Van and Gert Kaufman: 

Successful Persuaders

Van and Gert Kaufman were persuaders, but they used different tools for different aims. Both were very successful at their crafts.

Van Kaufman was an artist whose work was seen by millions of people and who probably helped persuade many thousands of them to buy a Pontiac.

Gert Kaufman, an environmentalist in the days before the term was commonplace, used well-chosen words to persuade not only local, state and federal officials, but also ordinary citizens to

support innovative ideas about the environment and recreation. She was the moving force behind a pedestrian path from Norwalk to Danbury — what she and others called the “Linear Park” and what a half century later is being developed as the Norwalk River Valley Trail.

A native of Georgia who grew up in California, Van Justin Kaufman was born in 1918. He loved painting from a very early age and by 10, was taking lessons at Otis Art School — a fresco he created as a student still exists on a wall of his Beverly Hills high school. By the late 1930s, he was working for Walt Disney studios, drawing the animation cells and layouts for such cartoons as Fantasia and Dumbo. “He worked on the famous dancing hippo sequence in Fantasia, and actually created the scene in Dumbo where the gorilla tries to escape his cage — which earned him a bonus,” said his son, Kris Kaufman.

In the late 30s, while attending what is now the California Institute of the Arts, he met fellow student Gertrude Hollingsworth. A native of Glendale, Calif., who was also born in 1918, Hollingsworth was studying dress design. The two were married in 1940.

During World War II he became a sergeant in the Army Air Corps’ First Motion Picture Unit,

working with such veterans as  Clark Gable, William Holden, Alan Ladd, Clayton Moore, and Ronald Reagan — his family has a weekend leave pass for Kaufman to visit his wife, signed by Captain Reagan. Among other projects he designed approximately 100 war insignias.

Around 1948, the Kaufmans moved to Ridgefield to be close to the large colony of artists that existed in Fairfield County. Van freelanced, worked for Esquire magazine and in the 1950s moved to automobile advertising in the days when both promotional brochures and magazine ads for cars

employed paintings instead of photographs. He started out with Mercury, moved to Buick, and finally settled in for many years at Pontiac.

     Art Fitzpatrick, who had begun his career as an automotive designer (he helped design the 1940 Packard sedan, among other cars), asked Kaufman to do the scenics for his car ads. The two became widely known in the business as “Fitz and Van,” with Fitzpatrick painting the cars and Kaufman doing the backgrounds.

     “These lush images depicted scenes of glamour and sophistication populated by suave,

well-attired cosmopolitan characters, always accompanied by a larger-than-life Pontiac with shimmering chrome and glistening paintwork,” said automotive writer James M. Kraus. “These were images that the aspirational car buyer could fantasize inserting himself into, and they nourished the idea that maybe he himself could gain access to this beautiful and exotic world if he went out and bought a new Pontiac.”

Kaufman and Fitzpatrick would regularly fly off to visit many of the world’s most glamorous

places — Rome, Paris, Monte-Carlo, Acapulco, Hawaii, Caribbean island, and the like — looking for inspiration and taking pictures to work into the backgrounds of paintings.

“These international locales were a departure from the conventional advertising practice in the

U.S. at the time and occasionally met with resistance in the insular world of 1960s Detroit management,” Kraus wrote. “An executive once groused to Fitz that a couple of the backgrounds looked a bit too foreign. He ended up with a tinge of red in the face, however, as the locales of the two images that he objected to were actually Upper Manhattan and Washington, D.C.”

Today,  their automobile advertising paintings — often signed “AF VK” — can bring

thousands of dollars at auctions. Hundreds of them can be viewed online.

“The reign of Fitz and Van at Pontiac coincided with the pinnacle of the era of Jet Age glamour and sophistication — an age they exquisitely grasped and captured,” Kraus observed. “Their images remain today as frozen moments in time, reflecting the spirit of idealized gracious living, 1960s style.”

Kris Kaufman once asked his father how long it took him to paint the scenes for the auto ads.

“20 years and three days,” his father replied. “Three days to paint one and 20 years to learn how.”

The Kaufmans lived at 100 Cain’s Hill Road (now the home of Howard Sanden, noted

American portrait artist). “It was love at first sight,” Gert Kaufman said in a 1975 interview. “The mountains, the valleys, the trickling streams — it was beautiful. I was so awed.”

A few years after they moved here, she learned that the state planned not only a four-lane “Super 7” highway up the Route 7 valley near her home, but also a flood control project that would take some of their land. Instead of simply opposing the projects, however, she studied them to determine how they could be accomplished with the least impact. She then successfully led efforts to modify the path of the new road and to eliminate a planned Super 7 interchange at Florida Hill Road. 

The state took an acre of their land for the Norwalk River Flood Control Project, which had

been inspired by a disastrous 1955 flood. She did not oppose the acquisition and instead joined Ridgefield’s Flood and Erosion Control Board (now merged into the Conservation Commission) to help oversee flood control efforts throughout the town. “She was a dedicated person when it came to flood and erosion control — things people didn’t talk about much back then,” said fellow conservationist Edith Meffley, adding that research Kaufman compiled in the 1960s and 70s was still being used four decades later.

But perhaps she was best known for her tireless efforts to establish the Western Connecticut Linear Park, which she described in 1971 as “an attempt to preserve the state’s natural environment for recreation purposes along a major transportation corridor. The greenbelt concept for Route 7 will allow nature trails for hiking, horseback riding, bicycling, and cross-country skiing to be provided along the full 34-mile length of the new highway.”

Kaufman, who became chairman of the Western Connecticut Linear Park Committee, said the

34-mile, 1,000-acre park would serve an estimated 450,000 population by 1990 and cost only 3% of the total outlay on Super 7. She gained widespread support for the project and was, in the end, much more successful than were proponents of the highway itself — Super 7 was abandoned in the 1990s as too expensive and environmentally troublesome.

Nonetheless, her concept of a Norwalk-to-Danbury pedestrian park lives today in the efforts to build the The Norwalk River Valley Trail (NRVT),  38 miles of multi-purpose trail connecting Calf Pasture Beach in Norwalk and Rogers Park in Danbury, passing through Wilton, Ridgefield, and Redding. In many places it would use state land acquired for Super 7 or flood control. Today, several miles of the trail exist in Norwalk and Wilton and another five or more may be completed this year.

“I won’t be able to ride a bicycle anymore by the time the bike trails are built,” Kaufman quipped in 1977. “But I’m not giving up. We’ve gotten too much, given too much.”

Her work on the linear park earned her much praise, not the least of which came from Richard M. Nixon. “It is a pleasure to learn recently of your efforts … to enhance the environment and provide additional outdoor recreation opportunities for residents of your community,” the president wrote her in 1972. “The successful results you have achieved I know will always be a source of great satisfaction to you and the members of your committee and, even more importantly, to countless Americans who in years to come will enjoy the legacy you have given them.”

Like her husband, Gert Kaufman was an artist — after graduating from art school, she had drawn Woody Woodpecker cartoons for Warner Brothers in Hollywood. Around 1960, Karl S. Nash,

Press editor and publisher, mentioned in passing that his newspaper needed a logo. “Mom happened to hear him and volunteered,”  son Kris recalled years later. “She drew the acorn that appeared on the papers for many years — for which she was paid $50.”

In 1976, after nearly 30 years in Ridgefield, the Kaufmans moved to the Los Angeles area where Gert earned a degree in landscape architecture. After Van died in 1995, she moved to Carmel, Calif.  She died there in 2002 at the age of 84.

In an interview in the 1970s, Gert Kaufman explained the drive behind her many years of fighting for the linear park and for conservation. “You can’t give up,” she said. “I think of Ridgefield as surrounded by dikes against which the developers are pushing all the time. They leak in, unless you keep your finger in. If you get tired and move away for just a minute, you’ve lost.”

Samuel Chambliss: 

Wetlands and Rhinos

Sam Chambliss had always been fascinated with nature and the environment, but unlike most people he made both his life’s mission — from fighting as a lawyer to protect Connecticut’s open spaces to acquiring a huge ranch in Zimbabwe to protect rhinos, elephants and other wildlife.

Samuel Mauldin Chambliss was born in New Jersey in 1929, graduated from Bucknell University, and earned his doctor of law degree at the University of Pennsylvania. He went on to earn his master’s in military law from the Judge Advocate General School at the University of Virginia. He then served in Germany as a captain in the JAG Corps of the U.S. Army.  

For a while, he practiced with the family firm in Chattanooga, Tenn., co-founded by his grandfather. He later moved to Connecticut where he continued his legal practice in Westport before settling in Ridgefield, becoming a specialist in the emerging field of environmental law.  

Two of his major clients were in the town of Redding, where he served as attorney to the Conservation Commission and the Redding Land Trust.

His reputation was such that, at the request of the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection, he wrote the first draft of the Connecticut’s Inland Wetlands Act, which to this day governs land uses in wetlands. 

He and his wife, Janet Bavier Parris, visited Zimbabwe in 1983, and fell in love with the countryside. In 1985 they bought 18,500 acres of African savanna and moved there permanently in 1987 when the the government asked them to be custodians of that country’s endangered black rhino.

The Chamblisses and two neighboring landowners enclosed their property with an electric fence, creating a 60,000-acre preserve.  

“We’ve got zebra, waterbuck, kudu, impala, reedbuck, elands, and the tsessebe, which is the fastest antelope in the world,” he told The Press in 1989. “There are also leopard and cheetah.”

However, “right now, one of the big things is to save the rhino, and Zimbabwe is just about the last country where there is a significant rhino population,” Chambliss said.

The rhinos the Chamblisses were trying to protect weren’t the friendliest of creatures. Soon after they set up their reserve, the government trucked in a black rhino that, threatened in another part of the country, had been captured and put in a crate for transfer.

“It came out of the crate and it had enough of being cooped up. It was looking for something to damage,” Chambliss said.

“Someone had left a pickup truck with two dogs in it parked nearby. After the first time he hit it, the truck bounced up and down on its shocks, which convinced the rhino it was alive.

“He kept jabbing his horn between the truck and the front tire. Finally he hit the tire, which gave up the ghost with a loud sssss.

“He kept right on killing the truck, till finally his horn came out through the top of the hood.

“We were all up trees like ornaments,” his wife, Janet, said. “Sam was up a tree, but only about five feet up, and someone told him to go higher. Eventually, the rhino got around to him and rammed the branch where he had been standing.”

After the rhino was through with the pickup and several treed bystanders, the animal turned on the 18-wheeler that had brought him.

After the rhino attacked the big truck, it “didn’t move,” Chambliss said, “and the rhino assumed it was dead. After a while he wandered off into the bush.”

Elephants provided a more pleasant experience. “We got 10 calves with the idea of starting our own little elephant herd,” he said. “But all 10 turned out to be males, even though they promised us three females.”

Janet Chambliss led the elephant raising, feeding them milk in pans. “They are very dependent and they bond to you,” she said. “When we first got them, after about a week, i went in and sat down cross-legged with them in an area we had set aside for them to sleep. One baby elephant lay down and put his head in my lap.

“They sort of decide you’re their mom.”

Their African paradise came to an end in 2003 when the government of Zimbabwe, which had begun confiscating property owned by white people three years earlier,  finally took over the Chambliss ranch.  After many tribulations, Sam and Janet Chambliss fled the country and, almost penniless, eventually settled in Gonubie, South Africa, in 2005.

In 2012, with Mr. Chambliss ailing, the couple returned to the United States so he could undergo medical treatment. He died in Florida in 2014 at the age of 84.

Shortly after his return to this country, he was asked whether he would write about his experiences in Africa. He said he might, The Press reported,  “but that people wouldn’t believe the horrors of Zimbabwe.” 

Saving daylight?

From an old campaign to make Daylight Saving Time the law in the United States.

Hardly a household exists that won’t take a while to recuperate from the arrival of Daylight Saving Time, which started today. Days later, all sorts of clocks — from car to microwave to DVR – will remain an hour behind. Morning minds are discombobulated as people ask themselves: Why am I up so early?
 
Many also ask: Why endure such annoyance twice each year? The answer: to save energy and maybe ourselves.
 
As long ago as 1784, Benjamin Franklin proposed a daylight saving time to save on candles, but it wasn't until World War I that the United States enacted saving time to conserve fuel for the war effort. Since more people are active late in the day than early in the morning, extending natural light in the evening reduces the need for artificial light and the energy required to produce it.
 
The fossil fuels that generate most of our electricity are not an endless resource. Nor is the atmosphere, which burnt fuel continues to befoul. So adding light to conserve energy and cut the poisons we breathe seems worth the semiannual annoyance of time changes.
 
Perhaps then, a name change is needed, something that better reflects what the time change all about.
 
How about Life-Saving Time?

Alien threats

Illegal immigrants are much in the news lately, but immigrants of a different sort are sneaking across our borders and causing havoc.

The Emerald Ash Borer, a beetle from Asia discovered here in 2002, has killed countless ash trees – more than 20 million in Michigan, Ohio and Indiana alone. It has cost towns, property owners, nurseries, and forest products industries – even baseball bat makers – tens of millions of dollars. It’s just one of a passel of insect and plant pests that have entered our country hidden in packaging or produce. Some problem plants, such as Purple Loosestrife, Japanese Knotweed and Yellow Flag Iris, were imported deliberately because of their beauty, only to become bulls in an environmental china shop.

Without natural controls, some alien plants spread wildly, pushing out native plants and in the process destroying ecologies that support many native birds, fishes, reptiles, amphibians, and insects.

What can we do? Know and destroy invasive plants. And insist that legislators support not only better surveillance of our ports of entry, but also research into combating imported pests that have already arrived.

Our leaders must understand that not all alien threats to our nation come from terrorists.

A lampmussel’s return

All environmental news isn’t bad: Behold the Yellow Lampmussel.

Last July, two naturalists canoeing on the Connecticut River found the first Yellow Lampmussel identified in the state since 1961. Once common and widespread, this mollusk was a source of food, currency, and jewelry for the American Indians. Colonists ate the meat and made buttons from the shells, whose interiors are lined with mother of pearl.

In nature, lampmussels help filter the water of both good and bad substances. They are also food for River Otters and other small mammals, as well as fish.

The Yellow Lampmussel succumbed to the activities of man, particularly polluting, damming, and dredging. The fact that they are being rediscovered here and in neighboring states, says the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection, is a sign that the health of at least some rivers is improving.

We can do our own part in creating healthy waterways by eliminating – or at least carefully using – pesticides, fertilizers and other chemicals on our yards. Remember, say environmental officials, “what you put on the land will eventually end up in our rivers.”

Deadly balloons

Just when you think you’ve heard all the ways we’re messing up nature comes news of yet another problem: balloons.

Yes, those symbols of childhood festivities are killing fish, birds, and even sea turtles. A full-page feature in the latest issue of Connecticut Wildlife points out that helium-filled balloons can travel miles, frequently ending up in the ocean. Fish and sea turtles see a popped balloon, think its food, and eat it. The result is a blocked digestive system and death.

Birds often grab the washed-ashore strings as nesting material, but these strings too often get wound around the birds – both parents and nestlings – resulting in strangulation or starvation. Swimming waterfowl can become entangled in the floating strings.

The problem is serious enough that Connecticut passed a law, making it illegal to launch 10 or more helium balloons in a 24-hour period.

So the next time you throw a birthday party, keep the balloons, as well as the kids, under control.

Bottled waste

Most of us don’t think twice about grabbing a bottle of water for a walk or workout. But we ought to think about it a lot more than twice.

The statistics of waste and extravagance are staggering, says the Earth Policy Institute:

• To package and ship the seven-billion gallons of bottled water we drink annually requires 1.5-million barrels of oil – enough to supply 100,000 cars for a year.

• Nearly 90% of the bottles wind up in landfills, where they take a thousand years to biodegrade.
  

• Bottled water costs 10,000 times what tap water does, and the difference in taste and content is usually barely detectable.
  

• When billions of people around the world lack safe drinking water, we are buying bottled water at per-gallon prices that exceed what we are paying for gasoline!

Most of us drink bottled water in a quest for purity. But the cost of that assumed purity is both pollution and waste.

SUVs and kids

Big SUVs have long come under fire as inefficient, gas-guzzling behemoths that waste energy and money as they pollute the air. But there was always the argument that they are safe – especially for a family with children. They look like tanks; they ought to protect like tanks. And what’s more important than keeping our kids safe?

Now researchers at Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia report that, in accidents, children are no safer in a big SUV than in a regular car. Despite their size -- an average of 1,300 pounds more than a car -- SUVs are twice as likely as a car to roll over in an accident. And children in rollovers were three times more likely to be injured, the hospital said.

How dangerous are rollovers? The federal government says, of the nearly 11 million passenger car, SUV, pickup and van crashes in 2002, only 3% involved a rollover. Yet, rollovers accounted for 33% of the fatalities that year.

If you want to keep your family safe, look beyond outward appearances. The National Highway Transportation Safety Administration’s Web site, www.safecar.gov, has more on what’s safe and what’s not in many categories – and notes that, when it comes to accidents, SUVs are the most likely to roll over.

An older tradition

Seasons may be known by their scents, but for many of us, the smell that was autumn is gone. Thirty years ago, pollution-fighting laws banned the burning of leaves, which had been almost as much a fall family tradition as Thanksgiving.

However, the ban taught many of us that the leaf smoke's heady aroma was really a waste. Piled out back, turned occasionally, and maybe even mixed with coffee grounds and vegetable scraps, leaves become wonderfully rich food for our gardens and lawns. Composting became more common.

But the law did not ban the burning of brush, the twigs and branches that the wind and we prune from the trees. Perhaps it should have.

Brush piles have a different natural benefit. They attract birds, creating a safe haven from hawks, cats and other predators. Some birds nest in them. And as it slowly rots the brush attracts wood-eating insects that many birds relish. That pile of branches can feed and shelter scores of birds while slowly returning the vegetation to the earth.

Thus, what we used to burn can instead enrich the soil as well as feed and protect wildlife. It happens naturally, the way that was “traditional” for the eons before man.

50 years ago…

Nature seems know. With day after day of showers and downpours, she must be celebrating the 50^th anniversary of her big 1955 show when nearly 14 inches of rain fell on an already water-logged town - a three-month supply in three days. The result was the worst flood our area experienced in the 20^th Century.

The flood of ’55washed away roads and bridges, destroyed homes, damaged factories, and killed three people. It also opened eyes. A new kind of care was needed in dealing with the land.

In the past half-century, flood zones and regulations restricting development in them have been adopted. The state has purchased many hundreds of acres to preserve natural “sponges” like swamps and pond watersheds. The Army Corps of Engineers has built a flood dam in Ridgefield, and plans others.

Much has been done, and 14 inches of rain might not do the damage today it did in 1955. But we should never be complacent; continued care, control measures and even an early-warning system are necessary.

After all, New Orleans thought the dikes would hold.

Butterflyways

Nature can be remarkably adaptable. Many examples have been documented of how wildlife has profitably used modern eyesores. Old cars dumped offshore create artificial reefs where fish, mollusks and crustaceans thrive. Once-rare peregrine falcons make their homes on microwave relay towers.

Now, one of the ugliest wounds man has cut into the landscape has been found to have its good side, too. Butterflies love interstates.

“Highways are of major importance for butterflies,” reports Jeff Boetner, a University of Massachusetts entomologist, who discovered that Silvery Blues (pictured), Common Ringlets and other species are extending their ranges, thanks to the interstate highway system. As one observer put it, “viewed from the perspective of a butterfly, an interstate highway is just an endless, sun-drenched field.”

This is especially true of roads that have been planted with wildflowers, a project many states have taken on more aggressively than our own. Be they herbs or shrubs, plantings help reduce the ugliness of expressways; if they provide food and shelter for wandering butterflies and birds, so much the better.

Now if our winged friends could only learn to fly above – not through – the traffic…

The Hidden World

Campephilus principalis has shocked Homo sapiens. We think we are, well, so sapiens about this Earth we have conquered, and yet a flashy bird bigger than a crow has managed to elude us for more than 60 years in our own back yard.

It’s a tribute to the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, and it’s also a tribute to the conservationists who saved the vast cypress swamps in Arkansas where the bird has hidden all these years.

Yet so much in nature is hidden. Countless creatures are still to be discovered, not just rediscovered. In the last decade more than 360 new species have been identified on the island of Borneo alone. The Vietnamese recently found a “new” tree and a “new” butterfly, and an unusual tweezer-beaked rodent was just uncovered in the Philippines. Last year, a new species of monkey was found in Bolivia and this year, a new brine fly was identified in Utah.

And that’s just on land. Scientists estimate anywhere from 500,000 to 10-million species live in the deep sea, most of them still undiscovered.

The trouble is, through uncontrolled development, pollution and simple carelessness, we may be killing off species faster than they can be found.