Eddy Brown: 
Child Prodigy Turned Radio Pioneer

If you were a fan of classical music in the first half of the 20th Century, you knew the name Eddy Brown. A child-prodigy violinist, Brown performed with orchestras across Europe and the United States early in the century and then turned to radio, where he became a pioneer in bringing classical music to the airwaves. He was the first director of WQXR, the New York City station that is still broadcasting classical music today and, thanks to the internet, has listeners worldwide.

A native of Chicago, Eddy Brown was born in 1895, son of an amateur violinist who had immigrated from Austria and a Russian mother who was a follower of Christian Science —  she named her son after Mary Baker Eddy, the religion’s founder.  The family moved to Indianapolis when Eddy was 4. Fascinated by his father’s violin playing, little Eddy began imitating dad and, showing considerable talent, was put into the hands of teachers at Butler University’s music conservatory in Indianapolis.  At the age of six, he gave his first public recital.

Continuing to show great promise, Brown was sent to Budapest at the age of nine to study at the Royal Conservatory of Music under such teachers as Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály. In 1905, at age 10, he made his European concert debut in Berlin and a year later, he won the Budapest Concerto Competition — the second-place finisher was a fellow student, Jeno Blau, who later changed his name to Eugene Ormandy.

After graduating in 1909, he began performing with orchestras throughout Europe, including a concert that year in Royal Albert Hall with the London Philharmonic. The following year, while continuing concert tours, he began studying in St. Petersburg, Russia, with violinist Leopold Auer. A fellow classmate was a young Jascha Heifetz.

Brown returned to the U.S. in 1916, making his debut in his hometown of Indianapolis with the New York Symphony, and a few days later, performed the same concert at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. Late that December, he gave a recital in Carnegie Hall. A New York Times reviewer observed: “Mr. Brown is one of America’s young artists who have come before the public at a time when war has sent all the greatest to these shores, and native talent must meet a competition never matched oversea.  He has maintained his place before the public by force of ability and character and a large audience greeted him yesterday.”

Over the next dozen years, he continued to perform in recitals and with orchestras around the country and abroad. 

Brown was signed by Columbia Records, for whom he produced more than 60 recordings between 1918 and 1927. In a 1923 interview, he said that it was harder to record the sound of a violin than the voice of a singer. “The great problem is to retain the peculiar timbre and quality of the violin expression to get the feel of the bowing, and the fingering, and to hold the distinctiveness which marks the violin from all other existing musical instruments,” he said. But, he added, “I am confident that it will be only a little while when the magicians of the phonograph laboratories will have captured the secret of violin tone.”

In 1930, perhaps weary of the concert life, he turned to radio, becoming one of the first people to bring serious classical music programming to the airwaves. His first post was as music director with the Mutual network’s WOR in New York, where he produced — and sometimes appeared in — many musical programs. His wife, Beth Lydy, a former Broadway musical actress, wrote  scripts for the programs. 

In 1936, he was named director of the brand new WQXR,  the first classical-only station in the United States. He became a part-owner and remained at the station until 1942. (Two years later it was sold to the New York Times; today it is owned, along with WNYC, by New York Public Radio.) He also became a station personality, hosting shows over the years. And, according to a station history, he was not narrow in his programming tastes, inviting guests like conductor Wilfred Pelletier of the Metropolitan Opera to hear Benny Goodman. “Brown’s mixing of jazz and classical artists produced a vibe of mutual appreciation that spilled over to WQXR programming,” the history said. “At a time when 80% of airtime was devoted to classical music, the station began broadcasting blues, jazz and swing.”

In 1944, Eddy and Beth Brown bought the former Carnall family homestead on Peaceable Street, described by The Ridgefield Press at the time as “a Colonial residence with attractively landscaped grounds, a tennis court, gardens and a two-car garage.” They maintained the place for several years but by 1949 the couple had moved to Italy to work for the  U.S. Department of State in a program to establish cultural ties between European nations and the United States. While there he and the Italian government established the Accademia Internazionale di Belcanto, a school and theater for young singers. He also created a program that allowed young American singers to perform in Europe and study at the Accademia. 

In 1956, the Browns returned to the States to become coordinators and teachers at the University of Cincinnati College Conservatory of Music. He later returned to Indianapolis to become the artist-in-residence at Butler University — where he had begun violin lessons 70 years earlier.

While on a 1974 trip to Europe where he was to lecture, he died of a heart attack in Italy. He was 78 years old. Beth Lydy Brown died five years later at 83.

In his younger concert-playing years, Brown did not make a lot of money. To help support himself, he collaborated with Louis Gruenberg, his pianist in many performances, to create the musical, “Roly-Boly Eyes,” which played 108 performances on Broadway in 1919 and then went on the road.  

Brown called it the most profitable thing he ever did.

Lois Bannerman: 
Harpist With A Kick

Lois Bannerman had an unusually interesting life, starting off when she was 10 and used her skates to fight off two male attackers, and ending with the elegance of antique Savannah townhouse.

In between she was one of the nation’s top harpists.

Lois Tiffany Bannerman was born in New York City in 1920 and grew up on Long Island, where at the age of seven, her harpist mother began teaching her the instrument. By the time she was 15, she was winning major awards in New York City and at 16, was invited to play at the White House.

But it was when she was 10 years old that she first made headlines. And what headlines!

TWO FAIL IN ATTEMPT TO KIDNAP HEMPSTEAD GIRL: TALENTED CHILD ESCAPES CLUTCHES OF KIDNAPERS declared the headline on a story that occupied the complete front page of the Nassau Daily Review on Sept. 3, 1931.

GIRL SKATER, 10, BATTLES 2 KIDNAPERS said the five column headline in the New York Daily News.

According to the accounts, “two swarthy-complexioned men” pulled up alongside Bannerman as she was roller-skating along a sidewalk near her home. One man hopped out of the car, grabbed the girl and covered her mouth with his hand. When she began fighting, the second man got out of the car and tried to hold her.

“Kicking and struggling, she used her steel-shod feet to such good advantage that the men dropped her, leaped back in their car and fled as another machine approached the scene,” said the Nassau County newspaper.

The Daily News put it this way: “She put up such a stiff struggle that the driver of the car was forced to come to his companion’s aid. He had a length of rope in his hands, and when he stooped in an

attempt to bind the girl’s legs, she felled him with a blow from her skate-clad foot.

“‘Look out! I hear a car!’ cried the fallen man and both leaped into their car and sped away.” They were never caught.

By the time she was 15, Bannerman was winning awards — including a scholarship to Juilliard — and performing in major concert venues in New York City. She went on to have a long career as a harpist, appearing with many major orchestras, on Broadway and frequently on early television. (A video of her in her 20s, performing in a light-hearted version of “In the Gloaming” in 1944, can be found on YouTube.)

In 1947, she married Harold Henrick, a 27-year-old Marine trainee, and the couple had a son, Mark. However, the marriage ended tragically in 1955 when Captain Henrick was piloting a private plane from his base in New Bern, N.C., to Long Island to spend Christmas with his wife and son. Almost within sight of his destination, the plane crashed into the Atlantic. A week later, his body washed ashore at the Rockaways.

Ten years later, Bannerman married John L. Senior Jr., a wealthy Harvard and MIT-graduate businessman, who had a “gentleman’s farm” in Ridgebury. The farm spread across the towns of

Ridgefield, Danbury and North Salem, N.Y., off Turner and Saw Mill Roads. While the main house may have been in Danbury, the couple always gave their address as Ridgefield. (The Senior farm is now a mix of pastures for horses, multifamily and single-family housing, and the corporate headquarters of Belimo — a maker of heating and air conditioning devices.)

In the late 1960s the couple moved to a house on the shore at Southport but soon after, they divorced.

In the 1960s and 70s, Bannerman continued performing, but spent part of her time working on supporting the Berkshire Music Center, home of the Tanglewood summer concerts, as well as teaching the harp. One of her students was her own son, John L. Senior III, who, like his mother and grandmother, became a professional harpist.

Bannerman eventually married Howard Crawford, a Connecticut architect and builder, and the two retired in the mid-1980s to a four-story 1854 Greek Revival townhouse in the city of Savannah, Ga. where they operated a bed-and-breakfast. Bannerman died in 1992 at the age of 71.

In the 1960s, composer John Downey was commissioned to compose a harp concerto for Lois Bannerman, but for reasons that are unclear, she was never able to premiere it. The work lay unplayed for years until her harpist son, John Senior, began championing its performance in memory of his mother.

In 1998, with Senior on the harp and John Downey conducting, the   Concerto for Harp was recorded by the Warsaw National Philharmonic Orchestra and is today available from MMC Recordings.

George B. Leeman Sr.:

Music for Kids and Stars

When George B. Leeman was only two years old, he astonished family members by picking out tunes on a piano. “By the time his fourth birthday rolled around,” The Ridgefield Press reported in 1962, “he was ready for a recital.” 

Born in 1907, the Oklahoma native studied music at the University of Oklahoma and went from there to RKO studios in Hollywood where he worked on RKO’s “Hollywood on the Air” radio show. 

However, he soon wound up in New York, working CBS radio and later television as a composer and arranger for the likes of Frank Sinatra, Perry Como, Dick Haymes, Paul Whiteman, Andre Kostelanetz, Archie Bleyer, and, for 12 years, with Arthur Godfrey. 

For Godfrey, Leeman prepared music for the daily show, as well as Godfrey’s weekly Talent Scout program. He served on the audition committee for the latter, and was involved in the auditions of many future stars, including Eddie Fisher, Wally Cox, and the McGuire Sisters.

A Ridgefielder since 1942, Leeman was instrumental in the founding of the Ridgefield Symphonette in 1964, and aided its growth into the Ridgefield Symphony Orchestra, one of the top small orchestras in the country. (His son, George Jr., has also been a leader in the orchestra, and wrote the program notes for many years.)  When it gave its first concert in April 1965, the

symphonette consisted of 24 musicians, 13 of them residents and only seven of them professionals.

“The reason for our existence is to provide the best possible entertainment for the people of Ridgefield who enjoy music of this calibre,” Leeman said in a 1972 letter to The Press.

After his retirement from CBS in 1959, Leeman gave private piano lessons to Ridgefield youngsters.  He also composed and arranged many songs and musical programs that were performed by children in the Ridgefield elementary schools, where his wife, Evelyn, taught for many years.

“Music,” he said, “is a therapy. Most children find something in music that relaxes them.” 

Leeman died in 1978 at the age of 70. Two weeks after his death, the Board of Education named the auditorium at Scotland School “the Leeman Room” in his honor.

Andrew Gold: 

A Man of Much Music

“He is comic, creative and charismatic, and he likes people to treat him like the typical guy next door," said a 1998 Ridgefield Press interview with Andrew Gold. 

Mr. Gold was the voice and music behind many popular tunes including some of Linda Ronstadt’s hottest hits such as You’re No Good and Heatwave. 

Besides songwriting and singing, he was a producer, engineer and musician, and played an amazing variety of instruments, including, guitar, bass, keyboards, accordion, synthesizer, harmonica, saxophone, flute, drums, ukulele, musette, and harmonium.

Andrew Gold was born in 1951 in Burbank, Calif. That he started writing songs when he was 13 was no surprise; his father, Ernest Gold, was the Academy Award-winning composer of the many film scores including, Exodus and On the Beach, and his mother, Marni Nixon, was in films the singing voice of Natalie Wood in West Side Story, Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady and Deborah Kerr in The King and I. 

In 1973, Gold joined Linda Ronstadt’s band and also arranged much of the band’s music

throughout the 1970s. He also recorded with such artists as Carly Simon, Neil Diamond, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Brian Wilson, James Taylor, Roy Orbison, Bette Midler, Diana Ross, and Cher.

Over the years Mr. Gold had also produced and wrote songs and music for many television and movie soundtracks, such as the theme to Mad About You on TV.  His biggest hit was “Lonely Boy,” a top-10 single in 1977.

Perhaps his most unusual accomplishment was serving as the voice of Alvin, the singing chipmunk on television! 

Many albums of his songs have been released, and he produced many albums of other artists. He had two hits of his own as high as number five on the charts. 

Mr. Gold maintained a studio on Bailey Avenue for a couple of years, but moved it to Nashville in 1999, and commuted between there, London and his home on St. Johns Road, where he lived with his wife and three daughters.  

In the early 2000s, he moved to California where he died in 2011 at the age of 59. He had been under treatment for cancer, but the cause of death was given as heart failure.

Charles Pope: 

King of the Choristers

Music has long been an essential part of Ridgefield life, and among the people who kept the town in song was Charles Pope. But the founder and leader of the Charles Pope Choristers had a stage and reputation that extended far beyond Ridgefield.

Over 34 years the choristers sang more than 1,600 concerts, most of them in and around New York City, including dozens of performances at Carnegie Hall.  But that was just one of the many activities of this man who often worked seven days a week providing people with music.

Charles Frank Pope was born on June 4, 1930, in Brooklyn, N.Y., At the age of 3,   he started his musical instruction at the piano under his father, Alfred August Pope Sr. He gave his first organ recital at 15 and a year later, was hired as a church organist.  

Though his father was a pianist, the young Charles Pope was discouraged from pursuing a career in music. “My family felt music wouldn’t be lucrative enough and thought I would starve,” he said in a 1966 interview. “I got a job in a bank for six months, but decided that it wasn’t for me so I went back to the organ.”

At the age of  17 he was attending Guilmant Organ School in Manhattan, and was studying choral and orchestral conducting, organ, piano, harmony, counterpoint, composition, and improvisation. In his younger days he was mentored by many leading musicians, including Robert Shaw, Elaine Brown, Fred Waring, Alice Parker, and Willard Irving Nevins.

At  Guilmant, Pope organized and began conducting the Charles Pope Choristers. Over the next 34 years this full chorus and show group presented more than 1,600 concerts and shows   — many years, he did two concerts annually at Carnegie Hall in New York City. In addition, he conducted more than 800 performances of other choruses in metropolitan New York.

Pope’s skill at leading the choristers often gained recognition in the press, including The New York Times. For instance, in 1961 after the choristers sang at the Town Hall in Manhattan, Alan Rich of The Times wrote that “the chorus has about 65 members, chosen without regard to musical training. This fact did not deter Mr. Pope from choosing an exceptionally varied, interesting and difficult program. The major work, in which the ensemble was joined by a group of brass players and a timpanist, was Purcell’s imposing Funeral Music for Queen Mary, of which few, if any, previous American performances are recorded. Energy and devotion characterized the performance, along with a remarkable degree of professional polish.”

According to his family, “he also won acclaim from the New York critics when he appeared at Carnegie Hall as a soloist with his interpretations of Bach.”

In the 1950s and 60s, Pope was also organist, choir director, minister of music, and youth director at many houses of worship in the city — ecumenical in his outlook, he performed at Lutheran, Methodist, Episcopal, Congregational and Catholic churches as well as Jewish synagogues.

At many churches, he organized, directed, and supervised up to five vocal, two handbell and brass choirs. He also influenced and oversaw the replacement of organs at seven churches.

 Pope’s Choristers appeared on both TV and radio. For the CBS television network, he conducted several hour-long, national Christmas specials and, for NBC, performed for the Kraft Music Hall and the Ernie Kovacs Show. For radio, the Charles Pope Choristers sang on  many WNYC radio broadcasts. 

He presented more than 250 fully staged Gilbert and Sullivan productions, including the Mikado, H.M.S. Pinafore, Iolanthe, and the Pirates of Penzance; staged tributes to Rodgers & Hammerstein; and did dozens of Broadway shows, including The Sound of Music, Amahl and the Night Visitors, Annie Get Your Gun, Guys and Dolls, Bye, Bye Birdie, Brigadoon, 1776, and The Wizard of Oz. 

Pope also served as the festival conductor for the Associated Male Choruses of America, at times leading a chorus of 2,000 men!

He was so busy he often worked seven-day weeks,  performing at the keyboard, leading  his choristers and other groups, and teaching music.

In 1965 when he moved from Brooklyn to a home on five acres in Ridgefield, he moved the choristers’ base of operations from the Brooklyn Academy of Music to Ridgefield. “My big dream for years was to have a home in Connecticut,” he said. “I looked for two years before I found this.” (To this day the sharp curve of Ridgebury Road where the Popes lived is called Pope’s Corner.)

A year later he married Eleanor Zettelmayer, whom he had met while serving as musical director for the Equitable Life Assurance Society where she was an expediter and he led the company choral group.

In 1972, he opened the Ridgefield Musical Kindergarten, aimed at teaching music to   four- and five-year-olds — who he said were “the ideal age to acquire with ease the language of music.”  By then he was also leading a bell choir and a boys choir, as well as the Charles Pope Choristers, from his house.

The Charles Pope Choristers continued to perform in Ridgefield and the region into the 1980s when the Popes decided to semi-retire and move north. He was living in Bethel when he died in 2006 at the age of 75 and had been providing organ music for churches in the area, especially Immanuel Lutheran in Danbury.

One of the churches he had served early in his career was the Dutch Reformed Church in Brooklyn, which had been established in 1654. There he started a “cherub choir,” and among its members was a young Lois Brennan. Both Brennan’s father and cousin were members of the Charles Pope Choristers, and “Uncle Charlie” became almost a part of her Brooklyn family.

“Charles and his dad were colorful characters in our family life,” Brennan recalled. “He would join us in the Berkshires for a week in August and scare the likes of us with ghost stories!”

Years later, when Brennan moved to Ridgefield, she was surprised to find Charles Pope and his choristers here. Their concerts could bring back many memories. 

“I was ushering the Charles Pope Choristers Christmas Concert at East Ridge Middle School when I heard them sing the old Scottish hymn, ‘God Be in My Head,’” she said of one occasion. “Well, tears filled my eyes at the remembrance of days long ago when my dad was one of them.” 

 For a while in the 1990s, the Popes’ son led a new group, the Jonathan Pope Choristers. Today he is teaching music at Newtown Middle School where many of his students describe him as “amazing.”

Jonathan had an amazing teacher himself.

Mary “May” Rockwell: 

A Hotel of Culture

A house with a lot of history was torn down in 2014, but little of its former glory was left by then. The large Victorian on Governor Street, which had long been an office building, was razed to make way for the new Ridgefield Visiting Nurse Association headquarters. It was a building that had led four lives in its two centuries, including several decades as the House of Friends.

The building originally stood on Main Street, in front of today’s Community Center, where it had been the home of the Perry family, which produced three prominent Ridgefield physicians. It then became the home of Gov. Phineas Lounsbury, who turned a colonial-style structure into a Victorian. When he decided to build a grander place, today’s Community Center, he moved his old house to Governor Street where it became the home of  Mr. and Mrs. John W. Rockwell and and their daughter, Mary. John, longtime owner of The Elms Inn, probably paid a modest price because the Rockwells and Lounsburys were relatives.

 Mary Hester “May” Rockwell was born in 1874 and received an education that was well above the average schooling for a Ridgefield native of the era. In 1889, when she was only 15 years old, she was studying at Centenary Collegiate Institute, a Methodist-owned college preparatory

school in Hackettstown, N.J., that is now Centenary University.

In 1891, when she was 17, her parents sent her to Europe and she spent six months studying music in Berlin, Germany. She later also studied at Oberlin College.

“Miss Rockwell was a tall, stately woman whose life was clouded by poor eyesight,” wrote Karl S. Nash in 1980. “She was an albino with one-quarter of normal sight in one eye and none in the other.

“In the 1920’s when she was in her forties, she left the Methodist Church where she had grown up and embraced Christian Science. She threw away her thick-lensed glasses and never wore them again. In embracing the teachings of Mary Baker Eddy, she became more calm of spirit and more able to cope optimistically with her infirmity.”

Rockwell was an accomplished pianist who taught piano to hundreds of Ridgefield children over more than 30 years, at first with her cousin Faustina Hurlbutt. The Hurlbutt-Rockwell School of Music regularly gave public recitals at her home.

Her house became rather large for a single woman, so in the 1910s May Rockwell began

renting rooms in a boarding-house fashion. She didn’t rent to just anyone, however; she sought guests who were intellectually interesting as well as congenial, and she called the place the “House of Friends.”

   Among those friends, best known was Mabel Cleves, her companion of more than 40 years (previously profiled in Who Was Who).  Columbia-educated and Montessori-trained,   Cleves began teaching here in 1898, and established not only the first kindergarten in town but also a public preschool.  She also founded the PTA in Ridgefield.

In late life, Miss Cleves bought an automobile and learned how to drive it. She would take Rockwell and other friends on fairly long rides around the countryside. “Sometimes Mary and Mabel would go wading at Compo Beach or Sherwood Island,” Nash said.

Besides long-term clientele, guests at the house included actors and actresses doing summer theater, and teachers and professors on summer break. The place had a “high cultural level,” The Ridgefield Press once reported. 

At Oberlin, Rockwell had studied under Professor Charles K. Barry who later became a regular summer visitor at the House of Friends.

Among the more unusual guests there were Mr. and Mrs. William Picke. Mr. Picke was a tutor

for the Doubleday family of Westmoreland. “He was a distinguished-looking man with a goatee and a British accent,” said Nash, who then recounted this widely told incident:  “At the silent movies in the town hall one Saturday night, Mr. Picke looked about and whispered to his wife — loud enough for somebody to hear— ‘Oh, my dear, we are the only ones of the upper class here.’”

Frail and infirm, Rockwell sold the house in 1947 and died two years later in a nursing home. Mabel Cleves died in 1952. 

Samuel Chotzinoff: 

Music over the Air

Arturo Toscanini, one of the leading conductors of the 20th Century, liked Ridgefield – and his friend Samuel Chotzinoff – enough to give concerts here in 1947 and 1949 to benefit the the Ridgefield Library (on whose board Chotzinoff served for 10 years) and the Ridgefield Boys Club. 

Chotzinoff, who lived on Spring Valley Road from 1935 to 1955 and was known as “Shotzi” in the music world, was music director of NBC and persuaded Toscanini  to lead the NBC Symphony Orchestra in the days when high culture was a part of commercial radio and television network fare.

As founder of the NBC Opera Company, Chotzinoff commissioned Gian Carlo Menotti to write television’s first opera, the now-famous “Amahl and the Night Visitors.”  Menotti and Toscanini often visited Chotzinoff’s Ridgefield home. 

Besides being an executive, Chotzinoff was, in the words of The New York Times, a music critic, a pianist, a novelist, a playwright, a raconteur, a wit, and an urbane and gentle man.”

Born in Czarist Russia around 1889, Samuel Chotzinoff (pronounced “SHOTzinoff) began studying piano when he was 10 years old. He came to America when he was 17, attended City College of New York, and continued piano studies. At 20, he was “ghosting” as piano player when his big break came.

The Times tells it this way: “He was playing a behind-the-scenes piano in a play called ‘Concert,’ while on stage the actor Leo Dietrichstein ran his fingers gracefully over a dummy piano. The scene had been rehearsed so minutely that the audience and the critics thought the actor was really giving a brilliant recital.

“One night Mr. Chotzinoff was either detained by traffic or kept home by illness — the story is told both ways —  and a substitute pianist was rushed in. Coordination was so lacking that Mr. Dietrichstein was still pounding the dummy piano when the music stopped backstage. The secret was out and the critics discovered Mr. Chotzinoff.”

Violinist Efrem Zimbalist Sr., who was to become a noted conductor (and father of Jr., the noted actor), heard about the incident, met with and hired Chotzinoff as his accompanist. Both were 21 at the time, and they toured widely together.

Chotzinoff subsequently became accompanist for another famous violinist, Jascha Heifetz, and wound up marrying Heifetz’s sister, Pauline, in 1925. 

At the time Chotzinoff was music critic for The New York World; later wrote for The New York Post. Famous for his honesty, he once criticized Heifetz’s performance of Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata. “He was sore as the devil,” Chotzinoff later told an interviewer. “But I told Jascha that I can only review his concerts as his critic and not as his brother-in-law.”

In the 1930s, Chotzinoff also taught at the Curtis Institute of Music.

In 1936, David Sarnoff, head of RCA, asked him to visit the semi-retired Toscanini in Italy to persuade the maestro to take over the NBC Symphony Orchestra. “Many persons considered Mr. Chotzinoff’s task about as hopeless as persuading Toscanini to play a jazz trombone,” The Times said. “But Mr. Chotzinoff did it.” And the two became fast friends.

Chotzinoff served as a music consult to NBC during the 30s and early 40s, and became music director in 1948. In 1951, he also became producer of NBC’s televised operas.

Chotzinoff also wrote a novel, “Eroica,” about Beethoven, co-authored two plays, and wrote a biography of Toscanini as well as an autobiography, “The Lost Paradise.”  

He also founded the Chatham Square Music School, which in 1960 merged with the Mannes College of Music, now part of The New School.

His daughter Anne Chotzinoff (1930-2002) married conductor Herbert Grossman. She wrote several books and translated many operas and lieder. Her daughter, Lisa Grossman Thomas, is a musician and writer. 

Chotzinoff died in 1964 at the age of 74.

Known for his sense of humor, Samuel Chotzinoff loved a good practical joke. He once hosted a party for Toscanini at which a woman, who was one of his wife’s relatives, dressed as a waitress and donned a blonde wig. 

“When she came in to serve coffee, she astounded the maestro by sitting on his lap,” The Times reported.

Larry Adler: 

Harmonica Virtuoso

Harmonica virtuoso Larry Adler lived here during a difficult part of his life. 

It was the late 40s and early 50s when the House Un-American Activities Committee sought out suspected communists, and a Greenwich woman had publicly claimed that Adler and his friend and longtime performance partner, dancer Paul Draper, had been communists. The story made national headlines,  and syndicated Columnist Westbrook Pegler of Ridgefield joined in the accusations against Adler and Draper.

Adler denied supporting the communist cause, but refused to take a loyalty oath and vociferously criticized the House Unamerican Activities Committee. He and Draper filed a libel suit against the Greenwich woman who had accused them, but the trial ended in a hung jury. The ensuing case was dismissed because Adler and Draper did not have the funds to continue it.

Born in Baltimore in 1914, Lawrence Cecil Adler taught himself the harmonica and was playing professionally by the age of 14. In 1927, he won a contest sponsored by The Baltimore Sun, playing a Beethoven minuet. About a year later, only 15 years old, he went to New York City where, with the help of singer Rudy Vallée, he began working as a vaudeville performer.

Over his long career he has performed everything from classical to jazz and pop music. He brought the “mouth organ” to the serious stage, gained worldwide recognition as a musician, and performed with leading symphony orchestras worldwide. Many works for harmonica were written with him in mind, including Ralph Vaughan Williams' “Romance in D-flat for Harmonica, Piano and String Orchestra.”

During World War II he entertained the troops on many USO tours with comedian Jack Benny. 

Adler, who lived at the James Waterman Wise home on Pumping Station Road (Paul Draper also stayed there), wrote several film scores including “High Wind in Jamaica” and  “Genevieve”; for the latter, written while he was in Ridgefield, he received an Academy Award nomination in 1953. Because he was blacklisted, his name was originally kept off the film’s credits in this country, but was eventually added; he still made a sizable amount of money from “Genevieve.”

He also appeared in five movies in the 1930s and early 40s.

In 1952, discouraged with the communist witch hunt, he moved to England from which continued to give concerts around the world, make recordings, write books, and even work as a food critic for a British magazine. He wrote “Jokes and How to Tell Them” (1963) — one of his oft-quoted lines is, “Vasectomy means never having to say you’re sorry.”   His autobiography, “It Ain't Necessarily So,” was published in 1985. He died in 2001.

A biographer once observed that Adler is “a good example of the adage, ‘Living well is the best revenge.’”