Joseph H. Donnelly: 

The First Lawyer

Joe Donnelly made quite a name for himself in Ridgefield. In fact, he made several names for himself.

Ridgefield’s first full-time practicing attorney and one of its most astute real estate entrepreneurs had a career that lasted more than 60 years and included countless hours of public service, both with Ridgefield government and in numerous community organizations.

“He was really good to an awful lot of people, and helped an awful lot of people — behind the scenes,” said Paul S. McNamara, who had been his partner for many years. “He was reserved and preferred to remain anonymous.”

Even so, his name does appear on three town roads.

Joseph Henry Donnelly was born in 1906 in Bridgeport, got his bachelor’s and law degrees

from Columbia University, and went to work for his brother’s  prestigious law firm in Bridgeport.

In July 1931, when he was only 24 years old, he decided to strike out on his own and arrived in Ridgefield in “an old Pontiac,” recalled former town historian Richard E. Venus. He lived at Ashland Cottage, the Victorian house just south of the St. Stephen’s campus where once another attorney had lived. While Samuel “Lawyer Sam” Keeler was a full-time attorney, he had practiced only in New York City; the newcomer, the town’s only local lawyer, was the first to live and practice full-time in Ridgefield.

After his marriage to Ellen Gavin, whom he had met at Columbia, Donnelly moved to a house on West Mountain Road. Later he bought a farm on Wilton Road West, part of which he eventually developed into a subdivision served by Donnelly Drive — one of three roads in town using his name.

Soon after his arrival Judge Donnelly became active in his new community. He was named the town attorney in 1935, serving until 1948 and again for a year in the late 1960s.

From 1941 to 1949 he was judge of probate, an elective office that was the source of the judicial title that stuck over the years — many people referred to him as “Judge Donnelly” long after he stopped being a probate judge.

For many years, he was involved in the drive to bring zoning to Ridgefield and was in the forefront of the campaign that led to zoning’s adoption in 1946. The ordinance he championed was written by his brother, John V. Donnelly, who was city attorney of Bridgeport and whose law firm broke in many of the state’s top trial lawyers, not to mention his own brother.

Joe Donnelly served in many other government posts including on a charter revision commission and the Police Commission. He was Ridgefield’s state representative from 1939 to 1941, and a prosecutor in the town’s Trial Justice Court in the 1940s. He was active in the Republican party, serving for a while as town chairman. He was a frequent moderator of town meetings.

Real estate was one of Donnelly’s long-standing interests and over the years he amassed a lot

of property. Though he had sold off some by the time of his death, he was still one of the town’s top 10 taxpayers — most of the other nine were corporations.

Among his earliest purchases was the commercial block belonging to Judge George G. Scott, whom he succeeded as probate judge. The block, which he acquired in 1943, consists of stores and offices between the Masonic Hall and the old Bissell building, which today includes Craig’s Jewelers, Shine Hair Salon and Rodier Flowers. He bought the land behind this in the mid-1950s and built the “Donnelly Shopping Center” that now houses the Ridgefield Thrift Shop, Ancona’s Wines and Liquors, Ridgefield Music, Colby’s, and other shops but had originally been home to Woolworth’s and First National.

He was involved in the development of Ridgefield Commerce Park on Danbury Road, and several subdivisions. Among these were the 1950s Scodon development in Ridgebury that includes Scodon Drive (he was the “don” while Ridgefield Savings Bank president Carlton Scofield was the “sco”).

With jeweler Francis D. Martin and real estate and insurance broker Arthur J. Carnall, he developed the road that’s named from the first three letters of the threesome’s surnames: Marcardon Avenue. Martin, also a large investor in real estate, was once Donnelly’s landlord — the judge’s first office was over today’s Planet Pizza in the Tudoresque building then owned by Martin.

Later, Judge Donnelly acquired Gov.  Phineas Lounsbury’s one-time home on Governor Street and converted it to offices, which included his own firm of Donnelly, McNamara and Gustafson (now practicing from the Ridgefield Bank building on Danbury Road).

Through his involvement in real estate, both in representing clients and in his own dealings,

he became perhaps the foremost authority on property in town, and some said his records were better than town hall’s. He maintained thousands of property records, first on three-by-five cards and later on microfilm. As historian Dick Venus observed, “he could search a title without leaving his office.”

“He was one of the best real estate lawyers,” said attorney John E. Dowling, who’d also been a probate judge. “He could tell you the deal on a closing many years after. Joe was a detail man.”

Donnelly’s business interests included the Cadillac dealership on Danbury Road, which he and Irving B. Conklin Sr. operated in the early 1950s; it later became Kellogg-Thiess. He had also served on the boards of directors of several banks. 

“He spent an awful lot of time on local organizations, helping the town,” said McNamara. Among the many civic groups for which he volunteered were the Salvation Army, the District Nursing Association, the Ridgefield and Fairlawn Cemetery Associations, and the Knights of Columbus. He was an honorary life member of the Ridgefield Volunteer Fire Department. During World War II he was on the Ration Board and the Selective Service Committee.

He belonged to St. Mary’s Parish, but was ecumenical in his assistance.  “He helped a lot of churches of all denominations,” said Dowling. “He did a lot of work for them and I don’t think he ever charged them for it.”

An avid golfer, Donnelly was a charter member of the Silver Spring Country Club.

“We used to play golf together,” Dowling recalled. “It used to be the lawyers against the bankers. Joe and I would play Scofield and (Frank) Warner.” Other Ridgefield businessmen who’d often be among his golfing partners or competitors included Abe Morelli, Reed F. Shields, Arthur Carnall, Fred Orrico, and Charles Coles.

In 1980 Donnelly was honored on his 50-year membership in the Connecticut Bar. He died in 1992 at the age of 85.

One of Joe Donnelly’s favorite legal cases  — and one he enjoyed recollecting — was his service as administrator of the estate of an 85-year-old Bethel woman named Helen Dow Peck. In 1955, Mrs. Peck bequeathed $180,000 ($1.7 million in 2018) to someone named John Gale Forbes, whom she’d “met” many years earlier via a Ouija board she had purchased at a toy store in 1919.

The bizarre case drew widespread publicity, especially after nine nieces and nephews appealed the bequest on the grounds that Mrs. Peck “did not have the right use of her reason when she executed her will,” giving a small fortune to a “spirit” she’d never seen in person.

The appeal went all the way to the state Supreme Court of Errors, and the relatives, represented by Dowling, won. 

The case “was on the Connecticut Bar exam at least once,” Dowling said with a smile.

Philip K. Saunders: 

'Dr. Panto Fogo'

Off and on for nearly a quarter of the 20th Century, the peripatetic P.K. Saunders lived in Ridgefield, probably where he wrote his critically acclaimed autobiography. But he was always heading off to other parts of the world, often to his native England and sometimes for extended periods, such as when he created one of Jamaica’s top golf clubs.

When he finally departed Ridgefield, the millionaire left behind a neighborhood served by a road bearing his name: Saunders Lane.

One of the more unusual characters in Ridgefield’s past, Philip Keith “P.K.” Saunders was  born in 1899 into an odd, but well-to-do British family. His father was a wealthy physician while his mother was an evangelical Christian who would move the family from town to town in order to find a local church suitable to her current needs. 

When he was only 15, he was sent to a Royal Navy training school and wound up serving in World War One as a British naval cadet and later engineer. During the war the teenage sailor nearly drowned when the dreadnaught he was serving aboard was sunk in the Dardanelles  and he had to swim for hours in the night before being rescued.

When he was 21, his family sent him to Brazil, where he worked as an engineer — one of his major projects was figuring out how to salvage hundreds of tons hides aboard a freighter that had run high and dry on a remote Brazilian beach. The wreck was far from civilization but close to native tribesmen, who would suddenly appear from the jungle to take their own share of the loot — Saunders and his crew put up no opposition, fearing the locals were headhunters.

The region was so remote that a “hotel” he stayed at in a nearby village while working on the freighter was little more than a thatched roof with four open sides. In his autobiography, “Dr. Panto Fogo,” Saunders describes an unusual feature of the hotel.

“The Hotel Mundo ... was infested with water rats from the nearby Carapata River, so instead of having a cat or a dog to keep the rats down, they had a tame anaconda, which was half grown and only 15 feet long,” he wrote. “Most of the time this pet lived in the rafters and you could wake up at night and hear a scuffle and a squeak as the rat went down. 

“At meals, Ninha, as she was called, would come round the tables and beg. She did this most

prettily, weaving her head and opening her mouth for titbits and she could catch better than an Australian cricketer, but the first time I met her it was quite a shock. 

“I had just arrived and was sitting at dinner, eating surprisingly delicious food. The only light was wax candles which flickered as the sea breeze blew through the room and a nice, gentle, big dog put his heavy flat head on my knee. So without looking down, I put my hand down to pat him on the head, only it was Ninha and the pretty little head was hard and stone cold.

“When I fell over backwards, old Captain Keelhauling, who was at the head of the table, lifted his long white beard to the sky and roared with merriment because it was his stock joke for newcomers and it had worked exactly to schedule on me.”

Around 1932 he moved to  South Africa, where he became an engineering draftsman for a company manufacturing explosives for the Johannesburg and Kimberley mines. As an engineer Saunders was assigned the task of cutting the costly power losses due to faulty, leaking valves used to supply air and water in the underground mines. While working in the mines at Witwatersrand, he invented a specialized valve for controlling air flow.

 The “diaphragm valve” traced its origins back to the ancient Greeks and Romans, who used a similar device to control the water and temperature of the hot baths.  Saunders had studied classical history and archaeology as a hobby, and knew of the ancient valve. His first modern diaphragm valve made him a millionaire.

Many patents were filed in his name for this valve, and he founded Saunders Valve Company in London to market his work. Saunders diaphragm valves are still used today, particularly in sophisticated medical equipment.

 By 1943 Saunders was in New York City, working for the U.S. Navy, installing anti-submarine devices on merchant vessels.

He continued to make the United States his home base, probably because he was irked by the climbing taxes in his native England. His autobiography is sprinkled with rants about the “socialists” who were taking his money. At one point he describes his savings account as  “devalued, inflated, exchange-controlled, and eventually tax-confiscated by a democracy in search of Utopia.”

Over the years he held many patents for inventions, usually related to valves and often designed to be labor-saving. He has been frequently quoted for his observation: “Laziness is the mother of nine inventions out of ten.”

By 1948 Saunders had discovered Ridgefield and moved to a house on lower Main Street.  At the time he was president of the Saunders Valve Company of America. 

In 1949 he bought the Starr estate, whose house is at the corner of Farmingville and Lounsbury Roads and whose land includes the site of today’s Farmingville School.  Almost immediately, he began plans for the 14-lot Saunders Lane subdivision, which he called Quaker Ridge. Houses began being built there in 1950. Oddly enough, one of the builders in the 1960s was William Saunders of Brookfield, no relation to P.K. 

 In 1960 Saunders wrote his light-hearted autobiography, whose full title is “Dr. Panto Fogo:  The Uninhibited Memoirs of A Twentieth Century Adventurer — His Inventions and His Escapades

on Four Continents and the High Seas.” The book is full of colorful tales of his experiences in South and North America, Africa and Europe, from his boyhood until just after World War II (he had planned a second volume to continue the post-war story). It was published by Prentice-Hall and he promoted it by observing, “The common belief is that all inventors are crazy, and I concur. Because if you are sane when you start off with an invention, the chances are you will be madder than a March hare by the time you are through — I was, as you will see.”

The book was praised by reviewers, including The New York Times and The Saturday Review, a literary magazine that said “Mr. Saunders is incapable of writing a dull paragraph,”

Dr. Panto Fogo is Anglo-Portuguese for “Dr. Pants-on-Fire,” a nickname friends gave Saunders after a rail trip through rural Brazil. He had ignored the friends’ warnings to keep his train compartment window closed and, as he napped,  his trousers caught fire from a spark thrown out by the ancient wood-fired steam engine.

While in Ridgefield, he continued to travel widely and, in 1950, to establish the Upton Country Club on the island of Jamaica. He maintained a home for himself and his daughter on Saunders Lane until 1974 by which time he was living in Manteo, N.C. He died there in 1997 at the age of 98.

 In an odd coincidence, the critic who reviewed Saunders’s book in 1960  for The Saturday Review was Quentin Reynolds, a journalist who had been a noted war correspondent in World War II. Reynolds later became even more famous for his libel suit against conservative syndicated columnist Westbrook Pegler — a Ridgefield resident — who had called him “yellow” and an “absentee war correspondent.”  Represented by the well-known attorney Louis Nizer, Reynolds wound up winning $175,001 (more than $1.6 million in 2018 dollars) in the case — at the time it was the largest libel judgment ever handed down. The lawsuit later inspired a Broadway play, “A Case of Libel,” and two TV movies.

Emily Eaton Hepburn: 

Landmark’s Builder

Ridgefield had many notable “summer residents,” New Yorkers who built weekend and vacation retreats that, more often than not, qualified as mansions. Emily Eaton Hepburn was among the more remarkable of these part-time Ridgefielders, but her accomplishments have been largely overlooked locally. 

A prominent figure in New York City’s intellectual, civic, and business scene over a half century, Emily Hepburn at the age of 61 built one of New York’s landmark hotels. The New York Times once called her “a real estate novice who created one of New York’s most distinctive skyscrapers.” 

The Vermont native was an 1886 graduate of Saint Lawrence University in Canton, N.Y. where she met her husband, Alonzo Barton Hepburn, then a lawyer and state banking official. He became a leading New York City banker and was named United States comptroller of the currency by President Benjamin Harrison. 

   The Ridgefield Press took note of their impending arrival in May 1908. “Mr. A.B. Hepburn,

one of the most prominent financiers of the country, former comptroller of the currency and now president of the Chase National Bank of New York, is building one of the most handsome homes to be seen in this town of beautiful homes,” the newspaper said.   The report was a bit misleading. Emily, not Barton, was actually overseeing the design and construction of “Altnacraig,” a magnificent mansion on High Ridge whose name could be translated, “high rock.”  The building later became a well-known nursing home, also called Altnacraig, whose residents included suffragist Alice Paul. Altnacraig burned to the ground in a suspicious 1994 blaze, and was replaced with a house of similar size. (Pictures of Altnacraig are in the Old Ridgefield photos collection.)

   Barton also met an unlucky end: He was run over by a bus while crossing a city street in 1922. “He was benefactor to Hepburn Hospital in Ogdensburg, N.Y., and six libraries in St. Lawrence County, N.Y., all of which are named for him,” reports St. Lawrence University, where his and Emily’s family papers now reside.

   Emily Hepburn had long been active in civic and charitable organizations including the New York Botanical Garden, City History Club for children, Inwood House girls reformatory, and the New York Infirmary for Women and Children. Here, she was a member of the Ridgefield Garden Club, a group that both beautified and promoted the town. 

She was also active in the suffrage movement and, after women had won the right to vote, she addressed a new need in New York: Housing for young, working women. After the war, many recent college-graduate women were coming to New York to seek careers. In 1924 Mrs. Hepburn and several others built the American Woman’s Association, a high-rise residence for working women, at 353 West 57th Street.

Hepburn was dissatisfied with the result, however, and on her own, planned a better building, with a more modern architect. “The boxy, unornamented American Woman’s Association clubhouse

had been simple to the point of drab, the ‘International Style’ with a migraine, designed by the otherwise traditionalist Benjamin Wistar Morris,” wrote Christopher Gray in The Times. “Mrs. Hepburn went to John Mead Howells, son of American author William Dean Howells, and a graduate of the École des Beaux-Arts.” 

   Hepburn almost single-handedly set about gaining support for the project, including selling stock (one of the stock purchasers was Sara Roosevelt, mother of Franklin Delano Roosevelt).  The

result was the 380-room Panhellenic House at First Avenue and East 49th Street, completed in 1928, described in early promotional brochures as “a club-hotel for women.”  The 28-story, orange-brick building is considered one of the great Art Deco skyscrapers in New York.

   “I wanted to prove that women could do big business,” Hepburn once said about her late-blooming career. The quotation appears “Daughter of Vermont,” a biography of her published in 1952, four years before her death.

   The hotel was not just a residence, but also a place where women could, in today’s parlance, “network,” and learn from each other. One supporter of the project called it “a training school for leadership, a mental exchange” for women.

    Hepburn, who also built and lived in an apartment building at nearby 2 Beekman Place, found occupancy rates at the Panhellenic House declining during the Depression, and opened the building to men as well as women, renaming it the Beekman Tower Hotel. The hotel continued in business until 2013 when it was converted to long-term residential suites.

 The Beekman, incidentally, is a block from the United Nations. The Times once reported that, “according to legend,” Hepburn “persuaded the Rockefellers to buy the East River land for the United Nations.” 

How’s that for good business sense? 

Louis J. Fossi:

‘King Lou’

“Lou Fossi’s fingerprints are all over Ridgefield,” The Ridgefield Press once wrote. He sold shoes, insurance, groceries, and real estate. He served on two town boards, and then for eight years became one of the most popular first selectmen of the 20th Century.

A native son who devoted much of his life to his community, Louis John Fossi was born in 1930, one of seven children of immigrants from the Marches region of Italy. He graduated from Ridgefield High School in 1949 and served in the Air Force where he met his wife, Anne, an Alabama native. He returned to town with his bride in 1955 and worked at Fossi’s Footwear and at selling insurance for Prudential. He later operated the Wayside Market on Danbury Road, opposite Grove Street. 

Always civic minded, he was active in scouting and other community organizations, but in the early 60s, “I ran for public office – got crazy, lost my head,” he joked many years later. 

He served on the Board of Finance for two years, then eight years as the only Democrat on the Board of Selectmen. 

In 1973, he was elected first selectman, one of those uncommon Democrats who could win handily in what was largely a Republican town. 

“The Watergate scandal in 1973 may have helped a little, and his personable nature surely helped a lot,” said his son, Larry Fossi. “He was, as his wife says, a ‘people person’ through and through. Everybody knew Lou, and Lou knew everybody.”
Two months after he took office, nature gave him his first test as a leader – a December 1973 ice storm devastated the area, knocking out power for as much as a week in some parts of town while temperatures dipped to minus-2. (The storm inspired the Ang Lee movie, “The Ice Storm.”)

There followed constant budget battles and problems with school closings. 

Nonetheless, his administration had many accomplishments: it built Ballard Green senior housing, helped bring Boehringer Ingelheim to town, replaced the dump with a transfer station, moved the police out of the town hall basement and into their own headquarters, and found new uses for the empty, deteriorating old high school. 

Campaigns were lively. One year, Republicans slighted his years as a grocery store owner, saying a sophisticated town couldn’t be run like “a mom and pop store.” Another year, the GOP  

characterized him as too dictatorial, calling him “King Lou” in advertisements — for years afterward, his friends presented him with crowns, scepters and other symbols of royalty as joke gifts. 

He was also the target of the Ridgefield Taxpayers League and its longtime leader, Lou Garofalo. A reporter for The Press recalled traveling with Fossi in a town vehicle on hot summer day when the first selectman turned on the air-conditioning, which was something of a luxury in those days of gas rationing and long lines at the pump. What would the head of the Taxpayers League think of that? asked the reporter.  “It’s because of people like him that I need the air conditioning,” Fossi shot back. Except that he didn’t say “people.”
That same reporter remembered one of the few times that  Fossi was genuinely upset with one of his  news stories. He had quoted  the first selectman using the word “damn,” which to the reporter seemed inoffensive.  Fossi was livid; his wife would read the quote, and he would be in hot water for weeks for cussing so freely in public.
Yet, despite his critics and tough times, Fossi always won re-election by wide margins every time he ran. 

Retiring from office in 1981, he worked in real estate until moving to warmer South Carolina in 1997. 

“You have to take your hat off to the people that run this town, whether it’s the boards and commissions or the garden clubs, whatever,” he said in an interview just before moving. “They do make it a very, very attractive town to live in.”

After he survived major surgery in 2003, Fossi’s oldest daughter, Cathy, asked him whether he had any regrets. Yes, he said, he regretted missing the funeral of John F. Kennedy, whom he admired. A year later, when Ronald Reagan — whom he also admired — died, Cathy phoned her father and asked if he wanted to go to the funeral ceremonies in Washington. He jumped at the opportunity and they spent a memorable day together.

Fossi died in 2013 at the age of 83.

Thaddeus Crane: 

The Spectacular Exit

If you were to go house hunting in Ridgefield during the first third of the 20th Century, chances were good that you would call on Thaddeus Crane. But he gained a fair bit of notoriety for

something quite different from selling homes and insurance: Mr. Crane may have had the most spectacular death of any Ridgefielder in the 20th Century.

In May 1928, for reasons unknown,  Crane drove at high speed onto a railroad crossing in Wilton where a northbound train, “whistle shrieking,” smashed into his Hudson sedan and hurled it into the air. The car exploded, crashed into the second locomotive, bounced through the air into the baggage car, and flipped off into a trackside signal box, which also exploded. 

Witnesses risked their lives to drag him from the burning car, but Crane died within minutes. 

Typical of fatal automobile accidents of the era, The Ridgefield Press devoted more than 20 column inches to details of the crash, but only two inches to his life. 

Thaddeus Bailey Crane was born in 1862 in nearby Somers, N.Y., a great grandson of Colonel Thaddeus Crane of North Salem, who commanded the 4th regiment of the Westchester County Militia during the Revolution. (Col. Crane, then a major, was shot through the hip at the Battle of Ridgefield in 1777, survived and later became a representative to the New York State General Assembly and was a member of the New York State Constitutional Convention in 1788 that ratified the Constitution.)

After schooling at an academy in Norwalk, Crane became a farmer and, in 1891, married Mary Lent Brown. In 1896 the couple moved to Ridgefield where they had a farm off South Olmstead Lane, and raised two daughters and a son. 

In 1909, a year after his wife died, Crane opened a real estate office, which was located  just north of where Planet Pizza (formerly Roma) is in the large Tudor-style building on Main Street. By

1920 he was one of only three real estate agents in a town that now has a hundred active Realtors; the other two were M. Estelle Benjamin and William R. Keeler.

Crane was well known in the community, serving on the school board in the 1900s and 1910s. He was a founding member of the Promoter’s Club, a predecessor of the Ridgefield Chamber of Commerce, and belonged to the Jerusalem Lodge of Masons. Active in St. Stephen’s Church, he was a member of the vestry when the parish built its new stone church in 1915.

How did Crane manage to enter a railroad crossing whose warning lights were flashing and where the train was both visible and loudly sounding its whistle?

There was a good deal of talk that Crane, in a hurry, decided to try to beat the train to the crossing. As Town Historian Dick Venus put it, “Thad one time ran a race with a locomotive in Wilton and came off second best.”

The Press provided plenty of analysis at the time. The crash occurred on what is now Route

33 near Route 7. A bridge now brings 33 over the tracks; back then, the road crossed the tracks.  “Mr. Crane was driving a Hudson super-six sedan,” the account said. “The machine was going across the railroad tracks at a fairly good clip when it was struck.

“The Wilton-Ridgefield road had been oiled recently and it had rained slightly before the accident happened. Whether Mr. Crane felt he could not bring the automobile to a stop in time to avoid the train and thus put on more speed in an effort to pass the crossing before the train will probably never be known. The danger signal was in working order and was still red after the accident.  The engineer blew the whistle of the train a considerable distance from the crossing and blew it continously when he saw the automobile.”

The train used electric engines; the Danbury line had been electrified three years earlier and

remained electrified until 1961. The engineer, Andy Dougherty, said that “he saw the crossing and apparently slackened speed. He blew the whistle for a second as an additional warning, although still thinking the car was about to stop. When he saw the automobile continuing, he threw on reverse. The train came to a halt some 200 yards north of the crossing.”

In the end, The Press concluded, “Why the accident happened cannot be understood by the authorities unless Mr. Crane, just before reaching the crossing, was unable to stop his automobile because of the wet road.”

Two years after his death, Mr. Crane’s business was sold to Arthur J. Carnall, and operated under the name, A.J. Carnall Inc. for decades.  In 1999, Ridgefield Bank, now Fairfield County Bank, bought A.J. Carnall Inc., and 10 years later renamed it Fairfield County Bank Insurance Services. It’s still headquartered in the “Carnall Building” at the corner of Main and Catoonah Streets.

Bart Salerno: 

Big Shop’s Savior

“He was a character beyond imagination,” said business associate Thomas Quinn after the 1988 death of Bart Salerno, an entrepreneur who started WREF, fed Olympic athletes, renovated old buildings, and enjoyed talking to anyone who struck his fancy. 

Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., in 1923, Bartholomew T. Salerno grew up in New York City. He served as a sergeant in a U.S. Marine Corps bomber squadron during World War II and won the Distinguished Fly Cross “for extraordinary achievement while participating in aerial flight, in actions against enemy Japanese forces in the Pacific Theater of Operations.”

After the war, he graduated from Springfield College and became a teacher. He moved to town in 1954 when he was teaching art at Ridgefield High School after earning a master’s degree at  Danbury Teachers College. A year later, he bought the  carriage house of opera singer Geraldine Farrar and converted it to a home off Silver Spring Road.

He operated Bart Associates, a real estate and insurance firm, which for many years operated out of a converted freezer building on Danbury Road. But he had many other interests. For instance, he spent 15 years getting licensing and antenna approval for WREF, Ridgefield’s AM radio station. In its early years under Salerno's ownership, WREF broadcast local news and programming but has since become a totally automated, computer-operated, oldies rock station with no local coverage at all.

He was a small-scale developer who also owned apartment buildings and other properties. His largest development was the subdivision of the former Firestone estate in the northwestern corner of Wilton.

Perhaps his most important contribution to Ridgefield was his renovation of the Big Shop, the early 1800s hall and factory that Hannibal Hamlin, as vice president under Abraham Lincoln, spoke in, and that had been a center of Ridgefield industry in the 1800s. The large building had stood at West Lane and Main Streets but when the “new” First Congregational Church was about to be built in 1888, the Big Shop was moved to the center of the village. By the 1970s, it had become a run-down tenement and had reached the point where the town condemned it as unsafe for human occupancy. Salerno bought it, carefully restored and remodeled it, and now the handsome Big Shop holds restaurants, shops and offices at the north end of the Bailey Avenue parking lot. 

Salerno had an eye for a winner, as demonstrated in 1977 when he sponsored Karen Kopins  in a Miss Ridgefield pageant. She went on to become Miss Connecticut, competed in Miss America, and wound up an actress who appeared in movies and TV series. 

He part-owned the company that fed the athletes at the 1980 Olympics in Lake Placid and then supplied food to the American team at Sarajevo in 1984. 

“He was happiest around peasants and poor people,” said Quinn, another partner in the food service company. Instead of hanging around formal functions in Sarajevo, Salerno could often be found playing cards with the locals. 

When he did join in the formalities, he was sometimes lost. “I can remember him sitting next to John Denver and Kirk Douglas and calling John Denver Kirk Douglas and Kirk Douglas John Denver,” Quinn said with a smile.

“He told John Denver he enjoyed him in Spartacus.”

Salerno was 64 when he died while on a visit to Florida.