Blanche Shoemaker Wagstaff: 
Beautiful, Talented & Gutsy

Blanche Shoemaker was no ordinary New York City socialite. The glamorous former debutante spent two years driving injured soldiers from battle zones in World War I and was a poet so popular she was nominated for a Nobel prize — by a member of the Nobel family.

As Mrs. Donald Carr, she once lived in Ridgefield with her  dog- and golf-loving husband on an estate they called “Birchglade.”

A native of Manhattan, Blanche Le Roy Shoemaker was born in 1888 to a well-to-do family — her father had been a railroad pioneer and president. She began writing when she was only seven years old and by 16,  Town and Country magazine had published her first poetry.

She made her social “debut” in 1905, the same year she was painted by the noted French portrait artist, Theobald Chartran, and the same year her first book of poems, The Song of Youth, was published. She was only 17.

In 1907, she married 1904 Columbia graduate Alfred Wagstaff Jr. who had apparently not yet found gainful employment after his recent motor trip around Europe. The New York Times coverage of the wedding gushed over the bride, calling her “highly cultured and exceedingly handsome,” noting that her first book of poetry had come out two years earlier and a second volume of verse, Woven of Dreams, was due out soon.  (Harrison Fisher, an artist once famous for his paintings of young women — especially for magazine covers,  later pronounced her “America’s most beautiful woman.”)

Blanche and Alfred had one child, Alfred III, born in 1908, and were divorced in 1920.  He served many years as president of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and died in 1930. Though she had divorced Alfred, she continued to write her books under the name of Blanche Shoemaker Wagstaff for the rest of her life.

When the United States became involved in World War I, Blanche Wagstaff helped found organizations that  provided stateside war support such as feeding, caring for and transporting soldiers, veterans and war workers. Apparently feeling her work stateside was not enough, she went to France and became an ambulance driver for two years, hauling wounded soldiers from war zones to hospitals.

It was perhaps through her war work that she met an Army veteran, Donald Carr, who had also served in France. They were married in a small ceremony in 1921 among only a few close relatives and friends, said The Times which, nonetheless devoted more space to this small Vermont wedding than it had to her first full-scale ceremony in New York City.

And The Times offered glowing coverage of her life as a young woman, including listing her six books published so far and noting she was founding editor of the Boston Poetry Review.

“She was presented at the Court of St. Jame’s shortly after her debut here and later had a private interview with Pope Pius,” the Times continued. “She has traveled extensively in Italy and in the Orient and has made several campaign trips in the great Sahara desert. She was engaged in war work, driving her motor at the front, was in the War Camp Community Service, and was one of the founders of the National League of Women’s Service and other war organizations.”

       A descendant of a couple of Mayflower people, Carr was a real estate broker, a writer, and loved dogs and golf. His canine speciality was springer spaniels and he was widely used as a judge of hunting shows involving those dogs. As an accomplished amateur golfer, he was well known, especially in Westchester County, and won a number of tournaments.

       Meanwhile, Blanche continued to write poetry, turning out a total of nearly 20 books in her lifetime. Early on she became known for sensual poems — a dozen of her verses appeared in a 1921 anthology called Poetica Erotica, which contains poems from Latins like Catulus and Ovid right up to modern writers. Her interests apparently changed a bit as she grew older; in 1944, she wrote The Beloved Son, a life of Jesus in verse.  She even turned to drama, writing a couple of poetic plays. H.L. Mencken praised one of them, Alcestis, for its “constant novelty and ingenuity of epithet,” but also criticized her for sometimes letting “her adjectives run riot.”

Her poetry was popular not only here, but in Europe, and in 1933, Ludwig Nobel, nephew of the founder of the Nobel prize awards, nominated Blanche Shoemaker Wagstaff  for the poetry award. Her book, Mortality and Other Poems, “is popular in Scandinavia,” said the Associated Press at the time.

The Carrs had been living in Bedford, N.Y., before coming to Ridgefield in the mid-1930s. The Social Register lists their home here as “Birchglade,” an estate we have been unable to identify but which they probably leased or rented.   In 1939  her son, Alfred Wagstaff III, became involved in establishing a summer theater, called The New England Playhouse, located in the Congregational Church House on West Lane. (The church house, which had been the old Ridgefield Clubhouse, burned down in 1978.)  Although  the operation struggled in its first two years, it was starting to draw sizable audiences when World War II came along and the effort ended.

In 1940, the Carrs were living on Ridgefield Road in nearby Wilton. They were in Hendersonville, N.C., by 1961 when Donald Carr died there at the age of 74.

Blanche was living with her son Alfred and grandchildren in Egham, Surrey, England when she suffered a stroke and died in 1967 (many profiles of her incorrectly report she died in 1957). She was 81. Blanche and Donald are buried together in Woodlawn Cemetery, the Bronx. Her son died in 1982.

Reflecting her husband’s interest in springer spaniels, Blanche Wagstaff wrote the 1927 book,  Bob, the Spaniel: A True Story, which among other things told how their dog saved them from their burning farmhouse.  Bob had also saved another dog from drowning and in 1930, Bob received a silver medal from the “Dog Hero Legion” in New York City.

Blanche may not have gotten her Nobel, but Bob got his silver.

Anthony Scaduto: 

Covering The Bad and The Beautiful

During his long life as a reporter and as a biographer, Tony Scaduto covered the bad and the beautiful — from Maffia dons to masterful musicians like Bob Dylan and the Beatles and celebrities like Marilyn Monroe. 

A man who was known for wielding words well even when in high school,  Anthony Scaduto was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., in 1932, son of a food importer and a seamstress. After graduating from high school, he got a job as a part-time copy boy at the New York Post to help pay for his tuition at Brooklyn College. He quit college after two years.

“I gave that up after I realized I was getting a better education on the streets of New York than I’d ever get in college,” he told Press interviewer Rick Honey in 1975.

One of his first beats was the police headquarters in Brooklyn. “That’s where I learned a lot about cops, some of whom I hated and some of whom I loved,” he said.

His coverage of the police included a much-praised 1964 series on the NYPD that, said The New York Times in 2017,  “captured the tensions of that time, dynamics still evident a half-century later.”  

Scaduto had written, “The New York policeman today is a perplexed, sometimes frightened man. From the cop on the beat to the highest-ranking superior, he points with pride to the praise the force has received from some quarters for its careful, bend-over-backwards handling of civil rights demonstrations, which are often admittedly deliberate attempts to provoke arrest. At the same time, he is bewildered, honestly shocked, to discover that a large number of Negroes and Puerto Ricans distrust and fear the police uniform and are expressing their hostility more and more openly.”

Covering crime — especially the mob — was one of Scaduto’s specialties at the Post. He grew up in a Brooklyn neighborhood controlled by the Maffia and, coming home from playing baseball one day when he was 12, saw the victim of a mob hit on the sidewalk in front of his friend’s house. “I was constantly aware of who the so-called wise guys were — the men in the mob or on the fringes of it,” he told Honey.

After 20 years at The Post, he left to focus on freelancing, mostly books, the first of which was  Bob Dylan: An Intimate Biography,  published in 1972. It took a journalistic look at Dylan’s life and work, and has received much acclaim over the years. “It is regarded as an influential book in the field, being one of the first to take an investigative approach to writing about his subject,” said one critic.

Among the fans of the book was Dylan himself. “I like your book,” the singer-songwriter told Scaduto after reading the manuscript when it was 80% complete. “That’s the weird thing about it.” Scaduto had allowed Dylan to see the incomplete manuscript if Dylan would consent to giving a rare interview. Dylan did.

In 1976, Scaduto produced Scapegoat: The Lonesome Death of Bruno Richard Hauptmann, an investigation into the trial of the man who was executed in April 1936 for kidnapping and killing the Lindbergh baby. “Mr. Scaduto, aided by his experience covering crime for The Post, built a convincing case that justice had not been served,” The Times said. “He found evidence that had been withheld, witnesses who had bent the truth, and more.”

“Scapegoat should be compulsory reading for those who fear that postwar rulings by the Supreme Court, protecting the rights of the accused, have tied the hands of justice,” a Times reviewer had said.

Scaduto also wrote biographies of Mick Jagger, Frank Sinatra,   and the Beatles as well as many articles for Playboy, Penthouse, Rolling Stone, and Newsday, the Long Island newspaper. His Lucky Luciano: The Man Who Modernized the Mafia,  published in 1975, was written under the pen name Tony Sciacca.

He also tried his hand at fiction, turning out a 1988 novel, A Terrible Time to Die, for G.P. Putnam’s.

Scaduto may have been introduced to Ridgefield in the early 1970s when he came to town to write an article for The Post about the growing battle over the use of certain books in the Ridgefield schools — part of the so-called “book burning.” While he didn’t like how the school board was handling the issue, he did like the town. In 1973, he moved to 125 Grandview Drive. “I was tired of New York City and its craziness,” he said.

Eventually, however, he apparently missed his old stomping grounds — by 1980, he had moved back to Brooklyn. During the 1990s he wrote many pieces for Newsday, the Long Island newspaper.

He died in 2017 at the age of 85.

Even as he was digging into and writing about popular musicians and unpopular crime bosses,  Tony Scaduto as a Ridgefielder kept his eye on the local scene, penning pointed letters to the Press about the goings on.

In 1975, for instance, he quickly took on a Ridgefielder who had written a letter to the editors, opposing spending town government money on the privately owned Ridgefield Library. 

“The library building is such a terrible waste of space and our master planners should find other uses for the property,” Scaduto responded the next week. “Let us sell all the books for kindling — I hope no one objects that that smacks of conservation, so pinkish a word — and tear down the building and then construct on the site an old-fashioned bowling green. And when the Rip Van Winkles of this town awake, they’ll feel perfectly at home.”

Kathryn Morgan Ryan: 

A Woman of Words

Often working in the shadow of her famous husband, Kathryn Morgan Ryan was nonetheless an accomplished writer and researcher, who wrote four books and had a successful career in magazines. 

The work through which she touched the most lives may well have been as a researcher and editor on her husband Cornelius Ryan’s World War II books, including “The Longest Day” and “A Bridge Too Far.” 

Mrs. Ryan grew up in Iowa, the setting for her 1972 novel, “The Betty Tree,” which The New York Times described as “a novel about Midwestern attitudes and two adolescent children coping with affluent, busy parents.” (She admitted later that she wrote “The Betty Tree” after a dispute  with her husband in which he maintained she could not write a book on her own; she wanted to prove him wrong.)

In 1946, at the age of 19, she graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism and had an early career that included writing and editing for Conde Nast magazines.  She was an editor at House and Garden until 1953,  starting out making “the extraordinary sum of $30 a week, but we were encouraged to wear hats in the office — the mark, in those days, of a lady editor,” she said.

From 1955 to 1960,  she was an associate editor with House and Home magazine.

“I was the resident house author on Frank Lloyd Wright,” she told an interviewer in 1972. “While my husband was roaming the world in search of one story after another, I seemed to be knee-deep in bricks and mortar.”

She and Cornelius Ryan were married in 1950, they had a son and a daughter, and for a while Kathryn Ryan was supporting the family while he was researching “The Longest Day.”

“Life really became difficult for us,” she said. “I was working full-time because my job was the Ryans’ only source of income. Our three-room apartment in New York was almost uninhabitable. The children slept in what we laughingly called ‘the master bedroom.’ We bedded down in a room that wouldn’t have made a good-sized closet. Everywhere else, the apartment was piled high with research.”

At the same time, she was also raising two children and helping her husband. “I organized, cross-referenced, filed mountains of information and edited copy,” she said. “Sometimes we worked until 2 or 3 a.m.”

During the same period she also wrote two books, “House & Garden’s Book of Building” and, with comedian Alan King, “Anyone Who Owns His Own Home Deserves It.”

Kathryn Ryan is best known for writing “A Private Battle,” the story of her husband’s death

from cancer, which became a Book of the Month Club selection, was condensed by Reader’s Digest, and made into a television special. The book, which bears her husband’s name as co-author, is based on secret notes and tape recordings her husband kept as he was dying from prostate cancer. The notes were discovered after his death.

“Connie was so objective he couldn't resist interviewing an ashtray if one happened to be there, and I think he was both fascinated and repelled by cancer,” she told a Times interviewer. “I think his attitudes indicate he probably would have written a pretty definitive book about it.”

She decided to use his notes to write “A Private Battle,” which was published by Simon & Schuster. 

It was a difficult, but cathartic experience, she told The Times. “Connie’s great desk sits just nine feet across the office from mine, and as I was writing it, I would be so immersed in the book I would really feel he was there.”

Over the years she received many honors. Some were unusual including, for her work on World War II, being made an honorary member of four paratroop units in the United States, England, and Poland. 

A Ridgefielder for nearly 30 years, she was active in community organizations, including St. Stephen’s Church, the Ridgefield Garden Club, and the District Nurse Association. She lived for many years on Old Branchville Road in a Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired house of redwood, cypress and 84 windows overlooking eight acres. After her husband’s death, she moved to  Jackson Court in the village and some years later, to Florida where she died in 1993 at the age of 68.

Kathryn Ryan’s lifelong love of words came from her mother, who was an English teacher. “We played great games of parsing English sentences,” she recalled in a 1976 Ridgefield Press interview. “We learned grammar in a very entertaining fashion.”

She felt English often wasn’t well taught. “The problem today was the same thing my husband encountered and overcame in writing. History doesn’t have to be dull, and neither does English. It all goes back to imagination, to making something truly interesting to the pupil, to make him want to participate in what you are teaching.

“Once you get participation, you don’t have someone in the back of the room yawning.” 

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. 

Eric Sonnichsen: 

Seaman and Wordsmith

Seaman, writer, boxer, and show dog breeder: Eric Sonnichsen was no ordinary Ridgefielder.

The New York City native, whose mother was a Russian countess and a journalist for The International Herald Tribune, ran away from home at the age of 16 (his father had done the same thing at 12). 

He sailed on freighters around the world, crossed the country on freight trains, and boxed professionally on three continents, including in Golden Gloves competition. He worked in the lumber mills of the Pacific Northwest and was a gandy dancer for railroads, laying and repairing tracks. 

But he was also writing, and H.L. Mencken, then editor of The American Mercury, accepted his first story when Mr. Sonnichsen was 19 years old. He also sold work to Story magazine. 

While he continued to write most of his life, he stopped trying to sell his work after he went back to sea. “He was bad at marketing,” said his daughter, actress Ingrid Sonnichsen. 

He spent more than 45 years as a merchant seaman, including service aboard Liberty ships plying the North Atlantic during World War II. Twice his vessels were torpedoed by German submarines. He retired in 1973 as a first mate. 

He and his wife, Muriel Gallick, a Broadway actress whom he married at the Stage Door Canteen, came to Ridgefield in 1965 and operated Meriking Kennels, breeding and showing German shepherds. 

Mrs. Sonnichsen, who most of her life was afraid of dogs, became so enchanted with them that she wound up an American Kennel Club official recognized to judge 26 breeds. She died a year and a day before her husband. He died Dec. 31, 1999, the day before “the new millennium,” at the age of 90. 

Clare Boothe Luce: 

A Most Admired Woman

Clare Boothe Luce “had those sought-after qualities – good looks, style, a sharp tongue, and great boldness – that made her one of the most popular and admired women of her day,” The Ridgefield Press said in her obituary in 1987. 

She was a famous writer, a congresswoman,  an ambassador,  and the wife of one of the most powerful men in the country, yet Luce was born into near poverty in 1903.  Her musician father soon abandoned her chorus girl mother, who worked hard to see that her daughter was well-educated. 

And Clare Boothe Luce worked hard to use that education. By 1930, she was a $20-a-week writer for Vogue and wrote pieces for the New Yorker; three years later she was managing editor of Vanity Fair. 

She wrote plays, movies and novels, including a 1940 best seller, “Europe in Spring.” Several of her plays were on Broadway, including the smash hit, “The Women,”  which also became a popular movie.

She was nominated for an Academy Award for  “Come to the Stable,” a 1949 film that tells the story of two French nuns who come to a small New England town and involve the townsfolk in helping them to build a children's hospital.

As a Greenwich resident she served as Fourth District congressman from 1943 until 1946. 

She was only the 29th woman to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives, but most of her predecessors took office after the death of a husband or father. Luce was only the 13th to be elected on her own merits.

After she retired from Congress in 1946, she and her husband, Time-Life magazine publisher Henry Luce,  bought the 100-acre former estate of Wadsworth R. Lewis  on Great Hill Road.  She began participating in the Ridgefield community, and was active in St. Mary’s Parish.

At a PTA meeting here in 1950, she urged more federal support of schools, particularly “Negro” schools in the South. 

A devout Catholic, she also favored public support of non-public schools. “To deny aid to private and parochial schools seems to me to be class legislation,” she told the PTA.

Mrs. Luce also followed local politics and among other events, attended a famous 1950s GOP caucus in town in which six people — four of them women — sought the party endorsement to run for state representative (Nancy Carroll Draper won).

During the Eisenhower administration, Mrs. Luce, a staunch Republican, was appointed U.S. ambassador to Italy. In 1962, she was a rumored U.S. Senate candidate from Connecticut, but the Luces both changed their voting address to New York and she ran unsuccessfully for the Senate there on the Conservative ticket. 

In 1966 the Luces sold their 22-room mansion; Henry Luce died a year later. Clare Luce eventually moved to Hawaii and late in life still held such stature in the party that when George H.W. Bush was first running for president, he visited her in Honolulu  to get her support. 

She died in 1987 at the age of 84.

Clare Boothe Luce was very quotable, and among the most famous – and pointed – observations was, “A man’s home may seem to be his castle on the outside; inside is more often his nursery.”

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.

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 

Max Gunther: 

A Prolific Writer

“The English language has an enormous amount of power if it’s used right,” Max Gunther told The Ridgefield Press in 1976. “In English, you can roll up your sleeves and really say what you want with impact.” 

And for nearly 50 years, doing it right was Max Gunther’s work. He wrote 26 books – several of them best-sellers – and countless magazine articles. 

A native of England, Gunther came to the United States as a boy, served in the Army, and graduated from Princeton in 1949. He began his career as news editor and staff writer for Business Week from 1950 to 1955, and was a contributing editor to Time. He also wrote for  Saturday Evening Post, Playboy, McCall’s, Reader’s Digest, Redbook, TV Guide, and many other magazines. In 1968, he became a contributing editor of True.

His first book, “Split Level Trap” in 1960, described suburban life and became a best-seller, as did “The Weekenders,”  a 1964 popular study of how Americans spent their weekends. 

His specialty was books on wealth. — one of his most quoted observations is “It is unlikely that God’s plan for the universe includes making your rich.”

A top seller was “The Zurich Axioms: The Rules of Risk and Reward Used by Generations of

Swiss Bankers.” The 1985 book was inspired by his father, Franz, who worked for what is now UBS, which is called the second largest wealth management organization in the world.

He also wrote “The Very, Very Rich and How They Got That Way” (1973) and “Instant Millionaires: The Secrets of Overnight Success”, both published in 1973.

Most of his   other books were non-fiction, many dealing with mystical subjects, including “D. B. Cooper: What Really Happened” which appeared in 1986, and “Wall Street and Witchcraft: An Investigation into Extreme and Unusual Investment Techniques.” Many of his books are still in print today.

Gunther lived on Peaceable Ridge and later Beechwood Lane from 1960 until 1987 when he moved to Heritage Village. He died in 1998 at the age of 72.

In a 1976 Ridgefield Press interview, Gunther credited his schooling in England and New Jersey with fostering his interest in writing. In England, “even in the very early grades, they were forcing us to write essays and they gave us topics that we could get our teeth into and could express our emotions about, not just dry expository subjects.”

In his Maplewood, N.J., high school, “there was a great deal of emphasis of writing. We had a couple of student magazines and a student newspaper and, of course, the yearbook, and there was abundant opportunity for writing. In this high school, writing was presented to us as an alternate after-school activity — as a way in which one could have some fun and get one’s creative urges working. It was presented as sort of an indoor sport, not as a type of work.

“I spent more time after school sitting at a typewriter than doing sports and things like that which other kids were doing.”

Samuel Grafton: 

He’d Rather Be Right

Samuel Grafton, who lived on Barry Avenue from 1948 until 1962, was a prolific writer who was accomplished in many genres. He wrote a nationally syndicated current affairs column,  penned several books on politics and economics, freelanced for magazines, published a popular mystery novel, scripted television dramas, and with his wife, Edith, wrote a Broadway play.

Today, one of his observations is still being frequently quoted: “A penny will hide the biggest star in the universe if you hold it close enough to your eye.” 

Born in Brooklyn in 1907, Mr. Grafton grew up in Philadelphia, and began writing for The New Republic when he was only a teenager. In 1929, the year he graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, he won a $500 prize ($7,000 in 2016 dollars) from the American Mercury magazine in a contest for an article on the faults of American higher education. 

He had planned to go to law school but was swayed by the editor of the Philadelphia Record to join his staff; Grafton became an editorial writer there from 1929 to 1934. 

He then signed on as an editor of The New York Post and in 1939 began a daily column that appeared in 120 newspapers for more than 10 years. Despite its name, “I’d Rather Be Right,” the column had a liberal bent. The name played on the old adage, “I’d rather be right than president,” but was also meant to reflect the fact that he truly believed all his opinions were absolutely correct.

Early in World War II, Mr. Grafton was the leading American journalist supporting de Gaulle and the Free French, and denouncing Vichy as a Fascist front. For this, he later received the French Legion of Honor. 

While a Ridgefielder he often wrote for major magazines, including Look, McCall’s, Saturday Evening Post, and even TV Guide. During the 1950s, he also wrote dramas for television shows, including Kraft Theatre and General Electric Theater.

In 1955, Mr. Grafton published a mystery novel, “A Most Contagious Game,”  about  a magazine reporter who joined the New York City underworld to get his story. The book got good reviews, sold well here and abroad, and was made into a television drama broadcast on Westinghouse Studio One in October of that year.

After leaving Ridgefield, he and his wife founded Grafton Publications, a small firm that produced newsletters on youth and drug addiction. He died in 1997 at the age of 90 and Edith in 2000. 

Their son, Dr. Anthony Grafton, who grew up here, became Dodge Professor of History at Princeton, and author of 10 books of history. Son John was an executive with Dover Publications and daughter Abigail, a clinical psychologist and organization consultant in Berkeley, Calif.

Howard Fast: 

Prolific Novelist

Ridgefield has been home to countless writers, but few as prolific as Howard Fast. 

The high school dropout published his first novel before he was 20 and by the turn of the 21st Century, had written more than 80 books of fiction and nonfiction under his own name and a series of mysteries as E.V. Cunningham. Literally millions of copies of Fast titles have been printed in a dozen languages, and many have stayed in print for years. 

Despite all this output, he took the time out to write a regular column for his local paper.v“Howard is bored to death when he's not writing,” said his wife, Bette, in a 1989 Ridgefield Press interview. 

Born in 1914 in New York City, the son of a factory worker,  Fast produced his first novel, “Two Valleys,” in 1933 when he was 18 years old and hitching rides around the country, looking for work. 

Six years later, when he was 24, his novel about Valley Forge, “Conceived in Liberty,” was published, sold a   million copies and was translated into more than 10 languages.

During World War II, he wrote copy for the Voice of America, working for the U.S. Office of War Information. 

Because of the poverty his family experienced when he was a child, he said,  he joined the Communist Party in 1943, a fact that later got him blacklisted; even his famous patriotic book, “Citizen Tom Paine” (1943), long a classroom classic, was banned for a while in the New York City schools because he was a communist. 

He was jailed for three months in 1950 for refusing to disclose some names before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. In 1952, he ran for Congress on the American Labor Party ticket.

Because he was blacklisted, he had to self-publish what became probably his most famous book, “Spartacus.” He also wrote the screenplay of the Stanley Kubrick movie starring starring Kirk Douglas with score by Ridgefielder Alex North. (North also wrote the music for “Cheyenne Autumn,” made from Fast’s novel, “The Last Frontier.”)

Most of his books were historical novels, many of them based on true stories. Another was “Freedom Road,” which was turned into a 1979 TV mini-series starring Muhammad Ali as an ex-slave who became a U.S. senator.

In 1956, he broke with the Communist Party and began a renewed career.  “I was part of a generation that believed in socialism and finally found that belief corroded and destroyed," The New York Times reported him saying in 1981. “That is not renouncing Communism or socialism. It's reaching a certain degree of enlightenment about what the Soviet Union practices. To be dogmatic about a cause you believe in at the age of 20 or 30 is not unusual. But to be dogmatic at age 55 or 60 shows a lack of any learning capacity.”

Fast lived on Florida Hill Road in the 1960s and early 1970s when he moved to Redding, and among the books he wrote while here was “The Hessian” (1972), a Revolutionary War novel set in and around Ridgefield. As are several of his classics, it is still taught in many schools today. 

Among his other popular books are “April Morning” and “The Immigrants.”  

Over his lifetime he also wrote stage plays, screenplays, television plays, poetry, non-fiction books for children, popular political biographies including two books on Yugoslavia's Marshal Tito, and a history of the Jews.

In 1980, the Fasts moved to Greenwich where he died in 2003 at the age of 88.

“The only thing that infuriates me,” he once said, “is that I have more unwritten stories in me than I can conceivably write in a lifetime.” 

Fanny Crosby: 

A Pioneering Woman of Song

Fanny Crosby was among the leading hymn-writers of all time, a blind woman who spent her formative years in Ridgefield. She wrote thousands of hymns, including “Blessed Assurance,” “Safe in the Arms of Jesus,” “Praise Him! Praise Him!,” and “Close to Thee.”

But while her production of religious music brought her fame, she was accomplished — even a pioneer — in others fields as well.

Born in 1820 in nearby Brewster, N.Y., Frances Jane “Fanny” Crosby was blinded at six weeks by a disease. A few months later, her father died, leaving his 21-year-old wife a widow. 

Fanny and her mother came to Ridgefield when she was nine, living with Mr. and Mrs. Elijah Hawley on Main Street on the south corner of Branchville Road in a house that’s no longer there. 

 “Mrs. Hawley, a kind Christian lady…who had no children of her own, became deeply interested in me, and under her supervision I acquired a thorough knowledge of the Bible,” Crosby wrote in one of her two autobiographies: “She gave me a number of chapters each week to learn, sometimes as many as five…and at the end of the first 12 months, I could repeat a large portion of the first four books of the Old Testament and the four Gospels.

 “The good Mrs. Hawley was kind in every respect and sought to teach me many practical lessons that I now remember with gratitude and affection.” 

When  Crosby was about 15, she left Ridgefield to attend the New York Institute for the Blind. Soon after graduation from the Institute in 1843, at the age of 23, she worked as a lobbyist in Washington, D.C., pleading for support of education for the blind. There she became the first woman to speak in the United States Senate. 

She later appeared before the joint houses of Congress, offering along with her oration this brief poem:

Ye, who here from every state convene,

Illustrious band! may we not hope the scene

You now behold will prove to every mind

Instruction hath a ray to cheer the blind.

Crosby soon joined the teaching staff of the New York Institute for the Blind. At this time she was beginning her writing career, producing non-religious poetry, and there she struck up a close friendship with a fellow teacher who was just 17 years old. His name was Grover Cleveland. The two spent time together after classes. and the teenaged future U.S. president often wrote down poems that Fanny dictated to him. 

She wound up publishing four books of secular poetry.

Crosby’s poetry-writing soon led to song-writing, though most were at first secular or, as she called them, “people’s songs” — probably what we’d today call folk songs. She wrote political songs, patriotic songs (especially during the Civil War), and even cantatas. During the war, she began writing religious songs, both under her own name and pseudonyms, and over her career she penned the lyrics to more than 8,000 hymns.

Crosby once said she wanted her hymns to win a million souls for Christ, and her words were certainly available to many more than a million:  Books containing her songs are said to have sold at least 100 million copies.

Many of Crosby’s hymns were published by Biglow and Main of New York City, one of the first publishers of sacred music. The “Biglow” was Lucius Horatio Biglow who, in 1889, bought an 18th century house on Main Street to create a fine retreat from the city. (When his daughter, Elizabeth Biglow Ballard, died in 1964, she bequeathed that estate to the town. Today, it is Ballard Park.)

Biglow probably came to Ridgefield because of his partner. The “Main” of Biglow and Main was Sylvester Main, born in Ridgefield in 1817 and a childhood friend of Fanny Crosby. “Among the playmates who used to gather on the village green was Sylvester Main who was two or three years older than I,” Crosby recalled.

“He was a prime favorite with the gentler sex, for he used to protect us from the annoyances of more mischievous boys.”

Sylvester Main became a singing-school teacher and wound up in New York City, compiling books of hymn music. He went to work for William Bradbury, music publisher and hymnist, and when Bradbury died around 1868, he and Lucius Biglow partnered to take over the firm, calling it Biglow and Main.

Sylvester’s son, Hubert Platt Main, was also born in Ridgefield, and composed more than 1,000 works, including the music for hundreds of popular hymns of the mid-19th century, among them “We Shall Meet Beyond the River,”  “Blessed Homeland,” and “The Bright Forever” — the words of the last two were written by Fanny Crosby.  

In the 1915 book, “Fanny Crosby’s Story of Ninety-Four Years,” she called him “one of my most precious friends.” The book includes a picture of the two, seated together, called “Fast Friends”

Fanny Crosby died in 1915 at the age of 94 and is buried in Bridgeport. She had been married for a while, but eventually separated. The couple had one child, who died as a baby. 

Hubert Main, who died in 1925, is buried in New Jersey beneath a stone that says, “We shall meet beyond the river.” —based on “Hidden History of Ridgefield”

Robert W. McGlynn: 

Beloved Man

Many of us often forget the impact that teachers have had on us. Pulitzer Prize-winning writer John McPhee never forgot a Ridgefield native who had a major influence on his life.

    Robert William McGlynn was born in 1921 into a working class family who lived on Fairview Avenue. His father, J. Edward McGlynn, was a house painter who late in life became an acting postmaster of Ridgefield.

    McGlynn attended Ridgefield schools and excelled at Ridgefield High School. In his senior year he was editor of The Hilltop Dispatch, the school newspaper, which that year won high praise in the Columbia University scholastic press competition. He was ranked second in his class of 37 students  (behind Stata Norton, who went on to become an acclaimed professor of pharmacology and dean of the University of Kansas School of Health Professions).

    As #2 in his class, McGlynn became salutatorian at the 1939 graduation. His speech, called “Through the Rough,” likened life to a game of golf, in which a group of men play the 18th hole. One player gets a hole in one while others, running into obstacles with their shots, struggle to

reach the cup. The strugglers are gaining more from the game — or from life, he suggests. “It is always wisest and best to seek that goal by the more difficult pass, for with the dumps and the knocks come the care and experience demanded by the importance of the position to be attained,” he says. “Those same bumps and knocks mold the character of the individual and the more intricately molded the character, the more capable the individual.”

One sentence in his talk, describing stronger vs. weaker players, perhaps hinted at one of his own struggles: “Determination, education and competency are ready and willing to back up the weaker.” In his senior year, his physician told McGlynn his health was too fragile for him to attend college and that he might not live beyond the age of 21.

McGlynn ignored the doctor’s advice and went to Wesleyan University where, in 1942, he was chosen a member of Wesleyan’s Honors College. Early on in his college years, he had planned to become a psychologist, “an outgrowth of my profound interest in human nature and all its intricacies,” he once told Karl Nash, editor of The Ridgefield Press.

However, McGlynn apparently found literature more rewarding than psychology. After he graduated in 1943 he was immediately hired as an English instructor at Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts, where he eventually became a legend.

At Deerfield, around 1948, McGlynn met a new student named John McPhee, who had transferred for a post-graduate senior year after completing Princeton High School and before entering Princeton University. Though McPhee never actually had him as a classroom teacher, McGlynn became both a mentor and a lifelong friend. 

In a 1996 essay McPhee recalled one of his first encounters with McGlynn — on a football practice field.

 “Attendance was taken exactly 17 times a day,” McPhee wrote, remarking on how closely

Deerfield students were watched. “In fall, attendance was taken on the Lower Level by Robert McGlynn with a clipboard. Relying on recognition alone, he checked off names. In the ranks and files of lightweight football calisthenics, he failed to see me. He walked around behind my jumping and flapping teammates, and found me lying on the ground looking at the sky. He liked that. He checked me off. In the extended indolence on the grass, he recognized essence of writer.”

    McPhee biographer Norman Sims describes McGlynn as “a voracious reader with an Irish background and a babbling, fluid way of talking.” He got McPhee excited about literature in a way his classroom teachers never had. One day he’d hand McPhee a book and later McPhee would go back and discuss it with him. “He was willing to talk about them, that was the thing,” McPhee said. “Like the students, he lived there the whole time and the school was his life.” 

And talk he did. McGlynn was famous for his amazing outpourings. As McPhee put it in 1984, his words “come in cloudbursts, in flooded rivers, braided cataracts, foaming white cascades. Kick him in the leg and words pour out his ears.”

In the foreword to McGlynn’s only novel, Ten Trial Street, McPhee wrote that McGlynn “became, among other things, a student of his students, exposing their innards with rays of humor that went to the bone but cut nothing. He led us up the hill to Joyce and Conrad, and down the other side to meet ourselves. He was prodigal with his talent — that brook he was babbling wherever he might be. It was for anyone. It was for me. As a writer now, I am forever grateful to him. And, as it happens, I was never in his class.”

McPhee biographer Michael Pearson put it simply: “McGlynn sparked in McPhee a deeper love of reading than he had ever experienced.”

During his years at Deerfield, McGlynn became widely known for inspiring many young writers and teachers, and for his interest in the literature of Ireland, birthplace of his grandmother and his great-great grandfather. He brought several Irish poets to the campus to speak and work with with students — one, Peter Fallon, spent a year at Deerfield. These visits helped spark McGlynn’s interest in publishing the works of Fallon and others by creating the Deerfield Press, a publishing house

described in its day as “important in the worlds of letters and small presses.”

In 1984, the year he retired, Deerfield Press published the small book, The Little Brown House: A Garland for Robert McGlynn. Among its contributors were poets Seamus Heaney and Robert Creeley. And, of course, John McPhee.

Three years later, alumni and friends donated $850,000 toward establishing the Robert W. McGlynn Chair in the Humanities at Deerfield Academy.

After his retirement Bob McGlynn moved to a log cabin in Warrenton, Va. He read  four to five books a week, gave readings of Irish poetry in the area and maintained a sizable correspondence with former students around the world. (More than two dozen of those students became school, college or university English teachers.)

McGlynn also eschewed technology of almost any kind. “I know nothing of faxes, word processors and computers,” he told a friend around 1990. “I don’t even own a telephone.”

He was only 72 when he died in 1993 — but he was long past 21. His ashes are buried in St. Mary’s Cemetery. 

Among the new friends he made in Virginia was newspaper publisher Arthur Arundel, who greatly admired the retired teacher. “There are so few like McGlynn who so completely earn and define the appellation of ‘Beloved Man,’” Arundel wrote after McGlynn’s death.