Noël Regney & Gloria Shayne:

What They Heard

When Noël Regney and his wife, Gloria Shayne, wrote the classic Christmas song, “Do You Hear What I Hear?” they had no idea it would be a hit — or even published.

“Columbia records was doing a cute Christmas song and they asked us to do something offhand for the other side of the record,” Ms. Shayne told The Ridgefield Press in 1969. 

“This is my chance to write a Christmas song for myself,” Mr. Regney later recalled thinking at the time. “I had thought I’d never write a Christmas song: Christmas had become so commercial. But this was the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. In the studio, the producer was listening to the radio to see if we had been obliterated.”  

He was walking home to his apartment on East 52nd Street when he “saw two mothers with their babies in strollers. “The babies were looking at each other and smiling, and all of a sudden, my mood was extraordinary.” He got home, sat down, wrote the lyrics, and handed them to his wife, who wrote the tune. 

“We couldn’t sing it through; it broke us up,” Gloria Shayne said.

The flip-side deal fell through, but Mercury records decided to produce the song, performed by Harry Simeone Choral, as a lead recording. A quarter of a million copies were released just after Thanksgiving 1962; they sold out within a week. 

A year later, Bing Crosby did a version, and for many years and under various artists, “Do You Hear What I Hear?” sold more than one million copies annually.  Now ranked among the 25 top Christmas songs of all time, the composition has been recorded on more than 120 albums by not only Bing Crosby, but also such other stars as Perry Como and Mahalia Jackson. The Regneys also did two other Christmas songs, still sung today: “I Sing Noel” and “Three Wise Men, Three.”

The daughter of an attorney and a professor, Gloria Shayne was born, nee Shain, in Brookline, Mass., in 1923, a next-door neighbor of Joseph and Rose Kennedy and their children—including John F. Kennedy. She earned a bachelor’s degree in music from Boston University and headed for New York City where she worked as a pianist and was an arranger for the likes of Stephen Sondheim and Irving Berlin.

In 1951 she met Noël Regney while she was performing at a hotel in New York City and the two collaborated on a number of hits, including “Rain Rain Go Away,” sung by Bobby Vinton, “Sweet Little Darlin,” by Jo Stafford, and “Another Go Around,” by Perry Como and Doris Day. Ms. Shayne also wrote the hit song, “Goodbye Cruel World,” recorded by James Darren — it was his biggest Billboard Hot 100 hit.

   The Regneys moved to High Ridge in 1969. After their divorce in the mid-1970s, she moved to Stamford, but Mr. Regney remained for many years in Ridgefield, where he was a frequent performer—often at benefits—and could also be found playing the piano at The Elms Inn. He also often made appearances in schools.

   A charming man with a deep voice whose accent reflected his native land, Mr. Regney was born in France as Leon Schlienger. He eventually took that name and spelled it backward—subtracting the LHCS and changing I to Y—to create Noël Regney. During World War II, the German army drafted him—he had grown up in Alsace near the German border and could speak German. He soon deserted, and joined the French resistance, acting as a double agent for the French, and was once wounded when he led Nazi troops into an ambush. 

After the war, he came to the United States as a working musician. After his collaborations with Ms. Shayne, Mr. Regney also wrote songs on his own, including several musicals. He also wrote the English lyrics for “Dominique,” the 1963-4 top hit by The Singing Nun. 

In 1975, he wrote the five-part cantata, “I Believe in Life.” “Writing it,” he said in 1977, “was like coming back to my first love. I began to think this would be my musical testament, something lasting.”

He died in 2002 in Brewster, N.Y. at the age of 80. Gloria Shayne Baker, who had remarried, died in 2008 in Stamford, age 84.

Hilda Spong: 

A Star of the Stage

Famous in her era as a talented and glamorous actress, Hilda Spong quietly lived her final years in Ridgefield. At the end, she was, alas, the subject of one of the most embarrassing typographical errors ever to appear in The Ridgefield Press.

The stage was in Hilda Spong’s blood. Born in 1875 in London, England, Spong was the daughter of Walter Brookes Spong, a landscape artist who was also well known as a stage scene painter for theaters in England and later Australia, where he moved with his family in 1886. 

Her long career began in Australia in 1890, when she was 15, and she soon moved to London. She was on the New York stage by 1898. Over the next 40 years, she performed professionally in more than 50 major productions on three continents, but mostly on Broadway. She specialized in comedy, but was equally adept at tragedies and melodramas. She was also in a couple of silent movies, and one 1933 “talkie.”

Spong was noted for being a “beauty,” a term she is said to have disliked. Nonetheless, The San Francisco Call said in 1901, reporting that she was about to appear on the stage there for the first time, “You never knew a beauty who didn’t want to impress you with the idea that she was all brain, just as the clever women long to be deemed beauties — New York has said that Miss Spong is plenty of both.”

A painting of Spong by noted Australian artist Tom Roberts is in Australia’s National Portrait Gallery in Canberra, where a video describing it is titled “Who the devil was Hilda Spong?” Suggesting she was the Cate Blanchett or Nicole Kidman of her day, the narrator says “she had the fame, the fans, the glowing reviews, the scandals, and the love affairs.” 

Spong was also painted by America’s acclaimed artist William Merritt Chase; that life-size, full-length portrait belongs to the Virginia Museum of Art in Richmond.

Around 1935, Miss Spong moved to 19 Main Street, a house she called Maplewood; it’s on the west side of the street just north of Wilton Road West.  She retired from the stage a few years later.  

“She was a versatile artist whose arduous training had included everything from Shakespearean tragedy to inconsequential comedy,” The Ridgefield Press said in her 1955 obituary. “Because she was professional in her attitude toward acting, she continued to study singing and rarely spent a day without reading Shakespeare.” 

In an unfortunate typo, that front-page obituary was headlined, “Hilda Spong, Stag Star, Dies at 81.”  

Dr. William Allee:
‘Father’ of Ridgefield High

Few individuals have affected the quality of Ridgefield schools a century ago as much as William Hanford Allee, a name all but forgotten today, but renowned and respected early in the 20th Century. 

“Dr. Allee may properly be called the father of Ridgefield High School,” The Ridgefield Press said at his death in April 1927. “He saw the need of such an institution in town. Although he met with strong opposition, he well knew the justice of the cause. Patiently he worked and finally triumphed.” 

A native of Brooklyn, N.Y., Dr. Allee was born in 1872, graduated from Brooklyn Polytech and Columbia Medical School, and opened a practice in Wilton around 1905. He and his wife, Laura Curie Allee, came to town in 1906, buying the former Hurlbutt place still standing at Main and Market Streets. 

Dr. Allee was elected to the school board in 1912, serving many years. “He was the guiding hand that created and developed the Hamilton High School (Ridgefield High’s original name) and saw it gradually advance into one of the best small town high schools in the state,” The Press said.

He also led the effort to secure land on East Ridge for a new grammar school and ball field – the Benjamin Franklin Grammar School later became Ridgefield High School. 

He was a true activist for education. 

“When we came to Ridgefield, the town did not provide free textbooks for school children,” his wife, later Laura Curie Allee Shields, wrote in her autobiography, “Memories.” “One day, one of his patients, a poor widow with five or six children, came to see him to ask if something could be done about free books, as it was simply impossible for her to buy books for all her children, either new or second hand. 

“Doctor went to see our town attorney, Judge Light, who, by the way, was a good suffragist, and he told him that Connecticut had two suffrage laws giving votes to women, one on all school questions and the other on libraries.” (This was eight years before the 19th Amendment was ratified.)

Allee decided to employ the little-used right of women to vote on school issues, but also learned that the previous time it was exercised, Ridgefield town officials had “lost” a voting list that contained names of women who officially wanted to be able to vote.

“Dr. Allee spoke before our Equal Franchise League and agitated the question with every woman with whom  he came in contact. Two hundred and six women gave their names to him to be made voters. Doctor made the list in duplicate.” The list was submitted to the town’s registrars of voters and they accepted it.

“The day came for the registrars to meet, and the women went to the town hall to be made voters. Doctor was there, and I will never forget the amazement and confusion of the men that so many women came up to the scratch. The men fumbled around at their desks and whispered and conferred with each other, and finally we were told that the list had been mislaid. 

“Doctor was all ready for them and handed in the duplicate list.” Because the original of the list had been properly received and acknowledged, they were forced to accept the copy.

“Cheers went up. The room was full, as well as the hall outside.  Well, we were all ‘made’ and I assure you it was a sacred rite.” 

A  town meeting Oct. 10, 1912, included, down on the bottom of the agenda, the question of free text books. The meeting began at 3:30 in a packed, standing-room-only town hall — about half of the attendees were women. However, most of those women had family obligations and “the men arranged it that the school business came up last. At 5 o’clock we were still there. Many mothers felt they ought to go home, but didn’t. It was almost 6 before the school business was reached. 

“Dr. Allee moved that the vote be taken by roll call, which was passed. Some women whose names were down toward the end of the list, went home and came back; some whose names came first, voted and then left to take care of the homes of those down at the end of the list. 

“Of course we won. I think if we had ever needed any more convincing arguments for woman suffrage, we had them that day.” 

“Memories” also describes how Dr. Allee went around, drumming up money to buy the East Ridge land for the new grammar school, part of the package that included creating Hamilton High School. Education advocates had agreed to buy the property to help convince the voters to build the town’s first modern school. 

Allee approached book publisher E.P. Dutton of High Ridge for a contribution, explaining the need for a modern school in Ridgefield. 

“Mr. Dutton was most enthusiastic and sympathetic, and he turned to Doctor and said, ‘Suppose we take it to the Lord.’ Doctor told me he knelt down by the couch and made a most beautiful prayer for direction and wisdom. Rising from his knees, he went to his desk and made out a check for $1,000 and, giving it to Doctor, told him, ‘Here, my boy, go to it!” ($1,000 then was worth nearly $25,000 in today’s dollars.) 

“Dr. Allee never rested, but day after day he went to see people from house to house until he had the whole $16,000” needed for the land. The town approved the schools project and both the grammar school and high school opened in 1915. And it was Dr. Allee who suggested the names for both; Hamilton and Franklin were two of his heroes from history.

Though a physician, Allee helped establish and was first president of the Fairfield County Farm Bureau. He was an official of the local, regional and state organizations of the Congregational Church, and his special interest was in youth groups. 

“His love of justice and fair play led him to champion many causes of importance in church and community,” The Press said.

Dr. Allee was 55 when he died in 1927.

The Abbe Family: 

The Charming Children 

It was 1936, the height of the Depression, and the nation was looking for distractions. Often the youthful and innocent provided them. Shirley Temple was a hit in the movies, Little Orphan Annie was the star of comics and radio. And in Ridgefield lived three children who also won the hearts of many Americans. 

From left to right, John, Patience and Richard Abbe.

In April that year, Patience, Richard and John Abbe became instant celebrities with the publication of their book, “Around the World in Eleven Years.” Written mostly by Patience, 11, and encouraged by their mother, Polly Shorrock Abbe, the travelogue was, according to its jacket, “by children for grown-ups. It is an enchanting odyssey.” 

Indeed, the three Abbes were offspring of James E. Abbe, one of the top photographers of the era, and with their parents, they had spent most of their lives in Europe. They played with Pavlova and Hemingway, loved Lillian Gish, and admired Thomas Mann — all of whom they met along with many other celebrities of the era. 

They arrived in Ridgefield in 1935, living first on West Lane just across the New York line and then on a West Mountain farm, all the time attending the East Ridge School (old high school). The next spring, The Press was full of reports of their exploding fame. The book was well reviewed everywhere — even the crotchety Alexander Woollcott called it “enchanting.” 

Hollywood wooed them for movies and politicians brought Patience to Capitol Hill, where she gave a dinner party — preparing her own food! 

“In spite of the whirlwind of excitement about their book, the youngsters are not the least carried away with any idea of their own importance,” The Ridgefield Press said at the time. “They remain perfectly natural children, with something akin to an air of resignation to their indubitable and meteoric rise to literary fame.”

A year later, they were gone — moving to a 320-acre ranch in Castle Rock, Colo., purchased with the profits from the book, which sold a then-remarkable 100,000 copies. The three — mostly Patience, who essentially wrote the first book — penned two more volumes: “Of All Places” (1937) and “No Place Like Home” (1940). 

Patience went on to work in journalism and lived in California, where she died in 2012. Richard eventually became a noted California judge; he died in 2000. John lived in California, too, and died the same year as Patience.

Their dad, James Abbe, is still recognized today as a pioneer photojournalist, and many of his works are owned by major museums. Though he was born in 1883, he was from Connecticut stock – many Abbes lived in Enfield. 

He grew up in Virginia and worked for newspapers and magazines, photographing many of the stars and political leaders of New York, Paris, London, Berlin, Madrid, and Moscow in the 20s and 30s. His portraits of Charlie Chaplin, Tyrone Power, Gloria Swanson, Cecil B. De Mille, and others were famous. But he went on to cover breaking news, recording the Spanish Civil War, the Nazis rise to power, and events in the Soviet Union — his 1932 portrait of Joseph Stalin was used to stop rumors that the dictator was dead. 

By the 1940s, Mr. Abbe had become a radio broadcaster in the West and in 1950, was one of the nation's first television columnists, writing for The Oakland Tribune until 1962 when he retired at 80. He was the author of I Photograph Russia (1934). Stars of the Twenties, a collection of his work, was posthumously published in 1975. 

Mr. Abbe died in 1973 in San Francisco.

Sidney Farrar:  

First Baseman and Opera Dad

Sidney Farrar had at least two claims to fame: A daughter and a glove. The Ridgefielder helped create one of the 20th century’s greatest opera stars and played for one of today’s major league baseball teams in its very first years.

Sidney Douglas Farrar was born in 1859 in Paris, Maine. By the 1870s, he was living in Melrose, Mass. where he was working in a box factory and playing semi-professional baseball for a local team. In 1880 he married Henrietta Barnes of Melrose, and two years later, their only child, Geraldine, was born. 

In 1883, Farrar joined the Philadelphia Quakers in the National League for the team’s very first season. A year later, they changed their name to the Philadelphia Phillies,  

The first baseman started seven years with the Phillies and was better known as a good fielder than a strong batter or runner. His last major league season, 1890, was with the Philadelphia Athletics in the short-lived and rebellious Players League. 

Farrar had a lifetime batting average of .253, with 905 hits but only 18 home runs. His best year was 1887 when he hit .282 and scored 83 runs. In 1888, he led the National League in being hit by pitches. In all, he played 943 games as a professional at a salary that ranged from $900 to $2,000 a season ($24,000 to $53,000 in 2016 dollars).

After he left Philadelphia, he played a couple of years of semi-pro ball in New Haven and Providence before retiring completely from the game to, according to The Ridgefield Press, focus on his daughter who showed “unmistakable signs of musical talent.” For a while, he operated a men’s clothing store in Melrose in partnership with Melrose native Frank G. Selee, a Hall of Famer who had managed the Boston Beaneaters (the first major league club to win 100 games in a season) and who later led the Chicago Cubs where, Baseball-Reference.com reports, he “was responsible for assembling the famous Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance double play combination.”

One baseball historian reports Farrar eventually sold his interest in the clothing store and borrowed thousands of dollars to help pay for his daughter Geraldine’s singing instruction in Europe.

Geraldine, who became a Metropolitan Opera star, owed not only her education, but at least some of her vocal talents to her parents. Both mom and dad reportedly had fine singing voices and performed a great deal in public, particularly with church choirs. “Farrar was a baritone, and it was said of him that if he was speaking in what, for him, was a conversational tone of voice on one side of a street, he could be clearly heard from the other side,” wrote Charles Paolino, a newspaper editor and historian. 

While still living in Melrose, Farrar ran for selectman of the town. “There was a great drive to defeat him,” The Press reported. “In the southern part of the town, there were some factories and Mr. Farrar had always been a friend of the factory worker. The election progressed throughout the day and at 4:30 in the afternoon, when the factories were let out, 600 men marched to the polls and swept their friend, Mr. Farrar, into office.”

Apparently to be closer to his daughter in New York after his wife died in 1923, Farrar bought a North Salem Road farmhouse and 30 acres from Joseph T. Hubbard,  calling it “Farrar’s Thirty Acres.” 

The Press said he convinced his daughter to move here and in 1924, Geraldine Farrar bought a place on West Lane. She lived in Ridgefield for the rest of her life here.

“In later life, when he had been widowed,” said historian Paolino, “Sid Farrar was a familiar figure at Geraldine’s concerts, and she said that he was often surrounded by other old ballplayers who may have looked a little out of place in the classical concert hall. It dawned on her, she said, that those old guys weren’t there to see her; they were there to see her dad.”

Farrar became active in the community, especially with the Masons, and was elected a director of the Ridgefield Savings Bank. He “was ever a booster of this town,” said his Press obituary in 1935.

 When his estate was probated, his possessions included a 1927 Locomobile sedan and 200 shares of International Telephone and Telegraph stock, then worth about $1,375.

Farrar Lane, off North Salem Road, was named for Sidney Farrar, whose farm bordered the road. The road, which existed long before Farrar moved there,  may be the old southerly end of what is now Mamanasco Road.

Samuel G. Goodrich: 

The Extraordinary Peter Parley

Samuel G. Goodrich was an extraordinary fellow on several fronts. The man who was known to millions in the 19th century as “Peter Parley” provided the nation with a new kind of textbook for its schools, helped introduce the world to one of America’s greatest early authors, and gave Ridgefield a remarkable account of life in the town more than 200 years ago.

Samuel Griswold Goodrich was born in 1793 in a house, no longer standing, near the corner of West and Golf Lanes. His father, the Rev. S. G. Goodrich, had moved there in 1789 to become the third minister of the First Congregational Church. 

When young Samuel was four, his father had a new home built on four acres on High Ridge; the house still stands today at the head of Parley Lane. Samuel spent his childhood there, and left in 1808 to work in a Danbury store and then in Hartford, eventually winding up in the publishing business in Boston. 

Literally millions of his Peter Parley books—chiefly histories, biographies and geographies—were sold in the 1800s. Some scholars consider Goodrich to be the father of the modern textbook because he made his schoolbooks interesting to children, both in the way they were written and in the way they were illustrated.

His brother, Charles A. Goodrich, was also an author whose histories were widely used in 19th century schools. 

Charles was a Yale graduate; Samuel never went to college, and when asked where he was schooled,  “My reply has always been, ‘at West Lane,’” he wrote, referring to the one-room Ridgefield schoolhouse he had attended as a boy. “Generally speaking, this has ended the inquiry, whether because my interlocutors have confounded this venerable institution with ‘Lane Seminary,’ or have not thought it worthwhile to risk an exposure of their ignorance as to the college in which I was educated, I am unable to say.”

Those words appeared in his 1,100-page “Recollections of A Lifetime,” published four years before his death in 1860. This autobiography offers more than 200 pages on what it was like growing up in Ridgefield at the turn of the 19th century and is a unique look at the life and characters in the town then. Few communities in this country are fortunate enough to have as extensive, as literate and as intimate a report on daily life two centuries ago.

Goodrich lived many of his adult years in the Jamaica Plain section of Roxbury, now part of the city of Boston, buying 45 acres of “wilderness” there in 1837. Interested not only in literature and publishing, he was also involved in political life, and served as both a state representative and a state senator from Roxbury in the Massachusetts legislature. (Today, there is a Peter Parley Road in the Jamaica Plain district of Boston, recalling Goodrich’s estate there.)

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Allan Nevins called Goodrich “Ridgefield’s greatest literary son.” Nevins said Goodrich’s “greatest service to pure literature” was not his books, but his illustrated annual, “The Token,” which he edited from 1828 until 1842. “The Token” published the works of rising authors, including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edward Everett, John Adams, and Horace Greeley as well as Goodrich himself. 

Hawthorne called “The Token” “a sort of hothouse, where native flowers were made to bloom like exotics.” 

During this period, these annuals became so popular, they were widely pirated, and Goodrich became what Nevins called “a figure of importance in the literary world.” Hawthorne, no doubt with tongue in cheek, called Goodrich “a gentleman of many excellent qualities, although a publisher.”

Nevins maintained that “Hawthorne … owed Goodrich a heavy debt, which he frankly acknowledged, for encouragement while he was still totally unknown. Goodrich saw the romancer’s first sketches when they were published anonymously, and inquired concerning their authorship, thus bringing about a correspondence.”

In those letters, Goodrich found Hawthorne depressed because his early works were not being published or appreciated. “I combated his despondency, and assured him of triumph, if he would persevere in a literary career,” Goodrich wrote in “Recollections.”

Goodrich not only published, but also promoted Hawthorne, writing essays for newspapers that praised his writing and networking on Hawthorne’s behalf in the publishing world. “In 1837, he urged Hawthorne to publish a volume, and helped him find a firm to issue ‘Twice-Told Tales,’ ” Nevins said.

“Twice-Told Tales” wound up getting fine reviews, including one from Edgar Allen Poe, who wrote: “The style of Hawthorne is purity itself. His tone is singularly effective—wild, plaintive, thoughtful, and in full accordance with his themes…We look upon him as one of the few men of indisputable genius to whom our country has as yet given birth.” The Grolier Club, the nation’s oldest society for book-lovers, named “Twice-Told Tales” the most influential book of 1837.

Hawthorne went on to become famous for such novels as “The Scarlet Letter” and “The House of the Seven Gables” while Goodrich, by his own accounting, published more than 170 books under the name of Peter Parley, many making use of other writers. His last effort, which appeared in 1859, was a 1,400-page, two-volume tome, “The Animal Kingdom Illustrated,” also later called Johnson’s Natural History.

Late in life, Goodrich was named U.S. consul in Paris and although millions copies of his books were already in print, he took that opportunity to get some of his titles published in French. He may have been a great literary man but he was also a savvy businessman. 

Betsy Talbot Blackwell: 

Magazine Innovator

Betsy Talbot Blackwell was one of the 20th century’s top women’s magazine editors, leading Mademoiselle from 1937 until her retirement in 1971, and quadrupling its circulation. In the process, she refashioned not only her publication, but the field of women’s magazines.

“Her attention to the college and young career women was so successful that other fashion magazines, like Vogue, Glamour and Harper's Bazaar, began to imitate Mademoiselle’s youthful format,”  The New York Times once reported.

Blackwell considered Mademoiselle a magazine of  “good taste at a moderate price” rather than a “deluxe luxury magazine with emphasis on Paris fashion,” she told The Times 

Betsy Talbot was born in Verona, N.Y., in 1905, the daughter of a fashion-expert mother and a writer father. Her mother, Benedict Talbot, was a well-known fashion stylist for such retailers as Macy, Gimbel, Saks, and Lord and Taylor. Late in life, she lived at The Elms Inn on Main Street where she died in 1974.

Betsy Talbot was educated at a convent school. When still a teenager  she began writing about fashion in 1923 and soon was assistant fashion editor at Charm magazine. 

In 1935, she joined Mademoiselle, then brand new. Under several noms de plume she was editor of four sections, including fashion. Two years later, she was named editor in chief.

She brought innovation to her magazine. For instance, “she took plain young women to New York, where she put them in stylish clothes, restyled their hair and makeup and then put their pictures in her magazine,” said the Los Angeles Times. “The idea that an ordinary girl could be turned into a fashion model soon made Mademoiselle must reading for young women across the land.”

She also introduced fine writing, publishing the works of such authors as Truman Capote, Flannery O’Connor, William Faulkner, Joyce Carol Oates, Dylan Thomas, and Eudora Welty. She was among the first to publish Gloria Steinem and other leaders of “women’s liberation.”   

In aiming her magazine at college students and graduates, she created the “college issue,” in which she would bring in a group of college-age “editors” each summer to create the September issue. Among the many interns who worked on these issues was the poet Sylvia Plath, whose novel, “The Bell Jar,” was modeled after her experiences under Blackwell.

Another summer editor was Joan Gage, a longtime journalist who wrote on the Huffington Post: “She was one of the last of what I call the Pleistocene Era of magazine editors — a group of eminent women who, early in the 20th century, ruled their kingdoms with the proverbial iron hand in a velvet glove...They dictated to the women of America what to wear and cook and how to behave, and the women of America took their word as gospel.”

Under Blackwell’s leadership, Mademoiselle’s circulation rose from 178,000 in 1939 to 540,000 in 1953. 

During her career she had many accomplishments and earned many awards. She was a Woman of the Year for the American Women’s Association, and was profiled in the 1984 book, “Wise Women: Singular Lives That Helped Shape Our Country.” She was the first and only woman on the board of directors of Street and Smith, the magazine publishing company, and was once the only woman director of the Hanes Corporation. She was also a director of the Columbia University School of General Studies. 

She was married to James Madison Blackwell III, a Wall Street lawyer, who died in 1961. Ten years later, she moved to West Lane to be closer to her son, James M. Blackwell IV, then a Newsweek executive and Ridgefield school board member. 

She died in 1985 at the age of 79.