Philip Wagoner, 

Underwood’s Overlord

Philip D. Wagoner may have built one of the largest mansions in town, but the man who produced millions of typewriters and was a pioneer in making digital computers, spent most of his Ridgefield years living in his own caretaker’s cottage.

Wagoner came to Ridgefield around 1932, when he was head of a group of companies that included Underwood Typewriter. He acquired a spread on West Mountain on the shore of Round Pond that included a residence and a large icehouse used to store ice cakes in the days before the electric refrigerators. Wagoner tore down both the house and ice house and built a large — some said “pretentious” — two-story mansion that was reputed to have cost about $100,000 at that time ($1.4 million in 2016 dollars). The stone facing on the house and entrance gates was imported from France. He called the estate “Oreneca,” after one of the American Indians who sold Ridgefield to the first settlers.

In 1940, about seven years after Philip and Effie Wagoner moved into their new house,  Effie died at the age of 64. “Although he recovered from the shock of this loss, it broke his spirit, which had led him to erect his great home here, and thereafter he spent the major part of his Ridgefield days in the seven-room foreman’s house on the property, which was a replica of the larger 27-room mansion,” wrote Karl S. Nash, former editor and publisher of The Ridgefield Press.

Born in 1876 in Somerville, N.J.,  Philip Dakin Wagoner came from a family that were among  the settlers of Staten Island, N.Y.

He graduated in 1896 from Stevens Institute of Technology; his thesis was typewritten, which was very unusual at the time, according the Journal of Business Education. Perhaps it presaged his future career.

Soon after graduation, he joined General Electric where he specialized in making military

products — airplane engines and artillery casings. In 1918 he became president of the Elliott-Fisher Company which soon merged with several firms, including the Underwood Typewriter Company, eventually operating under the name of Underwood Corporation.

Since the 1870s, John Thomas Underwood had been making typewriter ribbons and carbon paper, much of which supplied users of Remington typewriters. Then Remington decided to make ribbons themselves. That prompted John Underwood to fire back: Starting in 1896, he began making typewriters. In 1900 he launched the No. 5, which became the top-selling typewriter in the world; more than two million were made by 1920, by which time Wagoner had taken over the operation. (Underwoods were still being used in the newsroom of the Ridgefield Press in the early 1990s.)

Editor Nash himself used a No. 5 most of his journalistic life — he was a two-finger typist, but very fast with both. He recalled in the 1960s that “although Wagoner did not participate actively in the town’s affairs, he early made himself known in the town hall, particularly in the assessors’ and selectmen’s offices. On one occasion he presented several new Underwood typewriters for use in town offices. It pained him somewhat to see other brands in use officially in his home town.”

However, Nash added, Wagoner “thought the old No. 5 used by the editor of The Press at that time was certainly not worn out.” 

Under Wagoner’s command, Underwood operated the largest typewriter factory in the world, located in Hartford. The plant could turn out a typewriter a minute.

His favorite motto, “It Can Be Done,” was proven during World War II when Wagoner led the conversion of that huge typewriter factory into one that produced M1 carbines for the military.

Long before electronic computers, Wagoner saw the need for computing machines that could  

help businesses with functions like accounting and payroll. He established the Underwood Computing Machine Company in the late 1920s, making mechanical calculating machines. By the early 1950s, Underwood had acquired the business of the Electronic Computer Corporation, and began manufacturing digital computers under the trademark, Elecom. Its “low-cost digital computer” in 1952 consisted of two sizable desk units with an output of “20 digits per second of computed data plus 14 digits of descriptive information.” This machine weighed 750 pounds, had 160 vacuum tubes, required two kilowatts of power, and cost $17,000 ($153,000 today).  Its “average error free running period” was six hours.

At digital computers, Underwood lost out to International Business Machines and others, whose desktop computers eventually helped spell the end of the typewriter, too. The last Underwoods were made in the 1980s, after the company merged with Olivetti, another typewriter manufacturer.

Wagoner retired in 1956 after 60 years in the business world and died in 1962 at the age of 86, still maintaining his chief residence in Ridgefield.

Oreneca later became the home of Harrison and Jean Horblit, whose profiles also appear here.  

Paul C. Velte Jr.: 

Escape from Saigon

Paul C. Velte Jr. led a quiet life in Ridgefield, serving as a scoutmaster, a church building committee chairman, and even a justice of the peace. But his last job was anything but quiet: Working for the CIA, he orchestrated the evacuation of more than 1,000 Americans in the final hours of the U.S. presence in Vietnam. 

Velte was CEO of Air America, a large airline that was secretly owned by the Central Intelligence Agency and used for a variety of missions in Southeast Asia. During the war years, Air America had flown civilians, diplomats, spies, doctors, refugees, commandos, drug enforcement agents, injured soldiers, and even Richard M. Nixon. But its last mission was rescuing Americans from Saigon as the city was about to fall to North Vietnamese troops.

On April 29, 1975, the South Vietnamese capital became the scene of what has been called the largest helicopter evacuation in history. “Two United States Marine Corps helicopter squadrons, ten U.S. Air Force helicopters, and Air America carried out 1,373 Americans and 5,595 people of other nationalities,” wrote William Leary and E. Merton Coulter in MHQ, a military history magazine.

Velte didn’t direct operations from the headquarters in Washington: He was on the ground in

Vietnam, often in situations where he, his pilots and staff were under fire, such as at Tan Son Nhut airport just outside the city. He planned to supply 28 Air America Bell UH-1 “Huey” helicopters that were light enough to land on buildings; the larger Marine copters, used for most of the evacuation flights, were too heavy for many buildings to support.  

“Because of a shortage of pilots, many of these helicopters would have to be flown by a single pilot,” Leary and Coulter wrote. “According to the U.S. Air Force account of the final evacuation, ‘This was risky, but Air America was accustomed to such risks and expressed no reservations about that aspect of the Saigon air evacuation.’” 

Velte had to deal not only with the enemy fire, but also with political and other problems. U.S. Ambassador Graham Martin hesitated for days to act on evacuation planning. There was a lack of adequate fuel to keep the Hueys going. The military refused to protect Air America’s helicopters, and the North Vietnamese subsequently stole some of those undefended aircraft.  

In mid-April Velte had tried to get the Air Force to arrange for an aircraft carrier to be offshore to serve as an operating base in case his helicopters were needed for the evacuation and the Tan Son Nhut airport was under attack or overtaken.

“The baby carrier,” he told the Air Force, “had the necessary machine shops to do repair work, had fuel, and had mobility. It could move up and down the coast and would allow Air America to perform its missions as required.”  

An Air Force general said the carrier could not be provided, but then tried to arrange for 30 Marine pilots to serve as copilots on the Air America helicopters. Ambassador Martin, still reluctant to admit Saigon was about to fall, vetoed the plan for copilots. 

Martin was later criticized for delaying the evacuation planning and execution—even though most of South Vietnam had already fallen to the North. “Faced with imminent disaster,” Secretary of State Henry Kissinger wrote, “Martin decided to go down with the ship…. I considered Martin’s stonewalling dangerous.” 

In the end Air America, down to around 13 helicopters, still managed to evacuate more than 1,000 Americans and Vietnamese to offshore ships or to locations on land where the bigger Marine copters could ferry them to vessels. 

“That was no small accomplishment, to be sure,” said a CIA analyst named Frank Snepp, “particularly in view of the fact that the maximum capacity of each Huey was barely 12 people.”

According to Velte’s grandson, David Wilson, his grandfather “was on the last helicopter out of Saigon with nothing but a .45 pistol and a pair of underwear.”

The end of the Vietnam conflict also spelled the end of Air America. On May 5, 1975, CIA Director William Colby cabled Velte: “The withdrawal from Vietnam draws to a conclusion Air America’s operational activities.”

He added a few words of praise for the staff. “Air America, appropriately named, has served its country well,” he said.

However, “the pilots never heard even that modest accolade,” wrote Leary and Coulter. “The CIA would not publicly acknowledge its ownership of the airline for another year, and it would not issue a commendation to these secret soldiers of the Cold War until 2001.” 

A native of New York City, Paul Christian Velte Jr. was born in 1914. He was a Pace College

graduate and World War II Navy veteran who had worked as an executive for Pan American Airlines before joining Air America. He was based in Taipei, Taiwan, and later at the main Air America headquarters in Washington, but had also maintained a home in Ridgefield from 1955 until his death at age 62 in 1976—the same year the CIA officially dissolved Air America. 

His contributions to aviation were recognized in Who’s Who in America, but his contribution to the largest helicopter evacuation in history has gone largely unnoticed or unheralded. 

He is buried in Ridgebury Cemetery where a small monument marks his grave.

Jane Trahey: 

Women and Power

Jane Trahey’s accomplishments read like those of a half dozen people put together, all talented. 

She was a leading fashion copywriter, the first adwoman to earn more than a million dollars in a year, and among the first to establish her own New York City agency (with such clients as Calvin Klein, Bill Blass,  and Elizabeth Arden). 

She wrote a half dozen books of humor, including “Pecked to Death by Goslings,” a novel about living in the small town of Old Gosling — i.e., Ridgefield. It described her conversion of a New Road barn into a home, a place she called Versailles, “not because it looks like it, but because it costs as much,” she said.

Her novel, “Life with Mother Superior,” retitled “The Trouble with Angels,”  was made into a Hollywood movie starring Rosalind Russell and directed by Ida Lupino. 

Trahey was a playwright, the author of  “Ring Around the Bathtub,”  which was on Broadway. 

She had also written screenplays, cookbook parodies, and regular columns for Advertising Age, The Chicago Tribune, and Working Women. 

She was a leader in the National Organization for Women, wrote and lectured extensively about women and power, and was a founder of the First Women’s Bank of New York. She wrote an autobiographical self-help book called  “Jane Trahey on Women & Power: Who's Got It. How to Get It.”

And she won more than 200 awards for advertising, writing and public service. 

Born in Chicago in 1923,  Trahey graduated from Mundelein College, a Catholic women’s school, in 1943. Her first job was at The Chicago Tribune in the records library, known as the morgue. “My mother never got over it,”  she once said. “Every time she would call and someone would answer ‘the morgue,’ she'd cross herself and hang up.”

Her real career began writing advertising copy for men’s underwear. One of her first ad jobs was at Neiman-Marcus in Dallas. She came to New York in 1956 and soon founded Jane Trahey  Associates, which operated for many years under several names..

“It was a very informal company, like a playground,” Rocky Piliero, Trahey’s production manager, told The New York Times. “Ms. Trahey didn’t like accounts. She liked projects. She liked to do something new. She’d be gung-ho for six months, then get bored.”

She had her country home on New Road from the 1950s until the early 1970s, when she moved to Kent. She shared her place here with fabric artist Tammis Keefe, who died in 1960, and with her companion for more than 40 years, pioneering TV producer Jacqueline Babbin. 

Ms. Trahey died in April 2000 in Kent at the age of 76.

George Doubleday: 

The Man of Westmoreland

George Doubleday was the once-famous, rich and powerful head of Ingersoll-Rand Corporation, but his legacy in Ridgefield is a house of worship and a neighborhood. 

Born in 1866 in Michigan, George A. Doubleday had no connection with the book publishing company (as is sometimes reported in town). He joined Ingersoll Sergeant Drill Company in 1894 as an auditor, soon became treasurer, and when it consolidated into Ingersoll-Rand in 1905, was named a vice-president. By 1913, he was president, a post he held until 1935. He was chairman of the board till 1955, the year he died at the age of 89. 

When he took over the company in 1913, a corporate history says, “Doubleday was determined to make Ingersoll-Rand the leader in its product areas — drills, air compressors, jackhammers, pneumatic tools, and industrial pumps.” He kept the company very profitable and debt free, but in the end was criticized for failing to diversify. After his death subsequent leaders did just that. Today, Ingersoll-Rand owns such brands as Schlage locks, Thermo King transport temperature control equipment, Bobcat compact construction equipment, and Club Car golf vehicles.

Ingersoll-Rand had major plants in Phillipsburg, N.J., Easton and Athens, Pa., and Painted Post, N.Y. “In these locations, Ingersoll-Rand was the major employer,” the company history said. “Community life centered on the firm: Many workers lived in company-owned houses, and community and school events were held in company buildings. 

“Doubleday hired boys off the farm and trained them to become skilled machinists through a seven-year apprenticeship. These artisans accepted the company’s credo of pride in personal work, and only a handful of quality-control specialists were needed. Doubleday charged a premium price for the high-quality machinery this system produced.”

George Doubleday was a rather private individual — he would not even provide a picture of himself for the press and images of him are exceedingly rare. He carried this trait over into his operation of the company, the history said.  “He provided a bare minimum of information about

Ingersoll-Rand. Under Doubleday the company never released a quarterly report and its annual report was a single folded sheet of paper containing only the figures the New York Stock Exchange required.”

  In 1939, the House Ways and Means Committee listed the highest salaried men in the nation, and George Doubleday, at the then-tidy sum of $78,000 — equal to $1.4 million today — was the only Ridgefielder on it. 

Doubleday made Ridgefield his home for 40 years, buying the former Francis Bacon mansion, “Nutholme,” on Peaceable Street in 1915. He proceeded to acquire much of the neighboring land, mostly to the west and totalling nearly 300 acres. He gave his vast estate a new name, “Westmoreland,” presumably because it was moorlike and west of the village. 

In town, he was president of the nearby Ridgefield Golf Club (later Ward Acres) for many years, and his first wife, Alice Moffitt Doubleday, was active in the Ridgefield Garden Club and sang in St. Mary’s Choir. (Her sister was Mrs. John H. Lynch, whose West Mountain estate is now the Ridgefield Academy.) After Alice Doubleday died in 1919, George married his secretary, Mary White, and she, too, was active in the garden club and was a founder of the Ridgefield Boys’ Club. 

In the early 1960s, Doubleday’s heirs offered the town 250 acres of Westmoreland, some of which was talked of as the site for a multiple school campus; town fathers turned it down as expensive and unneeded. A Massachusetts firm quickly bought the property and subdivided it into 150 house lots, which the late Jerry Tuccio developed. 

In the early 1970s, the estate’s mansion was acquired by Temple Shearith Israel, now Congregation Shir Shalom, which still uses it as its temple and school.

George’s son, James M. Doubleday (1907-1970), became well-known in town. Over the years the Princeton graduate and local banking leader bought  several estates, razing the old mansions and replacing them with more modern and efficient equivalents. One place was the old Hillaire estate off West Mountain Road where his new home was called Hobby Hill. The estate was later subdivided and a road serving it, Doubleday Lane, today recalls James.

Charles Bluhdorn: 

The 'Mad Austrian'

His death seemed like his life: face-paced and high-powered. Charles G. Bluhdorn, who began his career as a $15-a-week worker and became one of the world’s richest and most powerful men, died of a heart attack on a corporate jet in February 1983, returning from a Caribbean resort he created. 

Born in Vienna in 1926, Bluhdorn as a boy was considered such a “hellion” that his father sent the 11-year-old to an English boarding school for disciplining. 

At 16, he came to New York, studying at City College and Columbia and served in the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II. In 1946, he went to work at the Cotton Exchange, earning $15 a week. Three years later, he formed a company that would make him a millionaire at 30. 

In 1956, he acquired Michigan Bumper, a small auto parts company that eventually grew into Gulf and Western, a conglomerate that ranked 61st in the Fortune 500 by 1981 and owned  Paramount Pictures, Madison Square Garden, and Simon & Schuster publishing as well as the Bohack supermarket chain, companies that made guitars and survival equipment for astronauts, and jet engine parts. He was CEO and chairman of the board.

In 1965 he was on the cover of Time magazine as one of a handful of millionaires under 40; he was said to be worth $15 million ($114 million in today’s dollars).

Once called “Wall Street’s Mad Austrian,” he was a classic workaholic. “My wife thinks I’m nuts,” he told an interviewer. “But when you’re building something, you’re spinning a web and tend to become a prisoner in the web.” 

While Bluhdorn was a high-powered, hard-driving executive, he was surprisingly informal. “Charlie makes a great impression at first,” an associate once said. “He dazzles you until you suddenly draw back. You wonder: Why is he acting this way? What is his game? Later you realize how natural and straightforward he really is. It can be a little scary. I mean you would expect the head of a huge corporation like Gulf and Western to be a little more, well, formal.”

A Life magazine profile by Chris Welles in 1967 offered this description of his work “style”: “Formality is the last thing anyone would accuse Charlie Bluhdorn of. His impatience throws his whole behavior out of whack. He never walks but runs, flat-footed, slightly off-balance, as if he were racing down a railroad track on snowshoes, jotting down thoughts on scraps of paper as he goes. The last time he was talked into a golf game, he smashed his golf cart into a cement wall. He distrusts anything mechanical. Often in his oflice, surrounded by telephones, he becomes Hercules battling the Hydra, cursing wrong numbers, crossed lines, small delays, hopelessly entangled in wires. stabbing wildly at the buttons on the receivers. ‘Bluhdorn is like a race horse,’ says an associate. ‘Put him on the track and he runs a great race. But somebody has to lead him back to the stable, cover him with a blanket and give him some food.”

When he died, Bluhdorn’s corporate jet was flying from the Dominican Republic to New York. He had a special fondness for the Dominican Republic, and spent millions on the economic and social

development of the island nation. Some called him the father of the Dominican tourism industry after he developed what became the world-famous Casa de Campo resort, which includes three internationally renowned golf courses designed by Pete Dye. Oscar de la Renta, a Dominican and a friend of Bluhdorn, designed the interior of Casa De Campo

Gulf and Western had some 300,000 acres of sugar plantation there, with a workforce of 19,000 people — it was the nation’s largest private employer, biggest landowner, and top taxpayer.  

After he bought Paramount in 1966, Bluhdorn planned to develop moviemaking center on the island. Scenes from such films as Godfather Part II (1974), Sorcerer (1977) and Apocalypse Now (1979) were shot there.

In 1963, Bluhdorn and his wife, Yvette, bought a 28-acre estate on lower Florida Hill Road. Over his years here, he quietly contributed to the community; for instance, he bought the Ridgefield Police a boat and trailer for its scuba team. He was also a trustee of Texas Wesleyan College and the Trinity Episcopal Schools Corporation in New York,  and bought a 12-story building at 2 Columbus Circle in order to donate it to the city in 1980 as a cultural center.

Bluhdorn was also modest in his tastes for a home. While his estate on Florida Hill Road had a pool, tennis court, greenhouse, and other amenities, his house had only eight rooms. When designer Alexander Julian bought the spread in 1988, he and his wife built and lived in a new 6,000-square-foot house on the property.

Bluhdorn was only 56 when he died. Among those who attended the private funeral services at St. Mary’s Church was former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.