Anthony Scaduto: 

Covering The Bad and The Beautiful

During his long life as a reporter and as a biographer, Tony Scaduto covered the bad and the beautiful — from Maffia dons to masterful musicians like Bob Dylan and the Beatles and celebrities like Marilyn Monroe. 

A man who was known for wielding words well even when in high school,  Anthony Scaduto was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., in 1932, son of a food importer and a seamstress. After graduating from high school, he got a job as a part-time copy boy at the New York Post to help pay for his tuition at Brooklyn College. He quit college after two years.

“I gave that up after I realized I was getting a better education on the streets of New York than I’d ever get in college,” he told Press interviewer Rick Honey in 1975.

One of his first beats was the police headquarters in Brooklyn. “That’s where I learned a lot about cops, some of whom I hated and some of whom I loved,” he said.

His coverage of the police included a much-praised 1964 series on the NYPD that, said The New York Times in 2017,  “captured the tensions of that time, dynamics still evident a half-century later.”  

Scaduto had written, “The New York policeman today is a perplexed, sometimes frightened man. From the cop on the beat to the highest-ranking superior, he points with pride to the praise the force has received from some quarters for its careful, bend-over-backwards handling of civil rights demonstrations, which are often admittedly deliberate attempts to provoke arrest. At the same time, he is bewildered, honestly shocked, to discover that a large number of Negroes and Puerto Ricans distrust and fear the police uniform and are expressing their hostility more and more openly.”

Covering crime — especially the mob — was one of Scaduto’s specialties at the Post. He grew up in a Brooklyn neighborhood controlled by the Maffia and, coming home from playing baseball one day when he was 12, saw the victim of a mob hit on the sidewalk in front of his friend’s house. “I was constantly aware of who the so-called wise guys were — the men in the mob or on the fringes of it,” he told Honey.

After 20 years at The Post, he left to focus on freelancing, mostly books, the first of which was  Bob Dylan: An Intimate Biography,  published in 1972. It took a journalistic look at Dylan’s life and work, and has received much acclaim over the years. “It is regarded as an influential book in the field, being one of the first to take an investigative approach to writing about his subject,” said one critic.

Among the fans of the book was Dylan himself. “I like your book,” the singer-songwriter told Scaduto after reading the manuscript when it was 80% complete. “That’s the weird thing about it.” Scaduto had allowed Dylan to see the incomplete manuscript if Dylan would consent to giving a rare interview. Dylan did.

In 1976, Scaduto produced Scapegoat: The Lonesome Death of Bruno Richard Hauptmann, an investigation into the trial of the man who was executed in April 1936 for kidnapping and killing the Lindbergh baby. “Mr. Scaduto, aided by his experience covering crime for The Post, built a convincing case that justice had not been served,” The Times said. “He found evidence that had been withheld, witnesses who had bent the truth, and more.”

“Scapegoat should be compulsory reading for those who fear that postwar rulings by the Supreme Court, protecting the rights of the accused, have tied the hands of justice,” a Times reviewer had said.

Scaduto also wrote biographies of Mick Jagger, Frank Sinatra,   and the Beatles as well as many articles for Playboy, Penthouse, Rolling Stone, and Newsday, the Long Island newspaper. His Lucky Luciano: The Man Who Modernized the Mafia,  published in 1975, was written under the pen name Tony Sciacca.

He also tried his hand at fiction, turning out a 1988 novel, A Terrible Time to Die, for G.P. Putnam’s.

Scaduto may have been introduced to Ridgefield in the early 1970s when he came to town to write an article for The Post about the growing battle over the use of certain books in the Ridgefield schools — part of the so-called “book burning.” While he didn’t like how the school board was handling the issue, he did like the town. In 1973, he moved to 125 Grandview Drive. “I was tired of New York City and its craziness,” he said.

Eventually, however, he apparently missed his old stomping grounds — by 1980, he had moved back to Brooklyn. During the 1990s he wrote many pieces for Newsday, the Long Island newspaper.

He died in 2017 at the age of 85.

Even as he was digging into and writing about popular musicians and unpopular crime bosses,  Tony Scaduto as a Ridgefielder kept his eye on the local scene, penning pointed letters to the Press about the goings on.

In 1975, for instance, he quickly took on a Ridgefielder who had written a letter to the editors, opposing spending town government money on the privately owned Ridgefield Library. 

“The library building is such a terrible waste of space and our master planners should find other uses for the property,” Scaduto responded the next week. “Let us sell all the books for kindling — I hope no one objects that that smacks of conservation, so pinkish a word — and tear down the building and then construct on the site an old-fashioned bowling green. And when the Rip Van Winkles of this town awake, they’ll feel perfectly at home.”

Frank Gibney:

Our Man In Asia

If Frank Gibney were still alive, he would hardly be surprised by the economic battles being waged today between the United States and China. He warned of them long ago.

Back in 1992, his book, “The Pacific Century,” predicted the rising economic power of  eastern Asian nations in the then-coming century. It was a companion to a 10-part PBS series, produced by his son, documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney. Few saw the series, however, because PBS scheduled it at one of the least-watched time slots of the week: 6 p.m. on Saturdays. Nonetheless, it won an Emmy for documentaries that year.

In the book Frank Gibney predicted that in the 21st Century, Pacific Rim nations like China, Japan, and Korea would become economic powerhouses, much more important to the United States than Europe. And how the U.S. handled relations with those nations would be critical.

“Gibney points out that, by the mid-1990s, our trade with the Pacific nations will be more than double our trade with Europe,” said Ray Cushing in a review of the book. “And yet, lack of understanding, even outright ignorance of these countries, is still all too prevalent in the United States.”

The book was written by a man who spent much of his boyhood in Ridgefield, the son of the couple who owned and operated the Outpost Inn on Danbury Road, now the site of Fox Hill condominiums.

And Gibney knew what he was talking about: He had spent his early career interrogating Japanese prisoners of war, devoted much of his later life covering Asia as a journalist living in Tokyo, and became a founder of the Pacific Basin Institute.

Frank Bray Gibney was born in 1924 in Scranton, Pa., and came to Ridgefield as an 11-year-

old when his parents, Joseph and Edna Gibney, took over the Outpost Inn. A former singer, his dad was a veteran of Longchamps and other prestigious restaurant operations, and turned Outpost into dining destination for many Ridgefielders as well as celebrities, including Lily Pons, Lawrence Tibbett, Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt, Clare Boothe Luce, and Eleanor Roosevelt (who, as first lady, drove herself there for lunch).

A bright boy, Frank Gibney commuted to Fordham Prep in the Bronx where he graduated as valedictorian of his class in 1941. He won a scholarship to Yale, but the war forced him to leave for service in the military. He was sent to the Navy’s elite Japanese Language School at the University of Colorado and became a naval intelligence officer. 

Gibney was assigned to a post in Hawaii where he interviewed many Japanese prisoners of war.  His dad, who had also entered the Navy after the war broke out, was working as a supply officer at the time. “When I became an intelligence officer,” Frank said in a 1992 interview, “I was assigned to interrogate Japanese POWs at a secret location in Hawaii. And who was in charge of supplying that secret location? My father.”

Later he was stationed in Japan during the postwar occupation. There he maintained contact with some of the prisoners he had once interviewed “through reunions at a sushi restaurant,” he said. “I was a small human bridge between Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s conquering army and a puzzled but receptive Japanese public.”

In 1947 Gibney came home and was looking for a job. While he was staying with his parents, “there was a gentleman who used to spend a lot of time at the Outpost Inn, who heard me talking about my situation,” Gibney recalled. The gentleman was Westbrook Pegler, a Pulitzer Prize-

winning syndicated columnist, who lived in Ridgefield. Pegler was impressed with the young man and called the Associated Press, which immediately hired him. Soon afterward he joined Time magazine as a correspondent  in both Europe and Asia. By 1949, he was Time-Life bureau chief in Tokyo.

In June 1950, while covering the Korean War, he was injured when an explosion wrecked the Han River Bridge, south of Seoul, Korea, as he was crossing it with two other journalists. “The three were fleeing from Seoul ahead of advancing Communist forces from the north,” the Associated Press reported. “The bridge was blown by the southern forces to slow the Red advance.” He was flown to Japan for treatment for relatively minor injuries.

Gibney later became a senior editor at Newsweek and a staff writer for Life Magazine. 

He also wrote a dozen books including “The Khrushchev Pattern,” “Korea’s Quiet Revolution,” and in 1960, “The Operators,” which was not about international politics, but about corporate criminals. “They’re Living It Up At Our Expense,” said the headline in The New York Times Book Review, adding in a smaller headline, “White-Collar Chiselers Thrive in the U.S. As Never Before, a Reporter’s Study Finds.”  It sounds like the 21st Century.

In 1979, he co-founded the Pacific Basin Institute in California “to further understanding, on both sides of the Pacific, of the tremendous importance of their relationship and their shared responsibilities,” the institute says. The organization moved to Pomona College in 1997. 

Frank Gibney died in 2006 at the age of 81. Among his survivors besides Alex were six other children, including  James Gibney, who became deputy op-ed page editor at The New York Times, features editor at The Atlantic Monthly, and is now an editorial writer at Bloomberg Opinion.

One of James Gibney’s toughest projects was a six-year stint overseeing the publication of the Encyclopaedia Britannica in Chinese, Japanese and Korean editions — “a task,” said  Times reporter Margarlit Fox, “that required him to be a scholar, editor and diplomat in equal measure.”

“One of Mr. Gibney’s most daunting tasks was to publish a Chinese edition, released in 1986,”  Fox said. “A six-year undertaking, it ran to 10 volumes and contained newly commissioned articles by Chinese scholars that dealt, however gingerly, with sensitive subjects like Stalin, the Korean War and Taiwan.”

John Neville Wheeler: 

News for You

Among the books in John Neville Wheeler’s library was a copy of “For Whom the Bells Tolls,” inscribed “To Jack Wheeler, who gave me the chance to go to war.” The book was signed by Ernest Hemingway, whom Mr. Wheeler had hired as a correspondent to cover the Spanish Civil War. 

Hemingway was just one of many great writers John Wheeler worked with. 

A native of Yonkers, N.Y., and a graduate of Columbia University,  Wheeler fought as a lieutenant in France during World War I. 

He began his newspapering career as a sportswriter at The New York Herald. There, in 1913, he founded the Wheeler Syndicate, distributing sports feature stories throughout North America. He soon also began distributing cartoons and comics. Among his artists was Bud Fisher, creator of the popular Mutt and Jeff comic strip, who was hired at a guaranteed $52,000 a year ($1.26 million in today’s dollars).

Wheeler went on to establish several more press syndicates, including the Bell Syndicate, and in 1930, became general manager of the large North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA). He hired and assigned many of the leading talents of the first third of the last century, including Ring Lardner, Grantland Rice, Joseph Alsop, Dorothy Thompson, Pauline Frederick, Sheilah Graham, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and, of course, Hemingway.

Though he sold NANA in 1965, he remained active as a writer and adviser to many leaders.

When President Eisenhower asked what he’d do about the growing conflict in Vietnam, he recalled in 1967, “I said I’d get the hell out of there. We never should have been there.” 

He and his wife, Tee, moved to Spring Valley Road in 1936; the name of Wheeler Road, then a dirt path that ran alongside their property, recalls them. 

On a grander scale, Cape Wheeler in Antarctica was named for John Wheeler because he had contributed to the cost of a 1947 expedition that explored that region, called Palmer Land, which is south of the tip of South America. 

Wheeler told the story of his life in an autobiography, “I’ve Got News for You,” which was published by E.P. Dutton in 1961.

He died in 1973 at the age of 87,  and is buried in Mapleshade Cemetery. In his obituary, The Ridgefield Press said John Neville Wheeler “never quit newspapering, permanently, until his death.”

Mildred Gilman Wohlforth: 

An Original Sob Sister

“I didn’t invent the title ‘sob sister,’ but I’m the first gal reporter who ever used it,” Mildred Gilman Wohlforth told an interviewer in the 1980s. 

The term described Roaring 20s reporters who specialized in heart-rending stories of personal tragedies, and Mildred Gilman was one of the originals as well as one of the highest paid in New York. Her subjects ranged from sordid crimes to White House society, interviewing murderers and heads of state with equal expertise. 

But Mildred Gilman was prolific writer who did much more sophisticated work over her career.  She wrote eight novels;  “Sob Sister,” first published in 1931, came out in several editions,  and was turned into a movie the same year,  starring  James Dunn and Linda Watkins.

She also wrote many magazine articles. One piece in The New Yorker in 1928, which could be as appropriate today was it was in the ’20s, was about a mother and son being interviewed for a place in an upper-crusty New York City nursery school. 

The Chicago native wrote her first story when she was 12 and began selling them when she was at the University of Wisconsin. After graduation she got a job as secretary to noted New York World columnist Heywood Broun, and frequented parties with the likes of Dorothy Parker, Alexander Wollcott, Robert Benchley, Harpo Marx, Bennett Cerf, Sinclair Lewis, Paul Robeson, and Harold Ross (she wrote one of the first profiles, on Robeson, for Ross’s then-new New Yorker).

While working for Hearst’s New York Evening Journal, she met Robert Wohlforth, a reporter for the competing Morning Telegraph. They were married in 1930, and later bought a 1730 home on Rockwell Road. 

She continued to write throughout her life and among the many celebrities she interviewed were Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Shirley Temple, Amelia Earhart, Gene Kelly, and Jimmy Durante. She was also supposed to interview Hitler in 1933, but the Gestapo, distressed at probing questions she had already asked Hermann Goering, threw her out of Germany. 

In Ridgefield, she was the first chairman of the Historic District Commission, promoted planning and zoning, and penned scores of letters to The Ridgefield Press aimed at the betterment of the town. 

Well into her 90s, she rode her bicycle three miles a day. 

She died in 1994 at the age of 97.

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.

Robert P. Scripps: 

Powerful Publisher

When he died at 42, Robert Paine Scripps was one of the most powerful men in American journalism. 

His Scripps-Howard Company owned more than 30 daily newspapers in all the leading cities: New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, St. Louis, Dallas, Denver. Most were started from scratch by his father, Edward Willis Scripps, whose career began in 1878 when, at 24, he founded the Cleveland Penny Press. 

Born in 1895, Robert Scripps joined the company when he was 16 and by 1917, was editorial director of the chain and in the 1920s became president and chief stockholder. 

In 1924, he bought an estate on Route 35, South Salem Road, and lived there fairly regularly until around 1933 when he moved back to his native California. His family continued to use the Ridgefield place, opposite Cedar Lane, as a vacation home until the late 1930s. 

Scripps raised some eyebrows in March 1931 at a conference on unemployment headed by U.S. Senator Robert M. La Follette Jr. of Wisconsin — a Republican who championed organized labor. Scripps testified that a solution to unemployment and industrial stability could be “shorter hours of labor than have ever been dreamed of; and wider distribution of wealth — through wages and otherwise — to permit increased luxury consumption and increased luxury employment.”

Scripps was best known in the newspaper industry for beginning the use of joint-operating agreements — in which two competing newspapers use the same offices and printing facilities. “In a period when fierce competition forced many poorly managed newspapers to fold, these agreements helped ensure the survival of the Scripps-Howard chain and numerous other newspapers,” a biographer wrote. The technique has been used into the 21st Century, though few cities remain that can support two newspapers. 

In March 1938,  Scripps died unexpectedly aboard his yacht off Baja California; the cause of death was listed as a “throat hemorrhage.” Ironically, 12 years earlier, E.W. Scripps, his father, had died aboard his own yacht off the coast of Africa. Daddy would have been the candidate for the hemorrhage — he smoked 30 cigars and drank four quarts of whiskey a day; instead, he died of apoplexy.

Among Robert’s children who lived in Ridgefield was Elizabeth A. “Nackey” Scripps, who married William Loeb, publisher of New Hampshire’s largest daily newspaper, The Manchester Union Leader. For many years, the Loebs also owned the Connecticut Sunday Herald, a conservative weekly published in Bridgeport and later Norwalk. 

After William Loeb died in 1981, Nackey Loeb continued to publish the Union Leader until she retired in 1999. She died in 2000, leaving the paper to the new Nackey S. Loeb School of Communications in Manchester.—J.S.

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.

Huntington Gilchrist: 

A UN Founder

Huntington Gilchrist was a man of many interests who had a unique career in international relations. A journalist, corporate executive, diplomat, soldier, educator, and political scientist, he was the only person from any country to serve as a senior member of the international staff in the establishment and operation of both the League of Nations and the United Nations. 

Born in Boston in 1891, Mr. Gilchrist graduated from Williams, Harvard and Columbia, taught two years at universities in China, was an Army captain in France in World War I, and had a distinguished career with American Cyanamid Company from 1928 to 1955. 

From 1919 to 1928, he was the only American on the senior staff working to establish the League of Nations, and he then worked with the United Nations off and on from 1944 to 1957, helping draft the UN charter in 1945. 

In 1950, he went to Brussels as U.S. minister in charge of the Marshall Plan in Belgium, Luxembourg and the Belgian Congo.  He represented the UN in Pakistan in the mid-1950s and helped found the International School in Geneva. 

He was a longtime trustee of the Brookings Institution, and wrote and lectured on foreign affairs and education. 

In 1960, 20 years after moving to Ridgebury, he was chairman of the 200th anniversary celebration of the founding of the Ridgebury Congregational Church. 

He died in 1975 at the age of 83.

Fabian Franklin: 

A Three-Career Conversationalist

Fabian Franklin, a man with a name that sounds like an actor’s, had three very different careers, none of them on the stage.

Born in 1853 in Hungary, Franklin came to this country in 1857. When he was only 11 years old, he won a scholarship to Columbian College, now George Washington University. After graduating in 1869, Dr. Franklin became a civil engineer and surveyor for a railroad and later worked for a city. 

However, mathematics was his passion and, in 1877, he switched careers and joined the mathematics department at Johns Hopkins University, teaching, studying and researching until 1895. He earned a doctorate in math there in 1880 and published many papers on mathematical concepts.

It was at Johns Hopkins that Franklin met a unique math student. Christine Ladd, who’d studied at Vassar, had applied for admission to the all-male university under the name, C. Ladd. She was admitted, but when university leaders discovered her sex, they at first limited the courses she could take, but eventually wound up giving her a $500 a year fellowship. She and Franklin, who was five years younger than she, became friends and were married in 1882. Christine Ladd-Franklin went on to become a pioneering woman psychologist and logician who developed the Ladd-Franklin theory of the evolution of color vision.  

In 1895, Professor Franklin, who enjoyed writing and admired journalism, switched careers again and became editor of The Baltimore News. After a few years there, he was hired as an editor at The New York Evening Post, retiring in 1917. 

He continued to write, producing many articles for periodicals as well as several books, including one on economics and another on Prohibition (which he opposed). 

“He was born a journalist by virtue of his passionate interest in the play of contemporary life,” said The New York Times at his death in 1939, adding,  “Dr. Franklin was beyond question one of the great conversationalists of our day and worthy to be compared with the giants of the art.”  

His wife died in 1930 and about a year later, Dr. Franklin and his daughter, Margaret, bought a home on Barry Avenue. “He was a familiar and striking figure on the streets,  his heavy white beard giving him a distinguished appearance,” The Press said in 1939.  

At his funeral, the Rev. William B. Lusk, rector of St. Stephen’s, observed, “In the seven years of his residence in Ridgefield, he was continually communicating something of his beautiful spirit of friendliness, kindliness, gentleness, modesty, courtesy, and good will…”  

When Lewis J. Finch subdivided the Fabian property in the 1960s, he called the small development “Franklin Heights.”  

Linette Burton: 

The L.O.L.

To anyone who sends a text message on a telephone, LOL is a staple acronym. But to thousands of readers of The Ridgefield Press from the 1950s to the 1990s, LOL meant something entirely different. Headlines would announce, “The L.O.L. Goes Round the World” or “Mr. Carter and the L.O.L. Talk Tobacco,” and readers would know the “Little Old Lady” had been off on another adventure.

Linette “Nat” Burton herself came up with the moniker, which started out as “the little old lady in tennis shoes,” got shortened to the “little old lady,”  and then became just “l.o.l.”

“Like lemmings going to the sea, the newsmen and the l.o.l. scurried across a snowy area and into the Cabinet Room in the White House,” she wrote in 1978 after she took part in a briefing with President Jimmy Carter, one of her many little old lady stories.  “As the l.o.l stamped her sneakers to get the snow off, she felt more than a little awed.”

Burton sat at the cabinet table in a chair that normally belonged to Joseph Califano, then the secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, who had recently railed against smoking.

“Taking a deep breath, the l.o.l. quaveringly announced her name and the paper she represented,” she wrote. She then indirectly offered a question for the president: “I happen by pure chance to be sitting in the seat that really belongs to Mr. Califano, which made me think that isn’t it odd that, while the United States government continues its price support of the tobacco industry, Mr. Califano has come out so strongly against smoking.”

The president smiled and said, “I don’t think it’s odd. As you know, Connecticut produces a lot of tobacco, and so does Georgia.”

There was laughter and, Burton wrote, “the moment to be forever remembered by the l.o.l. was over — the moment when the President of the United States spoke directly to her.”

Little did she know that a few years later, she would sit right next to President Ronald Reagan at a similar gathering.

Linette Arny Macan Burton was born in 1916 in Easton, Pa., daughter of the headmistress of a private girls school and a machine tool salesman. In 1933, her mother became head of St. Agnes Episcopal School in Alexandria, Va., where Linette Macan spent her senior year and, among other things, wrote the school song. Fifty-six years later, Burton returned to the school to find “Hail St. Agnes” still being sung by its students. (Even though in 1991 St. Agnes merged with a boys prep,   “Hail St. Agnes” is still sung today at St. Stephen’s & St. Agnes School. So is the “St. Stephen’s Fight Song.”)

She majored in English at Wheaton College in Norton, Mass., and served as editor of The Wheaton News. After graduating in 1938, she became an intern for The New York Herald Tribune and always remembered her getting her first byline for a story for the “Home Institute” section of the paper on “double ball-bearing casters.”

She soon became a staff writer for  Click, an entertainment magazine published in Philadelphia. While there she met a copy boy named Earl Burton, who was working for the Washington bureau of Time magazine. The two were married in 1940, and for a while Linette commuted to work each day from Washington to Philadelphia.

When World War II broke out, she joined the Office of Civilian Defense in Washington as a writer and public relations person while Earl became a lieutenant in the Navy,  serving as a writer in London during the German blitz and later in the Pacific.

While they were apart, the Burtons wrote two children’s books using wartime “Victory mail,”  a military mail process in which each letter would be censored, copied to film, and printed back to paper on arrival at its destination.  Their V-mail collaboration resulted in “Taffy and Joe” (1943), about the friendship between a dog and a monkey,  and “The Exciting Adventures of Waldo” (1945), about a wooden decoy duck that comes to life in the wild.  Both were published by McGraw-Hill and illustrated by Helen Stone, a popular children’s book illustrator in the 1940s. 

After the war and stints with Time’s Ottawa and Toronto offices, the Burtons moved to to Ridgefield in 1954 after Earl joined Time/Life’s New York headquarters where he eventually became the director of correspondents for Sports Illustrated. He died in 1968, only 52 years old.

The Burtons and their children lived on Bennett’s Farm Road in a 1790s farmhouse that has since been torn down; where it stood is now the parking lot for Bennett’s Pond State Park.

In her first years here, Burton was concentrating on raising a family and dealing with a succession of farm animals, including a burro, sheep, a calf, rabbits and a “Toulouse goose” named Horace that “became so fierce that tradesmen refused to get out of their trucks unless a Burton was on hand to protect them,” she once said, adding,  “When the children went to the end of the driveway to get the bus to go to school, Horace would follow them and stand in front of the bus, honking. Until one of the Burtons got out and flung Horace back onto the driveway, the bus could not move — to the delight of the children inside.”

In 1958, with her youngest child in first grade, Burton wrote Karl Nash, publisher of The Ridgefield Press, looking for a job. She soon got it and began 40 years of writing mostly personality features, interviewing thousands of people — from truckers and masons to movie actors and best-selling authors — and the two presidents. She found tradesmen as interesting as celebrities and enjoyed writing about a transcontinental truck driver as much as about a television star.

However, she was understandably pleased to have been invited to meet with Presidents  Carter and Reagan and wrote entertaining accounts of both sessions.

“How can that man wield the tremendous power of the presidency?” she wondered when she met  President Carter. “He looks like someone’s favorite big brother. No wonder everyone calls him Jimmy.”

She wrote many travel features, usually as the l.o.l. “Nat traveled to all the fantastic places that most of us only wish we could go to,” said novelist Elizabeth Daniels Squire, a longtime friend of Burton. Among her journeys was a 1984 trip around the world with fellow Ridgefielder Alice Gore King. “It was fun from start to finish,” King recalled. “Her sense of humor made molehills out of mountains. And she was kindness personified.”

Her l.o.l. features would even light-heartedly describe her misfortunes. In 1994, she fell and broke her elbow and nearly two months later, doctors discovered she had also broken her pelvis and needed to stay in bed at her home for more than a month. “In the next five weeks while the l.o.l. lay like a beached whale, an incredible number of trained District Nursing Association staff kept her from having to become a patient in a strange environment,” she later wrote in an appreciation of what is now the Ridgefield Visiting Nurse Association.

Burton was also active in the community. In the 1950s, when her family was involved raising farm animals, she ran a chapter of the Grange, an organization that had once been popular and sizable in town. She twice served as president of the League of Women Voters, and she sang with the Charles Pope Choristers. A painter, she was active in the Ridgefield Guild of Artists for many years. 

Nat Burton died in 1999 at the age of 83. Three years later, St. Stephen’s Church, where she

had been a longtime member, dedicated the “Linette Burton Memorial Garden” just south of the church and in front of South Hall. “It’s not just for members of the parish,” said Rector John Gilchrist. “We want to invite people off the street to come in and enjoy it as a quiet place.”

Burton loved gardens and the woods near her home, but did once run into trouble with a tree. Her little old lady feature  about her winning a raffle just before Christmas in the mid-1960s reflects how she could have fun with problems.

“Some little old ladies play bingo or save string or knit afghans to keep busy, but we know one who takes chances on things,” she wrote. “Lots of things, like Mustangs and Cadillacs, trips to

Europe or Hawaii, electric carving knives, and pine-paneled dens. Through all the years, she never won anything until that Sunday night, Dec. 5, a date which will be indelibly imprinted in her mind along with such other important dates as the Battle of Hastings, her wedding anniversary, and the last day to pay taxes without paying interest.

“It was 9:32 p.m. when the telephone rang and the caller announced, as though proclaiming the dawn of a new era, ‘This is Mrs. Richard Jackson. You have just won a live Christmas tree!’

“‘A live what?’ the l.o.l. responded dully, thinking quickly of the live ducks, dogs, cats, sheep, cows, burros, alligators, hamsters, and rabbits that had graced her home.

“‘A live Christmas tree,’ the caller repeated. ‘Remember the chance you took on the tree when you went through the Keeler Tavern the other day during their open house? Well, your name was picked. And the tree is here, waiting for you.’”

The story goes on to describe the family’s struggles in dealing with moving an eight-foot evergreen with a large ball, weighing 200 pounds, how it was loaded into their little VW microbus, and how it sat in front of the house, awaiting someone to dig a four-foot “crater” in which to plant the huge ball in the freezing ground.

“The l.o.l. is seriously considering offering chances (free) to participate in a muscle-building program (particularly the biceps) to anyone who is as chance-happy as she once used to be,” she said.

John B. Hughes: 

The News and Views

In the 1940s and 50s, the rich and cultured voice of John B. Hughes was as familiar to millions of Americans as the voices of Walter Cronkite, Charles Osgood, or Huntley and Brinkley would become to another generation.

Hughes was a newscaster and commentator whose long career spanned  the golden age of radio well into the early days of television.

A native of Cozad, Nebr., John Broughton Hughes was born in 1902. He began his news career in print journalism, working for the Portland Oregonian. He also enjoyed the theater and his work with an acting company led to going into radio.

He worked for the Warner Brothers’s Los Angeles radio station, KFWB, and during the late 1930s, had a daily NBC news commentary, called “Hughes Reel.” 

By 1940, he had joined the Mutual network where he was considered a specialist on the Orient — he predicted that the Japanese would attack the U.S. When Pearl Harbor occurred, he quickly became an important newscaster for the Mutual network on the West Coast.

Early in the war, Hughes supported the interning of Japanese-Americans who, he felt, would support their home country instead of the U.S. (The famous newsman, Edward R. Murrow, held a similar view.) Later in the war, however, Hughes did an about face, and in his commentaries became a leading voice supporting the rights of minorities and criticizing prejudice against Japanese-Americans. 

During the war, Hughes was a correspondent attached to General Douglas MacArthur’s headquarters, covering the advance from Australia to Japan. He made several amphibious landings and saw combat with guerilla forces and American troops. He was wounded twice, and twice refused the Purple Heart. 

He was sent home before the war ended, and was in the newsroom when the announcement of the Japanese surrender was made over KFWB — with actress Marlene Dietrich and basketball star and broadcaster Sam Balter assisting.

After the war, his “News and Views with John B. Hughes” was carried nationwide, first over

NBC, then CBS and later the Mutual radio network.  Many of his radio broadcasts can be heard today over the Internet.

The New York Times once observed that Hughes “has the polished diction of an ex-actor, which indeed he is.” Besides doing stage acting, he appeared in three films, “Meet John Doe” (1941), “Rhapsody in Blue” (1945) and “Gilbert and Sullivan” (1953) — he played himself in all three.

He was also the narrator of the World War II documentary, “The Battle of Britain,” produced by Frank Capra for the U.S. government.

He and his wife, Ariel, also founded a radio station, KXXX, in Colby, Kansas, which they ran for several years.

They came East around 1949, living first in Westport and then buying Ontaroga Farm, the former Starr estate, on the corner of Lounsbury and Farmingville Roads in 1950.

In the early 1950s, Hughes became one of the first TV anchormen, working for the Dumont network and WOR-TV with a nightly news programs. He also helped form the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists.

In 1958, he became the first anchorman and director of television news at WTAE in Pittsburgh, retiring in 1961, but working part-time as a radio and television news consultant for a while after that.

He died in 1982 in Pittsburgh, Pa., just two days before his 80th birthday. His survivors include a son, a grandson, and three grandchildren living in Ridgefield today.

John Scott: 

A Hands-On Journalist

When journalist John Scott worked with his hands, it was not just to type his eight books, scores of white papers, and countless Time magazine articles. Scott began his career a welder in Russia, and later, when he came to Ridgefield in 1948, built his stone-and-wood Peaceable Ridge home with his own hands. 

The son of the liberal social reformer, Scott Nearing, John Scott Nearing was born in Philadelphia in 1912. He dropped his father’s name after a disagreement and left the University of Wisconsin after two years because of financial problems. It was during the Depression and, intrigued by communism and socialism, he decided to learn electric welding at the General Electric school in Schenectady, N.Y., and, after unraveling a lot of red tape, headed for Russia. There, at age 20, he began working in a Urals factory as a welder. After several years, he became a foreman and finally a chemist.

It was in the Urals that he met and married his wife, Maria “Masha” Dikareva, the daughter of illiterate peasant parents. Thanks to the free education system in Russia, Masha Scott had studied mathematics and chemistry at a Moscow institute and her siblings included two teachers, two engineers, two doctors, an economist, and a college dean. Throughout her life, along with raising two daughters, Masha Scott continued her studies and taught in many places, including at the University of Connecticut and Norwich University in Vermont. She had earned a master’s degree and, late in

life, was working on a doctorate in Russian language.

      Scott lost his job in Stalin’s 1937 purge, but he remained in Russia as a French and British news correspondent. Two weeks before the German attack on the USSR in 1940, he was expelled from the country for “slandering” Soviet foreign policy and “inventing” reports of Soviet-German tension. 

He soon began covering World War II as a correspondent for Time magazine, and was in Japan in 1941, just before Pearl Harbor. 

In 1942, Scott became a staff writer for Time’s foreign news section and during much of the war, headed Time-Life’s bureau in Stockholm.  After the armistice he reopened the Central European bureau, covering the aftermath of the war. There are reports that especially early in the war, Scott worked for the U.S. Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency, and had supplied the government with information on the Soviet war industry.

Throughout and after the war,  he delivered many lectures on world affairs, speaking before such groups as the Foreign Policy Association. 

In 1948, he moved to Time’s Manhattan offices and came to Ridgefield where he took a year’s break and began building his Peaceable Ridge home. He later confessed that “I was going to run for the senate and write the great novel. Those projects flopped ignominiously, but I did get my house built.” 

Peaceable Ridge back then was called Standpipe Road, had only one house along it, and was

a narrow, dirt path that was treacherous in bad weather. But the view from his place offered a wide sweep of the Hudson Valley; on a clear day, one could see the Empire State Building.  He bought three acres from Harold O. Davis, who was the longtime town tax assessor, but, he said,  “later, when we got it surveyed, we found out we had five acres which is something that was very fortuitous — something for which I don’t think Harold has ever forgiven me.”

Scott decided to use the parcel’s natural resources — rocks and trees — to build his home, which wound up as an eclectic four-story structure along the side of a hill. The house had many walls of rock, beams from local trees, and no nails — Scott employed the colonial technique of using wooden pegs with mortise and tenon joints. He built most of the furniture, also without nails, including four large oak tables, one of which was so large that it could never be removed from the room in which it was fashioned. He took pains to make sure any “store-bought” furniture matched the hand-made look of the interior. “That was a regular Steinway,” he told a visitor in 1974, pointing to a piano, “but we sanded it down and stained it the same color as the rest of the stuff in the room.”

The grounds included many stone walls, a swimming pool and a tennis court.

The Scotts often entertained friends and associates at dinner parties and outdoor poolside gatherings — Vice President Henry Wallace of South Salem was a frequent visitor.

In 1951 he joined the close staff of Time-Life publisher Henry R. Luce, also of Ridgefield, and began in-depth reporting on crisis areas such as Latin America, the Soviet Union and the Middle East. Over 17 years he turned out 12 reports that Time distributed to leaders in government, education and business. 

He also lectured widely, especially at colleges and universities. A gifted speaker (he won an oratory contest as a child at the Quaker school he attended in Pennsylvania), Scott never used prepared text or even notes for his addresses. His many talks were often spiced with good humor. Lecturing, he said in 1973, is largely a matter of “mastering diaphragmatic breathing. I’ve been told that if you breathe right, it doesn’t matter what you say.”

His first book, published in 1942, was “Beyond the Urals,” the story of his experiences in the Soviet steel mill, which the New York Times called “a genuine grassroots account of Soviet life” and “a rich portrait of daily life under Stalin.” It is still in print.

 Other books were “Duel for Europe” (1942), “Europe in Revolution” (1945), “Political Warfare” (1955), “Democracy Is Not Enough” (1960), “China, The Hungry Dragon” (1967), “Hunger: Man’s Struggle to Feed Himself” (1969), “Divided They Stand” (about East and West Germany) (1973), “Detente Through Soviet Eyes” (1974), and “Millions Will Starve” (1975). 

Despite his work at Time and at his home, Scott still had time for his hometown, especially its political side. He belonged at first to the Ridgefield Democratic Club.  But he later became a Republican and promoted more conservative policies. He often spoke here, and in 1966, delivered the

Memorial Day address, supporting the United States’ involvement in the fast-expanding war in Vietnam.

After his retirement from Time in 1973, he became vice president of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, where he would also sometimes appear on the air.  In 1974, he made “five broadcasts in Russian on hunger, beamed to millions of listeners from Leningrad to Odessa,” he told an interviewer.

He also continued to lecture around the country. And it was while on a speaking tour in 1976 that he suffered a stroke at the Lake Shore Club in Chicago and died at the age of 64.

“He wanted to build the structure of a better world,” said the Rev. Clayton R. Lund of the First Congregational Church at his funeral. “Such optimism never left him because he had such access to human weakness and nobility; he was obsessed with the triumph of the human spirit.”

Masha Scott survived her husband by 28 years. She died in 2004 at the age of 92.

Hugh Mulligan: 

Globe-Trotting Journalist

Few people have seen the world as Hugh Mulligan had. 

He drank with John Steinbeck, covered the death of three popes and President Kennedy, was the only reporter — British or American — at the wedding and the funeral of Princess Diana, and was dining with Salvador Dali when the artist was booted from a restaurant because his ocelot defecated on the floor. 

He covered both the rise and fall of the Berlin Wall, accompanied Pope John Paul II on two dozen journeys, went to the North Pole in a Navy blimp, and rode an 18-wheeler up the Alcan Highway in the middle of winter. 

Mulligan had thousands of stories to tell of his half century as an Associated Press reporter, covering everything from wars to weddings, in 146 countries. 

A favorite anecdote concerned Steinbeck, with whom Mulligan had tried for months to get an interview at the author's Long Island home.  He gave up when he had to go to Vietnam. Three weeks later,  Steinbeck checked into the same Vietnamese hotel where Mulligan was staying. When the author, whose wife was trying to wean him off alcohol, discovered Mulligan had liquor, he started visiting the reporter’s room every night. 

“I finally had to tell him, ‘Steinbeck, for three months I couldn’t get an interview with you and

now I can’t get you out of my room!’”

Mulligan earned many awards, but his most prized was the 1967 Overseas Press Club Award for his coverage of the Vietnam War (about which also he wrote one of his three books, “No Place to Die: The Agony of Vietnam”). 

A native of New York City,  Hugh Aloysius Mulligan was born in 1925. He served in World War II as a rifleman in the Army's 106th Infantry Division in Europe. After the war, he resumed his schooling, graduating summa cum laude from Marlboro College in Vermont. He then earned a master's in English from Harvard and one in journalism from Boston University, both awarded in the same week without either school knowing he was also attending the other. 

After a stint teaching Latin and Greek in Boston, Mulligan joined AP in 1951 in Baton Rouge, La., and after 1956 was based in New York, except for a 1970s assignment in London. He retired in 2000.

A devout Catholic who had once studied for the priesthood, he covered 26 trips made by Pope John Paul II. He was so nervous when he met the pontiff for the first time that he dropped a bag of rosaries. But the pope blessed them, “even the broken ones,” Mr. Mulligan wrote later.

The Associated Press reported that “colleagues joked that Mr. Mulligan could find a way to mention the Catholic church in any story, no matter the subject. He said the first person he visited in any new place was the local priest, because ‘they always know what’s going on.’”

Among the many celebrities he interviewed were Marilyn Monroe, Margaret Thatcher, the Shah of Iran, John Glenn, Joe DiMaggio, Bob Hope, Brendan Behan, Tennessee Williams, James Jones, and, of course, John Steinbeck.

Mulligan moved in Ridgefield in 1977 and occasionally wrote columns about his experiences

in his hometown.

He was a voracious reader and diligent researcher who “gloried in finding obscure nuggets of fact and history,” a colleague once said. His Ridgefield home, which he named “Hardscribble House,” featured a wall-size bookcase with the works of Irish writers.

He often sent observations to The Ridgefield Press and in 2001, when the current fire chief, also an amateur actor, retired from firefighting to pursue his avocation, Mulligan offered this letter:

“Now that Dick Nagle has hung up his chief’s helmet and turnouts to pursue an acting-singing career, he might put together a cabaret show of old firehouse favorites. Like:

“Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.

“Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight.

“I don’t Want to Set the World on Fire.

“Too Darn Hot.

“My Old Flame.

“Setting the Woods on Fire.

“Having  A Heat Wave.

“Great Balls of Fire.

“My Heart Burns from Firehouse Cooking.

“Days of Lines and Hoses.

“Hunk of Burnin’ Love.

“Good Night Si-reen.”

Mulligan died in 2008 at the age of 83.

“Hugh's beat was mankind,” former AP president Louis D. Boccardi said at Mulligan's death. “He had a love affair with the world, and we of the AP loved him for it. There won’t be, there can’t be, another Hugh Mulligan.”

Joe Pisani, a Hersam Acorn Newspapers writer who had known Mulligan for 30 years, called him “a man who epitomized all that was honorable about journalism back before accountants and ad directors invaded the newsroom, back before publishers threw around terms like monetize and user-generated content as if they were voodoo incantations that could save this business, back before it was fashionable for journalists to wear their opinions on their sleeves.”

Robert Wohlforth: 

Writer and Publisher

Robert Wohlforth was a journalist, novelist, government investigator, and publisher. And he was a successful survivor of attacks during the McCarthy era.

Born in 1904 in Lakewood, N.J., Robert M. Wohlforth attended Princeton University (where many of his papers now reside) and graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point  in 1927. He served for a short time as an officer of the 18th Infantry, but was unhappy with the military and soon resigned.

In the late l920’s he worked for the New York Daily Telegraph as a reporter and theater critic, but also began to write articles critical of the military establishment. In one piece, which appeared in “The North American Review” in August 1934, he pointed out that the Army spent $2 million annually feeding mules and only $495,000 for armored vehicles.  

In 1934 he also published “Tin Soldiers,” an unflattering novel about cadet life at West Point. A New York Times review of the novel observed: “Mr. Wohlforth says he resigned from the army in 1928 because he was unable to keep up with the ‘straight-alcohol-and-ginger-ale drinkers’ at Fort Slocum, Camp Dix and Fort Jay, but it is obvious from the internal evidence of his novel that liquor had little to do with his distaste for the martial life. An individualist, he must have hated the routine of West Point, even in his relatively free upper-class-years.”
Wohlforth also wrote a series of reminiscences for the New Yorker, called “My Nickelodeon Childhood,”  recounting his experiences as a boy helping his father operate one of the first movie theaters on the New Jersey shore.

In 1934 he joined the staff of the U.S. Senate’s Nye Committee, which spent several years investigating the “merchants of death,” as the munitions industry was then called. This led to his appointment in 1936 as secretary of the La Follette Committee, which conducted a three-year investigation of labor spying, strike breaking, and other civil liberties violations that affected labor unions.  

In 1939, President Roosevelt appointed Wohlforth to the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice. When World War II broke out, he headed the War Division, which investigated an international web of economic connections among Nazi-run firms.  

He continued to work for the Justice Department until 1952, when “he was forced out of government employment by the McCarthyite witch hunt of the period,” his obituary said. Wohlforth had worked in government with people who were later identified as communists or Soviet sympathizers. 

In a 1953 piece, the caustic conservative columnist Westbrook Pegler, who had lived in

Ridgefield in the 1940s, linked Wohlforth to such people, but never claimed Wohlforth was a communist, or even disloyal. Pegler wrote of Wohlforth: “He said he had had a lot of ‘unfortunate associations,’ including professional relations on the Senate committees with Alger Hiss, John Abt and Charles Krivitsky, alias Kramer, named in sworn testimony by Elizabeth Bentley and others, as Soviet agents.”

However, Pegler continued, “Wohlforth lives at Ridgefield, Conn., formerly an ‘exclusive’ Christmas-card type of New England village which, of recent years, in common with Wilton and other scattered Connecticut communities, has become heavily infested with open and covert Reds.”

Among the Wohlforth “associations” Pegler attacked was former Vice President Henry Wallace. “He was a personal friend of the Henry Wallaces, who have a farm at South Salem where Bubblehead [Pegler’s name for Wallace] has been trying to breed a Rhode Island red to a French fried potato, but Wohlforth insists that he dropped Wallace, even socially, before he got going as the nominee of the Communists in 1948. However, they both are Episcopalians and sometimes meet in church.”

Wohlforth soon began a new career in publishing with Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He was hired by Roger Straus, a founder of the company and  became treasurer of  the publishing house, retiring in the mid-l980’s. 

A 67-year resident, Wohlforth was active in the community, and often penned light-hearted pieces for The Press, calling himself “Ridgefield’s Oldest Living Continuous Vertical Commuter.”   

He helped write the town’s first zoning ordinance and served on the Zoning Commission  for many years. 

He and his wife, Mildred, who lived in an 18th Century house on Rockwell Road, were influential in the effort to create a historic district on Main Street. He served as chairman of the Ridgefield Library board and was a director of the Nature Conservancy.

When he was working for the government, Wohlforth also helped a number of Ridgefield families of Italian ancestry in obtaining citizenship for their relatives. 

In 1977 when the town celebrated the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Ridgefield with an re-enactment, he played the part of General Benedict Arnold, one of the battle’s heroes, riding a white horse in colonial uniform.

He died in 1997 at the age of 97. Mildred, a journalist and a novelist (also profiled in Who Was Who in Ridgefield), died in 1994. They had been married for 64 years at her death.