Erland Van Lidth de Jeude: 

A Large Talent

Erland Van Lidth de Jeude was one of the most colorful, talented and fascinating people to grow up in town. 

Born in the Netherlands in 1953, Van Lidth de Jeude became a giant of a man, standing six foot six and weighing at times more than 400 pounds. He lived here from 1962 to 1970 and while at Ridgefield High School was a champion shot-putter. 

He turned down a football scholarship to Harvard and went to MIT where he took up Greco-Roman wrestling – “I found it more fun to throw people; they came back,” the shot-putter  joked in a 1978 Ridgefield Press interview. 

By that year he was ranked third in his class in the world, based on his performance during the World Cup competition in Teheran, Iran (the year before the Islamic Revolution there).

He was to compete in the 1980 Olympics in Moscow, but  the U.S. boycotted the games.

While still an undergraduate at MIT, he was a teaching assistant, a rare honor. After college, he became a systems and computer analyst for Citibank, but also studied opera and sang with companies in three states (siblings, Philip, a tenor, and Philine, a soprano, are both classical  singers). 

In 1978 Warner Brothers cast Van Lidth de Jeude as “Terror,” a member of  the Fordham Baldies street gang, in “The Wanderers.” Using the name Erland Van Lidth, he went on to play a prisoner in the 1980 film, “Stir Crazy,” with Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder. He appeared  a horror movie, “Alone in the Dark,” starring Jack Palance, that has become a sort of cult film. 

Van Lidth de Jeude’s last film was “Running Man” with Arnold Schwarzenegger, completed shortly before his death from heart failure in 1987 when he was only 34 years old.

Andrew Gold: 

A Man of Much Music

“He is comic, creative and charismatic, and he likes people to treat him like the typical guy next door," said a 1998 Ridgefield Press interview with Andrew Gold. 

Mr. Gold was the voice and music behind many popular tunes including some of Linda Ronstadt’s hottest hits such as You’re No Good and Heatwave. 

Besides songwriting and singing, he was a producer, engineer and musician, and played an amazing variety of instruments, including, guitar, bass, keyboards, accordion, synthesizer, harmonica, saxophone, flute, drums, ukulele, musette, and harmonium.

Andrew Gold was born in 1951 in Burbank, Calif. That he started writing songs when he was 13 was no surprise; his father, Ernest Gold, was the Academy Award-winning composer of the many film scores including, Exodus and On the Beach, and his mother, Marni Nixon, was in films the singing voice of Natalie Wood in West Side Story, Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady and Deborah Kerr in The King and I. 

In 1973, Gold joined Linda Ronstadt’s band and also arranged much of the band’s music

throughout the 1970s. He also recorded with such artists as Carly Simon, Neil Diamond, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Brian Wilson, James Taylor, Roy Orbison, Bette Midler, Diana Ross, and Cher.

Over the years Mr. Gold had also produced and wrote songs and music for many television and movie soundtracks, such as the theme to Mad About You on TV.  His biggest hit was “Lonely Boy,” a top-10 single in 1977.

Perhaps his most unusual accomplishment was serving as the voice of Alvin, the singing chipmunk on television! 

Many albums of his songs have been released, and he produced many albums of other artists. He had two hits of his own as high as number five on the charts. 

Mr. Gold maintained a studio on Bailey Avenue for a couple of years, but moved it to Nashville in 1999, and commuted between there, London and his home on St. Johns Road, where he lived with his wife and three daughters.  

In the early 2000s, he moved to California where he died in 2011 at the age of 59. He had been under treatment for cancer, but the cause of death was given as heart failure.

Edwina Eustis Dick: 

The Contralto Who Cared

Edwina Eustis Dick was a singer who spent as much time helping others as she did at her career.

Born in New York in 1908, Edwina Eustis was one of the youngest singers to win a scholarship to Juilliard, doing so before even graduating from high school. She also studied at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia and, after graduating, won the coveted Naumburg Award.

As a contralto, she sang leading roles with opera companies in New York, Philadelphia, Detroit, and other cities, and was a soloist with the New York Philharmonic and other leading orchestras, singing under Stokowski, Toscanini, Reiner, Iturbi, and Metropoulos. The New York Times once said she “possessed one of the most richly satisfying mezzo-soprano voices of our time.” (Her voice can still be heard on Sony Masterworks recordings.) 

In the 1930s, she worked with the Musicians Emergency Aid to help create jobs for unemployed musicians. She also worked with special education children in a New York City public school where she was successful in teaching music to a 16-year-old boy, who was unable  to speak, read, or write.

During World War II,  Eustis performed more than 1,000 times during a two and a half year USO tour that took her to all five Atlantic and three Pacific theatres. The songs of her regular program were always chosen by the troops from lists posted on bulletin boards ahead of her arrival. She also sang the church services with chaplains and for the wounded in hospital wards. While she was in Italy with the Fifth Army, she sang as many as seven church services on a single Sunday.

Among her more unusual performances were singing before the Shah of Iran and King Farouk in anti-German propaganda concerts, nine Christmas shows with a G.I. choir in Shanghai, a concert for Mrs. Douglas MacArthur and her son in Tokyo, and Holy Week services on a troop ship returning from Japan.

After the war, she undertook a pioneering project at a Long Island hospital in music therapy for the mentally ill, which led to doctors’ classifying music as “therapy.” She also trained young musicians in the new field of music therapy, and an annual scholarship in her name is offered by the American Music Therapy Association. 

Mrs. Dick and her husband, attorney Alexander C. Dick, were founding members of the American Symphony Orchestra, organized and conducted by Leopold Stokowski. Both locally and nationally, the Dicks were active in Republican politics — she served for a time as secretary of the Executive Committee of the Women’s National Republican Club. In Ridgefield she was active in the First Church of Christ, Scientist, on Main Street.  

In 1990, the Connecticut General Assembly honored “her long and successful career in music, her generous donation of time and talent to improving the lives of others, as well as her distinguished career in public service.”

She was a strong supporter of the U.S. troops and in 1991, during Operation Desert Storm, she wrote the Press: ”At a time when the men and women in our armed forces are facing their greatest test, we, at home, are facing a test as well. Our task is to maintain our unity and resolve as our troops are doing in the Persian Gulf...Our soldiers have said they have a job to do and are going to get it done. I feel I have a job to do, too, and that is to stand up in strong support of our magnificent troops.”

“Edwina was also a fun person!” said Henrietta Parsons, a friend. “She loved to body surf in the ocean—yes! an opera singer that body surfs.  Edwina and Alex had a summer house on Fire Island.  She would romp around the surf and just loved it!”

She lived  from the 1950s through the 1980s on Old Branchville Road, but moved to Heritage Village in Southbury after the death of her husband. She died there in 1997 at the age of 88. 

A road built in 1999 on part of her former homestead was named Eustis Lane.

Geraldine Farrar: 

A Great Human Being

Geraldine Farrar was still a teenager when she became a star, heralded around the world for her voice as well as her acting ability.

One of the Metropolitan Opera’s greatest lyric sopranos, Miss Farrar had spent 16 years with the company, singing the leads in Madama Butterfly, Carmen, Tosca, and many other productions.   

“Miss Farrar was the last of a great operatic tradition set by such stars as Enrico Caruso and Antonio Scotti,” The Ridgefield Press said in her obituary. 

Born in Massachusetts in 1882, she was a daughter of Sidney Farrar, a 19th Century professional baseball player with the Philadelphia Phillies, who later lived on North Salem Road—Farrar Lane is named after him, not his more famous daughter. He bought the place in 1923 and the story about his moving in said ”His daughter, Geraldine Farrar, will arrive later, it is expected.” 

Sidney Farrar and his wife, both church singers, sent Geraldine to singing lessons when she was 12.  

In 1901, she made her debut with the Royal Opera in Berlin and so impressed Lilli Lehmann that the star took Miss Farrar as a pupil. She went on to sing with companies all over Europe. She made her acclaimed debut with the Met in 1906, and over the following years, shared leading roles

with such greats as Caruso, Scotti, and Louise Homer. She knew many notables in the arts, including Camille Saint-Saens, Giacomo Puccini, Mark Twain, Sarah Bernhardt, Nellie Melba, Fritz Kreisler, and Jules Massenet. She was also the lover of Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini (who twice performed in Ridgefield). She made several films, including Carmen and Joan of Arc. 

When she sang her last role in 1922, “a cheering crowd surged forward shouting her name,” The Press said. “Outside 40th Street between Broadway and Eight was a solid mass of fans.”  

For years, recordings of her music were produced, and are still being sold today.

She wrote two autobiographies, “Geraldine Farrar: The Story of An American Singer” (1916) and “Such Sweet Compulsion” (1938). Several biographies have also been written.

In 1924, a year after her parents moved here, she acquired Fairhaven, a large home on West Lane. In 1954, she decided to downsize and, with her companion of 50 years, Sylvia Blein, moved to a much smaller place on New Street.

During her years in Ridgefield, Farrar didn’t just twiddle her thumbs. She did  much work for

the Red Cross, and during the war, drove for the American Women’s Voluntary Services and served on the War Price and Ration Board. She also helped the Girl Scouts and served as finance chairman of the organization. She sang at fund-raising concerts for Danbury Hospital in the late 1930s.

On the night she died in 1967 at the age of 85, the Metropolitan Opera was performing Madama Butterfly, an opera Farrar had starred in nearly 100 times. That week, The Press suggested her epitaph might be a sentiment she herself once expressed: “Far more important than being a great artist is to become a great human being.” 

Michael Connolly: 

A Songful But Short Life

Michael Connolly had finally “attained every actor-singer’s dream — his name in lights,” said his father shortly after Connolly died of a stroke in Los Angeles. 

It was 1989 and the longtime Ridgefielder, only 41, had just completed a successful, 14-month, national tour in Cole Porter’s musical, “Can-Can,” with Chita Rivera and Ron Holgate. 

James Michael Connolly was born in Massachusetts in 1947, came to Ridgefield as a boy and began acting and singing as a pupil at Veterans Park School. 

In 1965 he won the first $500 scholarship offered by the newly formed Ridgefield Workshop for the Performing Arts (now the Ridgefield Theater Barn). One of the judges in the scholarship competition was actor Cyril Ritchard, the Ridgefielder famed for his Captain Hook portrayal in “Peter Pan.” Ritchard was so impressed with Connolly’s talent that he personally sent him another $500. He said the 16-year-old singer had a lot of talent and should be encouraged. 

During his high school and college years, Connolly performed in many local productions. He graduated from Fordham University with a degree in English and while a student there, founded and directed the first choral club at Fordham Preparatory School. 

Although he was certified to teach (and did do substitute teaching in the Ridgefield schools), his career was on the stage and he went on to perform in more than 15 Gilbert and Sullivan operettas with the Light Opera of Manhattan, in summer stock, and in many touring productions. 

He appeared in several Broadway shows; his first was “Otherwise Engaged,” with Dick Cavett, in which he was assigned a dressing room at the Plymouth Theater that was once occupied by John Barrymore. 

“It was humbling to me,” he said, “more like a shrine than a dressing room.” 

His other Broadway shows included “Annie” and “Amadeus,” and he toured the country in the national company of “On the Twentieth Century” with Rock Hudson and former Ridgefielder Imogene Coca. 

Another summer he toured in “Sherlock Holmes,” sharing the lead with Leonard Nimoy.

He also appeared in the television soap operas, “All My Children,” and “One Life to Live.”

Throughout his career, he continued to perform locally, and was especially remembered for singing the National Anthem at post-parade ceremonies on many Memorial Days in Ridgefield. 

However, he told his family, he saved his best performances “for the ladies of the kitchen” at Italian-American Club functions he often attended. 

“Whenever he dedicated two or three songs to them,” his father James Connolly said, “the staff would emerge, wiping their hands on their white aprons, to be serenaded by ‘Mattinata,’ ‘Torna a Sorrento,’ or ‘Santa Lucia.’ ”

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.