Nancy-Carroll Draper:
She Created A Museum

Nancy-Carroll Draper stood out, not just in her hardy, six-foot stance but especially in her wide-ranging accomplishments. 

An heiress and a granddaughter of a Massachusetts governor,  Draper was an author, legislator, dog breeder and judge, a wildlife advocate, conservationist, cattle rancher, photographer, and philanthropist who founded the acclaimed Draper Museum of Natural History near Yellowstone National Park. 

Although she was a member of a prominent Boston family and lived in Ridgefield from 1947 until 1988, she  had maintained  a cattle ranch for many years outside Cody, Wyo., a region that turned out to be her first love. 

Nancy-Carroll Draper was born in Boston, Mass., on Aug. 28, 1922, daughter of Eben Sumner and Ruth Carroll Draper. Her father owned a textile mill and her grandfather, Eben Sumner Draper Sr., was governor of Massachusetts from 1909 to 1911. She attended private schools in New York City and Virginia, and studied at Goucher College in Baltimore.

At the outbreak of World War II, Draper was one of six people appointed by the admiral of the Sixth Naval District to serve in the Headquarters Motor Corps and soon became the youngest supervisor on the East Coast during the war.

In 1947,  Draper bought what had been the country home of Westbrook Pegler, the Pulitzer Prize-winning conservative columnist, and soon became active in local Republican politics, including serving for many years on the Republican Town Committee.

In 1952, she ran for state representative at a GOP caucus in which six people — four of them women — sought the job of representing Ridgefield in Hartford. Interest in the contest was so intense that among those who showed up to vote was former congresswoman and future ambassador Clare Boothe Luce of Great Hill Road. Draper won the party’s endorsement and the November election.

She served four terms as a state representative, losing her bid for a fifth term in 1960 to native son Romeo G. Petroni. 

A breeder of Great Danes since 1945, she had maintained a kennel, Danelagh, at her home on Old Stagecoach Road for many years. Dog News magazine in 1964 named her one of the top 10 Great Dane breeders in the nation. She was a recognized national and international judge of the breed — awards today in Scotland still bear her name — and she served as the president of the Great Dane Club of America. She also wrote the book, The Great Dane – Dogdom’s Apollo, in 1981.

          She traveled extensively in Europe, Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan, and in 1984 published a book of her  photographs of African wildlife, titled On Safari – Dogs Are the Excuse.

          Her love of the West and the Rockies began as a child when her family would visit the well-known Valley Ranch southwest of Cody. Around 1960 she purchased land  along the South Fork of the Shoshone River and created her Slide Mountain Ranch — her 1,900 square foot ranch house was much more modest than her 5,800-square-foot Ridgefield home. She’d spend part of the year in Ridgefield and part in Wyoming, where she raised and bred Highland and Charolais cattle.

          Draper began contributing to  Cody’s Buffalo Bill Historical Center in the 1980s. She was appointed to the advisory board of the center’s Whitney Gallery of Western Art in 1985. After she moved full-time to Wyoming in 1988, she began promoting the creation of a natural history museum at the historical center.  She gave some $13 million to what has been named the Draper Museum of Natural History.

“The Draper” – how Cody people refer to the  facility – was completed in 2002, the first museum of natural history to open in the 21st Century.

 

“The 55,000-square-foot museum looks a bit like the Guggenheim in Manhattan, only with more glass and more light,” said an account of the opening. “A great spiral of levels descends through the building as though the visitor were hiking home from alpine tundra to Douglas fir and lodgepole pine forests, to plains and meadows, all edging a 10,000-square-foot rotunda.  At each level a different ecosystem — its smells, sounds, textures and wildlife — is represented.” 

At the “trail’s” end, there’s a tiled map of Wyoming and Yellowstone, with a great lighted ‘sky’ above that serves as a planetarium.

Before Covid, more than 170,000 people were visiting the museum each year.

Draper said she wanted a natural history museum “to commemorate and interpret the Yellowstone area. I call it the missing link.”

In 1994, she established the Nancy-Carroll Draper Charitable Foundation which today is worth more than $16 million and distributes some $1 million in annual grants to not only the museum, but also natural history and wildlife organizations, including  African Wildlife Foundation and the Nature Conservancy.

Nancy-Carroll Draper died in 2008 at the age of 85. Her gravestone in a Cody cemetery is a simple boulder, bearing her name and the dates of her birth and death.

“It was one of my great privileges in life to know Nancy-Carroll when she first came to Wyoming,” said Alan K. Simpson, a former U.S. senator from Wyoming and the historical center’s chairman of the Board of Trustees — and a neighbor of Draper.

“Nancy-Carroll was big in stature, big in heart, big in generosity, and big in the lives of those of us who love the Buffalo Bill Historical Center,” Senator Simpson added. “I'll never forget the sight of her in that big yellow backhoe at the ground-breaking for the Draper Museum of Natural History. She hoisted herself into the cab, started digging, and has been digging for us ever since.”

Robert Vaughn:  

More Than A Solo

Not many Hollywood stars could be properly addressed as “Dr.” But Robert Vaughn, the actor and one-time political activist, was also a scholar whose Ph.D. thesis was so good, it became a book.

When “Only Victims: A Study of Show Business Blacklisting,”  was published in 1972, Kirkus Reviews called it “the most complete and intelligent treatment of the virulent practice of blacklisting now available.”

Nearly a half century later, it is still in print and regularly assigned to law students. 

To most people, of course,  Robert Vaughn was Napoleon Solo of the TV series, “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.,” or the cowardly fop in “The Magnificent Seven” or the heavy drinking friend in “The Young Philadelphians.” Over his long career, he was in more than 100 movies, starred in several TV series, appeared as a guest star hundreds of times in countless television programs, and performed on the stage.

Born in New York in 1932, Robert Francis Vaughn was the son of a radio-actor father and a stage-actress mother. He majored in journalism at the University of Minnesota where, in 1951, he won an acting contest, and decided to move to Los Angeles to pursue that career.

He made his TV debut in 1955 in the series, “Medic,” and his first starring role on the big screen was in Roger Corman’s “Teenage Caveman” in 1958. But it was his Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor for “The Young Philadephians” that really launched his career.

However, acting wasn’t his only interest, and he became active in the Democratic Party in California, eventually heading the Democratic State Central Committee’s speakers bureau.

Vaughn campaigned for John F. Kennedy (who was assassinated on Vaughn’s 31st birthday). He later became a friend of Robert Kennedy and his family, and seriously considered running for office himself until Bobby Kennedy was also killed.

“I lost heart for the battle,” he said later.

He did not lose interest in activism, however. A former Army infantry drill sergeant, Vaughn was the first major member of the film industry to speak out against the Vietnam War. He endured considerable criticism for his opinions, especially early on, but before he was finished, he had delivered more than 1,000 anti-war speeches. 

He never really lost an interest in politics, either. Though already famous as an actor (he was Photoplay’s Actor of the Year in 1965), he assumed the role of journalist in covering the 1972 Democratic National Convention for radio KABC in Los Angeles. In the 1990s, Vaughn was doing stints in New York City as a radio talk show host where he showed a keen ability at debating politics.

Perhaps not coincidentally, Vaughn won an Emmy in 1977 for his portrayal of a shifty H.R. Haldeman-type character in “Washington: Behind Closed Doors,” a fictionalized mini-series about the Nixon administration.

He and his wife, Linda, a former actress who has been an activist against child abuse, moved to the historic Sunset Hall mansion on Old West Mountain Road in 1982. In the mid-1990s, they sold the place and moved to a new home on Salem View Drive in Ridgebury where he worked on his autobiography, “A Fortunate Life,”  published in 2008, while continuing to appear on TV and in films. 

Vaughn would often be seen around town, doing his own shopping at Ridgefield Hardware or Stop & Shop, having a bite to eat at Nina’s, or attending his son’s Little League games. He drove several classic cars, including a silver Rolls Royce and a red Lincoln Continental.

He made his last film appearance in “Gold Star,” about a daughter’s leaving her life in the city to care for her dying father, portrayed by Vaughn. He delivered a mostly silent performance — he himself was dying of leukemia. Said a Hollywood Reporter reviewer: “It’s Vaughn, still looking dashing despite his obvious frailty, who gives the film its emotional core. In the deeply moving final scene, in which Carmine and Vicki sit quietly together on a beach, his plaintive eyes speak far more powerfully than any amount of dialogue.”

“Gold Star” was released Nov. 10, 2017, just one year after Vaughn had died at the age of 83.

Vaughn’s friendship with Bobby Kennedy led to a strange case of coincidence. On June 6, 1968, the day Robert Kennedy died, Vaughn appeared on the Dick Cavett Show to talk about Kennedy. Vaughn was clearly shaken as he discussed his friend with the popular TV interviewer.

Fourteen years later, Vaughn bought Sunset Hall.

Fifty years later, Cavett bought the same house.

Probably neither man had even heard of Ridgefield, much less Sunset Hall, when the 1968 interview took place.

John Winant: 

A Man of Merit

To Ridgefielders early in the 20th Century, he was Gil Winant, the catcher on a team of teenagers from the Ridgefield Club. To the King of England three decades later, he was Ambassador Winant, the man who splendidly represented the United States during Britain’s darkest hour. 

John Gilbert Winant was born in 1889 in New York City, a son of a wealthy real estate executive. Starting around 1907 when he was in his teens, he would spend his summers in Ridgefield with his family, who occupied what became the Peaceable Street estate of B. Ogden Chisolm. Later the family acquired a farm in nearby South Salem. 

The Winants were undoubtedly drawn to Ridgefield because John’s mother, Jeannette

Gilbert Winant, came from an old Ridgefield family. Jeannette’s parents were John A. and Jeannette Wilkie Gilbert, who have a huge monument in Ridgefield Cemetery. While the monument lists John and Jeannette and their children, including daughter Jeannette, it is most likely a memorial; none of the family named on the obelisk is actually buried in the plot. 

Winant and his three brothers belonged to the Ridgefield Club whose headquarters later became the Congregational Church House that burned in 1978. “The club had a fine ball team  for several summers and the Winants made up about one-third of it,” The Ridgefield Press reported in 1941. Among the other players was a young Francis D. Martin, who became a longtime Ridgefield businessman;  Gil Winant caught Marty’s pitches.

Throughout most of his life, John Gilbert Winant would visit relatives and friends in Ridgefield.

Winant attended St. Paul’s School in Concord, N.H., which apparently introduced him to the

state that was to become his home. After studying at Princeton, where one of his history professors was Woodrow Wilson, he left to take a position at St. Paul’s, teaching history. In 1916, he got his first taste of politics when he was elected to the New Hampshire House of Representatives.

However, a year later, with war looming, Winant joined the U.S. Army Air Service and was trained as a pilot. He wound up a captain, commanding the 8th Aero Observation Squadron in France.

After the war he returned to St. Paul’s and to politics; he was elected to the New Hampshire Senate in 1920. Five years later he was won a two-year term as governor of New Hampshire, the youngest person ever elected the state’s governor and the first to serve three terms. He was elected again in 1931 and 1933 at the beginning of the Depression, and though a Republican, “was quick to support President Roosevelt when the latter established the National Recovery Administration,” The New York Times reported. “This he did in the face of expressed disapproval of many rock-ribbed Republicans.”

While governor, The Times said, “Winant introduced many social and labor innovations that later were to become Federal laws. These included a minimum wage law, a state relief bill, aid to dependent children, and creation of the second state planning board in the country.” 

Under Winant, New Hampshire was the first state in the nation to fill its enrollment quota in the Civilian Conservation Corps. 

He also  limited the number of hours that women and children could work, and fought for transparency in government.  “Dismayed by the closed-door executive council meetings, he snuck a local reporter into the meeting, and the journalist wrote a front-page story on the council’s deliberations,” wrote Elizabeth Kendall in a profile of Winant.  “The meetings became open to the public as they remain today.”

New Hampshire historian Richard Hesse said Winant “was an excellent leader. He was very thoughtful and he could sit down and talk to a number of people who didn’t agree, and somehow bring them together.” 

Winant himself said, “Concentrate on the things that unite humanity rather than on the things that divide it.” 

His progressive thinking did not go unnoticed by President Roosevelt who in 1935 appointed Winant the first head of the new Social Security Board. Two years later he became U.S. representative to International Labor Office in Geneva, Switzerland, where he was elected director-general in 1939.

In 1941, as England was at war with Germany, Roosevelt picked Winant as U.S. ambassador to Britain, replacing Joseph P. Kennedy (father of John F. Kennedy). Kennedy had favored

appeasement of Germany while Winant made no secret that he and his government considered Germany the enemy. 

The Times in 1941 offered this analysis of the appointment. “The President, convinced that the war was causing fundamental social changes in England, desired as his representative in London a man of liberal mold intimately acquainted with the British labor leaders. Mr. Winant established such friendly relations as American representative to the International Labor Office and as its director since 1939...For this reason, as well as personal attributes — to his friends Mr. Winant seems to bear a moral and physical resemblance to Abraham Lincoln — the appointment is said to have been urged upon the President by Justice Frankfurter of the Supreme Court and others.”

Winant quickly won the hearts of the British people. When he arrived in England — which

was being bombed daily by the Germans — he declared at the airport: “I am very glad to be here. There is no place I’d rather be at this time than in England.” That statement was quoted on the front page of virtually every newspaper in that war-torn country.

“Winant lived modestly in London despite his station and traveled widely despite the Blitz,” said the Nashua (N.H.) Telegraph in a 2010 article.  “He became a familiar figure at bombed buildings, helping where he could. He preferred conversing with janitors and waiters to rubbing elbows with the high-born.”

Nonetheless, he wound up becoming close to King George VI and especially to Prime Minister Winston Churchill — he was with Churchill when both men learned that Pearl Harbor had been attacked; the two were excited because they knew it meant the United States would enter the war.

Winant spent many weekends at the prime minister’s country estate, Chequers Court, where he met and soon fell in love with Churchill’s daughter, Sarah, an actress 25 years his junior. According to an article published by the New England Historical Society, “They spent as much time

as they could together. They danced after dinner at wartime conferences in Cairo and Teheran, and saw each other in London, where her apartment was a five-minute walk from the U.S. embassy in Grosvenor Square. They were terrified of scandal and tried to keep the affair quiet.”

Sarah Churchill was separated from her comedian husband and Winant was married to Constance Rivington Russell, a former New York socialite, who was back in New Hampshire. Their marriage had been troubled from early on. “She loved Paris and parties, he loved Concord and social reform,” the historical society said.

After the war, Winant resigned as ambassador, took an apartment in London and told Sarah he would seek a divorce so they could be married. Sarah declined the offer. Winant was heart-broken.

For a while Winant served as U.S. representative to UNESCO. However, biographers have reported that he had hoped to be appointed the first secretary-general of the newly formed United Nations, and was disappointed when Trygve Lie of Norway got the post.

In early 1947, he left public life and retired to his home on Pleasant Street in Concord.  In her 2010 book, “Citizens of London: The Americans Who Stood with Britain in Its Darkest, Finest Hour,” Lynne Olson said Winant “was an exhausted, sick man.” He was estranged from his wife, depressed over the outcome of his affair with Sarah Churchill, saddened at not getting the UN post, and financially broke. 

On Nov. 3, 1947 — the day his autobiography, “Letter from Grosvenor Square,” was published — Winant went into a bedroom in his Concord home and shot himself in the head. He was 58 years old. Sarah Churchill, who had talked to Winant on the phone only a few days earlier, blamed herself for his death.

Winant wanted to be buried on the grounds of St. Paul’s School, but because he was a suicide, the Episcopal institution would not allow it and he was buried in a Concord cemetery. Twenty years later the school had change of heart, and Winant’s casket was moved to St. Paul’s.

Winant’s service and support of England was so appreciated by the English that, a year after his death, he was made an honorary member of the British Order of Merit. He was only the second — and the last — American to be so honored; the other OM was Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Throughout his life, John Winant was famous for his generosity. When he left for the war in 1917, he asked a friend to take care of his affairs. The friend was amazed to find a huge monthly bill for milk — Winant had been providing daily deliveries to needy families in the area. On his way to

the station to go to New York one day, he ran into a former maid at St. Paul’s who was financially destitute. He gave her all his cash and wound up having to borrow money at the station to buy his ticket. He often gave money to poor people outside the Statehouse and would tell the Concord police to buy breakfast for homeless people and send him the bill.

In 2007, 60 years after his death, a statue of John Gilbert Winant was erected in front of the State House in Concord. 

“Imagine if you can that he is here with us, right now, uncomfortably listening to us recount his good deeds,” said Mike Hirschfeld, rector of St. Paul’s School, during the dedication ceremony. “In my mind’s eye, I can see him shuffling uneasily, and awkwardly looking down at his feet, embarrassed by our praise.”

Norman Thomas: 

Six-Time Candidate for President

A conservative, Republican town like Ridgefield hardly seemed the place where one of the 20th Century’s leading liberals would live. But Norman Thomas, six-time candidate for president of the United States on the Socialist ticket, had not one, but two summer homes here. 

Thomas was born in 1884 in Ohio where as a boy he delivered newspapers for Warren G. Harding’s Marion Daily Star. Like his father and grandfather, he was a Princeton graduate (magna cum laude) who became a Presbyterian minister. 

One of his first posts was in East Harlem, where he devoted himself to helping struggling immigrants, especially Italian-Americans. 

“The neighborhood’s tenements were densely packed and could be tense,” wrote Louisa Thomas in “Conscience,” a biography of her grandfather. “Kids carried brass knuckles and the occasional pipe.” The latter was for beating, not smoking.

He and his wife, Violet, loved their work, but there were many differences between the poor immigrant residents of his parish and the Presbyterian minister and his wealthy wife, Louisa Thomas said. “One of them was that when the summer heat rose and released the street’s smells, when the Catholic church a block away held its annual festa and the carousing lasted all night, the Thomases could leave.” 

And where they often headed was Ridgefield. In 1911, Violet bought a place on Limestone Road, which they called “Old Farm” and used weekends and summers. 

“Norman would take the train out whenever his parish responsibilities and the countless organizations to which he belonged would allow,” Louisa said.  “There was a large garden and woods, and a lake nearby where Norman and the kids would canoe. They thought it was a refuge.” 

By 1914, the Thomases moved to a house on West Mountain Road, but continued to own the Limestone farm until 1923, by which time they were no longer summering here. 

Thomas was a pacifist, and opposed America’s entry into the first world war. After the United

States did declare war, he became active in civil liberties work, focusing on helping conscientious objectors. Along with Clarence Darrow, he was one of the founders in 1917 of the National Civil Liberties Bureau, which became the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

He also grew increasingly critical of the capitalist social order and joined the Socialist Party.  In a letter he included with his application, he said that he did not agree with all the Socialist Party’s platform and he feared any state that tried to master the minds and hearts of men, but that it was time for those who despaired of injustice to “stand up and be counted,” Louisa Thomas said.

He left the Presbyterian ministry to spend his life promoting the welfare of the poor and Socialist ideals. He ran for president in every election from 1928 to 1948, winning his greatest vote — 885,000 or 2.2% of the total — in 1932, the year Franklin Roosevelt was first elected. Some of his ideals were adopted by Roosevelt’s administration. 

He initially opposed getting involved in World War II but supported participation after Pearl Harbor, though he believed that the conflict could have been avoided honorably. However, he opposed the internment of Japanese Americans and called the ACLU’s support of internment “dereliction of duty.”

He remained an activist all his life. He promoted birth control, opposed the Vietnam War, supported many labor causes, and backed the Civil Rights movement — Dr. Martin Luther King telegrammed him congratulations on his 80th birthday in 1964. Conservative leader William F. Buckley chose Thomas to be the first guest on his new television interview show, Firing Line, in 1966. 

“Thomas had superb oratorical skills and passionate convictions,” The Ridgefield Press said in 1982. “They combined with a limitless energy to make him a strong spokesman for Socialist principles throughout his long life. During his few years in Ridgefield he soaked up his East Harlem experiences and distilled it into a coherent mission that he led until his death in 1968.”

One of Norman Thomas’s sons was Evan Welling Thomas 2d (1920-1999), who, as an editor  for HarperCollins and W. W. Norton & Company, published such best sellers as John F. Kennedy's “Profiles in Courage,”’ “Death of a President'' by William Manchester, and “The First Circle” by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn. In 1967, Evan Thomas acquired the memoirs of Josef Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, who’d defected to the United States. Her payment, which generated a huge amount of publicity, was more than $1 million, then a record amount for a book. 

Evan 2nd’s son, Evan Welling Thomas III, was a Newsweek editor and columnist, and author of nine books, including two New York Times bestsellers.

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.

Walter Gengarelly: 

His Own Drummer

Four Ridgefielders have been their party’s candidates for governor of Connecticut.

The Lounsbury brothers, Phineas and George, were both Republicans and both successful at winning the office.

Melbert B. Cary was a Democrat, but he lost.

And Walter Gengarelly was a Libertarian and, perhaps needless to say, he also lost. 

But few people have been as dedicated to a party and its ideals as was Gengarelly, who  died literally while running for office and whose name is recalled today in an award offered by the Connecticut Libertarian Party.

Walter Janvier Gengarelly Jr. was born in 1935 in New York City, but grew up on a poultry farm in Hillsdale, N.J. He  served three years in the U.S. Army as an artillery radar technician.

Gengarelly began his career in aviation when he took a job at the Ramapo Valley Airport in Spring Valley, N.Y.  to earn money to help pay for his own flying lessons. He worked his way up from a mechanic’s helper to a commercially rated charter pilot, flight instructor, and finally manager and vice president of the airport itself.

In 1967, while living in Vermont, he was involved with stage and screen choreographer Michael Kidd in establishing the Red Fox Airport, a small air strip near Bondville, which he subsequently managed. He owned a Cherokee 235 and used it in business and pleasure for many years.

Gengarelly became an advertising and promotions executive for publications in the aviation field. He and his family moved to Ridgefield in 1974, after he joined Air International News, a magazine based in Danbury. 

In Ridgefield he became active in the Ridgefield Taxpayers League, the Mill Rate Watchers,

and the Republican Party. As a Republican, he ran unsuccessfully for first selectman in 1979 against popular incumbent Louis J. Fossi.

Three years later, after dropping out of the GOP, Gengarelly ran for governor on the Libertarian ticket. He knew he would not win the election, but putting himself up as a candidate allowed him and his party to spread the Libertarian message. 

“The simplest explanation is that we are fiscal conservatives and social liberals,” Gengarelly told The Ridgefield Press. “The point, really, is that people should have a right to make choices about their lives themselves, and not have the government make it for them. How you would educate your children, what kind of medicine you would use if you’re sick, what kind of doctor to get to if you’re sick, what work you do, what you get paid for working.”

Gerard Brennan, state chairman of the Libertarian Party at the time, said Gengarelly was chosen based on his political experience and his ability to articulate the party’s philosophy. Because the Libertarian platform was not well known, it was that articulation, rather than winning the election,

that was most important, Brennan said.

“We don’t have any delusions about winning right away, but it’s important to disseminate our ideas,” added state secretary Richard Loomis.   

In the end, Gengarelly got only about 8,000 votes — winner William A. O’Neill, a Democrat, received 569,000 votes and Republican Lewis B. Rome, 496,000. 

Gengarelly did not give up with his efforts to promote Libertarian positions. He ran for state representative from Ridgefield in 1983 and  for congressman in the 5th Connecticut District in 2002, 2008 and 2010.

Gengarelly was locally known not just for his political activities but also for his rather troubled gas station. In 1978, he bought what had once been called the Hilltop Service Station on Route 33, Wilton Road West, near the Wilton line. In the late 1960s, Shell had acquired the old family-run operation, tore down the low-key but comely Hilltop building that had included a convenience store, and built a modern, glassy station with three service bays — and no store. 

Shell sought a permit to do auto repairs at the station, something Hilltop had never done. The Zoning Board of Appeals refused to allow repairs, saying it would be an illegal expansion of a non-conforming use, and courts upheld the board. Shell was stuck with a three-bay station that could sell only gasoline, oil, and tires, not a moneymaking proposition back then, and the operation eventually shut down.

When Gengarelly took over, he gave up his job working for the aviation magazine, which required a lot of travel, and began working full-time at the gas station. Long hours, many problems and lots of stress resulted. Six months after he bought the station, the nation was hit by the big fuel crisis that resulted from the Iranian revolution. Many stations — especially Gengarelly’s new operation — could not get needed supplies of gas. Long lines formed at stations, and rationing was common.   

All this stress helped lead to the breakup of his marriage. It was a sad irony, Gengarelly said,

 because he had given up his magazine work so he wouldn’t have to travel. “I wanted to be home with my family, that’s why I switched careers,” he told The Press in 1990. “But it wasn’t a good career move.”

The station could not bring in enough money to pay the bills and eventually failed, but Gengarelly, as a Libertarian believer in free enterprise, did not blame the failure on the system. “That’s one of the perils of the free enterprise system,” he said. “Sometimes you go into business and you make money. Sometimes you go into business and you lose money. It just didn’t work out for me — or us, I should say,” referring to his family.

Things got so tough that, for a while, Gengarelly was living in the gas station. Despite all his problems, however, he always seemed optimistic and invariably wore a big smile.

The property was eventually sold, owners got permission for it to become a convenience store, but the station has nonetheless remained closed for years — a sad eyesore on a scenic highway with no other commercial properties for miles.

Gengarelly eventually moved to Newtown and later Danbury. He died of heart problems in 2010 at the age of 75 while in the midst of yet another campaign for Congress. In his honor, the Connecticut Libertarian Party State Central Committee issues the Walter Gengarelly Jr. Award at its annual convention to a person who has exhibited a “sustained and selfless effort to support the cause of liberty” at “extreme sacrifice to him or herself.”

“He was a kind, gentle and generous person who — to those of us who knew him well — very much marched to the beat of his own drummer,” said Wilson Leach, managing director of Air International News. Citing Gengarelly’s Libertarian campaigns for governor and congress, he added, “To the average person this may have appeared to be an unrealistic pursuit, but clearly Walt was a staunch believer in individual liberties.”

Simon Greco: 

Outspoken Artist

Artists in Ridgefield have tended to focus on their art and avoid the political limelight. Not so with Simon Greco, who spoke at many meetings, penned many letters to the editors and challenged laws, budgets, schools and other matters.

However, though even The New York Times covered his feisty ways, Greco was much better known nationally for his art, not his complaints.

“Simon Greco was an extraordinary artist,” said art historian Terence E. Hanley. “His work is mesmerizing.” 

A native of Italy, Simon Greco was born in 1917 to an Italian-American father and an Italian mother.  The family came to the United States in 1921 and settled in St. Louis where his father

worked for a gas company. Greco said that St. Louis abounded in cultural opportunities and that his early art education was acquired at the St. Louis public library. His formal education consisted of two years of high school and two years of vocational training.

“Almost entirely self-educated, Greco is widely informed in such diverse arenas as philosophy, religious history, literature, and music,” said a 1952 profile of him in the Bridgeport Sunday Post.

 By the 1940s, Greco had moved to New York to do commercial art as well as his own work. He was best known for his “magic realism” paintings, a style that was popular in the mid-20th Century, and was considered an expert at it. He became well known for two series he illustrated for Life magazine, The World We Live In in 1953 and The Epic of Man in 1956. He also painted many covers for magazines during the 1950s and 60s.

Greco’s moving to Hayes Lane in 1949 helped inspire a second direction in his art.    “Since moving to Ridgefield, my thoughts have turned more and more to the manifestations of nature with which we are surrounded, and with the problem of extending the range of ideas and thoughts which

could be adequately handled by non-objective art,” he told The Post.

 He began painting non-objective works — what some consider abstract expressionism — while continuing to produced the “magic realism” pieces. And it was the latter that were more popular. His works are in the  Smithsonian Institution, the American Museum of Natural History, the U.S. Naval Academy, and other collections. 

In Ridgefield, he became involved in the community, and was a frequent voice at town meetings and in letters to the newspaper. A Democrat, he tried in 1963 to vote in a Republican primary here in an attempt to challenge what he considered a flaw in a state law. He was unsuccessful, but his effort was covered by The Times.

He was a voice of conservatism when it came to schools, going so far as to maintain that libraries in elementary schools were wasteful. He felt that the proposed Ridgebury School should not be a spread-out affair, but an efficient, two-story, box-like building with many fewer toilets than planned. “I think it is absurd to have 12 rooms with separate toilets — if the children are so retarded beyond kindergarten that they require such toilets, then they should be in special schools,” he wrote in 1960.  “We should not waste tax money on extravagant buildings. We should spend it instead where it will do the most good, that is, in securing the best teachers, books and educational materials available.”

Perhaps Greco felt a closeness to teachers and books. He himself taught at at various institutions in Fairfield County and, in 1968, he wrote the book, “The Art of Perspective Drawing,” for the well-known Grumbacher series.

Nonetheless, Greco criticized the way art and the arts in general were taught.  Speaking at a gathering with the Connecticut Commission on the Arts in 1964, Greco was quoted as saying, “With

everyone taking up art in schools, colleges and adult classes, art is constantly being thrown at the public and a general vulgarization of theater, books, music, and art has descended upon us,” he declared. “When you cater to the masses on a cultural level, you debase the arts. Instead of education and elevation, our society is getting entertainment. Art is not entertaining.”

In 1964, Greco moved to North Salem Road and a few years later, relocated to Fairfield after joining the staff of the University of Bridgeport. He later lived in Westborough, Mass., where he died in 2005 at the age of 87.

Theodore Sorensen: 

The President’s Man

When President John F. Kennedy challenged the nation at his inauguration,  “Ask not what  your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country,” he was relying on the wordsmithing of a young man named Theodore Sorensen.

Sorensen was not only a speechwriter for the president, he was a trusted adviser and confidante.

Even Richard M. Nixon was in awe of his abilities. “You need a mind like Sorensen’s around you that’s clicking and clicking all the time,” Nixon once said. 

Sorensen, who lived in Ridgefield in the 1970s, headed  Kennedy’s staff for the eight years he was a U.S. senator, and then spent three years as the president’s special counsel on domestic affairs. 

Theodore Chaiken Sorensen was born in Nebraska in 1928.  His mother was a social worker, feminist and pacifist and his father, a Republican lawyer and Nebraska attorney general, had named his son after Theodore Roosevelt.

He graduated from the University of Nebraska with a law degree and in 1952 moved to Washington where he worked as a government lawyer. He was soon hired by Kennedy, a new Democratic senator from Massachusetts. The two shared many political ideals and values.

Kennedy often made use of Sorensen’s skill with the English language and, according to The New York Times, when Kennedy’s bestselling book, “Profiles in Courage,” was published in 1956, “it was no great secret that Mr. Sorensen’s intellect was an integral part of the book. Sorensen later admitted he drafted most of the chapters. “I’ve tried to keep it secret,” Sorensen told The Times.

During several years of traveling the country with Kennedy in preparation for his 1960 run for president, the two worked closely together on honing a message and voice. “He became a much better speaker,” he said. “I became much more equipped to write speeches for him. Day after day after day, he’s up there on the platform speaking, and I’m sitting in the audience listening, and I find out what works and what doesn’t, what fits his style.”

One of the Sorensen-written campaign speeches has been widely credited with helping turn the tide toward a Kennedy victory. The nation had never elected a Catholic president, and millions of voters were suspicious of his Catholicism. On Sept. 12, 1960, in an address to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, Kennedy said,  “I am not the Catholic candidate for president. I am the Democratic Party candidate for president who also happens to be a Catholic. I do not speak for my Church on public matters – and the Church does not speak for me.”

While Sorensen’s job in the White House was domestic policy, Kennedy often sought his help with international issues, including when the Cuban missile crisis confronted the new president in 1962 after the CIA discovered the Soviets building missile sites in Cuba. “When he became president and was faced with the Cuban crisis, the first nuclear confrontation in history, I was involved,” he told Linette Burton of The Ridgefield Press. “The president had his own foreign policy advisers including, of course, the secretary of state, in the White House, and he called in 12 men whose judgment he trusted” — Sorensen among them. “No one had had experience in a thing like this, but we hammered it out together.”

Sorensen wound up drafting a sensitive letter from Kennedy to Soviet premiere Nikita Khrushchev. “Time was short,” he later told The Times. “The hawks were rising. Kennedy could keep control of his own government, but one never knew whether the advocates of bombing and invasion might somehow gain the upper hand.

The letter called for a peaceful solution to the conflict. “I knew that any mistakes in my letter — anything that angered or soured Khrushchev — could result in the end of America, maybe the end of the world.”

Soon, however, negotiations and a U.S. quarantine on Soviet ships approaching Cuba led to Khrushchev's withdrawing the missiles.

Sorensen admitted worshipping Kennedy and when the president was killed, he was devastated. He dropped out of government service for a while, but returned in 1970, two years after Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated. He ran for Bobby Kennedy’s senate seat from New York. He later admitted it was a mistake. “I simply thought that if I were to carry on the Kennedy legacy, if I were to perpetuate the ideals of John Kennedy, as Robert Kennedy tried to do, that I would need to be in public office. Frankly, it was an act of hubris on my part.”

After his defeat he returned to his law practice. But when he moved to Bennett’s Farm Road in 1972, Sorensen told interviewer Burton, “I’m young enough to think I’ll be back in government.”

And he was right.

In 1976, President Jimmy Carter nominated Sorensen to be director of the Central Intelligence Agency. However, after a storm of protest connected with charges he had leaked classified information as a Kennedy adviser,  Sorensen withdrew. 

The next year, Carter named him to the Presidential Advisory Committee for Trade Negotiations and he was involved in the late 1970s negotiations that led to turning the Panama Canal over to Panama in 1999. 

He served President Clinton as a member of the President’s Commission on White House Fellowships and endowed a grant of his own: the Theodore C. Sorensen Research Fellowship at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston; it helps scholars of domestic policy, political journalism, polling, and similar subjects. 

Sorensen wrote several books, including “Kennedy,” “The Kennedy Legacy,” and “Watchmen in the Night: Presidential Accountability after Watergate.” 

He later lived in Bedford, N.Y., and practiced law in New York City.  When he died in 2010 at the age of 82. The Times called him “one of the last links to John F. Kennedy’s administration … who did much to shape the president’s narrative, image and legacy.” 

Debs Myers: 

Puckish Persuader

In his obituary, The New York Times called Debs Myers “a puckish former newspaperman who became an adviser to nationally prominent political figures.” It added that he was also “a chain smoker of cheap cigars, whose rumpled suits never seemed to fit his football-shaped body.”

Perhaps it’s no wonder Myers tried his hardest to stay out of the limelight. But he had another explanation.

“In government,” he said, “most of the so-called hidden persuaders would do better to remain hidden.”

As an adviser to New York City mayor Robert F. Wagner,  U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and presidential candidate Adlai E. Stevenson, he believed that, “in a political campaign, the most important thing is the ability to turn lemons into lemonade — to make a potentially damaging issue work for you, not against you.”

Born in 1911 in Kansas, Eugene Victor Debs Myers was named for the Socialist leader who ran for president five times and who was friend of his father. He maintained that he dropped out of school after junior high and at the age of 15, went to work in the sports department of The Wichita Eagle, later becoming its city editor and then Oklahoma bureau chief for United Press International.

During World War II, he served briefly in the regular Army — “I may have been the most inept soldier in the Army,” he said. “It was the about-face that did me in. I had lost a lot of weight and my pants kept falling off.” 

Instead of sending him to fight, the Army transferred him to the staff of “Yank,” the Army’s magazine, where he wrote many feature stories. He later edited a book, “Yank: The G.I. Story of the War.”

After his discharge he became managing editor of Newsweek and was soon working for Adlai Stevenson, writing many of his campaign speeches. After Stevenson’s second unsuccessful run for president, Myers quipped: “I will never again work for a candidate who is short and plays tennis.”

He was more successful with Bobby Kennedy, masterminding many aspects of the campaign that got him elected U.S. senator from New York. 

In the 1960s, he served as Robert Wagner’s executive secretary, heading what The Times called the mayor’s “personal brain trust.” He was credited with helping keep Wagner popular with the people of New York City.

After leaving the political world in the mid-1960s, Myers founded a public relations firm called Infoplan International, based in New York. 

He and his wife, Nellie, lived on Fulling Mill Lane from 1967 to 1969 when they moved to Bethel. He died there two years later of cancer; he was only 59.

In City Hall Park in Manhattan, within view of the window of the office where he worked under Wagner, a monument to Debs Myers stands next to a dogwood tree, also placed there in his honor. The monument bears one of Myers’ most often quoted observations: “Do the right thing, and nine times out of 10, it turns out to be the right thing politically.”

The monument, near the park’s famous fountain, is directly across Broadway from the Woolworth Building, the skyscraper designed by Cass Gilbert of Ridgefield. 

Ebenezer W. Keeler: 

A Remarkable Man

Beyond having a rather remarkable beard, Ebenezer W. Keeler was a rather remarkable 19th Century man —  an admired farmer, an avid reader, a town leader, and a builder who worked on major mansions and led construction of a landmark church.

A descendant of one of Ridgefield’s founding families, Ebenezer Wood Keeler was born in 1840 on the family farm along Branchville Road, land that had belonged to Keelers for four generations. 

He was educated at the Rev. Dr. David Short’s private school on Main Street where he became “a great reader,” according to a contemporary biography. His love of reading led him, along with other community leaders, to serve on an 1871 committee that put together the first public library in Ridgefield. His wife, Emma, was also active in the project, and helped care for the first collection of 2,500 books.

Like his ancestors, Keeler was a farmer and he was quite good at it. “Ebenezer Keeler approached the operation of his farm with the same tenacity of his forebears and he could make that farm work where others just could not make it go,” said town historian Dick Venus. (Today’s Twin Ridge development is part of the old Keeler farm.)

But Eben Keeler pursued other vocations as well. He was a surveyor and did much  surveying work in the south part of town. Perhaps more noteworthy, he was involved in the construction of several mansions, at least one of which still stands today: The house of book publisher E.P. Dutton on High Ridge. He worked on Casagmo, the mansion that once stood at the northern end of Main Street. During his building heyday, he employed crews of 20 to 30 men.

A member of the First Congregational Church, Keeler put his knowledge of construction to work there, serving as chairman of the building committee that in 1888 erected the current stone church at the corner of Main Street and West Lane.

He was also a public official. In 1865, he was elected a state representative from Ridgefield;  at 24, he was the youngest member of the House. He then became the town’s chief executive. However, election wasn’t always easy. Venus tells it this way:

“Eben was elected first selectman of Ridgefield back in the days when it was necessary to elect

a board of selectmen each and every year. He won in 1877, in 1878 and again in 1879. After losing in 1880, he came back to win in 1882, in 1883, and in 1884. He lost again in 1885 but came right back and was returned to office in 1886 and 1887. Once again he lost in 1888 and by so doing, missed the ‘pleasure’ of serving the town during the great blizzard that year. However, Eben stormed back to win in 1889, and again in 1890, truly a remarkable man.”

Keeler died in 1900 at the age of 59. His wife, who died in 1934, was the daughter of Dr. Archibald Y. Paddock, a noted New York City dentist who committed suicide in 1889 after accidentally shooting her brother, Harry.

Harvey P. Bissell: 

The Man of the Store

Harvey P. Bissell, once a power in state and town government, would probably be surprised that his name is known today only as a pharmacy. But the druggist-turned-politician would no doubt be pleased that his business is not only still alive, but is the oldest continuously operated retail store in Ridgefield. 

“Mr. Bissell was an indefatigable worker for his party and was highly regarded all over the state,” The Press said at his death in 1930. 

Born in 1866 on a Morris farm, Harvey Platt Bissell was educated as a pharmacist and came to Ridgefield in 1895 to buy the Main Street store and pharmacy that had been established in 1853 by Hiram K. Scott. Some may think he picked the wrong time to buy the business for   four months later, it burned to the ground in the great Fire of 1895 that destroyed much of the village business district.

Undaunted, Bissell built a new building that was long known as “the Bissell Building” and housed his pharmacy and at least one other business — for many years, it was an auto dealership and repair garage, and later, Brunetti’s Market and then Gail’s Station House restaurant.

Alas, in 2005, just over a century after it was built, Bissell’s building burned to the ground, prompting the modern-day Bissell Pharmacy to move to its present location. (In rebuilding after the fire, the Bissell Building’s owner did an incredible job of reproducing the original structure, so much so it’s difficult to tell pictures of the original and new buildings apart.)

Harvey Bissell began his career in Connecticut politics in 1901 when he was elected a state representative from Ridgefield, and later state senator for three terms from 1914 to 1920. In the Legislature, he was involved in reforming the State Health Department and narcotics laws. He was elected state comptroller in 1921, serving two years and gaining a reputation for efficiency. 

He was “influential in bringing about the building of concrete roads leading into Ridgefield in order to make it of easy access year round,” The Press said. “This he believed would help attract many more of the most desirable people to our residential town.” 

He served on the Ridgefield school board, and was a member of the Republican Town Committee for 16 years. He was also a burgess of the Borough of Ridgefield, back when we had borough covering the village.

Two weeks before Warren G. Harding died in 1923, the president named Mr. Bissell collector of customs for Connecticut. Calvin Coolidge reappointed him in 1928, the same year he finally sold his drug store.

On the day of his funeral in 1930, the State Capitol closed in his honor. His handsome home on West Lane is now the West Lane Inn. 

At Harvey P. Bissell's funeral in 1923.

E. N. Bailey: 

Frontiersman First Selectman

E. N. Bailey was no ordinary first selectman. He “surprised some and frightened others by arriving frequently in the village with large copperhead snakes twined around his neck and shoulders,” The Ridgefield Press reported at his death in 1955. “He wasn’t afraid of them and gave the impression that he wasn’t afraid of anything else either.”

Eldridge Nettleton Bailey was born in Shelton in 1876. Usually called “E.N.” or “Bill,” he came to Ridgefield at the turn of the century to work for Henry B. Anderson who was then developing his vast estate on West Mountain, now the Eight Lakes Estates (Anderson is also profiled in Who Was Who).  Bailey was a construction engineer, and supervised the building of Anderson’s roads as well as the Anderson mansion on West Mountain. “He was a tall man, carried himself erect, walked with great strides, and wore the striking clothes of a frontiersman,” said Karl S. Nash, Press publisher, who knew the man.

Bailey became head of the Ridgefield Water Supply Company, largely owned by Anderson, as well as Anderson’s Ridgefield Electric Company. 

However, he was better known for his political career. Bailey was elected first selectman 11 times. The post was then part-time, and the term, one year, and he held the job most years from 1911 to 1926. But now always.

His political career began in 1910 when he was elected to the Board of Selectmen to serve with Benjamin F. Crouchley, a rare Democratic first selectman. The next year he defeated Crouchley for first selectman, but lost in 1912 to Charles B. Northrop. He returned to power in 1913, and was re-elected in 1914 and 1915. Orville W. Holmes then won the Republican nomination in contests with Bailey for three years in a row, but Bailey did not give up, finally winning the job back in 1919 and holding it until 1926 when Winthrop E. Rockwell was the victor “in a memorable party battle in the town hall,”  Nash recalled. Rockwell went on to hold the job for 20 years — Bailey tried once to return and failed.

He was “a force in Ridgefield affairs and remained a controversial figure throughout his public life,” Nash said in Bailey’s obituary. 

Bailey was a director of the Ridgefield Savings Bank, now Fairfield County Bank. He and his wife, Lois, sang in the First Congregational Church choir. He also tried his hand at amateur theater, which led to a bit of a scandal. In rehearsing for a play in the 1920s, he fell in love with his leading lady, Miss Nina Olmstead. He and Lois were soon divorced and Bailey married Miss Olmstead. The two moved to a farm in Bradford, Vt., but, according to Nash, “his marriage foundered and he returned to Ridgefield and spent his declining years at The Elms Inn.”

He died in 1955 at the age of 77.