John D. Edmonds: 
His Pension Lived On

Too often  people of talent and promise are lost to war. Such was the case with John Edmonds, but it wasn't a Civil War bullet or blast  that ended his military career and may have contributed to his early death. And, amazingly,  his 80-year-old widow was reapplying for pension benefits more than a half century after his death.

 John D. Edmonds was born in Ridgefield in 1832, a son of Robert Chauncey and Abby Darling Edmonds who lived on Silver Hill Road,  a short distance west of Wilton Road West. By 1850, when he was 18, Edmonds was teaching at one of Ridgefield’s one-room schoolhouses. (His father, Robert, was an official of the Flat Rock School district, but the Flat Rock school committee did not employ John.)

He met Harriett Eliza “Hattie” Edmond, a first cousin with a “singular spelling,” and they were married on  Aug. 22, 1853, in Portchester, N.Y., officiated by a Presbyterian minister, according to research by Judith Adams, a descendant of his family. Hattie was 16 and John, 21.  

Hattie was a daughter of Aaron and Harriett Edmond of Ridgefield (some members of the family spelled their name Edmond but most chose Edmonds — and a few appeared as Edmunds). Apparently John, Hattie  and her parents all shared an interest in the West — western New York, that is, an area that had been opening up to farming development after the Revolution. By 1855, John and Hattie, and their baby daughter, Emma, were living near the Finger Lakes, at Benton, N.Y., with her parents and other family members 

But Benton was not west enough. By 1860 John was teaching school in Ada, Mich., just east of Grand Rapids. 

When the Civil War broke out, Edmonds was quick to respond. Despite having a wife and two young children and being 29 years old, he enlisted  in the 2nd Regiment of Michigan Cavalry Volunteers at Grand Rapids in September 1861, signing up to serve three years. 

By January 1862, he was stationed at the Benton Barracks in Saint Louis, Mo., when the
accident that helped doom him occurred. Something spooked the horse he was riding, and it took off, out of control. The horse ran past a shed, from which roof boards were projecting. Edmonds collided with the boards, which hit him in the lower ribs of his right side, and he was thrown from the horse.

The injury was so severe, Edmonds was unable to return to active service and was honorably discharged from the army in May 1862. He returned to his family, who were living in Grand Rapids, and according to medical records, was unable to work more than a few days at a time. 

Since teaching was a rather taxing job, Edmonds apparently decided to take up law as a profession since he could more easily coordinate his workload to his physical disabilities. He began law schooling in Grand Rapids and became a lawyer.

Meanwhile, his brief service made him and his family eligible for an army disability pension that provided money off and on for a half century — long after he had died.. But to obtain veterans disability payments, he and especially his widow, Hattie, went through what must have been tiring application procedures several times over. Just surviving records reveal more than 50 pages of submissions and correspondence,  including testimony from doctors on the nature of his injury, his disability, and his death as well as evidence of his marriage and his children. 

Even a character reference was provided.  Said one physician who backed up his claim,  “Mr. Edmonds is an entirely upright and reliable man of good habits and I know nothing to invalidate his claim.”

Soon after returning to civilian life, John Edmonds began applying for the  pension. In 1863,  Dr. E.R. Ellis examined him and rated him two thirds incapacitated. “Applicant complains of severe pain in his right side over the region of the short ribs ... which at times, especially on exposure or over exercise becomes greatly aggravated,” the physician said.

He received a pension of $5.33⅓  a month ($64 a year) — equivalent of about $112 a month or $1,350 a year today.

However, his health continued to deteriorate. He and probably also his family, by then including two boys and a girl, moved back to Ridgefield, probably to live with his parents. On July 23, 1865, he died of what Ridgefield physician Nehemiah Perry determined to be “consumption” — what we now call tuberculosis. He was only 33 years old and is buried with his parents in the Hurbutt section of the Ridgefield Cemetery on North Salem Road.

Subsequent documentation described the disease as “contracted while in the service.”

After his death Hattie began applying to take over his benefits, and a year or so later, started receiving $8 a month in “widow’s relief,”  an amount increased after another  year to $14 apparently to include support for the three children whose existence had required additional documentation.

However, when she married Charles P. Scott in 1870, Hattie lost her pension. Nonetheless, the children — all still minors — remained eligible, but apparently Hattie had to reapply to keep those modest support payments coming to her new name, Hattie E. Scott. As each child reached 21, the benefit for him or her stopped and by the early 1880s, the family was no longer receiving any military pension payments.

All that later changed many years later. Charles Scott died in 1911, leaving Hattie a widow for the second time. Apparently it was six years before she realized that, as an unmarried widow of a Civil War-disabled soldier, she was once again eligible for John’s pension payment.

In 1917 at the age of 80 and living in Loveland, Colo., Hattie again began a tedious process of applying for a pension, including digging up half-century-old records and testimony. 

She succeeded. The pension was still $8 a month, and despite time and inflation, had changed little in buying power. In 1866, $8 had been worth the modern equivalent of $141. In 1918, it was worth $138.

Hattie Edmonds Scott collected that $8 a month or $96 a year until her death in 1923 at the home of her son, Lynn Edmonds, in Loveland. She was 87 years old. The local newspaper described Hattie as a “pioneer” of Larimer County, Colo, “having come to the county in 1871” and noting that her husband had  “at one time been county clerk.”

Her first husband and Lynn’s father, Civil War veteran John Edmonds, who had died 52 years earlier, was not even mentioned. 

Joseph H. Donnelly: 

The First Lawyer

Joe Donnelly made quite a name for himself in Ridgefield. In fact, he made several names for himself.

Ridgefield’s first full-time practicing attorney and one of its most astute real estate entrepreneurs had a career that lasted more than 60 years and included countless hours of public service, both with Ridgefield government and in numerous community organizations.

“He was really good to an awful lot of people, and helped an awful lot of people — behind the scenes,” said Paul S. McNamara, who had been his partner for many years. “He was reserved and preferred to remain anonymous.”

Even so, his name does appear on three town roads.

Joseph Henry Donnelly was born in 1906 in Bridgeport, got his bachelor’s and law degrees

from Columbia University, and went to work for his brother’s  prestigious law firm in Bridgeport.

In July 1931, when he was only 24 years old, he decided to strike out on his own and arrived in Ridgefield in “an old Pontiac,” recalled former town historian Richard E. Venus. He lived at Ashland Cottage, the Victorian house just south of the St. Stephen’s campus where once another attorney had lived. While Samuel “Lawyer Sam” Keeler was a full-time attorney, he had practiced only in New York City; the newcomer, the town’s only local lawyer, was the first to live and practice full-time in Ridgefield.

After his marriage to Ellen Gavin, whom he had met at Columbia, Donnelly moved to a house on West Mountain Road. Later he bought a farm on Wilton Road West, part of which he eventually developed into a subdivision served by Donnelly Drive — one of three roads in town using his name.

Soon after his arrival Judge Donnelly became active in his new community. He was named the town attorney in 1935, serving until 1948 and again for a year in the late 1960s.

From 1941 to 1949 he was judge of probate, an elective office that was the source of the judicial title that stuck over the years — many people referred to him as “Judge Donnelly” long after he stopped being a probate judge.

For many years, he was involved in the drive to bring zoning to Ridgefield and was in the forefront of the campaign that led to zoning’s adoption in 1946. The ordinance he championed was written by his brother, John V. Donnelly, who was city attorney of Bridgeport and whose law firm broke in many of the state’s top trial lawyers, not to mention his own brother.

Joe Donnelly served in many other government posts including on a charter revision commission and the Police Commission. He was Ridgefield’s state representative from 1939 to 1941, and a prosecutor in the town’s Trial Justice Court in the 1940s. He was active in the Republican party, serving for a while as town chairman. He was a frequent moderator of town meetings.

Real estate was one of Donnelly’s long-standing interests and over the years he amassed a lot

of property. Though he had sold off some by the time of his death, he was still one of the town’s top 10 taxpayers — most of the other nine were corporations.

Among his earliest purchases was the commercial block belonging to Judge George G. Scott, whom he succeeded as probate judge. The block, which he acquired in 1943, consists of stores and offices between the Masonic Hall and the old Bissell building, which today includes Craig’s Jewelers, Shine Hair Salon and Rodier Flowers. He bought the land behind this in the mid-1950s and built the “Donnelly Shopping Center” that now houses the Ridgefield Thrift Shop, Ancona’s Wines and Liquors, Ridgefield Music, Colby’s, and other shops but had originally been home to Woolworth’s and First National.

He was involved in the development of Ridgefield Commerce Park on Danbury Road, and several subdivisions. Among these were the 1950s Scodon development in Ridgebury that includes Scodon Drive (he was the “don” while Ridgefield Savings Bank president Carlton Scofield was the “sco”).

With jeweler Francis D. Martin and real estate and insurance broker Arthur J. Carnall, he developed the road that’s named from the first three letters of the threesome’s surnames: Marcardon Avenue. Martin, also a large investor in real estate, was once Donnelly’s landlord — the judge’s first office was over today’s Planet Pizza in the Tudoresque building then owned by Martin.

Later, Judge Donnelly acquired Gov.  Phineas Lounsbury’s one-time home on Governor Street and converted it to offices, which included his own firm of Donnelly, McNamara and Gustafson (now practicing from the Ridgefield Bank building on Danbury Road).

Through his involvement in real estate, both in representing clients and in his own dealings,

he became perhaps the foremost authority on property in town, and some said his records were better than town hall’s. He maintained thousands of property records, first on three-by-five cards and later on microfilm. As historian Dick Venus observed, “he could search a title without leaving his office.”

“He was one of the best real estate lawyers,” said attorney John E. Dowling, who’d also been a probate judge. “He could tell you the deal on a closing many years after. Joe was a detail man.”

Donnelly’s business interests included the Cadillac dealership on Danbury Road, which he and Irving B. Conklin Sr. operated in the early 1950s; it later became Kellogg-Thiess. He had also served on the boards of directors of several banks. 

“He spent an awful lot of time on local organizations, helping the town,” said McNamara. Among the many civic groups for which he volunteered were the Salvation Army, the District Nursing Association, the Ridgefield and Fairlawn Cemetery Associations, and the Knights of Columbus. He was an honorary life member of the Ridgefield Volunteer Fire Department. During World War II he was on the Ration Board and the Selective Service Committee.

He belonged to St. Mary’s Parish, but was ecumenical in his assistance.  “He helped a lot of churches of all denominations,” said Dowling. “He did a lot of work for them and I don’t think he ever charged them for it.”

An avid golfer, Donnelly was a charter member of the Silver Spring Country Club.

“We used to play golf together,” Dowling recalled. “It used to be the lawyers against the bankers. Joe and I would play Scofield and (Frank) Warner.” Other Ridgefield businessmen who’d often be among his golfing partners or competitors included Abe Morelli, Reed F. Shields, Arthur Carnall, Fred Orrico, and Charles Coles.

In 1980 Donnelly was honored on his 50-year membership in the Connecticut Bar. He died in 1992 at the age of 85.

One of Joe Donnelly’s favorite legal cases  — and one he enjoyed recollecting — was his service as administrator of the estate of an 85-year-old Bethel woman named Helen Dow Peck. In 1955, Mrs. Peck bequeathed $180,000 ($1.7 million in 2018) to someone named John Gale Forbes, whom she’d “met” many years earlier via a Ouija board she had purchased at a toy store in 1919.

The bizarre case drew widespread publicity, especially after nine nieces and nephews appealed the bequest on the grounds that Mrs. Peck “did not have the right use of her reason when she executed her will,” giving a small fortune to a “spirit” she’d never seen in person.

The appeal went all the way to the state Supreme Court of Errors, and the relatives, represented by Dowling, won. 

The case “was on the Connecticut Bar exam at least once,” Dowling said with a smile.

Charles Recht: 

Voice of the Soviet Union

For 12 years following World War I, the United States had no formal diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. During that time Ridgefielder Charles Recht was in effect the Russian ambassador, the Russian embassy, the Russian consul and perhaps even the Russian Chamber of Commerce in this country. 

Recht, who had a home here for 15 years, was an American attorney who represented Soviet interests in the U.S. from 1921 to 1933. He was the only officially recognized contact between the two countries.

“His arguments in financial disputes for Soviet citizens against American interests were a prelude to the establishment of formal diplomatic contacts,” said The New York Times. “In his long career, the gentle, urbane lawyer also represented a variety of anarchists, radicals and persons accused of being Soviet agents.”

Recht was also a novelist, poet and translator of plays including the first English version of August Strindberg’s “Miss Julie.”

A native of Bohemia, now part of the Czech Republic, he was born in 1887 and came to this country when he was 13 with his widowed mother and siblings. The family settled in Manhattan and he worked at various jobs to support the family, including employment as a librarian before he was 20. He became a citizen in 1909.

He worked his way through New York University Law School and became an attorney, but he was also associated with many of the literati of his era, including H. L. Mencken (a client), Eugene O’Neill, Sherwood Anderson, and poet Edgar Lee Masters, the attorney who wrote the “Spoon River Anthology.”

In 1915, he married Aristine Munn, a physician who belonged to a wealthy Rochester family. She died in 1952. 

Recht opposed the U.S. entry into World War I. He became an attorney for the Civil Liberties Bureau, which advised many conscientious objectors, and he served alongside such notables as Clarence

Darrow and Norman Thomas, the six-time presidential candidate (who also had a home in Ridgefield). 

After the war he represented many foreign-born anarchists and radicals who were being deported by the U.S. Government in the wake of widespread labor unrest. One was Ludwig Martens, a Marxist and an engineer. At the Soviet Union’s behest in 1919, Martens set up the Russian Soviet Government Bureau, an informal embassy in New York, that conducted a considerable amount of commercial business. The federal government declared the operation illegal, and in 1921 deported Martens, who was defended by Recht.

Impressed with Recht’s work, the Soviet Union hired him as their representative in the United States.

During the 1920s he oversaw many trade negotiations between American companies and the Soviet Union, even exchanges of motion pictures.  He made 22 trips to Russia during the period, and often carried back dispatches from Lenin to leading American intellectuals. 

In 1933, Recht turned over his duties to the new Soviet Embassy in Washington, D.C., but he continued to represent various Soviet citizens and institutions throughout his career.   

Despite his close association with the homeland of communism, Recht maintained that he was never a communist. When questioned about it, he said communism was fine for a country like Russia, but “not the United States.”

Over the years, he also handled many smaller cases, including tenants fighting landlords and teachers who were fired for their views. He also fought for more liberal immigration policies.

He published several books including two novels, “Rue With A Difference” in 1924 and “Babylon on Hudson” in 1932, and a collection of his poems, “Manhattan Made.”

Recht had a house on a hill off Florida Road from 1950 until his death in 1965 at the age of 78. According to The Ridgefield Press, he and his wife, Lillian, “did not participate much in the civic affairs” of Ridgefield, but “they had a wide circle of friends here.” 

Romeo Petroni, 

The Friendly Judge

For many Ridgefielders, he was the tall, friendly fellow with the big smile who’d stand on the sidewalk in front of the town hall or Squash’s, selling Lions Club raffle tickets or promoting a candidate in the local election. For others throughout Connecticut, he was the distinguished, silver-haired man in black robes who presided over their trial.

After a long life of working and serving in his home town, Romeo Petroni became the first native to serve as a Connecticut Superior Court judge.

“It’s a demanding, challenging position that requires broad knowledge of the law, but at this point in my life, I’m ready for it,” Judge Petroni said in May 1990 when he received the appointment. 

Romeo Geno Petroni was born in Ridgefield in 1929, the son of immigrants from Italy. His father, a laborer, died when Petroni was nine, leaving his mother, Madalena, to bring up him and his sister. Petroni worked hard in school and became president of his Ridgefield High School graduating class in 1946. He went to Syracuse University, graduated from Fordham Law School, and served in the U.S. Army for two years. 

He returned to town in 1957, joining the law practice of  John E. Dowling, a prominent Democrat, as an associate. The same year, Petroni got his first taste of public service  when he became town attorney during the administration of his father-in-law, First Selectman Leo F. Carroll.  

Four years later, running as a Republican, Petroni was elected Ridgefield’s state representative, serving until 1967. 

In 1966, Petroni made an unsuccessful run for Congress, and was always proud of the fact that at a fundraising dinner in his honor, the speaker was Gerald R. Ford, then a congressman and minority leader of the House. Among other GOP notables who campaigned for him was Tricia Nixon, daughter of soon-to-be president Richard M. Nixon. 

His campaign platform included his belief that President Lyndon Johnson should have negotiated with the North Vietnamese leaders to try to end the Vietnam War. ”I think we should see the President personally enter into direct negotiations with the foe rather than have him assign Secretary of State Dean Rusk or Defense Secretary Robert McNamara to do the chore,” he told interviewers from the Danbury News-Times.

From 1971 to 1974, he was a state senator and in 1974 was elected Ridgefield’s probate judge, a position he held for 16 years. 

In 1986, he ran for governor, but failed to get the Republican nomination. Oddly enough, he was nominated to the Superior Court by the man he would have run against, incumbent Democratic Governor William O’Neill. 

Throughout his career in Ridgefield, Petroni was very active in the community, and among other things was chairman of Boy Scout fund drives, a director of the Boys Club and the Village Bank, and a trustee of St. Mary’s Parish. He belonged to the Lions Club, Knights of Columbus, Italian-American Club, and the Ridgefield Volunteer Fire Department. For many of these groups, he provided free legal services.

He received many honors, including Rotary Club Citizen of the Year in 1984 and a Ridgefield Old Timers award, and was listed in “Who’s Who in American Politics” for many years.

Judge Petroni called Ridgefield home for 60 years, but soon after becoming a judge, moved to the New Haven area to be closer to the courts in which he would preside.

He continued to serve as a regular judge until he turned 70 in 1999, when he was named a judge trial referee, a part-time position in which he could be selected to preside over special cases, often involving family disputes and children.

He and his wife, Catherine,  lived in Madison where he died in 2015 at the age of 86.

Petroni was always a strong family man and when local Republicans honored him at a dinner in 1982, he declared, “My good mother, my strong and righteous wife, my daughters — when you honored me tonight, you honored them, and for that I am truly happy and grateful.”

That same dinner, which also served as a GOP fundraiser, was attended by  many Democrats, including Selectman Lillian Moorhead, one of the most dedicated Democrats in town. 

“I just want you all to know how painful it was for me to write out a check to the Republican Town Committee,” she told the gathering about her ticket purchase. “I really can’t think of many people I’d do that for, and Romeo’s one of them.”

Samuel Keeler: 

The Stern and Staunch Commuter

When he was 86 years old, Samuel Keeler was still commuting to his law office in New York City and was reputedly the oldest commuter on the New Haven line — both in age and length of endurance. He was still making the trip until a month before he died in 1932; he had started this daily journey back around 1870 and may have been among the first passengers on the Ridgefield to Branchville railroad spur that opened that year.

That’s more than 60 years of riding the rails to work in the era of the smoky, noisy steam locomotive. No wonder he looked so grumpy.

Although his business was in the city, “Lawyer Sam,” as he was called to distinguish him from grocer Sam (S.D.) Keeler, had a considerable influence on the town toward the end of the 19th Century and during the first third of the 20th.

“He was sharp, learned, without much humor, small of stature — but solid,” wrote longtime Ridgefield Press publisher Karl S. Nash in a 1971 profile of Keeler. Nash knew the man personally.

Born in 1845 in Wilton, Samuel Keeler had as one of his childhood teachers George E. Lounsbury, who later became governor and from whose brother he later acquired The Ridgefield Press. 

He began commuting to law work in the city soon after graduating from Yale in 1867, but eventually also became busy in Ridgefield, serving as a school board member for 20 years from 1892 until 1912, one of the burgesses of the borough, and a pillar of the First Congregational Church. 

In 1900, he was a founder of the First National Bank and Trust Company of Ridgefield (now Wells Fargo), and was later fifth president of the Ridgefield Savings Bank  (now Fairfield County Bank), serving from 1907 to his death. 

Early in the century, controlling interest in The Press was held by ex-Gov. Phineas Lounsbury, a staunch, tee-totaling Methodist who had ordered that no liquor advertising appear in the paper. One day, he picked up The Press and saw a liquor ad. Outraged, he immediately sold the newspaper to Keeler, “as staunch a Democrat as Mr. Lounsbury was a Republican,” Nash said years later. 

While he kept his feelings out of the news columns,  Keeler wasn’t afraid to take on Republicans editorially, and he fought a long battle with the administration over inequitable property assessments, going so far as to publish several pamphlets on the subject. He remained owner of the newspaper until his death, at which time The Press observed: “Mr. Keeler was a man who always minded his own business. In the wake of his course over the sea of life, there was no tacking or filling.”

Gerard Herrick: 

Rotary-Wing Pioneer

Long before the military developed vertical take-off and landing aircraft, like the Osprey, Gerardus Herrick of High Ridge had invented an aircraft that did that.

Gerardus Post Herrick, who generally went by the name of Gerard, was a rather eccentric but talented lawyer and a skilled research engineer.  Born in 1873, he was a member of the 13th generation of the Post family to live in New York City since the clan arrived in 1654. He graduated from Princeton and became an attorney. 

After serving as a captain in World War I in the Army Air Service—not as a pilot but as a gunnery officer—he came up with the idea of a convertible aircraft that could fly either fixed-wing like a conventional plane or vertically as an “autogyro.”  In the 1920s and 1930s, he partnered with a couple of aircraft manufacturers to build a working model of his autogyro. 

   “The first aircraft, the HV-1, was ready on Nov. 6, 1931,” the Smithsonian Institution says. “The test pilot, Merrill Lambert, made several successful test flights in both fixed- and rotating-wing mode, but when he attempted an in-flight transition between the two, the aircraft fell out of control and crashed. Lambert bailed out of the aircraft, but was killed when his parachute failed to open.” However, an analysis of the accident found the basic design was sound, and Herrick continued to develop what he called a “vertiplane.” 

   The plane was a fixed-wing monoplane with a large overhead propeller, shaped somewhat like a smaller wing. The aircraft could take off as a monoplane and once in the air, convert to a

hovering aircraft using the large overhead propeller. It could then land in a very small area. The aircraft could also take off vertically, but could not convert to horizontal flight in mid-air, and had to remain a “helicopter” until it landed.

 A new version, the HV-2a, began flying successfully in 1936, cruising at 100 mph as a fixed-wing plane and 65 mph in autogyro mode. The 2,300-pound aircraft needed only 60 feet of runway to take off. Unfortunately, the aircraft’s “remarkable performance did not justify production as the weight penalties imposed by carrying both rotary and fixed wing structures eliminated its commercial advantage over conventional airplanes,” the Smithsonian said.  

   Herrick continued to work on convertible airplane ideas and unsuccessfully tried to gain investor and government support until his death in 1955. He didn’t limit his interests to aircraft, however, and over the years the attorney/engineer wrote a manual for small-arms instructors, and did research work into blast furnaces, steam engines, lenses, and rifle sights.

   “Gerard Post Herrick was one of the earliest to advocate combining fixed-wing flight with rotary-wing flight,” wrote Dr. Bruch H. Charnov in a study of the inventor. “He has been given little notice by vertical flight historians, quite unjustifiably becoming one of the forgotten rotary-wing pioneers, the champion of a concept that even today in various forms seeks legitimacy.”

   He and his wife, Lois, had their High Ridge home here starting in the 1920s. A large garage in back once housed the HV-2a, historian Dick Venus recalled. After Lois Herrick died in 1983, Mr. Venus was at an estate sale on the property when he came across “the largest propeller that I had ever seen, lying on the floor of the garage. No doubt this enormous thing could lift a house right off the ground if you had a machine with the energy to turn it.”  He concluded it was a spare for the HV-2a, which had already been donated to the Smithsonian Institution.

   Incidentally, Herrick was a cousin of Myron T. Herrick, the U.S. ambassador to France who greeted Charles Lindbergh on his arrival in Paris in 1927. Myron must have been popular: He’s the only American ambassador to France with a street in Paris named after him — Avenue Myron Herrick.—from “Hidden History of Ridgefield”

John Edward Dowling: 

A Jewel of A Jurist

Eddie Dowling was one of Ridgefield’s most intelligent, colorful and well-liked attorneys. He was also a war hero.

“He’s the sweetest guy around,” said Superior Court Judge Patricia Geen at a 1985 dinner in his honor. He’s a “classic Irishman, a rare jewel,” added Judge Howard J. Moraghan.

Famed for his sharp, wry wit, Dowling often regaled people with tales from his long career. Some described his FBI days, such as the time, in a Midwestern cornfield, he had his gun drawn as he stalked a criminal who turned out to be a scarecrow. Some told of unusual legal cases, such as the Bethel woman who left her sizable estate to a name she discovered using a Ouija board. And many were about life in Ridgefield, such as the time a prominent clergyman, who had been complaining for weeks about a pothole at a local gas station, grabbed a pole and went “fishing” in it to emphasize his point.

While Dowling loved to talk, he usually said little when it came to the two Purple Hearts he earned in World War II.

John Edward Dowling was born in 1922 in a High Ridge house behind St. Mary's Church, where his father was the sexton for many years.

As a boy, he earned money for the family delivering newspapers. One of his customers was Judge Joseph H. Donnelly, then the only lawyer practicing in town. At a dinner honoring Dowling many years later, Donnelly observed that then-heavier Dowling had been a “skinny” kid back then. Dowling replied: “Donnelly didn’t tip too much either.”

Dowling graduated in 1939 from Ridgefield High School where the six-foot-four inch student played basketball. He was an usher at the old Ridgefield Playhouse movie theater, clerked at a store, and drove a school bus to earn money while attending Danbury State Teachers College.

In 1942, he joined the U.S. Army and fought with the infantry in the invasion of Europe. Around Christmas 1944, during the Battle of the Bulge, he rescued two injured comrades. 

Usually quiet about his war years, Dowling would say little about the event, describing it tersely: “We were under attack and these fellows got wounded and I went out and got them out, back to a medic. It was under fire, but I got away with it.”

Private Dowling was wounded twice in the war, the more serious injury occurring in April 1945 during the invasion of Germany. “The war was rapidly ending,” he said in a 2002 interview. “We were liberating towns. They were happy to see us and not the Russians.”

He was a member of an infantry anti-tank unit that set up a 57-mm gun on a road near the town of Unter-Gruppenbach. An approaching German tank blew up the gun. Dowling and two other men were hit, and a fourth man was killed. Injured seriously enough to have been later given the Last Rites, Dowling nonetheless dragged the two injured comrades to a ditch alongside the road. All three hid there wounded as the German tank drove by (it was knocked out down the road). Dowling was sent to Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington, D.C., to recover, and was discharged from the Army in July.

Though he earned the Soldiers Medal, two Purple Hearts, the Bronze Star with Oak Leaf Cluster, and other commendations, Dowling rarely talked of his war exploits and did not even receive his medals until 40 years after the war — and then, only because his son, Michael, researched and requested them from the Army.

One time when he was asked about his war record, he replied, “You want a war record? Go see Dom Bedini. He jumped at D-Day.”

As for himself, “I was in the service — period.”

Nonetheless, late in life, when efforts were being made by the Ridgefield Historical Society to record the experiences of Ridgefield soldiers in World War II, Dowling allowed Press editor Macklin Reid to interview him on his service. He spoke little of the battle exploits, however, and much of the lighter incidents in the war.

"We never did hit a tank," he admitted with a gleam in his eye. "My first shot with the anti-tank gun, I missed the tank and hit a house and it went through the basement. And you know what came out? Four hundred chickens! So after that, everyone in my unit would say, 'Hit another house!' They liked dead chicken meat.”

After his discharge, Dowling earned a law degree from Fordham University, and spent three years as an FBI agent in Illinois and Texas. 

He returned to town in 1951 and accomplished the then-incredible: As a Democrat he was elected judge of probate in this largely Republican town, defeating a well-known Republican attorney, Michael Bruno. The last Democrat to hold that office had been in 1879, and none has held it since.

“The response of townspeople to his candidacy must warm this young man’s heart and give him renewed inspiration to pursue his career with vigor and enthusiasm,” a Press editorial commented at the time. “During his school years here, Eddie Dowling worked hard. He clerked in a grocery store to earn money to continue his education in teachers college and later law school. Here is a local boy who has made good, a youth who, by diligent application to a program of study and work, has demonstrated that Ridgefield boys and girls need not necessarily go far afield to make their way in life.” (The editorial was written by Karl S. Nash, a native son who went off to Harvard and returned to town to run its newspaper.)

Judge Dowling continued to practice law here for most of the next half-century. Many young attorneys began their careers working in his office, including Joseph Egan, the current (2016) probate judge, Romeo Petroni and Sue Reynolds, both of whom later became Superior Court judges, George M. Cohan, and Jane Belote.

At his funeral Judge Egan called Dowling “one of the best known and beloved people in Ridgefield.” Describing him as a “townie in the true sense of the word,” he said “Ed was great to and for the town of Ridgefield.”

“His life had its ups and downs,” he added. “He handled them all with class and dignity.”
Jane Belote said, "More than any other attorney I have ever known, John Dowling truly loved the law and enjoyed being a lawyer. As a summer intern in his office I discovered that, despite the roguish sense of humor and abundant Irish charm, he brought to his practice not only a keen analytic mind but also understanding, concern and tolerance for his often colorful clients.
“Unusual things happened regularly in John Edward's life,” Attorney Belote added. “Every day was an opportunity for adventure.”

Pam Allen, who had been his legal secretary on and off for more than 30 years, said “he was a great boss. He was a legend. There won’t be another like him, ever.” 

Many remembered him also as a caring man, who often used his legal skills to assist people in need. “He’s helped Ridgefield a lot,” The Press once said in an editorial. “He’s one of the nicest guys in town, and if somebody needs a lawyer and can’t afford to pay, he’s the one most apt to help.”

Dowling also served the community as a member of the Board of Finance in the 1960s and the Veterans Park School Building Committee in the 1950s. He was appointed town attorney, both in the 1950s and in the late 1960s, and was frequently a moderator of town meetings. He was a member of the Ridgefield Housing Authority for several years while living at Ballard Green. From 1959 to 1961, he was chief prosecutor in the Danbury Circuit Court, now the Superior Court, and was for a while president of the Danbury Bar Association. He was one of the founders and a director of the Village Bank and Trust Company.

He was a longtime member of the Ridgefield Volunteer Fire Department, and had served as a trustee for many years. At one point, he acquired an antique Seagraves fire engine, which he outfitted with church pews and used to haul fans to football games at Immaculate High School in Danbury. He later gave the truck to the Volunteer Fire Department, which used it for parts in restoring and maintaining its 1931 Seagraves, which is used in parades.

He had been active at St. Mary’s Church where, in 1962, he chaired the committee that helped persuade voters to provide school bus transportation to St. Mary’s School in the days before state law required public busing of private school children.

In 2002, the Ridgefield Old Timers honored him at its annual awards banquet. In 2001, he was a grand marshal of the Memorial Day Parade.

He enjoyed golf, and played frequently with other leaders of the business and professional community. He was a member of the Silver Spring Country Club for many years.

Dowling’s wife, the former Regina Marie Malkiewicz, died in 1972. The couple met when he was an FBI agent in Chicago and they had eight children. Eddie Dowling died in 2004 at the age of 82.

When he was in his 70s, Judge Dowling lived at Ballard Green, the senior citizen complex that he called “Geritol Gardens” and where he was still practicing law. One of the few single men living there, he used to quip, “I never lock my door because there are 50 women watching it at all times.” 

Melbert Cary: 

A Man of Many Parts

Melbert Cary was — as they used to say — a man of many parts. He was a lawyer, a politician, a novelist, a historian, a leader in medical education, and a philanthropist. He came close to being the third Ridgefielder elected governor of the state. But one of his more unusual, and probably least successful “parts” was being an inventor.

Cary’s namesake son and his daughter in law gained even more notoriety for their accomplishments and gifts than he did.

Melbert Brinckerhoff Cary Sr. was born in 1852 in Racine, Wisc. By his own account, after graduating from Princeton, Phi Beta Kappa, in 1872, he “spent a year cattle-ranching in the far West.” He returned to Wisconsin, practiced law briefly in Milwaukee and then became assistant general solicitor of the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railway until 1882. He moved to New York in 1883 and formed his own law firm, which grew into Cary, Miller and McEwen.  His specialty was railroads.

Cary came to Ridgefield in the early 1890s, owning “Wildflower Farm” along both sides of

lower West Lane. His mansion stood atop a hill across from Cedar Lane. The spread included a sizable farm on the north side of West Lane; two barns on the property were later converted into houses at 334 and 336 West Lane.

Cary quickly became active in the Democratic party in Connecticut, and served as chairman of the Democratic State Central Committee for several years. 

In 1902, a year after Republican Governor George E. Lounsbury of Ridgefield left office, Cary ran for governor on the Democratic ticket.  He lost to a Meriden Republican named Abiram Chamberlain, but remained a power in state politics as well as influential in Ridgefield goings on. He was a delegate to the 1908 Democratic National Convention that nominated the golden-throated William Jennings Bryan for president. (Bryan spoke in Ridgefield in 1907 — “Main Street looked as though half the population of the town had turned out,” The Ridgefield Press reported. However, Bryan was as successful in his bid as Cary had been in his.)

Cary was also a writer, whose four books included “The Connecticut Constitution” (1900) and “The Woman Without A Country” (1934) and, when he was in his 80s, the novel, “Back Stage” (1938). 

His wife, the former Julia Metcalf, was active in the woman suffrage movement.

Although Cary moved around in New York’s high society, hewas  evidently in touch with the ordinary folk of Ridgefield. When the son of a local farmer ran into trouble with the New York City police and, with his wife, was thrown in jail, Cary volunteered his services to rescue them.

It was like an episode from “Downton Abbey” or “Upstairs, Downstairs.” In 1896 young newlyweds David and Susan Dann were held in Manhattan’s notorious “Tombs” prison, accused of involvement in the theft of silverware from a banker’s Manhattan townhouse where Susan worked as a maid. Susan was a recent immigrant from Ireland and David was a poor housepainter who grew up on a Ridgefield farm.

There was no real evidence that Susan or her husband had anything to do with the stolen silver, yet they, along with Susan’s sister, spent 10 days in the Tombs.  “They put [her and her sister] in with the lowest kind of women,” Susan told a newspaper. “We heard things that were terrible to us, and were compelled to associate with women who were awful. They said things that men would not say.”

David Dann’s father, Levi, was a farmer who lived near Cary’s Ridgefield mansion. He knew Cary was a prominent New York lawyer and approached him about helping his son. Cary did so immediately, and soon told The New York Times, “I have gone through the evidence … and the only way it connects Susie Dann with the silver is through the fact that she had charge of it. The only way her husband is connected with it is through the fact that the morning after the robbery, he walked with her in public for an hour ... Yet our clients were kept in jail ten days. It was simply an outrage.”

Cary not only got the Danns freed from prison and the charges dropped, but also sued Susan’s employer, blaming the banker for convincing the police that she should be arrested.

(The unusual story of David and Susan Dann is recounted in much more detail in “Wicked Ridgefield, Connecticut,” a book published by The History Press in 2016.)

Cary became quite involved in the stock market in which he invested heavily. However,

according to Ridgefield historian Dick Venus, “there were times in the early part of [the 20th] century when the world of finance sent out some unmistakable signals that it might be ailing. Then came the Panic of 1907 and 1908, and Mr. Cary was one of those who suffered serious financial setbacks.”

This probably led him to decide to sell his Ridgefield mansion in 1909. However, he held onto a couple of hundred acres of the estate with the hope of one day building a new house for himself. That never happened, and his home remained Manhattan, at first on Broadway and finally in the Hotel Gotham on Fifth Avenue (now called The Peninsula New York).

Cary remained active in community service. He served for 12 years as president of the Board of Trustees of New York Homeopathic Medical College, now New York Medical College, and 20 years as president of the board of the college’s Flower Fifth Avenue Hospital, the first teaching hospital in the United States to be owned by a medical college.

When Cary retired from the law in 1926, he was apparently able to spend more time with other pursuits. He sought — and successfully obtained — a patent on a rather unusual  lamp device that, as he put it, “can be easily and quickly attached to a vase or other receptacle without requiring any preliminary adjustment of or mutilation of the article to which the device is attached.” Simply put, it was a pair of opposing light-bulb sockets, attached to a flange that fit over the top of vases or jars so one could instantly create a decorative lamp. The top socket held the bulb that would provide illumination and support the shade while the bottom socket’s bulb would make the vase glow and provide weight to keep the array from tipping over. 

In 1926, two years after he applied, the U.S. Patent Office granted patent number 1,573,805 for the “lamp structure.” It is not known whether the device was ever subsequently marketed, successfully or otherwise.

When Cary died in 1946 at the age of 93, he was the oldest living Princeton graduate. 

Melbert Cary’s son, Melbert Jr. (1892-1941), who had lived at Wildflower Farm as a boy and was known as “Mike,” became even more famous than his father. The Yale graduate was a celebrated graphic artist and an expert on printing, who brought many European typefaces to America and wrote books on the printing and type.  

Cary founded the Press of the Woolly Whale, which republished out-of-print titles that he felt should be reintroduced to the public. 

His own professional library of 20,000 volumes was donated to Rochester Institute of Technology, where it is today considered “one of America's premier libraries on the history and practice of printing.” For many years, RIT has had the position of “Melbert B. Cary, Jr. Distinguished Professor,” and the school periodically presents the “Melbert B. Cary Jr. Award”  to those “who have advanced technology in graphic communications and related industries.”

One of his more unusual interests was antique and unusual playing cards, and his collection of more than 2,600 packs of cards was donated to Yale where it is now at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library.

 In 1923, Melbert Jr. married Mary Flagler (1901-1967), a wealthy granddaughter of Henry Flagler, who with the Rockefellers founded Standard Oil and who was largely responsible for developing Florida by creating railroad lines and towns there. Melbert and Mary eventually acquired a 1,8000-acre estate outside Millbrook, N.Y., which they turned into a vast wildlife refuge called Cannoo Hills. In her will Mary Flagler Cary established a charitable trust to oversee the estate, which became the Cary Arboretum. Today it is the Cary Institute for Ecosystem Studies, a nonprofit institution that has 120 staff members and maintains one of the largest ecological research programs in the world. Its areas of expertise include disease ecology — especially tick-related diseases, urban ecology, forest health, and freshwater ecology.

Mary also made another, rather astounding gift: She left $50 million — about $365 million in today’s dollars — to create a trust fund for the State of New York. She said the money could be used for any public, religious, scientific, charitable or educational purposes. The only restrictions were that the trust could not “carry on propaganda or otherwise attempt to influence legislation” and that it “not participate in or intervene in any political campaign on behalf of any candidate for public office.”

In 1936, Melbert Cary’s Wildflower Farm became the home of another New York lawyer, William Matheus Sullivan, who called it Dunrovin and built a small theater on the property where Metropolitan Opera stars would periodically perform. The opera house is still there, but the mansion burned to the ground late one Sunday night in 1977 after the owners left a bucket of hot fireplace ashes on the porch and returned to their New York City home.

Samuel Keeler: 

The Stern and Staunch Commuter

When he was 86 years old, Samuel Keeler was still commuting to his law office in New York City and was reputedly the oldest commuter on the New Haven line — both in age and length of endurance. He was still making the trip until a month before he died in 1932; he had started this daily journey back around 1870 and may have been among the first passengers on the Ridgefield to Branchville railroad spur that opened that year.

That’s more than 60 years of riding the rails to work in the era of the smoky, noisy steam locomotive. No wonder he looked so grumpy.

Although his business was in the city, “Lawyer Sam,” as he was called to distinguish him from grocer Sam (S.D.) Keeler, had a considerable influence on the town toward the end of the 19th Century and during the first third of the 20th.

“He was sharp, learned, without much humor, small of stature — but solid,” wrote longtime Ridgefield Press publisher Karl S. Nash in a 1971 profile of Keeler. Nash knew the man personally.

Born in 1845 in Wilton, Samuel Keeler had as one of his childhood teachers George E. Lounsbury, who later became governor and from whose brother he later acquired The Ridgefield Press. 

He began commuting to law work in the city soon after graduating from Yale in 1867, but eventually also became busy in Ridgefield, serving as a school board member for 20 years from 1892 until 1912, one of the burgesses of the borough, and a pillar of the First Congregational Church. 

In 1900, he was a founder of the First National Bank and Trust Company of Ridgefield (now Wells Fargo), and was later fifth president of the Ridgefield Savings Bank  (now Fairfield County Bank), serving from 1907 to his death. 

Early in the century, controlling interest in The Press was held by ex-Gov. Phineas Lounsbury, a staunch, tee-totaling Methodist who had ordered that no liquor advertising appear in the paper. One day, he picked up The Press and saw a liquor ad. Outraged, he immediately sold the newspaper to Keeler, “as staunch a Democrat as Mr. Lounsbury was a Republican,” Nash said years later. 

While he kept his feelings out of the news columns,  Keeler wasn’t afraid to take on Republicans editorially, and he fought a long battle with the administration over inequitable property assessments, going so far as to publish several pamphlets on the subject. He remained owner of the newspaper until his death, at which time The Press observed: “Mr. Keeler was a man who always minded his own business. In the wake of his course over the sea of life, there was no tacking or filling.”

Samuel Chambliss: 

Wetlands and Rhinos

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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