Nino Carbe: 
Behind the Animations

You probably haven’t heard of Nino Carbe, but if you were a kid any time from the 1940s through the 1980s, you have seen his work. Carbe drew backgrounds for many of the great animators — from Walt Disney and Walter Lantz to Hanna Barbera and Filmation — whose productions appeared both on the big screen and on television.

Carbe, who lived in Ridgefield in the 1950s and early 60s, also illustrated many books, especially for children.

A native of Sicily, Nino Carbe was born in 1909 and immigrated with his family when he was three. He was soon exhibiting talent at both art and classical violin, but excelled at the former. At the age of 16, he began studying art at the Cooper Union.

By his early 20s Carbe was illustrating books for New York City publishers, including such classics as Tales of the Arabian Nights, Cyrano de Bergerac and Frankenstein. In 1936, he moved to California and was soon hired by Walt Disney for whom he drew backgrounds of such Disney feature-length classics Fantasia, Bambi, Pinocchio, and Dumbo, as well as many shorter “cartoons.”

During World War II, he worked on Victory through Air Power and other projects for the Army. Disney also lent his talents to Walter Lantz — creator of Woody Woodpecker — who was producing military training films using animation.

After the war Carbe returned to illustrating books for children and also began ranging into such work as designing fabrics and Christmas cards. He and his wife, Betty, moved East to be closer to publishers and in 1953, he bought a house on Ledges Road. 

In 1964, he returned to California and to Disney, working on films such as The Jungle Book. When Walt Disney died in 1966, he joined Walter Lantz, creating the backgrounds for some of the last Woody Woodpecker cartoons, along with TV series like Chilli Willi and The Beary Family.

He then worked for Hanna Barbera as an artist for The All New Superfriends Hour, and Filmation, creating settings for He-Man and the Masters of the Universe series on TV. He also designed and drew backgrounds and layouts for Ralph Bakshi’s 1978 The Lord of the Rings animation.

Late in life, Carbe turned to painting, producing many oils, acrylics and watercolors,   experimented in bronze sculpture, and designed batik scarves and even clothing. And on the more practical side, he also built furniture.

Nino Carbe died in 1993. Betty died in 2018; they are buried in her family’s plot in Bonaparte, Iowa.

Nino and Betty Carbe had two daughters. Elizabeth “Liza” Carbe, a writer and journalist in California, maintains a website, ninocarbe.com, displaying and honoring her father’s work. 

Daughter Victoria “Vicki” Carbe Valentino, an alumna of Veterans Park and Ridgefield High Schools, became an actress who appeared in a dozen movies and on TV. In the 1960s, she was a Playboy Bunny — she was “Miss September” in 1963. She later became a registered nurse. 

More recently, Vicki Carbe  was in the news as one of the dozens of women who publicly accused comedian Bill Cosby of sexual assault.  In 1970 when she was 24, she said, Cosby raped her at his apartment after giving her a pill that rendered her immobile. “We are vindicated, we are validated,” she told USA Today after Cosby was sentenced to prison in 2018.

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.

Max Wilk: 

A Man of Memories

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Donald I. Rogers:

Economic Conservative

In a 1966 talk to the Ridgefield Republican Women’s Club, Donald I. Rogers disclosed that President Kennedy cancelled his subscription to The New York Herald-Tribune because of Rogers’ column.

“I am worse than a Republican, I am an economic conservative,” he told the group. “I’m not a John Bircher and I’m not a true right-winger, but I am a conservative when it comes to economics.” 

A Connecticut native, Donald Irwin Rogers was born in 1918 in New Hartford, where he grew up and, at the age of 12, created a “news bureau” that covered area towns for several  newspapers. He continued the bureau until he was 18 when he went to work for The Providence Journal. 

Rogers joined The Herald-Tribune in 1950 and was its business and financial news editor until 1963. From 1950 until 1966, he wrote a widely read, syndicated business-affairs column — the one Kennedy disliked.

He was a frequent panelist on the Longines Chronoscope, an early television talk show that aired from 1951 to 1955. Among the people he interviewed was Senator Joseph McCarthy, during the height of the McCarthyism turmoil.

Rogers was the author of 14 books, including “Teach Your Wife to Be A Widow,” “How to Beat Inflation Using It,” and “The Day the Market Crashed.”

In “The End of Free Enterprise: A Manifesto for Capitalists” (Doubleday, 1966), he observed that “what the business world needs is a decision about the principles it stands for. It needs a credo, a manifesto, a set of guides and goals behind which harried and hard-working executives can rally. Lacking this, the enterprise system will be whittled away by the voting strength of those who don’t understand it or who, understanding it, are opposed to it.” 

In 1962, the Conservative Party in New York State attempted to get Rogers to run for governor, but he declined. Years later, he told The New York Times that he had “little in common with organized Conservatives” and considered himself a “moderate liberal who believes in the competitive enterprise system, free markets and the prudent handling of other people’s money by Government as well as by thrift institutions and others in the private sector.”

Rogers moved to Mimosa in 1964 when he was publisher of the once popular Bridgeport Sunday Herald, a conservative Sunday-only newspaper that served all of Fairfield County. Around 1975, he tried to do what no one else has done: He produced a daily newspaper aimed at all of Fairfield County. He was editor and publisher of the short-lived attempt, called The Fairfield County Courier. 

He moved to Manhattan in 1976 and died four years later at the age of 61. His daughter, the late Lynn Wallrapp, a longtime Ridgefielder, was a novelist.

Cyril Ritchard: 

‘Captain Hook’

Millions knew him, not by his name but by his character. For Cyril Ritchard played Captain Hook alongside Mary Martin when the acclaimed Broadway production of “Peter Pan” was staged live for television March 7, 1955, making TV history with its huge audience and high quality production. 

His face and his voice were famous and he enjoyed telling of the time he was spotted by a rough-looking gang of teenagers who surrounded him. 

“I thought they were going to attack me, but instead they stared and exclaimed: ‘You're Captain Hook!’ I'm glad the reason for their attention was curiosity, not animosity.”

The witty actor from Australia starred in countless stage and screen productions around the world and over a career that started before World War I and ended in 1977 when he collapsed on stage of a heart attack. 

Born Cyril Trimnell-Ritchard (a name he shortened to fit on marquees) in 1898,  Ritchard was

the son of a hotel manager father who wanted him to become a doctor. However, he quit medical school at the age of 19 and took to the stage, making his debut in the chorus of a Sydney musical. Three months later, he was performing the lead.

From there he went on to appear over the next half century in innumerable comedies, Shakespearean plays, musicals, and even operas.

“I have four notes, two of them good,” he said of his singing abilities. 

Ritchard also made six movies, including “Half A Sixpence” in 1967.

Shakespearean comedy fascinated Ritchard, who often performed at the American Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford, Conn., and worked to raise money for its survival. In an effort typical of both his

energy and his versatility, he directed the play and performed two parts (Oberon and Bottom) in a 1967 production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” at Stratford.

“It’s really a mental feat,” he said at the time. “The changes would be quite impossible if my mind panicked...But I like the challenge.”

Throughout his career he was known for his smile and his sense of humor. He once told Leonard Lyons of The New York Post That he was unaffected by small audiences in theaters. “Fortunately,” he said, “my sight is bad, so I can’t even see the empty seats.”

“He was a very funny and witty fellow,” said actress Kathleen Eason, a longtime friend and fellow Ridgefielder. “His stories and anecdotes of happenings to him on and off stage were

hysterically funny. Once, when he was very young and just starting to be successful, a fan asked for his autograph at a movie premiere. Cyril brightened right up and with his pencil poised, began laboriously to write: ‘Best wishes and good luck, Cyril Ritchard’ The irate fan said: ‘Come on, hurry up, don’t write a book. Here comes Greta Garbo!’ ”

He maintained that he developed his abilities at comedy as a child. “As I was taken to my room to be spanked by my father, I had to think of something to make him laugh,” he said. “If I could, it was a pretty weak spanking.”

He bought his Danbury Road home, which he called “Lone Rock,” in 1960, and “absolutely loved Ridgefield and that little house,” Eason said. “He couldn’t wait to get out of New York and to his Shangri-La, as he called it.”

Ritchard frequently entertained guests from New York at Lone Rock. One Sunday in the summer of 1965, he bused up the entire cast and crew from “The Roar of the Greasepaint — The Smell of the Crowd,” in which he played one of his best-known roles. He had planned to serve them

beefsteak and kidney pies, but changed his mind. “I remembered about Americans and kidneys, and substituted the beef Wellington,” he said, adding that Americans are likely to find kidneys appealing only when they denote the shape of swimming pools.

He was often seen about town with his poodle, Trim (a trimmed version of his trimmed name). “He got to know a great many people in the town,” Mrs. Eason said. “He always raised his hat, helped old ladies across the road, and stopped to talk to people.”

Ritchard contributed to many local organizations including the Ridgefield Workshop for the Performing Arts. He read the Declaration of Independence at a 1976 Bicentennial ceremony at the Community Center. “I was shocked when they asked me to do this,” he told the crowd. “I'm not an American. I'm a citizen of Australia. And I love the British. So there!”

Despite his age — he had turned 79 a couple weeks before his death — and warnings from his doctor, Ritchard maintained a work schedule that would tire a much younger man. In 1974, when he was hospitalized after collapsing at work in California, he admitted that “the doctor here says in the future I should be a little less enthusiastic in my work. I had been under pressure for six weeks. I was directing (“Sugar”), but nine other people thought they were, and kept screaming.”

   A few months later the 76-year-old appeared in three concerts of  “La Perichole” in Miami and a short time after that, gave 22 performances of 11 different programs during a 2½ week Theatre Guild at Sea cruise in the Caribbean.

   “I never worked so hard in my life,” he admitted afterward.

   A devout Catholic who attended  Mass almost daily, he was a benefactor of St. Mary's Parish. His funeral in 1977 was at St. Mary’s, with the Mass celebrated by longtime friend and TV celebrity, Bishop Fulton J. Sheen. 

   Cyril Ritchard is buried at St. Mary’s Cemetery next to his beloved wife, actress Madge Elliott, who had died five years before he moved to Ridgefield — he loved the town so much he had had her remains moved here from New York.

Under his name, Cyril Trimnell-Ritchard, on the gravestone, it says, “Captain Hook.”

Alex North: 

Music for the Movies

Music for many of the top movies of the 20th Century was composed by Alex North, a man who also mentored many composers — including John Williams.

“You’d make a hell of a composer,” North often told a young Williams.

North, who had a home on Great Hill Road for a dozen years, earned Oscar nominations for 14 of his films and in 1986 was the first composer to receive a Lifetime Achievement Academy Award for his body of work.

Born in 1910 in Chester, Pa., North studied piano at the Curtis Institute of Music, Juilliard, and the Moscow Conservancy. He also studied with Aaron Copland. 

North wrote ballet and classical music in the 30s and 40s – Benny Goodman performed his Revue for Clarinet and Orchestra. 

During World War II, he spent several years in the U.S. Army, service that included being the officer in charge of entertainment for recuperating soldiers in hospitals throughout the U.S. He also wrote music for two dozen government documentaries related to the war.

His first movie score, for Elia Kazan’s “A Streetcar Named Desire,” in 1951 won him an Academy Award nomination, and he was eventually nominated 13 more times. 

He wrote the music for dozens of leading films, including “Death of A Salesman” (1951), “Viva Zapata!” (1952), “The Rose Tattoo” (1955), “The Rainmaker” (1956), “Stage Struck” (1958), “The Sound and the Fury” (1959), “Spartacus” (1960), “Cleopatra” (1963), “Cheyenne Autumn” (1964), The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965), Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1968), 2001: A Space Odyssey, “The Shoes of the Fisherman” (1969), “Willard” (1971), “Dragonslayer” (1981), “Prizzi’s Honor” (1985), “Good Morning, Vietnam” (1987), and “The Last Butterfly” (1990).

As a young musician, John Williams played piano in North’s orchestras.  “For those of us coming of age in the 1950s, and seriously interested in film music, Alex North was an inspiration, a role model and a hero,” Williams wrote the foreword to Sanya Henderson’s 2003 biography, “Alex North, Film Composer.” “He was then and remains so today.”

North also wrote much music for TV and won an Emmy for the score to “Rich Man, Poor Man” in 1976. In 1949 he wrote the music for Broadway’s “Death of A Salesman.” He won a Golden Globe for his score for “The Shoes of the Fisherman.” 

North's song, "Unchained Melody," from the film “Unchained,” became a pop music classic. More than 1,500 different recordings of  “Unchained Melody” have been made by more than 670 artists. In 1955, when it first appeared, three versions of the song (by Les Baxter, Al Hibbler, and Roy Hamilton) made the Billboard Top 10. Probably the best-known version, however, was by the Righteous Brothers.

North may have been introduced to Ridgefield through Marthe Krueger, a noted dancer in the 30s and 40s, who in 1942 opened the Marthe Krueger School of Dance on Branchville Road. North and she had collaborated on three dance pieces, and Kruger invited him to teach at her school.

North bought a home here in 1950 and continued to use it until the early 1960s. In 1954, he made some local news when he joined his neighbor, Time magazine chief Henry Luce, and Ridgebury conservationist Daniel M. McKeon in successfully suing the town to stop a development along Great Hill Road.

He died in 1991 at the age of 80 in Los Angeles. John Williams offered a eulogy at his funeral.

William Hanley in 1964. —N.Y. Times

William G. Hanley:

Acclaimed Screenwriter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Imogene Coca:

Sweetheart of TV’s Golden Age

Imogene Coca was the “sweetheart of the golden age of television,” as one critic put it. The  comedienne, who enjoyed the country life of Ridgefield, was known by virtually anyone who owned a TV set in the 1950s and beyond.

Coca, whose show business career spanned 80 years, began performing at the age of 11. Her mother, Sadie Brady, was a magician’s assistant, and her father, Joseph Fernandez de Coca, had been a violin soloist with the Philadelphia Symphony in his youth and later conducted orchestras in Philadelphia, Atlantic City and for the Keith/Albeer vaudeville circuit.

Watching him rehearse, the young Imogene “caught the bug.” At the age of 15, she was performing in Jimmy Durante’s Slipper, a tony New York club. She made her Broadway debut in “When You Smile,” starring Jeanette MacDonald, and continued working as a singer and dancer in New York until her friend, producer Leonard Sillman, saw another aspect to her talent.

Working with her first husband, Robert Burton, in “New Faces of 1934,” Mr. Sillman assigned her and a young Henry Fonda to entertain the audiences with brief comedy routines in front of the curtain while the scenery was being changed.

By the early 1950s, she had entered a new medium, starring with Sid Caesar in the award-winning NBC television series, “Your Show of Shows.” According to writer Sidney Fields, “Imogene Coca is the only TV comedienne who can convulse an audience with just a wink. With one grimace she can make her mouth threaten her chin; with another, one eye will battle her nose. The endless variety of expressions on her flexible face continuously amazes everyone including Max Liebman who directs Imogene.”

She later starred in “The Imogene Coca Show”  and appeared in several Broadway shows including The Girls in 509 where she met her second husband, King Donovan. They subsequently appeared in more than 30 productions together, including Plaza Suite, The Rivals, and The Gin Game.  She continued making appearances on television; for a while, she even appeared in the soap opera, “One Life to Live.”

In 1967, she co-starred in the CBS television special, “The Sid Caesar-Imogene Coca-Carl Reiner-Howard Morris Reunion Show,” bringing together the cast of “Your Show of Shows”; it won 11 Emmies. Over the years, she herself earned three Emmies — 1952 for Best Actress, 1966 and 1967 for Outstanding Variety Special). 

On film, Coca may be best remembered as Aunt Edna strapped onto the car roof in National Lampoon’s Vacation, with Chevy Chase, and for her featured part in Under the Yum Yum Tree, with Jack Lemmon.

Miss Coca lived in Manhattan for most of her life, but often summered in the country, including periods in Ridgefield. She first came here in the fall of 1953, leasing a house on Silver Spring Lane. Mark Basile, a close longtime friend of  Coca, said she was probably introduced to the town by longtime Ridgefielders Debbie and Jack Rosenberg; Debbie Rosenberg was Coca’s agent for most of her career.

“She had loved Ridgefield,” Mr. Basile said of Coca.

She died in 2001 in Westport at the age of 92.

Jessie Royce Landis: 

Mother to the Stars

“I am probably one of the most prolific mothers out there,” said Jessie Royce Landis in a Ridgefield Press interview in 1966, the year she moved to Old Branchville Road.  “But I am lucky enough to have children who are doing nicely and give me no trouble.” 

Those “children” included Grace Kelly, Cary Grant, June Allyson, Tab Hunter, Anthony Perkins, Jean Peters, and Kim Novak. 

Miss Landis played mother to all of them in Hollywood films. As a stage and screen actress for 50 years, she was often cast as a mother, but also played countless other parts with the likes of Noel Coward, Bob Hope, Lucille Ball, Ray Milland, and Ingrid Bergman. Among the best-known

films she appeared in were Alfred Hitchcock’s two classics, To Catch A Thief and North by Northwest, both starring Cary Grant. She was only eight years older than Grant when she played his mother in the latter.

Born Jessie Medbury in Chicago, Ill., in 1896, she began her career on the stage, performing in plays ranging from Shakespeare to modern comedies. She wound up on television, where she appeared in scores of shows – often as a mother. One of her roles was as Madame Olga Nemirovitch in The Man from U.N.C.L.E, a popular TV series that starred Robert Vaughn, who also made Ridgefield his home.

Miss Landis was also a writer who penned several comedies for the stage. She detailed much of her life in her autobiography, “You Won’t Be So Pretty, But You Will Know More,” about which one critic wrote: “It’s a pity it is true. It would make such wonderful fiction.” 

Miss Landis, whose husband was Army Major General J. F. R. Seitz, died in 1972 and is buried in Branchville Cemetery.

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.   

Gene H. Ellis: 

Actress Turned Writer

Gene Ellis was talented on the stage, on the ice and on the typewriter. The former actress was for many years a writer of several of the most popular “soap operas” on television.

Born Gene M. Hufeisen in Seattle, Wash., in 1933,  she spent much of her childhood in Fairbanks, Alaska, where her father had a construction company. She began ice skating as a grammar school student. She also studied dance with a young man named Donald Saddler, who at the time was serving in the U.S. Army in Alaska, but who later became a Tony Award-winning choreographer for both Broadway and Hollywood.

She returned to Seattle to complete her high school education, and continued to study both skating and dance, but ultimately decided to pursue the latter. She majored in drama at the University of Washington, but quit after a year to move to Europe to work on her acting and dancing. She dubbed films in Rome and studied dance in Paris.

Ellis moved to New York City in 1953 to pursue her theatrical career. After winning dancing roles in summer stock, she made her Broadway debut in the Josh Logan production of “Wish You Were Here.”

Her husband, Ralph, noted that the production was “complete with onstage swimming pool — she lied about not being able to swim so she wouldn’t have to get wet eight performances a week.”

She then joined the national tour of the musical “The Boy Friend.”  She danced many major roles in summer stock, “always to critical acclaim,” said Ralph, who had been a fellow actor; they met and married in 1961.

Returning to New York City, she acted in several off-Broadway shows, including a   revival of Shaw’s “Buoyant Billions” and “Mrs. Warren’s Profession” and became a featured performer in both winter and summer stock, appearing with such actors as John Raitt and Howard Keel. 

She also appeared on television in the 1957 musical special of “Pinocchio” with Mickey Rooney and Walter Slezak, and a year later she used her skating talents in the TV musical special, “Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates” with Tab Hunter and Dick Button.

In 1963, she retired from  acting and dancing — in her final performance, in the Paper Mill Playhouse production of “West Side Story,” she was two months pregnant.

By 1964 Ralph had also stopped acting and had turned instead to a career as a full-time writer of daytime television dramas. After the birth of their third child, the Ellises moved to Ridgefield in 1972 where their fourth  child — Ridgefielder Catherine Ellis Dulecki — was born. 

That same year, her husband persuaded Gene to try writing scripts.

“Gene was always interested in writing,” Ralph said. “She wrote a weekly column for the Washington University paper when she was student there.  It was humorous in tone and had a large readership, including a female student, who wrote her ardent fan letters.  Needless to say, the fan was taken aback when they met and she discovered ‘Gene’ was a girl.” 

In high school, she had won first place in a Seventeen Magazine contest for a short story that was subsequently published in the magazine.

Together with Ralph, and also separately, Gene wrote under the name Eugenie Hunt.  

The Ellises wrote for many years in the 1970s and 80s for “As the World Turns,” the second

longest-lived of the television soap operas — started in 1956, it ran 54 seasons until 2010 (only The Guiding Light ran longer, by three years). For several years, they were the head writers on the show, which over the years had featured such budding young actors and actresses as Meg Ryan, Julianne Moore, Parker Posey, Matthew Morrison, Martin Sheen and James Earl Jones.

They also wrote many episodes of  “Search for Tomorrow,” a show that ran from 1951 to 1986. In all, Gene wrote nearly 500 episodes of the program. Among the future stars who appeared on ‘Search’ were Morgan Fairchild, Susan Sarandon, Jill Clayburgh, Kevin Bacon, Lee Grant, Sandy Duncan, Kevin Kline, and Wayne Rogers.

She and her husband were also head writers for “The Doctors.”  On her own, she wrote scripts for “Loving,” “One Life to Live” and “General Hospital.”

Having both acted professionally was an advantage for the Ellises. “An acting background is a tremendous help in writing scripts,” Ralph said. “While some might be total failures at novels, which require descriptive passages, actors are very adept at improvisation and transfer that ability to creating dialogue. The best writers we ever hired were actors.”

When her daughters, Catherine Dulecki and Susan Ellis, were teenagers, their parents sometimes sought their help. “They would often ask me and my sister to read a line or two and tell them if it sounded like something a teenager would say,” Catherine recalled.

Both young women also got a chance to be a part of a show.  “In 1984, my sister and I were in an episode where Jermaine Jackson and a relatively unknown Whitney Houston performed a concert in the fictional town of Oakdale on ‘As The World Turns,’” Catherine said.

Their brothers, Steve and Tom Ellis of Ridgefield, were also on “As the World Turns.”

In 1974  the Ellises won a Writer’s Guild of America award for best daytime show, “Search for Tomorrow.” In the years that followed Gene was also nominated for the Writer’s Guild Award for her work on “One Life to Live” and “Loving.”

Gene Ellis retired from writing in 1994, but remained active locally as a member of the Caudatowa Garden Club and volunteering at the Keeler Tavern Museum.  

The couple had been married for 55 years when Gene died in October 2016 at the age of 82.

Over the years, the Ellises were often asked where they got their plot ideas. “We never used Ridgefield experiences in any direct way, although the tranquility of living here certainly provided a more comfortable creative atmosphere than our years in New York City,” Ralph said.  “Since we didn’t know any murderers, blackmailers, amnesia victims, and only a few adulterers, we made them up.” 

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.

Milton Biow: 

Modern Advertising Leader

What do the Mimosa subdivision, Philip Morris cigarettes, Lucille Ball, and box-top premiums have in common? Milton Biow.

A leader in modern-day advertising techniques, Mr. Biow rose from humble beginnings to operate one of the largest ad agencies, write now-classic ad copy, create radio and TV shows, and come up with the name of what is now a North Street neighborhood.

Milton Harry Biow (pronounced “be-o”) was born in 1892 in New York City. Although he barely graduated from grade school, he had set up his own advertising agency by the age of 25. The Biow Company grew to become one of the nation’s largest agencies, grossing at times hundreds of millions in today’s dollars.

He created such advertising slogans as “It’s Bulova Watch Time,” “Pepsi Cola Hits the Spot,” and “Call for Philip Morris.”  He is also said to have originated the idea of sending in cereal and other product box tops for premiums.

The New York Times once said that among the products “he made household names” were Anacin, Eversharp, Ruppert beer, Schenley whiskey, and Lady Esther cosmetics. 

“We moved them by the ton,” he’d often say. “We are a tonnage agency.”

Although he promoted the sale of  many tobacco and alcohol products, Mr. Biow never smoked or drank himself.

Also involved in radio and TV, Mr. Biow created the “Take It Or Leave It” radio show which became the $64,000 Question on TV. He  also brought to television ”The Lucy-Desi Show,” starring Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz.

He was credited with being an originator of the modern school of advertising and the first to use radio and TV “spot” commercials to saturate the national market, especially for watches.

“All watches offer time,” he once explained. “Bulova watches not only give the time, but provide beauty, a source of pride, an added measure of value to the user. It’s advertising which sells the plus difference.”

Although he shied away from publicity most of his life, Mr. Biow published an autobiography in 1964, called “Butting In: An Adman Speaks Out.” Promotional notes for the book said, “He never really cared much about money — and he made millions. He was not in politics — yet he ‘ghosted’ some of the smartest lines ever spoken by a president of the United States….He still doesn’t know an adverb from a preposition — but he has just written the gayest, wisest, frankest, most hell-raising book on advertising ever published.”

The president was Franklin D. Roosevelt who, according to one author, used “the catchy slogans that Milton Biow passed along for his speeches.”

Mr. Biow came to Ridgefield in 1952, buying as a weekend and summer retreat a 37-acre estate on North Street that had been called “Wood Acres.” He changed the name to “Mimosa” after planting trees of that species around the house. (Accustomed to warmer climates, the trees had died off by the 1960s.)

In 1964 he sold the estate to Ernestine Tuccio whose husband, Jerry, subdivided the property into Mimosa Estates.  (Mr. Tuccio at first wanted to call the main road into the development “Airline Circle” because so many airline pilots were buying his houses in the early 1960s.

The Planning Commission felt the name wasn’t an appropriate and Mimosa Circle was used instead.) 

The estate house, painted “Mimosa yellow,” was retained and still stands.

In 1956, Mr. Biow closed his agency to devote himself to other interests, including his autobiography and work with the National Conference of Christians and Jews, of which he was a founder. He was also active in the United Jewish Appeal, the United Hospital Fund and the Muscular Dystrophy Association. 

He died in 1976 in Manhattan at the age of 83. 

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. 

Jacqueline Babbin: 

Early writer for television

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Irene Kampen:
Life without Owen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ball won two Emmy Awards during the show's seven-year run.
Although she wanted to, Kampen never did get to meet Lucille Ball. She probably did meet Vivian Vance, who played Ethel Mertz on both I Love Lucy and The Lucy Show — Vance lived on Route 116 in nearby North Salem.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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