Books Set in Ridgefield

Here’s a collection of novels and non-fiction memoirs set in Ridgefield.  

Fiction

A Dying Fall by Hildegarde Dolson, Lippincott, 1973: The victim supposedly slips on a step in the Aldrich Museum sculpture garden, falls and is mortally impaled upon a sharp work of art. Dolson lived in Lewisboro.

Cast Down; A New England Haunting by Tracy Petry, My Mutt Publications, 2015. Story of a family that moves to “Bridgefield” and  a ghost connected with the lost village of Dudleyville.  

Divide by Two by Mildred Gilman (Wohlforth), Mercury, 1940: Novel of a child of “modern” divorced parents who tries with unusual results to arrange his life to his liking. Mrs. Wohlforth, one of the original “sob sister” newspaper reporters, lived on Rockwell Road for many years.

Don’t Raise the Bridge (Lower the River) by Max Wilk, MacMillan, 1960. A humorous novel about life in suburbia, airline pilots and a country inn (what is now Bernard’s). Wilk lived on Silver Spring Road when he wrote the book.

God’s Payday by Edgar C. Bross, G. W. Dillingham Company, 1898: A romantic drama, with scenes in Ridgefield — the main character pays a visit by train to escape the city and stays at the Keeler Tavern. Bross was editor of The Ridgefield Press from 1887 to 1899

Hometown Heroes by Susanna Hofmann McShea, St. Martin’s Press, 1990: The first in a series about a quartet  of senior citizen amateur detectives solving mysteries. See also Ladybug, Ladybug, and The Pumpkin-Shell Wife. 

Ladybug, Ladybug by Susanna Hofmann McShea, 1994: See Hometown Heroes.

Murmuring Ever by Lynn Wallrapp, Manor Books Gothic, 1975:  Tale of a family moving to a New England town, where they discover a terrifying legend that has haunted the town since the Revolutionary War. The teenage girl falls in love with the ghost of a soldier hanged 200 years earlier. The author grew up in Ridgefield  and wrote the book here.

My Brother Sam is Dead by Christopher Collier & James Lincoln Collier, Scholastic, 1974: A fictional account of teenagers in the Revolutionary War, set in Redding as well as Ridgefield; won Newbery award, Christopher was Connecticut state historian.

Murder and Blueberry Pie by Richard and Frances Lockridge, Lippincott, 1959: The scene of the title crime is the Keeler Tavern during Ridgefield’s 250th anniversary celebration. The Lockridges, who wrote the famous Mr. and Mrs. North series of mysteries and movies, lived in Lewisboro.

Please Omit Funeral by Hildegarde Dolson, Lippincott, 1975: Deals with the death of the author of a controversial book that has just been banned by the local (Ridgefield) school system. The novel was written during Ridgefield’s famous “book burning” era. 

The Hessian by Howard Fast, Morrow, 1972: A novel about a fictional incident involving German soldiers during the Revolutionary War in Ridgefield and Redding. Fast lived on Florida Hill Road.

The Pumpkin-Shell Wife by Susanna Hofmann McShea, 1992: See Hometown Heroes.

The Red Petticoat by Joan Palmer, Lothrop Lee & Shepard,1969. A fictional account of the “Red Petticoat” legend from the Battle of Ridgefield in 1777, aimed at teenagers. Palmer, a former AP journalist, lived in Lewisboro.

The Ridgefield Tavern: A Romance of Sarah Bishop by Dr. Maurice Enright, privately printed, 1908. Highly fictionalized story of hermitess Sarah Bishop of the cave.

To Spite Her Face by Hildegarde Dolson, Lippincott, 1971: One of the two murders in this mystery takes places in the Ridgefield Thrift Shop. 

Two Little Girls in Blue by Mary Higgins Clark, Simon and Schuster, 2006. A thriller set in Ridgefield about a mother’s search for her kidnapped child.

Non-fiction

A Private Battle by Cornelius Ryan and Kathryn Morgan Ryan, Simon & Schuster, 1979. Kathryn Morgan Ryan used her late husband’s secret accounts to tell the story of his four-year battle with cancer. Cornelius was the author of “The Longest Day” and two other acclaimed histories of World War II, and Kathryn was an editor and novelist who assisted him in his research. They lived on Old Branchville Road. 

Life Without George by Irene Kampen, 1961: A humorous autobiographical account of dealing with single life in Ridgefield after Kampen’s husband runs off with another woman. Book became the basis of Lucille Ball’s TV series, “The Lucy Show.” Kampden wrote other humorous autobiographical books while living in Ridgefield.

Lost in Place: Growing Up Absurd in Suburbia by Mark Salzman, Random House, 1995: Salzman, author of the book and movie, “Iron and Silk,” offers a light-hearted autobiographical look at his childhood and youth in Ridgefield.

Memories by Laura Curie Allee Shields, privately printed, 1940: An early activist for woman suffrage tells the story of her life, most of it lived on the corner of Main and Market Streets.

The Nearly Departed: Or, My Family and Other Foreigners by Brenda Cullerton, Little, Brown and Company, 2003: Humorous reminiscences about growing up in an unusual family  on lower St. Johns Road in the 1950s and 60s. 

Dr. Maurice Enright: 

A Better Doctor Than Writer

Ridgefield has figured into the subject or the setting of dozens of books over the last two centuries. Many are well-done, be they history or fiction, but one book stands out as just plain awful. Its author was a beloved physician.

Maurice Enright was born in Ridgefield in 1862, son of Irish immigrant farming parents who lived on Ramapoo Road opposite Casey Lane. James and Jane Enright must have been an inspiring mother and father, for many of their children became successful in the worlds of business and health.

One daughter, Helen, became a leading nurse in New York City and, late in her career, became the first nurse ever employed by what’s now the Ridgefield Visiting Nurse Association.

Maurice Enright grew up in town, attending its one-room schoolhouses, and was then tutored in classical studies by Father Thaddeus P. Walsh, pastor of St. Mary’s Parish. That education was enough to gain him admission to the College of Physicians and Surgeons of New York, the first medical school in the United States and now part of Columbia University.

Dr. Enright established a practice in Brooklyn, N.Y., where he also served on the staffs of St. Catharine’s Hospital and the Little Sisters of the Poor Home for the Aged. He was a sanitary inspector for the Brooklyn Board of Health for eight years.

“Dr. Enright is progressive as a physician and as a citizen, and takes a deep interest in everything that pertains to the growth and welfare of Brooklyn, giving his support to every movement which in his judgment is calculated to advance the interests of its people,” said the “A History of Long Island” by Peter Ross, published in 1902.

On his death in 1926, The New York Times called him “a well-known Brooklyn physician and author.”

He was certainly well-known as a doctor in Brooklyn, but one might question his fame as an author.

His only known book was a novel, “The Ridgefield Tavern: A Romance of Sarah Bishop (Hermitess),” published in 1908 in both hardcover and paperback editions.

Set in the late 1700s the novel describes Sarah Bishop as the daughter of the keeper of the local inn which Enright calls the Ridgefield Tavern but illustrates it with a picture of Keeler Tavern. (History — or perhaps legend — says the real hermitess Sarah Bishop was a farmer’s daughter from

Long Island who was ravaged by a British soldier during the Revolution. She had no early connection with Ridgefield or the tavern before she began her many years of living in a small cave on West Mountain.)

In Dr. Enright’s story Sarah falls in love with an American patriot. He is wounded in battle and Sarah marries him on his deathbed — she is a widow 36 hours after she becomes a bride. After his death she retires to a cave on West Mountain for the rest of her life.

“The Ridgefield Tavern” was apparently not well-received by critics. The only review we could find devoted two sentences to it, and they were devastating: “In ‘The Ridgefield Tavern,’” wrote The New York Sun on June 27, 1908, “Dr. Maurice Enright betrays only elementary perceptions of the art of fiction. The bits of historical information included in his story are interesting; the rest of it is well nigh unreadable.”

That’s pretty rough. But then, the novel offers such lively action passages as: “When the colonel was wounded he was partly facing his men and the bullet passing obliquely through the soft parts of his back, shattered the dorsal vertebrae and either a fragment of bone or the bullet is pressing upon the spinal marrow, causing paralysis below that point.”

As for romantic writing: “That there was a mutual attraction between them could be observed by the lingering gaze of the Colonel in letting his eyes rest for a moment longer than usual in evident admiration, while a slight suffusion mounting from cheek to forehead, and a dropping of eyelids, a slight embarrassment indicating that deeper feeling which follows attraction.”

If you don’t mind Dr. Enright’s style, print-on-demand copies of his book are available on Amazon for from $10 to $50. An original hardbound is being advertised for $975!  

Kathryn Morgan Ryan: 

A Woman of Words

Often working in the shadow of her famous husband, Kathryn Morgan Ryan was nonetheless an accomplished writer and researcher, who wrote four books and had a successful career in magazines. 

The work through which she touched the most lives may well have been as a researcher and editor on her husband Cornelius Ryan’s World War II books, including “The Longest Day” and “A Bridge Too Far.” 

Mrs. Ryan grew up in Iowa, the setting for her 1972 novel, “The Betty Tree,” which The New York Times described as “a novel about Midwestern attitudes and two adolescent children coping with affluent, busy parents.” (She admitted later that she wrote “The Betty Tree” after a dispute  with her husband in which he maintained she could not write a book on her own; she wanted to prove him wrong.)

In 1946, at the age of 19, she graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism and had an early career that included writing and editing for Conde Nast magazines.  She was an editor at House and Garden until 1953,  starting out making “the extraordinary sum of $30 a week, but we were encouraged to wear hats in the office — the mark, in those days, of a lady editor,” she said.

From 1955 to 1960,  she was an associate editor with House and Home magazine.

“I was the resident house author on Frank Lloyd Wright,” she told an interviewer in 1972. “While my husband was roaming the world in search of one story after another, I seemed to be knee-deep in bricks and mortar.”

She and Cornelius Ryan were married in 1950, they had a son and a daughter, and for a while Kathryn Ryan was supporting the family while he was researching “The Longest Day.”

“Life really became difficult for us,” she said. “I was working full-time because my job was the Ryans’ only source of income. Our three-room apartment in New York was almost uninhabitable. The children slept in what we laughingly called ‘the master bedroom.’ We bedded down in a room that wouldn’t have made a good-sized closet. Everywhere else, the apartment was piled high with research.”

At the same time, she was also raising two children and helping her husband. “I organized, cross-referenced, filed mountains of information and edited copy,” she said. “Sometimes we worked until 2 or 3 a.m.”

During the same period she also wrote two books, “House & Garden’s Book of Building” and, with comedian Alan King, “Anyone Who Owns His Own Home Deserves It.”

Kathryn Ryan is best known for writing “A Private Battle,” the story of her husband’s death

from cancer, which became a Book of the Month Club selection, was condensed by Reader’s Digest, and made into a television special. The book, which bears her husband’s name as co-author, is based on secret notes and tape recordings her husband kept as he was dying from prostate cancer. The notes were discovered after his death.

“Connie was so objective he couldn't resist interviewing an ashtray if one happened to be there, and I think he was both fascinated and repelled by cancer,” she told a Times interviewer. “I think his attitudes indicate he probably would have written a pretty definitive book about it.”

She decided to use his notes to write “A Private Battle,” which was published by Simon & Schuster. 

It was a difficult, but cathartic experience, she told The Times. “Connie’s great desk sits just nine feet across the office from mine, and as I was writing it, I would be so immersed in the book I would really feel he was there.”

Over the years she received many honors. Some were unusual including, for her work on World War II, being made an honorary member of four paratroop units in the United States, England, and Poland. 

A Ridgefielder for nearly 30 years, she was active in community organizations, including St. Stephen’s Church, the Ridgefield Garden Club, and the District Nurse Association. She lived for many years on Old Branchville Road in a Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired house of redwood, cypress and 84 windows overlooking eight acres. After her husband’s death, she moved to  Jackson Court in the village and some years later, to Florida where she died in 1993 at the age of 68.

Kathryn Ryan’s lifelong love of words came from her mother, who was an English teacher. “We played great games of parsing English sentences,” she recalled in a 1976 Ridgefield Press interview. “We learned grammar in a very entertaining fashion.”

She felt English often wasn’t well taught. “The problem today was the same thing my husband encountered and overcame in writing. History doesn’t have to be dull, and neither does English. It all goes back to imagination, to making something truly interesting to the pupil, to make him want to participate in what you are teaching.

“Once you get participation, you don’t have someone in the back of the room yawning.” 

Max Wilk: 

A Man of Memories

“My mind is a repository of memories, of cameos and anecdotes,” Max Wilk said in 1997. “Nightly, I entertain a cast of thousands. Usually, at about 4 a.m., they arrive.” 

Then 77, Wilk was still doing what he had done for years – write books and scripts, and write them with a sense of humor. 

The son of a literary agent and Warner Brothers story editor,  Wilk was born in 1920, grew up in Minnesota, and studied drama at Yale. He served in the Army in World War II with a Hollywood motion picture unit, and wrote training films starring the likes of Alan Ladd, Clark Gable, and Jimmy Stewart. After the war, he worked on Broadway and, starting in 1948, became a pioneer in television, writing skits for comedians like Ed Wynn, Victor Borge, Art Carney, and Jonathan Winters. 

He and his family moved to Silver Spring Road in 1951 and here he wrote his first book, “Don’t Raise the Bridge, Lower the River,” published in 1960. “While the locale of this book is Connecticut, it has nothing of importance to say about Suburbia, Exurbia, or the stifling wave of Middle Class Conformity which, it is augured, will soon engulf the whole of Fairfield County,” the jacket says. 

Nonetheless, local readers could see many lighthearted slices of 1950s Ridgefield life in his portrait of Green Haven and an innkeeper (loosely based on Walter Tode’s Inn on West Lane, now Bernard’s). The book was turned into a movie starring Jerry Lewis, but its setting was changed from a Ridgefield-like town to London, England!

Wilk went on to write nearly 20 books with such titles as “The Golden Age of Television: Notes from Survivors” and “They’re Playing Our Song: Conversations with America’s Classic Songwriters.” He wrote the novelization of The Beatles’ cartoon movie, “Yellow Submarine.”  His novel, “Help, Help, Help,” also contains anecdotes based on living in Ridgefield. 

He  also wrote many TV shows and his CBS special, “The Fabulous Fifties,” won an Emmy, a Peabody and a Writers Guild Award. 

Wilk and his wife, Barbara, an artist who exhibited nationally and who had received the President’s Volunteer Action Award for community service, moved in 1966 to Westport where Wilk died in  2011 at the age of 91. 

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.” 

John Ames Mitchell: 

The Father of Life

Magazine publisher, architect, artist, novelist, mystic, mystery: John Ames Mitchell was a Renaissance man who kept to himself but influenced many. 

Born in 1845, the Harvard-educated architect designed a number of buildings including the beautiful Unity Unitarian Church in Easton, Mass, but soon decided architecture wasn’t for him. He went to Paris and studied at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, and in 1883 founded the original Life magazine, promising “to speak out what is in our mind as fairly, as truthfully, and as decently as we know how.”

Much more like today's New Yorker than the Life of the later 20th Century, Mitchell's magazine discovered and encouraged many fine writers and artists at the turn of the 20th Century, such as Charles Dana Gibson, the illustrator who created the Gibson Girl. It covered the literary scene as well as political and social issues. His staff  included the Harvard graduate and founder of Harvard Lampoon, Edward Sandford Martin. 

Life was purchased in 1936 by another Ridgefielder, Henry Luce, who turned it into a picture magazine. Mitchell and Horace Greeley of The New York Herald Tribune founded the Fresh Air

Fund, which for many years operated the Life Fresh Air camp for city kids on the site of today's Branchville School. 

Mitchell also penned a half dozen novels, the most famous of which, “Amos Judd” (1895), was made into the 1922 silent film, “The Young Rajah,” starring Rudolph Valentino. 

He was “a man who planted many seeds,” said Abraham Puchall, who has a much more than   passing interest in Mitchell. He has lived and worked in Mitchell’s world for years.

The headquarters of Mitchell's Life is now The Herald Square Hotel in New York, a gift to Mitchell from Charles Dana Gibson in appreciation of the publisher’s having seen and developed his potential as an artist. The hotel is operated by Puchall, whose Ridgefield home on West Lane was once Mitchell’s home, called Windover.

Puchall has spent countless hours researching John Ames Mitchell’s life and philosophy. 

Mitchell loved cherubs, he said, using them in his writing and as a symbol for his magazine — Gibson had noted sculptor Philip Martiny create a cherubic Winged Life over the main entrance to the Life building. To him,  Puchall said,  Cupid personified a cheerful but unrelenting guide to truths about human nature and the creative spirit. 

Mitchell died in 1918 and is buried in Fairlawn Cemetery.

While his magazine is gone, his books mostly forgotten, and his camp has vanished, Ridgefield has one monument to John Ames Mitchell that thousands see daily. Soon after the turn of the 20th Century, Mitchell donated a watering trough for horses, handsome enough to be placed in the middle of the intersection of Main and Catoonah Streets. It had a large bowl to serve passing horses and included, at its base, a special opening for village dogs in need of a drink. The trough now stands in the island at the intersection of West and Olmstead Lanes, where it is often mistaken for a fountain.

Irene Kampen: 

Life without Owen

Irene Kampen’s divorce led not only to a new career, but a popular TV series starring another recent divorcee, Lucille Ball. 

Kampen and her husband, Owen, moved to Ridgefield in 1954 and almost immediately, their 15-year marriage fell apart. 

“I was brought up to believe that if you cooked, dusted and baked blueberry muffins for your husband, you would both live happily ever after,” Kampen said. “Well, I dusted, I baked and one day I looked around our house, high on a Ridgefield hill, and ‘George’ was gone. 

“Now the advice I give to all young brides is ‘Don’t dust! Light a lot of candles. They’re much more romantic.”

Forced to support herself after the divorce, she was soon exhausted commuting to work at her father’s New York City flower shop, and turned to writing. A few years later, she produced the light-hearted “Life Without George,” published by Doubleday in 1961, based on her new life as a single mom. The book became the inspiration for The Lucy Show, a comedy about a divorced woman starring Miss Ball, who had recently divorced Desi Arnaz. 

Kampen and her then 17-year-old daughter Christine used to watch the show every Monday night. “It’s our lives we’re seeing,” Kampen told Associated Press. “They’ve changed specific incidents, but the characters are recognizable and so are the situations.”

Many changes were made from book to sit-com script, including the elimination of Kampen’s two cats — “Cats are untrainable and impossible to use in a show filmed before a live audience as is ‘The Lucy Show,’ ” explained AP TV-radio writer Cynthia Lowry.

“But,” added Kampen, “they’ve left the house pretty much the way it was — they even have the location right, only instead of Ridgefield and Danbury, they call the towns Ridgebury and Danfield.”

Ball won two Emmy Awards during the show's seven-year run.

Although she wanted to, Kampen never did get to meet Lucille Ball. She probably did meet Vivian Vance, who played Ethel Mertz on both I Love Lucy and The Lucy Show — Vance lived on Route 116 in nearby North Salem.

Kampen went on to write 10 humorous novels, often based on her own experiences, with such titles as “Here Comes the Bride, There Goes the Mother” (based on the 1966 wedding of her daughter, Christine, to Ridgefielder Stephen Guthrie), “Fear Without Childbirth,” “Due to A Lack of Interest, Tomorrow Has Been Cancelled,” and “Nobody Calls at This Hour Just to Say Hello.” 

Irene Trepel Kampen was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., in 1922 — her father, Jack, who later lived in Ridgefield, owned a flower shop in Rockefeller Center, was an amateur magician, and was president of the American Society of Magicians for 12 years. Her mother Mary co-starred in Trepel’s magic shows, including on USO tours in World War II.

Kampen attended the University of Wisconsin where she was editor of the campus humor magazine and graduated in 1943. She worked for a while at The New York Journal-American and after her marriage, moved to brand-new Levittown, Long Island, where she worked for the local weekly newspaper as a reporter and gossip columnist.

Living in Ridgefield for more than 30 years, Kampen had homes on Stonecrest Road, Lookout Drive, and finally Rockwell Road. She was active in the Women’s Town Club and the Ridgefield Woman's Club, helped with Red Cross fund drives, and was a frequent luncheon speaker

Soon after her divorce, she began writing pieces for The Ridgefield Press, including a column  under the pseudonym, H. Loomis Fenstermacher. 

“I poked fun at local subjects such as the Southern New England Telephone Company, CL&P and the Ridgefield police department,” she told an interviewer about her column. “I thought the column was funny, my mother thought it was funny, and the publisher, Karl Nash, thought it was funny. However, the people I wrote about did not think I was funny, and I was let go.”

So, instead of the column, she sat down and wrote “Life without George.”

The way to become a writer, she said years later, was: “Get divorced. And also, if you want to write books, get fired.”

Kampen enjoyed pulling off stunts, as well. One time, to draw attention to how long it took to get a walk light on Main Street, she set up a typing stand with typewriter on the sidewalk by town hall  to suggest she had enough time to work on a novel while waiting for the walk light.

Irene Kampen moved to California in 1988 and died 10 years later at the age of 75.

How did Owen Kampen feel about becoming “George” to millions of readers and viewers? In a 1961 letter to The Press, Owen, a commercial artist who did many pulp fiction covers and taught at Famous Artists School, said he had picked up a copy of his ex-wife’s book soon after it came out and began reading it with trepidation. 

“There is nothing funny about divorce, but Irene’s book is; from the flyleaf on, I smiled and finally laughed. In retrospect, it’s a little rewarding to know you had some part in bringing a long-stilled and genuine talent to the fore, for all to enjoy.”

And if that praise from an ex-husband wasn’t surprising enough, consider who selected Kampen’s book as the model for Ball’s new show: The head of Desilu Productions, Desi Arnaz.

William Hanley in 1964. —N.Y. Times

William G. Hanley:

Acclaimed Screenwriter

Like so many other writers, William G. Hanley started out struggling, holding a variety of jobs to survive while spending his after-hours at a typewriter. But his talent and drive paid off, and he wound up winning two Emmy Awards and being nominated for a Tony, turning out dozens of stage and television scripts, and producing several novels. 

A native of Lorain, Ohio, William Gerald Hanley was born in 1931. His uncles included British novelists James Hanley and Gerald Hanley, and a sister,  Ellen Hanley, who was an actress and also a Ridgefielder. 

     He grew up in Queens, N.Y., attended Cornell for a year,  served in the Army, and studied the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, where he began writing scripts. To survive he worked in banks and factories and even as an encyclopedia salesman.

     His big break came in 1962 when two one-act plays, performed Off Broadway, won him high praise from critics and earned a Drama Desk Award. “Whisper Into My Good Ear” is about two lonely old men who plan to commit suicide together, and “Mrs. Dally Has a Lover” featured a married woman and her romance with a teenager. 

     Howard Taubman  in The New York Times called Mr. Hanley “an uncommonly gifted writer…His style is lean and laconic, shading almost shyly and unexpectedly into tenderness and poetry. His perception of character is fresh and individual.” 

      In 1964, his “Slow Dance on the Killing Ground” opened on Broadway to enthusiastic reviews, but lasted only 88 performances.

Soon Mr. Hanley began writing television scripts. In 1966, he turned his stage play, “Flesh and Blood,” about the troubles of a disintegrating family, into a TV film for which NBC paid him $112,500 ($830,000 in 2016 dollars); The Times said that, at that time, it was the highest price ever paid to a single author for a TV script.  

Over the next 30 years, he wrote at least two dozen TV scripts. Two earned him Emmys: “Something About Amelia,” a 1984 ABC movie about incest, starring Ted Danson, and the 1988 mini-series, “The Attic: The Hiding of Anne Frank,” starring Paul Scofield and Mary Steenburgen 

He received an Edgar Award for his teleplay for the 1987 miniseries, “Nutcracker: Money, Madness & Murder.”

His novels included Blue Dreams, Mixed Feelings, and Leaving Mount Venus, all published in the 1970s.

His actress sister Ellen Hanley was known for her role as Fiorello H. La Guardia’s first wife in the 1959 Broadway musical “Fiorello!” Also in that production was actress Pat Stanley, who became Mr. Hanley’s wife in 1962; they were later divorced. 

Mr. Hanley, who had lived in Ridgefield during his later years, died in 2012 at the age of 80 and is buried in Mapleshade Cemetery beside his sister and his parents 

Samuel Grafton: 

He’d Rather Be Right

Samuel Grafton, who lived on Barry Avenue from 1948 until 1962, was a prolific writer who was accomplished in many genres. He wrote a nationally syndicated current affairs column,  penned several books on politics and economics, freelanced for magazines, published a popular mystery novel, scripted television dramas, and with his wife, Edith, wrote a Broadway play.

Today, one of his observations is still being frequently quoted: “A penny will hide the biggest star in the universe if you hold it close enough to your eye.” 

Born in Brooklyn in 1907, Mr. Grafton grew up in Philadelphia, and began writing for The New Republic when he was only a teenager. In 1929, the year he graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, he won a $500 prize ($7,000 in 2016 dollars) from the American Mercury magazine in a contest for an article on the faults of American higher education. 

He had planned to go to law school but was swayed by the editor of the Philadelphia Record to join his staff; Grafton became an editorial writer there from 1929 to 1934. 

He then signed on as an editor of The New York Post and in 1939 began a daily column that appeared in 120 newspapers for more than 10 years. Despite its name, “I’d Rather Be Right,” the column had a liberal bent. The name played on the old adage, “I’d rather be right than president,” but was also meant to reflect the fact that he truly believed all his opinions were absolutely correct.

Early in World War II, Mr. Grafton was the leading American journalist supporting de Gaulle and the Free French, and denouncing Vichy as a Fascist front. For this, he later received the French Legion of Honor. 

While a Ridgefielder he often wrote for major magazines, including Look, McCall’s, Saturday Evening Post, and even TV Guide. During the 1950s, he also wrote dramas for television shows, including Kraft Theatre and General Electric Theater.

In 1955, Mr. Grafton published a mystery novel, “A Most Contagious Game,”  about  a magazine reporter who joined the New York City underworld to get his story. The book got good reviews, sold well here and abroad, and was made into a television drama broadcast on Westinghouse Studio One in October of that year.

After leaving Ridgefield, he and his wife founded Grafton Publications, a small firm that produced newsletters on youth and drug addiction. He died in 1997 at the age of 90 and Edith in 2000. 

Their son, Dr. Anthony Grafton, who grew up here, became Dodge Professor of History at Princeton, and author of 10 books of history. Son John was an executive with Dover Publications and daughter Abigail, a clinical psychologist and organization consultant in Berkeley, Calif.

Howard Fast: 

Prolific Novelist

Ridgefield has been home to countless writers, but few as prolific as Howard Fast. 

The high school dropout published his first novel before he was 20 and by the turn of the 21st Century, had written more than 80 books of fiction and nonfiction under his own name and a series of mysteries as E.V. Cunningham. Literally millions of copies of Fast titles have been printed in a dozen languages, and many have stayed in print for years. 

Despite all this output, he took the time out to write a regular column for his local paper.v“Howard is bored to death when he's not writing,” said his wife, Bette, in a 1989 Ridgefield Press interview. 

Born in 1914 in New York City, the son of a factory worker,  Fast produced his first novel, “Two Valleys,” in 1933 when he was 18 years old and hitching rides around the country, looking for work. 

Six years later, when he was 24, his novel about Valley Forge, “Conceived in Liberty,” was published, sold a   million copies and was translated into more than 10 languages.

During World War II, he wrote copy for the Voice of America, working for the U.S. Office of War Information. 

Because of the poverty his family experienced when he was a child, he said,  he joined the Communist Party in 1943, a fact that later got him blacklisted; even his famous patriotic book, “Citizen Tom Paine” (1943), long a classroom classic, was banned for a while in the New York City schools because he was a communist. 

He was jailed for three months in 1950 for refusing to disclose some names before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. In 1952, he ran for Congress on the American Labor Party ticket.

Because he was blacklisted, he had to self-publish what became probably his most famous book, “Spartacus.” He also wrote the screenplay of the Stanley Kubrick movie starring starring Kirk Douglas with score by Ridgefielder Alex North. (North also wrote the music for “Cheyenne Autumn,” made from Fast’s novel, “The Last Frontier.”)

Most of his books were historical novels, many of them based on true stories. Another was “Freedom Road,” which was turned into a 1979 TV mini-series starring Muhammad Ali as an ex-slave who became a U.S. senator.

In 1956, he broke with the Communist Party and began a renewed career.  “I was part of a generation that believed in socialism and finally found that belief corroded and destroyed," The New York Times reported him saying in 1981. “That is not renouncing Communism or socialism. It's reaching a certain degree of enlightenment about what the Soviet Union practices. To be dogmatic about a cause you believe in at the age of 20 or 30 is not unusual. But to be dogmatic at age 55 or 60 shows a lack of any learning capacity.”

Fast lived on Florida Hill Road in the 1960s and early 1970s when he moved to Redding, and among the books he wrote while here was “The Hessian” (1972), a Revolutionary War novel set in and around Ridgefield. As are several of his classics, it is still taught in many schools today. 

Among his other popular books are “April Morning” and “The Immigrants.”  

Over his lifetime he also wrote stage plays, screenplays, television plays, poetry, non-fiction books for children, popular political biographies including two books on Yugoslavia's Marshal Tito, and a history of the Jews.

In 1980, the Fasts moved to Greenwich where he died in 2003 at the age of 88.

“The only thing that infuriates me,” he once said, “is that I have more unwritten stories in me than I can conceivably write in a lifetime.” 

Frederick Nebel: 

Hero of Pulpdom

In 1955, Frederick Nebel marked the 25th anniversary of his career as a full-time writer. “In that quarter century,” The Ridgefield Press said, “he has, by his own estimate, pounded out more than 4,000,000 words on his three typewriters — in the form of novels, novelettes, short stories, and articles.”

Many of those words were for some of the classic “pulp” magazines of the 1920s and 30s, such as Black Mask and Dime Detective. He and his friend, Dashiell Hammett, were leading producers of the era’s noir style of  hard-boiled detective tales. 

Seven of his stories were turned into Hollywood films, and many more movies sprang from characters he’d originated. 

A native of Staten Island, N.Y., Louis Frederick Nebel was born in 1903 and dropped out of school at the age of 15. He worked on the docks, sailed on tramp steamers and labored as a farm hand  in northern Canada until he was in his early 20s and began to write for money. 

His first story appeared in Black Mask in 1926 and he soon created the MacBride and Kennedy series of mysteries about a police detective and a hard-drinking newspaper reporter. He later sold the rights to Hollywood, which turned the boozing male Kennedy into a  female   named Torchy Blane, and nine movies — not involving Nebel — resulted. “Hell, they always change the stuff around,” Nebel said when asked about the movie series. “But I don’t mind — as long as I don’t have to make the changes.”

Despite his output, he wrote only three novels; today titles are so prized that first editions of Sleepers East (1933), But Not the End  (1934) or Fifty Roads to Town (1936) may fetch as much as $1,300. Sleepers East, which The New York Times Book Review said has a “full measure of action, suspense and emotional conflict . . . and thrills a-plenty,” was made into a 1934 movie. (Actor, raconteur and concert pianist Oscar Levant worked on the screenplay.)

After he and his wife, Dorothy, came to Ridgefield in 1934, his popularity continued to rise and he began writing for “slick” magazines such as Collier’s. 

Unlike many writers and artists who’ve lived here,  Nebel became active in the community. During World War II, he was a member of the War Price and Ration Board and later served as one of the first members of the Zoning Board of Appeals — including stints as its chairman. 

However, in the late 1950s, after he became ill, the Nebels moved to Laguna Beach, Calif. where he died of a stroke in 1967 at the age of 63. 

Long after his death, Nebel is being rediscovered and collections of his short stories are being published as books. His complete series of Dick Donahue private detective stories, published in the 1930s in Black Mask, were collected in a 2012 anthology, “Tough As Nails.” A year later, “Raw Law: The Complete Cases of MacBride & Kennedy Volume 1: 1928-30,” came out. They and other Nebel collections are still in print.

“While Nebel's work is not as well known as his good friend Hammett...he deserves to be read and reread as a hero of pulpdom,” said Hugh Lessig, a writer and student of the “hardboiled pulps.”

William Blankenship: 

Two Careers in Writing

William “Bill” Blankenship had two careers, both successful and both involving writing.

The IBM speechwriter, who lived in Ridgefield in the 1970s, wrote novels in his spare time — a dozen of them.

Born in Chicago in 1934, Mr. Blankenship graduated from the University of Southern California in 1957. After two years in the U.S. Army, he began a career in communications at the Pasadena Chamber of Commerce and then joined IBM, where he worked 30 years as a communications manager and speechwriter in San Jose, White Plains, Armonk, and Tokyo offices.

On the side, he wrote fiction. His 12 novels, many of them bestsellers, were The Helix Files, The Programmed Man, Leavenworth Irregulars, Tiger Ten, Yukon Gold, Brotherly Love, Blood Stripe, The Time of the Cricket, The Time of the Wolf, Ghost of Silicon Valley, Daisy on Wheels, and Mark Twain and the Hanging Judge.

They included science fiction, mysteries, thrillers, horror and historical tales and were published in 27 languages. Brotherly Love became a CBS movie of the week in 1985.

 “Bill was a great friend to many and was loved for his warmth, humor, generosity, and the great tolerance and respect he showed towards everyone he knew,” his family said when he died in 2012 in Walnut Creek, Calif.  at the age of 77. “He loved people and he made them laugh.”

Jacqueline Babbin: 

Early writer for television

Jacqueline T. Babbin was an Emmy-winning pioneer among women in the field of television production.

Born in Manhattan in 1921, Ms. Babbin started high school at age 11, and Smith College when she was only 15. She began her career working for a literary agency, but moved to television in 1954 becoming a script editor for David Susskind’s production company, Talent Associates. There she was soon writing TV adaptations of stage plays, including Our Town, Ethan Frome, Billy Budd, and Harvey. She moved to producing, becoming one of the first women to be a head producer, and leading such acclaimed series as Armstrong Circle Theater and The DuPont Show of the Month.

With Mr. Susskind’s company, she produced many top TV specials including Hedda Gabler (1963) with Ingrid Bergman and Michael Redgrave  and The Crucible (1967) with George C. Scott, Colleen Dewhurst, and Fritz Weaver. Her 1976 TV movie Sybil, about a woman with multiple personality disorder, starred Sally Field and Joanne Woodward; it won both Emmy and Peabody awards for her and a total of four Emmys, including one for Ms. Field.

“Jackie, next to me, you’re the best TV producer I know, ” Susskind once told her.

In 1968 she started her own production company, called Clovis, doing original dramas for children and earning a Peabody for one of them on the Children’s Hour, called J.T.,

ABC hired her in 1979 as a vice president in charge of bringing novels to television through mini-series, including  Inside the Third Reich, Masada, and The Winds of War. 

“In order for a miniseries to be successful in today’s market,” Ms.  Babbin told The New York Times in 1980, “it has to have a high concept and a high theme. The subject matter has to be something special. There has to be a reason to disrupt the regular programming.”

By then she was working in California, but in 1982 she grabbed the opportunity to return to New York by producing the popular soap opera, All My Children. “She helped enliven the tired soap opera formula with fast-moving stories of adventure and international intrigue,” said the Paley Center for the Media.

Babbin lived on New Road from 1961 until the mid-1970s, with her companion of 40 years, Jane Trahey. (Ms. Trahey was a leading advertising executive, a screenwriter and a novelist, whose book, Pecked to Death by Goslings told of her experiences living in suburban Ridgefield.)

The two moved to Kent where  Babbin, who retired in the early 1990s, wrote two mystery novels, Prime Time Corpse and Bloody Soaps. She died in 2001 at the age of 80. Ms. Trahey had died a year earlier. 

Thomas Walsh: 

Man of Mysteries

“Writing mysteries takes a thief’s mind,” Thomas Walsh told The Ridgefield Press in a 1962 interview. But he also confessed that “the life of a writer isn’t all beer and skittles. 

“One good thing is that you can work wherever you hang your hat,” he said, “but writing is a frightening business. You sit down there with a blank piece of paper and you have to fill it. A doctor or lawyer or insurance man gets out and talks to people, but a writer just sits by himself and writes.” 

Walsh did plenty of writing. He turned out 11 novels including “Nightmare in Manhattan,” which won a 1950 Edgar Award and was made into the film, “Union Station,” starring William Holden and Barry Fitzgerald.

“The Night Watch,” a 1952 book, became the 1954 movie, “Pushover,” starring Fred MacMurray and Kim Novak.

A native of New York City, Thomas F. M. Walsh was born in 1902 and began writing for his high school newspaper. He dropped out of Columbia in his sophomore year and went to work as a reporter for The Baltimore Sun.

He started writing short stories to supplement his meagre reporter’s salary and began selling to

major magazines. Saturday Evening Post carried more than 50 of his mysteries, but his work also appeared in Collier’s, Good Housekeeping, Woman’s Home Companion, and other periodicals.

Most of his stories featured “hard-shelled, tender-hearted Irish cops.”

All 11 novels were set in New York City. He won the first Inner Sanctum Mystery Award for “The Eye of the Needle,” and his other books included “The Dark Window,” “The Action of the Tiger” and “Dangerous Passenger.” 

With the money he earned from Union Station, he bought a “little house” on eight aces on Casey Lane where he lived from 1949 to 1965. He died in Enfield, Conn., in 1984 at the age of 76.

Robert Wohlforth: 

Writer and Publisher

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Margaret Smith Boyd Shane:

Writer among Writers

Margaret Woodward Smith Boyd Shane grew up in a world of writers, wrote under several names, and became a best-selling author.

Margaret Woodward Smith was born in 1895 in Indiana. Her mother, Grace Woodward Smith, was a former high school principal who wrote articles for the Delineator, a popular magazine for women. Her father, Duncan Smith, was a newspaper editor and publisher, later a humor columnist. 

She attended the University of Chicago and worked for newspapers in Chicago and St. Paul, Minn., before marrying Thomas A. Boyd, also a writer. By 1920, she was writing novels.

The Boyds were both friends of F. Scott Fitzgerald, who recognized talent in each of them. As he had with Thomas Boyd’s successful novel, “Through the Wheat,” Fitzgerald brought Margaret’s novel, “The Love Legend,” to his famous editor, Maxwell Perkins, who published it in 1922. “The Love Legend,” published under the pen name Woodward Boyd, became a bestseller and was praised by The New York Times as “a lively, colorful tale.”
A year later she produced “Lazy Laughter” and then “The Unpaid Piper” (1927). 

The couple came to Ridgefield in 1925 and bought a house on North Salem Road, which she retained after their divorce in 1929. She married another writer, Ted Shane, and as Peggy Shane she produced more novels including “Tangled Wives” (1932) and “Change Partners” (1934). 

The Shanes made their home in Ridgefield except during a stint in Hollywood, writing for movies. 

In 1941, she and Arthur Sheckman wrote “Mr. Big,” a Broadway show directed by George F. Kaufman and starring Hume Cronyn and Fay Wray; it ran for only seven performances. (However it wasn’t a total loss; when a Hollywood studio later appropriated their title for the film of a different story, the playwrights successfully sued and collected damages.) 

Peggy Shane lived most of her last 10 years in England and France, but fell ill and came back to Ridgefield where she died in 1965 at the age of 69.
Her father was Duncan MacMillan Smith, also profiled in Who Was Who in Ridgefield. A Chicago journalist, he spent his last 25 years here and wrote the popular Ridgefield Press column, “A Birdseye View,” for many years. Her daughter, Elizabeth Boyd Nash, was an editor and co-owner of The Press for nearly 40 years. Her grandson, Thomas Boyd Nash, became the newspaper’s publisher. 

Mary Luke: 

Biographer of Ancient Royalty

A long-ago world of Tudor and Elizabethan royalty fascinated Mary Luke, a meticulous and critically acclaimed novelist and biographer whose specialty was the wives and children of Henry VIII. 

“History books give you the facts and we all know that Henry VIII had three legitimate children,” Luke told an interviewer in 1970. “What history books don’t tell is their relationship to each other and to those around them.” 

From her first book, “Catherine the Queen,” through her last published work, “The Nine Days Queen: A Portrait of Lady Jane Grey,” she set about chronicling the often complex relationships of royal characters of the 16th and 17th Centuries.

Born Mary Munger in 1925 in Pittsfield, Mass., Luke graduated from business school and worked in advertising,   for a documentary film company and for RKO Studios in Hollywood before finding herself as a writer. 

Between 1967 and 1986, she wrote seven books on Elizabethan and Tudor royalty, all well received by The New York Times and other reviewers. 

Luke researched her subjects thoroughly, visiting the places where the characters lived, reading their letters and journals, and viewing sites where dramatic episodes in her books took place. 

A Ridgefielder for nearly 40 years,  Luke lived on Hawthorne Hill Road and was active in the community. She was president of the Ridgefield Library and a longtime board member. She also worked for the District Nursing Association (now Visiting Nurse Association), and the Thrift Shop, and was active in the conservation efforts of both the Ridgefield and Caudatowa Garden Clubs.

A prolific letter-writer, she often penned comments on Ridgefield affairs in the letters column of The Ridgefield Press. She supported some officials and criticized others, backed some proposals and opposed others, all with an eye toward improving the cultural or environmental quality of the town.

“I have lived here long enough,” she wrote in 1971 after being in town 21 years, “to remember many of the things which, in such a relatively short period of time, have disappeared. When, for instance, we had no shopping centers and less wall-to-wall black asphalt. Instead there were historic homes in those areas — homes which might have been restored  and remained useful. When I could have tea at ‘Graeloe’ [the estate that is now Ballard Park] and dinner at the old Outpost Inn [now Fox Hill condominiums] and not be concerned about the disappearance of the majestic old trees along Cornen Avenue, now the Danbury Road, our ‘Gasoline Alley.’ It seems that familiar areas or landmarks are now being swallowed up so quickly, no one has a chance to protest — until it is too late.”

She died in 1993 at the age of 74.