Marian Cox: 
‘Lady of the Orchids’

 “New York’s Famous ‘Lady of the Orchids’ Bares the Hidden Story of Her Fabulous Society Life.”

The headline stretched across the top of two pages of the San Francisco Examiner’s Sunday magazine in 1934 for two weeks in a row. In the two-part article, Marian Cox explained why she “seeks to bury her ‘Parasite Past’” by selling almost all of her possessions, including Stonecrest, her estate-farm along North Street in Ridgefield.

Cox, an author and feminist who was considered both talented and beautiful, may also have been one of the wealthiest women to live in Ridgefield. Married to a multimillionaire, she rubbed shoulders with the literati and the “400” in the city and entertained the likes of presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan both at both her Manhattan and Stonecrest mansions.

A daughter of a well-to-do Southern family from St. Louis, Mabel Marian Metcalfe gave her birth year as 1882, although there is some evidence she was born in 1878. In 1899, when she said she was only 16 years old, she married  Dr. John Watson Cox, a wealthy New York City chemical manufacturer who was 43.

“There was I,” she told the Examiner, “a child of 16 thrown into the mad whirl of New York society, straight from a sheltered, quiet home in the old South. Immediately I must play hostess to distinguished guests and be mistress of a 20-room mansion and 14 servants.”

She succeeded, it seems, and her mansion — which stretched from East 38th to 39th Streets in the fashionable Murray Hill section of Manhattan — became a destination. “The foremost statesmen, leaders from the field of literature and most of the social greats, frequented the Cox mansion, which was as impressive and grandiose as any in the New York of its day,” said the Examiner, which shared the story with many Hearst newspapers across the country.

In between a life of hosting parties and managing a household of 14 servants, Marian Cox started to write. She turned out several books, the first of which was The Crowds and The Veiled Woman, published in 1910 by Funk and Wagnalls. Her stories were considered feminist, featuring strong women. The San Francisco Chronicle said the book “sounded the most distinctive and ambitious note in recent American fiction.”

When her book, The Dry Rot of Society, was published in 1919, a male reviewer in The New York Sun called Cox “one of the few great feminine writers of English. She has a lucid style [and] she has that rare gift among women — irony. She has vision. She mocks, she scorns, she pities. She thinks without sinking into mere philosophizing...She has beautiful wisdom.”  

However, Cox confessed in the 1934 article that, at Murray Hill and Stonecrest, she grew addicted to her possessions, which, she explained, gave her a sense of identity. As she became an increasingly popular hostess, they served as anchors in a sea of social events. 

“I delighted in showing off my wonderful home and champagne goblets with the longest stems in New York (so I was told), jeweled Bohemian glasses, Royal Crown Leighton and Copeland china — all sorts of superlative things to make a grace of the mere animal functions of eating and drinking,” she wrote.

At least one guest did not seem to impress her. A devoted Democrat, Dr. Cox was treasurer of the Democratic National Committee and two-time presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan would often stop by their home on his visits to New York. Bryan was the famous orator, who would later add to his notoriety by opposing Darwinism in the Scopes trial.

“From my long-stemmed champagne goblets, he always drank grape juice while the rest of us drank wine, and he preached prohibition while manifesting such a Gargantuan appetite for food that he was the first person who impressed me with the truth of the adage:

“We compound for sins we are inclined to,

“By condemning those we have no mind to.”

“Bryan never drank himself into life,” she added, “but he ate himself unto death, in my inconsequential opinion.”

Dr. Cox died in 1928 and six years later, Marian Cox decided she had had enough of being saddled with millions of dollars in possessions and the responsibilities — and guilt — that came with them. She auctioned off virtually all of her furnishings and art, as well as Stonecrest.

“We possessed this city home of 20 rooms and a country home of 30 rooms and now I am wondering if I have ever had a home at all,” she said in 1934. At Murray Hill, “my salon was like frozen music, Louis 15th in style, with all its furniture reproductions of historic pieces at the palace of Versailles, Fontainebleau and Museum of the Louvre. My bedroom was a copy, even to the silk upon the walls, of the bedroom of Marie Antoinette.”

Of Stonecrest, which the Coxes bought around 1908, she said she emulated Marie Antoinette and attempted to convert the farm into a prosperous dairy. However, she admitted, she was unable to transform herself into a successful business woman.

After she left both homes  and their furnishings, Cox lived in various places until late 1940, when she returned to Ridgefield, acquiring the former home of artist George Stengel on lower Main Street.  “It seems I am only following the instinctive lure of the past in returning to Ridgefield to find the home for which I have been vainly seeking ever since I left there,” she wrote in a long essay in The Ridgefield Press about returning to town.

However, her stay was not long. During the war she met James Fay Logan, the captain of a Liberty Ship that was transporting war supplies in the North and South Atlantic, and Indian Oceans.  Captain Logan was at least 17 years younger than she. They were married in 1943 and later moved to New York City.

 Although she spent much of her life in the limelight and seemed to thrive on publicity, Marian Cox Logan faded from the scene late in life. She apparently died in the early 1970s — her exact date and place of death has not been discovered. Captain Logan died in 1981.

In 1967, still using the name Marian Cox, she self-published her memoirs, The Sphinx Wore An Orchid. The title was a reference to her reputation decades earlier as an orchid lover. In fact, she confessed at the time she was selling her Ridgefield home, “At my country estate, ‘Stonecrest,’ in Connecticut, there was a conservatory and a gardener for the sole purpose of raising rare orchids for me. Twice a week I received a huge box of flowers for the house and orchids for myself. I was then, truly, a Lady of the Orchids.”

She found symbolism in her love of “such strange orchids raised solely for me. As strange as those I had seen in the botanical gardens of Buitenzorg, Java. Orchids like little tarantulas pinned to my heart. Spotted orchids like blooms corrupted by the sun. Pure orchids so white they seemed innocent of every touch of the sun. My young life in its flowery grave of solitude and splendor!”

But, she added, “this is what made me write — in a superb sublimation of sex and humanity. Four books of mine were published during this gala period, books strange as Java orchids for an American girl to write.”

David W. Workman: 

The Editor Who Became A Cop

David W. Workman was a small-town newspaperman with a large involvement in the community he covered for three decades. After he retired from newspapering, he turned to protecting the village, even packing a pistol as he patrolled village streets.

Workman spent 33 years at The Ridgefield Press, many of them as an editor,  changing the newspaper’s focus to solely local news. He also was unafraid to criticize powerful people, as a 1922 racial incident demonstrated.

“He was a staunch and loyal supporter of our town and lent his influence to its growth and progress through critical periods,” The Press said the day after his funeral.

David Whitney Workman was born in Norwalk in 1876, attended private and public schools there, and graduated from Brown Business College in Norwalk. He got his start in newspapers, working for the South Norwalk Sentinel, a weekly founded in 1870. 

In 1900, he joined the staff of The Press, then housed in the Masonic building just south of the Town Hall. He was in charge of what was called the mechanical department — the printing presses and typesetting. Back then the Press also did “job printing” and had both small and large presses to produce a variety of printed documents. 

It was also at a time when most of the type — the backward letters made of metal — were put together by hand, one letter at a time. Under Workman’s subsequent management, a Linotype machine, the company’s first “modern” piece of printing equipment, was installed. The giant, keyboard-controlled machine considerably speeded up the process of producing type.

Workman soon began taking on reporting and writing assignments and became assistant editor  in 1904 under S. Claude O’Connor. He wound up doing most of the writing. When O’Connor left in 1923, Workman took over full control. He ran the paper until it was sold in 1932, staying on for a while to help the new editor and publisher, John A. Thayer.

Under Workman’s reign, The Press became an entirely local newspaper. Before he took control, half of each issue was printed in New York City, filled with national stories, columns, pictures, and ads. The outside pages were written and printed in Ridgefield, then collated with the “boilerplate” pages. By the time he retired, the entire Press was printed in Ridgefield, and all its pages contained local news locally written.

Workman knew the town like few others. Besides covering Ridgefield for the newspaper he was for many years  the clerk of the Board of Finance, clerk of the Board of Education, and  a registrar of voters for the Republican Party. His wife, Edna Innes Workman, was secretary, treasurer at St. Stephen’s Church and superintendent of its Sunday school.

His special interest was Ridgefield’s woodlands and for 17 years, he was the district forest fire warden for the State Department of Forestry, issuing state-mandated burning permits and  overseeing fire prevention measures. Back when Ridgefield was much more rural, it was considered an important office.

“He devoted a great deal of time to the preservation of the beauty of the out-of-doors so often threatened by an expanding urban civilization,” The Press said in its tribute to Workman. “The blanket of pine and hemlock which covered his casket gave testimony that his efforts had not been in vain.”

 After leaving the Press in 1932, he became a town cop. Back in the 1930s, long before the town had its own “real” police department, Ridgefield’s policing was done by the Connecticut State Police, supplemented by town constables, local people who were chosen for that office at town elections — and had been since the early 1700s. Some of those constables were hired as paid employees of the town — one for daytime and one for night — to patrol the village, handle traffic, and deal with other minor offenses. The evening constable was often called the “night watchman.”

However, after the state enacted a new civil service law, the policing job conflicted with his fire prevention post. The state paid fire wardens a stipend of a mere $10 a year, but because it was a payment for an official position, he was considered a state employee; as such he fell under the  newly enacted civil service laws. Those laws forbade state employees from “political activities.” That meant Workman could not hold elective office — even constable.

So in 1937 he retired as forest fire warden (his son, Kenneth, took over) so he could continue as a “night watchman.” 

It turned out to matter little. Workman died the next year, 1938, after a lengthy illness. He was only 62 years old. 

The large crowd that attended his funeral at St. Stephen’s Church included “a squad of state policemen...in uniform,” The Press reported.

That might have been a little surprising to people 16 years earlier. Back in October 1922, The Press ran a fiery, front-page editorial criticizing the state police’s handling of the brutal beating of a black man on Bailey Avenue. 

The incident occurred in September when the inebriated brother of the commander of the Ridgefield state police barracks accosted the black man who was eating at Coleman’s Lunch behind town hall. After entering the diner, Thomas Kelly declared that he didn’t want to eat at the same counter with  “a nigger”  and ordered Robert Cooper to leave. When Cooper refused, Kelly punched him in the face. He then chased Cooper up Bailey Avenue, hit him, knocked him down, and kicked him  before several people finally rescued Cooper and called a doctor.

Several days later Kelly was arrested for assault and breach of the peace, but after a quick trial, was given a $15 fine.

The Press minced no words in expressing its outrage. “A brutal bully makes a most atrocious attack on an inoffensive peaceful man of good reputation, simply because he is a colored man, and he goes unpunished in this town,” an editorial said. “The state police take charge of the arrest and punishment of the bully and do not call Mr. Coleman [the lunch counter owner] or the doctor or any of the witnesses to testify to the assault or the seriousness of the crime so that the justice may know what punishment to inflict.” 

Then, it pointed out that “Thomas Kelly is a brother of John C. Kelly, head of the State Police in this town. Are relatives of the State Police exempt from punishment for crimes? Apparently an investigation should be made by those who appoint and control the State Police.”

Several wealthy townspeople wound up hiring a major New York City lawyer to demand that the Connecticut State Police headquarters in Hartford investigate the incident and its handling. The commissioner of state police said he’d look into it, but the outcome was handled quietly. 

Apparently Lt. John Kelly, the Troop A commander, was not found at fault, for he eventually rose to the position of commander of the entire Connecticut State Police.

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.”

Karl S. Nash, 

The Country Editor

While most people thought of him as a newspaperman,  Karl Nash was really a teacher. His subject was Ridgefield and his students were its residents. As a country newspaper editor and publisher for more than 60 years, he spent his life telling townspeople about themselves, their neighbors and their institutions.

Nash not only taught Ridgefield, he also served it in many official capacities – including  20 years on the Board of Education. 

 Karl Seymour Nash was born in 1908, descended from several of the founding families of the town including not only the Nashes, but the Seymours, Smiths, Olmsteds, and Keelers. His homestead on Main Street had been in his family since the town’s first settlement.

His father, Howard Patterson Nash, died when Karl was 13, and his mother, Christie Law Jones Nash, was left with little money and five children to support. She worked as a librarian at the Ridgefield Library almost next door to their home  — now an apartment building at 486 Main Street — and hooked rugs to sell. 

As the oldest child, Karl became a head of the household, helping care for the children and doing many of the chores. As he grew older, he also worked at his grandfather’s Walnut Grove Farm in Farmingville, including delivering the dairy’s milk in the village.

He was a top student at Hamilton High School (later called Ridgefield High School) on Bailey Avenue, where he graduated in 1926. He went off to Harvard, planning to become a minister.

However, after getting a Harvard degree in government in 1930, he turned to journalism instead. 

As a teenager he had already developed a nose for news, covering local events for The Ridgefield Press and area dailies, and even starting his own, short-lived “Ridgefield Record.” Back home from college, he became a Danbury Evening News reporter and in 1935, married Dorothy C. Baxter, granddaughter of D. Crosby Baxter who had founded The Ridgefield Press in 1875. (While the Baxter family was no longer associated with the newspaper, they were prominent in the community.) Karl and Dorothy later divorced; however, Dorothy’s brother Frank was married to Karl’s sister, Elizabeth, who became the longtime treasurer of the Acorn Press, parent company of the Ridgefield Press.

In 1937, Karl and his brother, John, bought The Press for just under $2,500. It was a struggle. “I had been married in 1935 and had an eight-month-old daughter, so I didn’t have any money to invest,” Nash recalled years later. “John had $92 and he and I borrowed $250 from my mother. With this and $2,000 we borrowed from the town’s jeweler, now the town’s banker  (Francis D. Martin), we bought the Press.”

The business included a small print shop that produced stationery products for local customers. 

“How John and I thought we could both ever make a living from this run-down $12,000-a-year-gross business, I don’t know,” he said. “But we went to work at it and worked hard. We put ourselves on the payroll at $25 a week and for months on end didn’t collect it.”

A year later, they established The Wilton Bulletin and moved  their operations from the Masonic Hall, just south of town hall, into an old garage on Bailey Avenue. Over the years the parent company, Acorn Press, grew into a multi-million dollar group of eight weekly newspapers, which merged in 1997 with the Hersam family’s weeklies based in New Canaan to become Hersam Acorn Newspapers. In the early 2000s, Hersam Acorn was publishing nearly 20 newspapers in southern Connecticut, Westchester, N.Y., and Vermont. The papers remained in the hands of the Nash and Hersam families until October 2018 when they were purchased by Hearst.

John left the business in 1948 to own and operate other weekly and daily newspapers in Connecticut and Massachusetts. He died in 2013 at the age of 101.

In 1951 Karl married Elizabeth Grace Boyd, daughter of novelists Thomas Boyd and Margaret Woodward Smith. She had been hired as an intern on a 75th anniversary issue project, and the two co-edited the newspaper for many years. Under their leadership in the last half of the 20th Century, the Press’s paid circulation reached nearly 90% of the homes in Ridgefield.

Always active in town, Nash was chairman of the school board for 17 years and a member from 1942 until 1962, “devoting my efforts to raising the standard of a somewhat backward school system,” he said years later.

He served on several school building committees, belonged to the Parks and Recreation Commission, and moderated countless Town Meetings. 

A Republican much of his life, he was kicked out of the party in 1963 when he helped people

who were forming the Good Government Party in reaction to what they saw as anti-education efforts by both established parties. The GGP ran candidates for the school board in 1963 and 1965, and though none was elected, one collected nearly 1,300 votes. The GGP itself never had more than 75 members and was disbanded in 1981 after many years of inactivity.

Always curious about the town’s past, Nash wrote many pieces about Ridgefield history and as chairman of the town’s huge 250th anniversary celebration in 1958, arranged to have Silvio Bedini write the town history, “Ridgefield in Review.” 

He also organized, wrote for, and led substantial projects to compile histories of all aspects of Ridgefield life for special 75th and 100th anniversary editions of The Press in 1950 and 1975. The result was hundred of thousands of words of history of the community, illustrated with scores of pictures.

In 1983, the year he turned 75, Nash was named the Rotary Club Citizen of the Year.

He was 84 when he died at his retirement home in Cocoa Beach, Fla. in 1992.

Many who knew him considered Karl Nash the epitome of the country journalist. “He was a gifted and tough editor who taught dozens of young men and women how to write — and appreciate the beauty of — a simple, declarative sentence,” said his son Thomas B. Nash in his father’s obituary. “He was a serious newsman who sought to treat people fairly and in a consistent manner.”

“Karl had a love and sensitivity for his home town that came from being not only a  native son, but also a descendant of the founders and earliest settlers of the community,” said an editor who worked under him for many years. “Generations of Ridgefield were in his blood.”

Karl Nash himself was less effusive about his contributions. “Our papers might be called progressively independent,” he wrote in 1960. “They are said by some to be a force for good in their communities, by others a menace to the inhabitants.”

 “They continue to grow and prosper, however,” he added, perhaps with a twinkle in his eye.

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.

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.

Elizabeth Leonard: 

The First First 

In a town where men had been the managers for more than two and a half centuries, Elizabeth Mary Nowotarski Leonard made local history in 1981 when she was elected the first woman first selectman. And her election wasn’t even close, for Mrs. Leonard was already widely popular, famed for her devotion to Ridgefield and its people.  But ironically, the Democrat she beat was also a woman— and a pioneer in her own right.

The New York City native arrived here in 1958, and worked for a decade as the Ridgefield reporter for The Danbury News-Times, often turning out six or seven stories a day. 

Around 1970, she turned the tables; instead of covering politicians, she became one. She left the newspaper and joined the Republican Town Committee, serving as its secretary, and also became vice president of  the Fifth Congressional District Women’s Republican Club. She was named to a Charter Revision Commission, and began a long stint as a lively and witty moderator of Town Meetings. 

In 1976, she overcame opponents on her own town committee, in a caucus and at a primary, to win the nomination for state representative, and went on to defeat Lillian Moorhead in the election.

She served in the State House till 1981, earning the nickname “Studs” for her support of legislation allowing studded snow tires. 

Because of her efforts for improved rail service on the Danbury line, a self-propelled Budd car was named Lizzy in her honor. 

In 1981 she was elected first selectman (she always preferred to be called first selectMAN because that was the traditional title for the job). The woman she beat was Lillian Moorhead again. Moorhead had been a member of the Board of Selectmen since 1973, and was the first woman to serve on that board since the town was founded 258 years earlier.

During Leonard’s six years as chief executive, the town began paramedic service, built more housing for the elderly at Ballard Green, added a sewage treatment plant for Route 7, refurbished athletic fields, rebuilt schools, and began work on the Prospect Ridge congregate housing for the elderly. When she left office, the town had a $700,000 budget surplus.

Ill health, including severe arthritis, forced her to retire from office in 1987, but not from the volunteer Board of Selectmen, where she continued to serve until her death in 1992 at the age of 56. 

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.”  

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.”

D. Crosby Baxter: 

The Little Acorn

D. Crosby Baxter was a jack of many trades, but the one he may have been least adept at has had the most lasting effect on Ridgefield. In 1875, Baxter founded the town’s only newspaper. 

He admitted that he wasn’t very good at newspapering, but he knew Ridgefield needed a newspaper. So in the basement of his home on Main Street on Jan. 13, 1875, he started “Baxter’s

Monthly.” Within two months, the journal was a weekly named The Ridgefield Press.

Baxter was, as his obituary said in 1923,  “a unique character whose individuality stood apart from others.”

 Darius Crosby Baxter was born in Somers, N.Y.,  in 1842, and moved to Ridgefield with his parents when he was 11. He started out as a shoemaker, but turned to storekeeping for a livelihood after he lost his left hand in a blasting accident. 

In 1865, Baxter married  Flora E. Farvor of Washington, Conn. They lived for a while on West Lane, later on Catoonah Street, and then in a house he bought on Main Street just north of the building where Planet Pizza is. 

It was perhaps because of his dealings with fellow local merchants that Baxter realized a need for businesses to get their messages out. In 1875 at the age of 32, with no experience in either printing or journalism, he founded Baxter’s Monthly to do just that. He bought a printing press and began work in his basement. 

In the early days the paper was full of ads for local businesses but carried little “news.” Issues contained a few local social news items, usually reported in a light-hearted vein, as well as jokes, stories and poems.

An example of Baxter’s sense of humor appears on the third page of the first issue, under the headline, “Found”: “On the side walk, in front of the town house [hall], a piece of thin steel about too (sic) inches long, said to belonged (sic) to a ladies wardrobe and supposed to have been broken by making too low a bow to our curly-haired country clerk; the same can be had by calling at this office and paying for this ad.”

News items were often terse. In his “About Town” column one week in 1875, Baxter reported: “Warm. Potato bugs.” 

“The succinct quality of some of the writing may have been occasioned by the fact that every letter of type had to be picked up by hand, and Baxter had not been trained as a printer,” said Karl Nash in a history of The Press. And, of course, he had only one hand to work with.

Subscriptions were initially 75 cents a year, but once the paper went weekly, rose to $1.25 — about $27 in today’s money. That’s a lot, and apparently Baxter had trouble getting enough subscribers for a while. In 1877, he printed a notice saying he’d take produce to pay for a subscription “if the party has no cash.”

Incidentally, the first subscriber was William W. Seymour, great-great grandfather of future publisher Karl Nash and great-great-great grandfather of the next publisher, Thomas B. Nash. (In more small-town connections, Karl Nash’s first wife was Dorothy Baxter, granddaughter of D. Crosby, and Karl’s sister, Elizabeth, longtime treasurer of The Press, was married to Frank Baxter, D. Crosby’s grandson.)

Twenty five years after he founded the paper, Baxter reflected on the early days. “The first paper was printed on a Kelsey press made at Meriden, Conn.,” he wrote in 1900. “It was just large enough to print one page at a time; in fact, I did not have type to print only one page at a time. 

“Hon. R. J. Walsh of Greenwich, Conn., was a great friend of the little paper from the start, and done a great deal for it. We used to be up late at night after many had gone to their slumber, thinking what we could fill up the paper with, as we did not know anything about paper work.”

He said it “took all our spare time (a month) to get the paper out on time, for I did not know anything about setting type and sometimes I would make a mistake and have to set it all over again.”

He got help with the editorial content from folks like Hubert Main, the hymn composer (also profiled in Who Was Who), who would write humorous pieces; Dr. W.S. Todd, a local physician; and Henry Mead, a Main Street businessman.

Baxter’s motto for the paper was “Tall oaks from little acorns grow.” “It took hard work to have it grow,” Baxter said. “I got discouraged a lot of times, but I made up my mind it should grow to be a large tree, and it has, to a large and healthy tree. Many spoke discouraging words of the little sheet, but others encouraged me to keep it growing for perhaps if I had not started the little paper, Ridgefield would never had had a paper.”

His motto remained in place through the 20th Century, and when the Nash brothers, Karl and John, bought the operation in 1937, they named their company Acorn Press. The newspaper, now part of the multimedia, 12-newspaper Hersam Acorn Network, still has an image of an acorn in the nameplate at the top of the front page.

Five years after he began, Baxter moved the operations to the Masonic Hall. (The building next to town hall burned down in the great first of 1895 — but The Press did not miss that week’s issue, which carried extensive coverage of the blaze. A new Masonic Hall was quickly built, and The Press resumed work there, remaining until 1938 when the Nash brothers moved it to its present location in an old automobile garage on Bailey Avenue.

By the time Baxter sold the operation in 1880 to Charles W. Lee, The Press was running eight broadsheet pages. Only two of those pages were local news and advertising, however; the rest was “boilerplate” news, features and ads that had been prepared by a company in New York City.

Baxter next opened what was to be the town’s first livery stable. There he sold and rented horses, and performed taxi services, such as bringing people from and taking them to the train station on Prospect Street. Twenty five years later, the town had three livery stables.

After that, he ran a country market, called the Lakeview Store, on North Salem Road in the Scotland district. Around 1920, when he was in his late 70s, failing health forced him to retire. He died in 1923 at the age of 80.

“Mr. Baxter was gifted with good business senses and a sense of humor,” said his obituary, tersely adding, “He had many terse sayings.”