The Allee Sisters

This charming portrait shows the Allee sisters, Jean Harriet (left) and Dorothy Diemar (right) with an unnamed nurse, probably around 1916. Jean is holding a monkey and Dorothy, what appears to be a clown  — they may have been favorite toys or just props provided by the photographer, Joseph Hartmann.

The sisters were the daughters of Dr. and Mrs. William Allee, who lived at 304 Main Street at the southern corner of Market Street. After the doctor’s death in 1927, Mrs. Allee married James Van Allen Shields and became Laura Curie Allee Shields. (She wrote a 300+-page autobiography, “Memories,” with many glimpses of early 20th Century Ridgefield.)

Dorothy (1909-96) married August J. Detzer Jr. (1898-1976), a Navy captain who served in World Wars I and II, as well as Korea, and owned radio stations WINE-AM and WGHF-FM in Brookfield. (WINE is still around at 940 kHz, but WGHF is now WRKI, long called “I-95 Radio.”) The Detzers lived in the family homestead at 304 Main Street for some years.

Jean (1908-90) married Graham Ford Dawson (1910-95), and moved to New Zealand, where she spent the rest of her life.

The Allee/Shields house still stands (and was just sold in November). Laura Shields lived there until her death in 1968 and so did her daughter Dorothy and son-in-law. After Capt. Detzer’s death, Dorothy Detzer moved to Bayberry Hill Road, where she lived for many years, and then spent her last years at Casagmo.

Olaf Olsen: 

A Man of the Movies 

Olaf Olsen had a long career both in front of and behind the camera. 

Born in 1919 in Heidelberg, Germany, Olsen moved to England when he was 15, and began acting professionally while still a teenager. He played mostly supporting roles in 29 British films including “The Man in the White Suit,” “Lilli Marlene,” and “We Dive at Dawn,” alongside such greats as Alec Guinness, Deborah Kerr, John Mills, and Leslie Howard. 

At 18, he portrayed a German POW in the BBC production of “Journey’s End,” the first full-length drama ever broadcast over live television. 

He was only 19 in 1938 when he played Queen Victoria's son-in-law with Dame Anna Neagle as the queen in “Sixty Glorious Years,” a film about the reign of Queen Victoria. In 1953, the year of the present queen's coronation, he portrayed Prince Albert with Miss Neagle in the musical version of the Victoria story, “The Glorious Days,” which was at London’s Palace Theatre for two years. 

Olsen also appeared in more than 1,000 BBC radio and TV broadcasts. In 1954, he went to Hollywood to sign a movie contract but Jack B. Ward offered him the vice-presidency of Ward Acres Studios of New Rochelle, N.Y., a newly formed enterprise that produced TV commercials and documentaries. In 1957 he and Ward moved to a Ridgefield estate that had once been the Ridgefield Golf Club, calling it Ward Acres, and breeding and raising award-winning thoroughbred racing horses. 

He continued to produce travel documentaries as the Olsen Film Productions Company, serving as cameraman, producer, director, cutter, editor, and synchronizer. Distributed by the J. Arthur Rank Group, most were world travelogues, but some also dealt with horses and wildlife. His favorite was “Lion Country Safari.” 

One of his interests was exotic waterfowl, and he kept a number of species of geese and ducks from around the world on a Ward Acres pond alongside Lewis Drive. He gave up the hobby, he said, after both wild predators and neighborhood children repeatedly attacked his birds.

Almost as soon as he arrived here,  Olsen became active in the Red Cross. He also formed a group that visited and entertained patients — including the criminally insane — at the old Fairfield Hills State Hospital in Newtown, Southbury Training School, and other institutions and hospitals in the region. He showed his films to many organizations and in many schools. 

Did he miss acting? he was asked in 1975. “No,” he replied. “When you've had your name in lights for two years in London, what else do you want?”

Nonetheless, in 1996, when he returned to London for a memorial to Dame Anna Neagle, many fans sought his autograph and Princess Anne invited him to a party. “What a delightful and fascinating man he is,” the Princess was quoted as saying after meeting and chatting with  the long-retired actor.

Olsen died in 2000 in Ridgefield at the age of 81.

Ralph Edwards: 

A Man of Consequences

Anyone who owned a radio in the 1940s or a television in the 1950s knew Ralph Edwards. He created and starred in shows with titles that became so familiar that even a town took one as its name. One of his shows — The People’s Court — is still running today, 78 years after his first success — Truth Or Consequences — went on the air.

 For all his fame, however, few people knew that Ralph Edwards and his wife, Barbara,  had a home in Ridgefield — a town he had earlier visited as part of his $500-million bond-selling efforts in World War II.

 Ralph Livingston Edwards was born in 1913 on a Colorado farm. When he was 13, his family moved to Oakland, Calif., where as a teenager he combined his ability as a writer with his love of radio to create skits for the local station, KROW.  While studying at the University of California at Berkeley, where he earned a degree in English, Edwards worked at Oakland’s KTAB, now KSFO, doing nearly every job from janitor to producer. After graduating in 1935, he   worked for a while at KFRC in San Francisco, but the mecca for radio in the 30s was New York  so in 1936 he hitchhiked across the country to Manhattan where, he said, “I ate ten-cent meals and slept on park benches.” He landed some part-time announcing work, but his big break came when CBS hired him as a full-time announcer (among his young cohorts was Mel Allen).

By 1939 he was doing 45 programs a week, including The Fred Allen Show, Major Bowes’s Amateur Hour, and the Lucky Strike Hit Parade — all among the most popular shows on radio at the time.

A year later Edwards sold NBC his idea for a game show, called Truth Or Consequences, in which contestants were asked a ridiculously hard or nonsensical question and if they failed to answer correctly — as most people invariably did — they had to undergo some sort of silly task or stunt in order to win the prize. “They had to do such things as bark, crawl on their bellies, push a walnut with the nose, bathe an elephant, get into a doghouse and, in one instance, sell an icebox to an Eskimo,” The New York Times reported.

The show began on NBC radio in 1940, with Mel Allen as host. A year later, a special edition of Truth Or Consequences was aired on the first day of commercial television in the United States. Back then TV was in its infancy — only 7,000 television sets were sold in 1941 (compared to 15 million 10 years later). The show continued on radio until 1957, but in 1950 also became a regular on television; for many years, an Edwards discovery, Bob Barker, hosted Truth Or Consequences. It lasted until 1988, one of the longest running game shows in TV history.

During World War II, Truth Or Consequences went on the road as part of an effort to sell war bonds. On Dec. 14, 1944, Edwards and his crew staged a show at the Ridgefield Playhouse on Prospect Street (now the site of the Prospector) during the Sixth War Loan Drive. With the show’s

help Ridgefield topped $1 million in bond sales in that drive, a record for the town (it was equivalent to about $14 million in 2018 dollars). In all during the war, Edward was credited with selling more than $500-million in war bonds — about $7 billion today! 

In 1948, Edwards started an equally popular radio show, This Is Your Life, in which guests,  both famous and unknown, were surprised and then profiled through reminiscences of family and friends. Considered a pioneer of today’s reality TV, This Is Your Life switched to television in 1952 and continued until 1984. Edwards himself hosted this show most of its run (Ronald Reagan filled in twice for him).

Edwards, who won two Emmies for This Is Your Life and one for Truth Or Consequences, also created a dozen other programs including such long-running shows as   Name That Tune and The People’s Court — the latter is still being broadcast. 

In 1958, Edwards and his wife, Barbara, bought a house on the corner of North Street and Stonecrest Road, and used it off and on until 1971 — probably mostly on visits from the West where they had a home in Hollywood. Barbara died in 1993 and Ralph in 2005 at the age of 92.

Truth Or Consequences was so popular that in 1950,  Edwards announced he would broadcast his 10th anniversary program from the first town in the United State to change its name to Truth Or Consequences. Hot Springs, N. Mex., did just that, and the community of about 6,000 people now also has a Ralph Edwards Park.  Edwards made a point of personally visiting the town at least once each year for the next 50 years.   

John B. Hughes: 

The News and Views

In the 1940s and 50s, the rich and cultured voice of John B. Hughes was as familiar to millions of Americans as the voices of Walter Cronkite, Charles Osgood, or Huntley and Brinkley would become to another generation.

Hughes was a newscaster and commentator whose long career spanned  the golden age of radio well into the early days of television.

A native of Cozad, Nebr., John Broughton Hughes was born in 1902. He began his news career in print journalism, working for the Portland Oregonian. He also enjoyed the theater and his work with an acting company led to going into radio.

He worked for the Warner Brothers’s Los Angeles radio station, KFWB, and during the late 1930s, had a daily NBC news commentary, called “Hughes Reel.” 

By 1940, he had joined the Mutual network where he was considered a specialist on the Orient — he predicted that the Japanese would attack the U.S. When Pearl Harbor occurred, he quickly became an important newscaster for the Mutual network on the West Coast.

Early in the war, Hughes supported the interning of Japanese-Americans who, he felt, would support their home country instead of the U.S. (The famous newsman, Edward R. Murrow, held a similar view.) Later in the war, however, Hughes did an about face, and in his commentaries became a leading voice supporting the rights of minorities and criticizing prejudice against Japanese-Americans. 

During the war, Hughes was a correspondent attached to General Douglas MacArthur’s headquarters, covering the advance from Australia to Japan. He made several amphibious landings and saw combat with guerilla forces and American troops. He was wounded twice, and twice refused the Purple Heart. 

He was sent home before the war ended, and was in the newsroom when the announcement of the Japanese surrender was made over KFWB — with actress Marlene Dietrich and basketball star and broadcaster Sam Balter assisting.

After the war, his “News and Views with John B. Hughes” was carried nationwide, first over

NBC, then CBS and later the Mutual radio network.  Many of his radio broadcasts can be heard today over the Internet.

The New York Times once observed that Hughes “has the polished diction of an ex-actor, which indeed he is.” Besides doing stage acting, he appeared in three films, “Meet John Doe” (1941), “Rhapsody in Blue” (1945) and “Gilbert and Sullivan” (1953) — he played himself in all three.

He was also the narrator of the World War II documentary, “The Battle of Britain,” produced by Frank Capra for the U.S. government.

He and his wife, Ariel, also founded a radio station, KXXX, in Colby, Kansas, which they ran for several years.

They came East around 1949, living first in Westport and then buying Ontaroga Farm, the former Starr estate, on the corner of Lounsbury and Farmingville Roads in 1950.

In the early 1950s, Hughes became one of the first TV anchormen, working for the Dumont network and WOR-TV with a nightly news programs. He also helped form the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists.

In 1958, he became the first anchorman and director of television news at WTAE in Pittsburgh, retiring in 1961, but working part-time as a radio and television news consultant for a while after that.

He died in 1982 in Pittsburgh, Pa., just two days before his 80th birthday. His survivors include a son, a grandson, and three grandchildren living in Ridgefield today.

Samuel Chotzinoff: 

Music over the Air

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chotzinoff died in 1964 at the age of 74.

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

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

Paul Baker: 

Multi-media Man of Words

Paul Baker was a remarkably versatile man of many media. He was best known as a radio broadcaster but was also a local TV personality as well as the voice of the Danbury Racearena, the stock-car track at the old Danbury Fairgrounds (now the mall).

His deep, rich voice was readily recognized, whether it was coming out of a radio, a TV set, or a public address system.

Born Paul V. Baldaserini in 1920 in Ridgefield, he grew up in town and graduated from Ridgefield High School in 1937 at the age of 16.

His distinctive voice was probably a factor in his entering radio, but his career began with a different kind of broadcasting. Mr. Baker was an air traffic controller in the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II, and later, in the Korean War.

While stationed at an air base in Belim, Brazil, during World War II, he met a fellow airman who’d been a well-known West Coast radio announcer, and who was working at the Armed Forces Radio Service station in Belim. (AFRS provided news and entertainment to American troops.)

Recognizing Baker’s potential on-the-air talent, the friend invited him to do shows at the AFRS station in his spare time.

After  Baker returned to civilian life, he decided he wanted to write. He approached Ridgefield Press publisher Karl Nash in 1947 and got a job as a reporter.

However, his AFRS experiences in Brazil had sparked a fascination with radio so that when an opening occurred at WLAD in Danbury, he grabbed it. 

His military experience also inspired his “new” name. When he arrived at WLAD, “the program director asked me what name I was going to use on the air — since I was going on in about five minutes,” he said in an interview. “Since I had dealt with code in the service — it was A-Able, B-Baker, etc. — I said I’d use Baker for now.” And it was Baker ever after.

He was both a newsman and an announcer, and for many years his morning show was probably the most listened to radio program in the Danbury area. 

In 1977, he and Abe Najamy took over local cable TV Channel 10, and among other things, produced the only local TV news show ever devoted to this area.

Among the people who got their start in TV during the Baker years at Channel 10 were Ridgefielder Chip Dean, now an ESPN director, and Paul’s own son, Joe, another director at ESPN.

After leaving WLAD, Baker had a weekly interview show on WREF in Ridgefield.

Baker, who had lived in Southbury for many years, served as toastmaster for many area functions, mostly charitable in nature, and was a member of many clubs and organizations. He had a 24-year association with the Southern New York Racing Association — on countless Saturdays in summer, he was the announcer at the stock car races at the Danbury Fair grounds, now the Danbury Fair Mall.

A longtime sports enthusiast, he was a founding member of the Danbury and Ridgefield Old Timers Associations. As a golfer, he carded four holes-in-one — his last at the age of 90.

But for all his vocal and athletic talents, Paul Baker never forgot his first love — writing. Late in life, he produced four books, as well as countless newspaper columns, all focusing on a local history and personalities of the past.

“I would rather write  ... than do all the broadcasting in the world,” he said in 1999.

He died in 2014 at the age of 94. 

Jim Lowe: 

The Green Door

Ridgefield once had a Green Doors motel. It also had the man who sang the number-one hit song, “The Green Door.”

That, however, was the only connection between the motel and the song.

Jim Lowe, who sang the “The Green Door,” and was a longtime New York City disk jockey, died Monday, Dec. 12, 2016, at his home in East Hampton, N.Y. He was 93 years old.

A radio personality for more than a half century, Lowe had lived at Twin Ridge in the 1970s

while he was an afternoon disc jockey on WNBC in New York.

Though he sang “The Green Door,” which became a number-one hit in 1956, he admitted in a 1971 Ridgefield Press interview, "I knew I couldn't really sing." So after his brief but successful flirtation with recording, he returned to being a disc jockey, a career he'd begun in 1948 when he graduated from the University of Missouri.

Over the years Lowe worked as a DJ on such radio stations as WCBS, WNBC and, for more than 20 years, on WNEW. Probably his most popular show was “Jim Lowe and Friends,” which lasted until 2004, although he spent many years in the 1960s hosting the popular overnight program, “Milkman’s Matinee,” on WNEW. 

Nicknamed “Mr. Broadway,” he was considered an expert on American popular music of the 20th century, especially the 1940s and 50s.

He was also a composer and wrote  “The Gambler's Guitar,” a 1955 hit sung by Rusty Draper, and “Close the Doors They're Coming in the Windows,” a million-seller country hit. 

He appeared in many commercials during the 1970s and 80s.

A native of Springfield, Mo., Lowe was born on May 7, 1923, the son of a surgeon. He served in the U.S. Army during World War II.