Bob Gustafson: 

Ridgefield’s Cartoonist

Several nationally known cartoonists have lived here, but none has taken up Ridgefield as a subject for his art as Bob Gustafson did. The Ridgefield Press’s cartoonist for more than 40 years produced literally thousands of cartoons for the newspaper. Some teased town officials for their actions or inactions, others illustrated community problems,  many promoted good causes in a good-natured way, and a few were just good gags. 

 A native of Brookline, Mass., Robert D. Gustafson was born in 1920. He  was a paperboy as a youngster, served as a pilot in the U.S. Army, pitched semi-pro baseball in the Boston area, played drums in a band, and studied at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts School. 

Before he was 21, he was sending cartoon gag ideas to The New Yorker, and several were purchased and used. He later did cartoons for magazines like Good Housekeeping and Saturday

Evening Post.

“You have to come up with something you like and let everybody judge it,” Gustafson said in a 1991 interview about his work. “Sometimes it flops. It’s not like being a plumber — when you go in and fix a pipe and turn the faucet on and the water comes out, you know it’s OK.”

After working for a Boston magazine and a newspaper, he got a job with King Features, ghosting several comic strips and eventually taking over the nationally circulated strip, “Tilly the Toiler,” which had started in 1921 when he was only a year old.  He later worked for Mort Walker on both Beetle Bailey and Hi & Lois. And on the side, he did cartoons for The Press.

“Cartoonists never stop learning,” he said. “They’re always observing.” 

Although he lived in Ridgefield only from 1954 to 1960, Gustafson continued to “observe” town affairs at his Greenwich home through the pages of The Press, which he read thoroughly for ideas. He’d also chat by phone each week with the Press’s editor, looking for ideas on timely issues — and giving the editor hell if he had changed a word or two in a caption the previous week.

Gustafson had several favorite subjects, including the Cass Gilbert fountain. He was aghast at suggestions that the landmark be moved from its island at Main Street and West Lane, complaining repeatedly about that work of art’s being sacrificed to “the almighty automobile.” In cartoon after cartoon, he dealt with the issue. Saddened by cars all too often crashing into the monument, he’d offer entertaining suggestions for protecting it — one shows the fountain, raised on a mound and a

tunnel running under it to carry the traffic. But one week, seemingly giving up hope, he drew another showing the fountain, well-protected from cars by big railings, being hit by an airplane.

He also attacked vandalism, often portraying vandals as evil-looking thugs. Being a senior citizen himself, he encouraged help for Ridgefield’s elderly, and would offer suggestions on how to

improve their lot. He supported many town organizations, but especially the Community Center — he was active in the center in its early years and, as an accomplished photographer, used to take publicity pictures for them.

One of his favorite subjects in the 1950s and 60s was Leo F. Carroll, the colorful and charismatic first selectman and former state police leader. Carroll, who lived directly across Wilton Road West from Gustafson, was often teased for his pronouncements such as when he declared that

Ridgefield’s dump was “the most delightful dump in America.”

Though most of his Press cartoons were very local in nature, some captured wider attention. When controversy erupted over a new gas station’s need to cut down some large trees to make access to the highway safer, Gustafson drew a cartoon showing a couple of giant trees like the redwoods in California with a big opening so people could drive through them. Shell Oil Company offered to buy the cartoon. 

A gag, playing on the idea that we’ve all seen supermarket shopping carts in strange places,

showed an Arab on a camel in the middle of a desert coming upon a shopping cart. Grand Union later bought it.

Gustafson won many awards for his work including commendations from professional cartoonist organizations and from the New England Press Association. 

For relaxation, he enjoyed golf and following the Boston Red Sox. For many years he loved teasing Yankee fans, but by the late 1990s had come to enjoy watching the Sox’s arch enemy — he especially admired Derek Jeter.

Bob Gustafson died in 2001 at the age of 81. 

Fixing A Fractured Fountain

The Cass Gilbert Fountain has often been damaged by errant autos, but the winter of 1975-76 was a particularly rough time for the venerable and vulnerable monument. During the five months from November 1975 until March 1976, it was struck by cars at least three times.

The most serious crash occurred in December when the fountain was hit by a car that then left the scene. The driver was later  arrested and his insurance company made to pay for repairs.

Here, in late March 1976, we see Primo Polverari of Stonecrest Road, left, with his son, Bill, working on fixing the fractured fountain. Hidden behind the fountain is another helper, Jimmy Vozzo. They had relaid the base, which holds water, and patched it with a special mixture of white cement and marble dust.

One of the region’s top stonemasons, Primo Polverari believed the marble from which the fountain was fashioned came from Italy. One large slab was split in two in an accident that occurred many years earlier, but otherwise the stonework was in pretty good shape, he said.

Poverari felt strongly that the fountain should be protected, either by some form of durable fencing, or by moving it to another site, as had been suggested often in the past — especially by the the State Highway Department, which hates that intersection.

Dave Hebert, then the superintendent of Parks and Recreation which takes care of the fountain, agreed that something needed to be done to protect the monument. “I don’t think it can take much more pounding,” he told The Ridgefield Press.

However, Hebert felt that if a fence were erected, it should be of a low and attractive design. “I don’t want anything to take away from the appearance of the fountain,” he said.

Hebert asked the Planning and Zoning Commission’s Architectural Advisory Committee to suggest a fence design, possibly a post-and chain arrangement. Most of the cars that manage to hit the structure aren’t traveling very fast, so a low fence should stop most vehicles, he felt.

Someone had suggested to Hebert that the fountain be raised up on a mound of earth so that cars would strike the mound and not the stone. The superintendent felt that would be too expensive, but in fact two decades later — after a drunken driver shattered the fountain in 2003 with a Hummer — it was indeed raised a bit.

However, what has probably helped more than anything is the additional placement of planters holding shrubs around the base of the fountain. Between the concrete walls of the planters and the dirt packed inside, a pretty effective set of bumpers has been created.  Several of the planters have been smashed in accidents, but each time, they managed to keep the cars — in one case, a truck — from hitting the fountain.

Primo Polverari retired a few years later from fountain work; he died in 1996. Much of the repair work in the 1980s and 90s and early 2000s was done or overseen by Dr. Robert Mead, a dentist who lived just north of the Keeler Tavern. He often used some dental techniques to fix the marble. 

The fountain was erected in 1915-16, a gift of noted architect Cass Gilbert who lived in what is now the Keeler Tavern Museum. 

Appropriately, in 2016, the museum bought Dr. Mead’s brick house to use as its administrative headquarters. That building had been erected in 1936-37 by Julia Gilbert, Cass’s widow,  as a monument and museum to her husband’s works.  It proved too small to handle the mass of papers and pictures that Gilbert left, so the museum was sold as a residence, eventually becoming the home and office of dentist Mead, who thus had more than a passing interest in the well-being of Gilbert’s great gift to the town.

Cass Gilbert: 

A Most Remarkable Architect

In New York, his Woolworth Building — once the tallest building in the world — still graces the Manhattan skyline.  

In Washington, his Supreme Court building stands strong, despite battles over whom it houses. 

In Ridgefield, while it has too often fallen to the failings of drivers, his fountain has greeted visitors for more than a century.

Cass Gilbert, who bought the Keeler Tavern as his country home and gave us our fountain, was one of the most acclaimed architects of the 20th Century. He designed dozens of important buildings including the U.S. Custom House in New York, the state capitols of Minnesota, Arkansas

and West Virginia, the main libraries of St. Louis and Detroit, and parts of the campuses of the Universities of Texas and Minnesota.

A native of Zanesville, Ohio, Gilbert was born in 1859, and named for Lewis Cass, a U.S. senator from Michigan who served in the cabinets of Presidents Jackson and Buchanan, and was a distant relative of his surveyor father. 

Gilbert quit studies at Macalester College and at the age of 17 went to work for an architect in St. Paul, Minn., then spent 1878 studying at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After some time in Europe, he joined the prestigious New York firm of McKim, Mead, and White — White being the famous Stanford White, shot and killed by a jealous husband in 1906. 

By 1882 Gilbert had set up his own architectural business in St. Paul, Minn., with James Knox Taylor, a fellow student from MIT. They turned out many local houses, churches and commercial buildings as well as the Minnesota State Capitol. 

In 1880, while still in New York, he met his future wife, Julia Finch, a finishing school student. She was 18; he, 21. But it was not until 1886 when Julia was vacationing at Lake Minnetonka in Minnesota that they again met and struck up what became a serious relationship. He was living in St. Paul with his mother and she in Milwaukee with her parents, and most of their courting took place via the U.S. mail. They were married in 1887.

In 1899, Gilbert won a competition to design the U.S. Custom House in lower Manhattan — with a little help from his by-now former partner, James Taylor, who had become a federal Treasury Department design official; Taylor cast the deciding vote in Gilbert’s favor. Virtually an unknown on the national scene, Gilbert won out over many well-known firms and soon gained a wider reputation and many jobs in New York City, to which he moved in 1900. 

Among his New York City projects over the years were a tall neo-Gothic building at 90 West Street (heavily damaged on 9/11); the U.S. Courthouse at Foley Square; the New York Life Building; and many train stations on the Harlem branch of what is now Metro North.

In 1913, his most famous project, the Woolworth Building, opened in Manhattan. At 790 feet, it was the tallest building in the world at the time. One contemporary observer — a minister — called it Gilbert’s “Cathedral of Commerce.” 

With many more words and much more poetry, Paul Goldberger, the architectural critic of The New York Times, described it in 1981 as “one of the great icons of 20th Century architecture. It has a mix of delicacy and strength that is almost Mozartian, a sense of light, graceful detail applied to a firm and self-assured structure that no later building has ever quite equalled….It was pure, graceful composition — the serene ordering of well-proportioned parts.”

Although the Woolworth Building was one of Gilbert’s most famous accomplishments, he was not the first choice to design it. Frank W. Woolworth, owner of the huge chain of “dime stores,” first approached McKim, Mead, and White, where Gilbert had earlier worked. Among the staff architects there was Harris Hunnewell Murdock of Spring Valley Road in Ridgefield. Murdock later revealed that Woolworth had called on the telephone to ask the firm about designing his new headquarters.  After Woolworth hung up, one of the firm’s partners told his secretary to give a polite brush-off to the “five-and-dime man.”

While some of his buildings were among the tallest of their time, Gilbert grew pessimistic about the future of skyscrapers, revealing in 1931 that he was uncertain that form of architecture was “here to stay,” The Ridgefield Press reported at the time. In fact, he didn’t seem happy about the tall, light-hogging buildings he’d done.

 “When I see the long shadows cast even at noon on a winter’s day,” he said, “I sometimes

wonder if the light and air their occupants enjoy compensate for the sunlight their neighbors lose.”

Among Gilbert’s less lofty Connecticut projects were the New Haven train station, New Haven (Ives Memorial) Library and the Waterbury City Hall. 

And, of course, a little fountain in Ridgefield.

Cass and Julia Gilbert came to Ridgefield in 1907, buying what had been the Ressiguie's Hotel, earlier known as the Keeler Tavern. (The Press in 1907 indicated Julia was a descendant of Timothy Keeler, the 18th Century innkeeper, but we have been unable to find evidence of that.)

The Gilberts called their home the Cannonball House because of the cannonball — actually, a defused grenade — lodged in one of the beams on the north side of the building; it was fired from a British cannon during the Battle of Ridgefield in 1777 and can be seen by visitors today.

Gilbert immediately set about enlarging the building by adding a wing to the rear that included a dining room and then-modern kitchen, with additional rooms upstairs. Around 1915, he built the formal, brick-walled gardens and Garden House, now used for many weddings and special events. But he avoided changing the lines and historic features of the old tavern building itself.

His best known work in Ridgefield, however, is the fountain that he donated to the community in 1916 at the intersection of Main Street and West Lane. When it was installed, the

intersection looked much different from today’s heavily trafficked junction — it was a simple triangle that included a tree, and the fountain itself was much lower, with its base almost flush with the ground. The fountain was made of Italian marble — the same material used on his U.S. Supreme Court building.

The fountain was not only a welcoming symbol for people arriving from the west or south, it had a practical purpose. The lower, ground-level bowl served as a watering trough for horses that had just made long climbs to reach Ridgefield; the fountain is some 800 feet above sea level.

After being hit by many automobiles over the ensuing century, including a Hummer driven by a drunk in 2003 that shattered much of the structure, the fountain has been raised a couple feet and surrounded by planters designed to absorb the shock of a crash. A truck that hit the fountain in 2018 did hardly any damage, thanks to these precautions. 

The landmark has also survived numerous attempts by the State of Connecticut to move it elsewhere so that a more traffic-friendly intersection could be created. Ridgefielders, of course, have fought each and every move-the-fountain proposal, refusing to sacrifice a landmark that sits in a prominent location at the main southern entrances to the village.

Cass Gilbert died in 1934 while on one of his frequent trips to England. There he was held in

such high esteem that he had been elected to the Royal Academy of Arts, the only American since John Singer Sargent, the painter, to be so honored. (Gilbert had earlier been president of the National Academy of Design for eight years and was appointed to the Council of Fine Arts by Presidents Roosevelt, Taft and Wilson.) 

The London Times wrote after he died, “The list of his most important buildings would only be long enough to prove him the most remarkable architect of his generation in America.”

Since his death, more than a dozen books have been written about Cass Gilbert and his work. 

Only a year after he died, his architect son Cass Gilbert Jr. of Wilton (he designed what’s now the Ridgefield Playhouse) created a brick building at 152 Main Street as a museum to hold his father’s sketches, drawings, paintings, and papers. Located just north of the Gilberts’ Keeler Tavern home and part of the original Keeler Tavern lot, the Cass Gilbert Memorial was dedicated in October 1937 in a ceremony at which Gov. Wilbur Cross spoke.

“I am proud...to have known him, for he was one of the highest ranking architects of the country,” Governor Cross said. “He was a man who could see beauty in the tall building. You cannot prize too highly Cass Gilbert.”

However, the memorial building turned out to be too small to house the large collection of Gilbert material, which was eventually turned over to the Smithsonian Institution, Library of Congress, Minnesota Historical Society, and other archives. The memorial building was sold as a residence and eventually became the home and dental offices of Dr. Robert Mead.

Quite appropriately, Bob Mead turned into an expert at repairing Cass Gilbert’s auto-

damaged fountain, and often was called upon to do so — using, also appropriately enough, dental epoxy. Dr. Mead even had copies of the fountain’s spouting turtles made so they could be replaced after periodically being stolen by vandals.

Dr. Mead died in 2015 and a year later, his family sold the homestead to the Keeler Tavern Museum, which now uses the building for its offices. Thus, two properties that were one in the 1700s and 1800s were back together again.

Cass Gilbert and many members of his family are buried in a large plot at Fairlawn Cemetery. Oddly enough, only a few dozen feet away is the grave of Ralph Thomas Walker (1889–1973),  designer of dozens of famous skyscrapers whom The New York Times called the “architect of the century.”

Thus, in a small rural cemetery on North Salem Road, containing about 625 graves,  the remains of two of the 20th Century’s greatest city architects rest in peace, each beneath relatively modest stones.

Dr. James Henry Inkster: 

Helping the Health of Body and Soul

In an era when there are literally dozens of physicians practicing in Ridgefield, it’s hard to believe that not too long ago, there were only two doctors in town.

That sparsity of medical care in 1944 helped Dr. Henry Inkster to decide to come to Ridgefield.

“There was such a great need here,” he said in an interview 20 years later. 

But not everyone who arrived at his office when he hung out his shingle was necessarily ailing. 

“At first some people paid the $3 office visit charge just to take a look at the new doctor,” he said. “There weren’t many new faces around because of the war.

The town had only 3,500 people back then, and many were off fighting or supporting the war.

James Henry “Harry” Inkster was born in 1899 in Spokane, Wash.,  and served in the U.S. Army during World War I. After the war he studied at the University of Washington and then came East to attend Cornell Medical School where  he met his wife, Evelyn Rogers, a native of Massachusetts and a Bryn Mawr graduate. The two physicians both graduated in the Class of 1930.

He practiced in New York City for nearly a decade while commuting to Newtown where he and Evelyn had restored an antique house. She worked as a pathologist in the city.

Tiring of commuting, the Inksters decided in 1944 to move his practice and their home to Ridgefield after he conferred with Dr. Francis B. Woodford, the town health officer. Woodford was one of only two physicians practicing here — the other was Dr. Joseph S. Bell. Dr. Woodford had recommended that he come here “just as fast as we can get you a house,” Inkster recalled later.

That house stood on the north side of the Ridgefield Library property (later it was the home

and office of Dr. James Sheehan; the library bought and razed it in the early 1980s to make way for an expansion.) After living and practicing there for 10 years, the Inksters bought the antique house just south of the Keeler Tavern Museum and opposite the Cass Gilbert Fountain. For their last four years here, they lived on Barrack Hill Road.

Though he considered specializing in pediatrics here, Inkster decided to remain a general practitioner. He was well known for making house calls in his sporty red Karmann Ghia, license plate JHI. Evelyn, who assisted in his practice under the name of Dr. Rogers, had a red Volkswagen, license ERI. (James Inkster was a longtime member of the Sports Car Club of America and active in its local unit.)

James Inkster was a leader in the operations of St. Stephen’s Church, serving as senior warden for many years, and as a member of the vestry, a lay reader, a chalice bearer, and president of the Men’s Club. With Seth Low Pierrepont he co-chaired the committee that selected the Rev. Aaron Manderbach as the new rector in 1950 and in 1958 he led negotiations that resulted in the church’s receiving South Hall as a gift from the Electro-Mechanical Research company, which had used it as

offices for many years.

Evelyn Inkster was also active in the community, especially with the Ridgefield Library and the District Nursing Association

By 1964  after James Inkster had suffered some health problems, the couple left town and found a retirement home in New Hampshire. There for many years he was part-time medical director for a local school system. In 1979 they moved to Groton, Conn., to be closer to their daughter.  He died in 1985 at the age of 85. Evelyn Inkster died two years later at the age of 86.