ridgefield Library). 

As a boy, he had a large newspaper route to help with the family income. In 1928, only 13, he went to work on Conklin’s Dairy Farm before and after school, and later worked full time. “I always loved horses and drove a team, plowing fields and mowing hay,” he recalled. 

When tractors took over from horses, he moved to the retail part of the milk business. 

Later, he became superintendent for many years at Dr. Royal C. Van Etten’s 87-acre Hillscroft

Farm on St. John’s Road.

In the 1950s, he operated Dic-Rie Dairy (named for Dick and his wife, Marie), delivering milk to many households. 

In 1961, President John F. Kennedy appointed him postmaster of Ridgefield, a job he held for 21 years, longer than any person before or since. He was also the last Ridgefield resident to serve as the local postmaster — every postmaster back to Joshua King in 1789 had lived in town, but none since 1982 has.

“In the post office Dick Venus was always a smiling, friendly fellow, ready to greet and talk to anybody who dropped by,” Press publisher Karl S. Nash once wrote. “He knew everybody in town and, better than that, where they lived. In fact, Dick made it a point of pride never to return a piece of mail as undeliverable just because the addressee had not reported a change of address. The problem

arose most frequently at Christmas time — some years Dick had 5,000 pieces of mail with expired addresses or insufficient ones. He took these home with him and worked on the problem there, and rarely got any thanks for his effort.”

A lifelong Democrat, Venus served three terms as a selectman and ran twice unsuccessfully for first selectman against the popular — and Republican — Leo F. Carroll. In one of those runs, he lost by only 208 votes. He was a longtime friend and supporter of U.S. Senator Thomas Dodd and later his son, Senator Christopher Dodd — Chris Dodd attended Venus’s funeral.

He served on the Historic District Commission, the Zoning Board of Appeals, and was a leader in or member of many community organizations, including Kiwanis and the Boys Club.

In the mid-1980s, the governor appointed Venus as Ridgefield’s first official town historian. He was active in the Ridgefield Archives Committee, later the Ridgefield Historical Society.

And if that wasn’t enough, Venus was a musician. Around the age of 10, he taught himself the harmonica and played it so well that he gave a concert at age 11 on WICC radio in Bridgeport. Starting in 1928, he was a drummer in the Ridgefield Boys Band and later was drummer for his own

Mayflower Swing Band, organized in 1934, which played throughout the area.

A longtime member of the Knights of Columbus, Venus was a devout Catholic. In fact, his belief in his faith’s tenets led him decline to perform a celebrity wedding in his capacity of justice of the peace. It was 1941, and the notorious millionaire and socialite Tommy Manville wanted to marry his fifth wife — Venus turned him down because divorce violated Catholic doctrine. (Manville went on to amass 13 marriages to 11 women before his death in 1967 at the age of 73.)

In 2000, the town renamed the old Ridgefield High School the “Richard E. Venus Municipal Building.”  It was just one of many honors that also included Rotary Citizen of the Year in 1974.

He died in 2006 at the age of 91. A year later, a section of Route 35, West Lane, from the Cass Gilbert Fountain to Olmstead Lane — where he had lived — was named the Richard E. Venus Memorial Highway. 

His wife, Marie Bishop Venus, former chair of the Democratic Town Committee, died in 2011 at the age of 92.

Dick Venus saw the town change a lot from his childhood, but he never stopped loving it and its people. 

“It’s grown too fast,” he said in 2000. “We weren’t prepared for it ... There are a lot of nice people who have moved into Ridgefield, and there are others — it’ll take them a little time to get acclimated. My mother always taught me to tip my hat and smile at people. With some, if you do that, they’ll glare at you like you’re crazy, but they’ll get along. They’ll get the swing of things before they’re through. Most everybody who comes through Ridgefield stays, if they can. Ridgefield is a great town.”