George B. Leeman Sr.: 

Music for Kids and Stars

When George B. Leeman was only two years old, he astonished family members by picking out tunes on a piano. “By the time his fourth birthday rolled around,” The Ridgefield Press reported in 1962, “he was ready for a recital.” 

Born in 1907, the Oklahoma native studied music at the University of Oklahoma and went from there to RKO studios in Hollywood where he worked on RKO’s “Hollywood on the Air” radio show. 

However, he soon wound up in New York, working CBS radio and later television as a composer and arranger for the likes of Frank Sinatra, Perry Como, Dick Haymes, Paul Whiteman, Andre Kostelanetz, Archie Bleyer, and, for 12 years, with Arthur Godfrey. 

For Godfrey, Leeman prepared music for the daily show, as well as Godfrey’s weekly Talent Scout program. He served on the audition committee for the latter, and was involved in the auditions of many future stars, including Eddie Fisher, Wally Cox, and the McGuire Sisters.

A Ridgefielder since 1942, Leeman was instrumental in the founding of the Ridgefield Symphonette in 1964, and aided its growth into the Ridgefield Symphony Orchestra, one of the top small orchestras in the country. (His son, George Jr., has also been a leader in the orchestra, and wrote the program notes for many years.)  When it gave its first concert in April 1965, the symphonette consisted of 24 musicians, 13 of them residents and only seven of them professionals.

“The reason for our existence is to provide the best possible entertainment for the people of Ridgefield who enjoy music of this calibre,” Leeman said in a 1972 letter to The Press.

After his retirement from CBS in 1959, Leeman gave private piano lessons to Ridgefield youngsters.  He also composed and arranged many songs and musical programs that were performed by children in the Ridgefield elementary schools, where his wife, Evelyn, taught for many years.

“Music,” he said, “is a therapy. Most children find something in music that relaxes them.” 

Leeman died in 1978 at the age of 70. Two weeks after his death, the Board of Education named the auditorium at Scotland School “the Leeman Room” in his honor.

Samuel Keeler: 

The Stern and Staunch Commuter

When he was 86 years old, Samuel Keeler was still commuting to his law office in New York City and was reputedly the oldest commuter on the New Haven line — both in age and length of endurance. He was still making the trip until a month before he died in 1932; he had started this daily journey back around 1870 and may have been among the first passengers on the Ridgefield to Branchville railroad spur that opened that year.

That’s more than 60 years of riding the rails to work in the era of the smoky, noisy steam locomotive. No wonder he looked so grumpy.

Although his business was in the city, “Lawyer Sam,” as he was called to distinguish him from grocer Sam (S.D.) Keeler, had a considerable influence on the town toward the end of the 19th Century and during the first third of the 20th.

“He was sharp, learned, without much humor, small of stature — but solid,” wrote longtime Ridgefield Press publisher Karl S. Nash in a 1971 profile of Keeler. Nash knew the man personally.

Born in 1845 in Wilton, Samuel Keeler had as one of his childhood teachers George E. Lounsbury, who later became governor and from whose brother he later acquired The Ridgefield Press. 

He began commuting to law work in the city soon after graduating from Yale in 1867, but eventually also became busy in Ridgefield, serving as a school board member for 20 years from 1892 until 1912, one of the burgesses of the borough, and a pillar of the First Congregational Church. 

In 1900, he was a founder of the First National Bank and Trust Company of Ridgefield (now Wells Fargo), and was later fifth president of the Ridgefield Savings Bank  (now Fairfield County Bank), serving from 1907 to his death. 

Early in the century, controlling interest in The Press was held by ex-Gov. Phineas Lounsbury, a staunch, tee-totaling Methodist who had ordered that no liquor advertising appear in the paper. One day, he picked up The Press and saw a liquor ad. Outraged, he immediately sold the newspaper to Keeler, “as staunch a Democrat as Mr. Lounsbury was a Republican,” Nash said years later. 

While he kept his feelings out of the news columns,  Keeler wasn’t afraid to take on Republicans editorially, and he fought a long battle with the administration over inequitable property assessments, going so far as to publish several pamphlets on the subject. He remained owner of the newspaper until his death, at which time The Press observed: “Mr. Keeler was a man who always minded his own business. In the wake of his course over the sea of life, there was no tacking or filling.”

Samuel Chambliss: 

Wetlands and Rhinos

Sam Chambliss had always been fascinated with nature and the environment, but unlike most people he made both his life’s mission — from fighting as a lawyer to protect Connecticut’s open spaces to acquiring a huge ranch in Zimbabwe to protect rhinos, elephants and other wildlife.

Samuel Mauldin Chambliss was born in New Jersey in 1929, graduated from Bucknell University, and earned his doctor of law degree at the University of Pennsylvania. He went on to earn his master’s in military law from the Judge Advocate General School at the University of Virginia. He then served in Germany as a captain in the JAG Corps of the U.S. Army.  

For a while, he practiced with the family firm in Chattanooga, Tenn., co-founded by his grandfather. He later moved to Connecticut where he continued his legal practice in Westport before settling in Ridgefield, becoming a specialist in the emerging field of environmental law.  

Two of his major clients were in the town of Redding, where he served as attorney to the Conservation Commission and the Redding Land Trust.

His reputation was such that, at the request of the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection, he wrote the first draft of the Connecticut’s Inland Wetlands Act, which to this day governs land uses in wetlands. 

He and his wife, Janet Bavier Parris, visited Zimbabwe in 1983, and fell in love with the countryside. In 1985 they bought 18,500 acres of African savanna and moved there permanently in 1987 when the the government asked them to be custodians of that country’s endangered black rhino.

The Chamblisses and two neighboring landowners enclosed their property with an electric fence, creating a 60,000-acre preserve.  

“We’ve got zebra, waterbuck, kudu, impala, reedbuck, elands, and the tsessebe, which is the fastest antelope in the world,” he told The Press in 1989. “There are also leopard and cheetah.”

However, “right now, one of the big things is to save the rhino, and Zimbabwe is just about the last country where there is a significant rhino population,” Chambliss said.

The rhinos the Chamblisses were trying to protect weren’t the friendliest of creatures. Soon after they set up their reserve, the government trucked in a black rhino that, threatened in another part of the country, had been captured and put in a crate for transfer.

“It came out of the crate and it had enough of being cooped up. It was looking for something to damage,” Chambliss said.

“Someone had left a pickup truck with two dogs in it parked nearby. After the first time he hit it, the truck bounced up and down on its shocks, which convinced the rhino it was alive.

“He kept jabbing his horn between the truck and the front tire. Finally he hit the tire, which gave up the ghost with a loud sssss.

“He kept right on killing the truck, till finally his horn came out through the top of the hood.

“We were all up trees like ornaments,” his wife, Janet, said. “Sam was up a tree, but only about five feet up, and someone told him to go higher. Eventually, the rhino got around to him and rammed the branch where he had been standing.”

After the rhino was through with the pickup and several treed bystanders, the animal turned on the 18-wheeler that had brought him.

After the rhino attacked the big truck, it “didn’t move,” Chambliss said, “and the rhino assumed it was dead. After a while he wandered off into the bush.”

Elephants provided a more pleasant experience. “We got 10 calves with the idea of starting our own little elephant herd,” he said. “But all 10 turned out to be males, even though they promised us three females.”

Janet Chambliss led the elephant raising, feeding them milk in pans. “They are very dependent and they bond to you,” she said. “When we first got them, after about a week, i went in and sat down cross-legged with them in an area we had set aside for them to sleep. One baby elephant lay down and put his head in my lap.

“They sort of decide you’re their mom.”

Their African paradise came to an end in 2003 when the government of Zimbabwe, which had begun confiscating property owned by white people three years earlier,  finally took over the Chambliss ranch.  After many tribulations, Sam and Janet Chambliss fled the country and, almost penniless, eventually settled in Gonubie, South Africa, in 2005.

In 2012, with Mr. Chambliss ailing, the couple returned to the United States so he could undergo medical treatment. He died in Florida in 2014 at the age of 84.

Shortly after his return to this country, he was asked whether he would write about his experiences in Africa. He said he might, The Press reported,  “but that people wouldn’t believe the horrors of Zimbabwe.” 

Frank Taylor: 

The First Shot

According to his obituary in the Feb. 5, 1931 Press, Frank Taylor was “Ridgefield’s first regular officer” of the law. He may have also been the first one ever to shoot a suspect. 

A native son, Taylor was born in 1860 in the Limestone District and in the late 1890s became “the village night watchman,” a job he held for some 25 years. 

Back then, there was no police department and merchants chipped in for his $100-a-month salary. He would  check their front and back doors each night, and see that other things, such as streetlights, were in order. 

“He was a big man and exhibited a very authoritative appearance,” said Dick Venus in a Dick’s Dispatch column in the 1980s. “He was, however, a very kindly and understanding gentleman.”

And, Venus added, Constable Taylor and his large nightstick were well respected by kids and appreciated by parents. When he approached groups of youngsters at 8 or 9 at night and suggested it was time to head home, “it would have been a very rare occasion if a dissenting opinion was expressed,” Venus wrote. 

But he could also proved capable of handling bigger things and was involved in foiling a burglary of the U.S. Post Office.

One Sunday night in 1903, a trio of men in a wagon drawn by two horses pulled up in front of the post office, then located a few doors north of where Books on the Common is now. Just down the street, in front of the town hall, was Dick Venus’s father, Charles, and four friends, chewing the fat in front of the town hall. They saw the wagon pull up. Here’s how Dick Venus describes what happened, based largely on his father’s eyewitness account:

“One man stayed in the wagon, to hold the horses, and the other two approached the post office door. One carried a large crowbar and it was evident that they were not about to mail that heavy bar.

“The five at the town hall had directed their attention to the activities down the street and when the sound of the front door of the post office being forced reached their ears, they all began to shout for Frank Taylor.

“That exemplary limb of the law had just started his evening tour and had crossed Main Street from the apartment over Bissell’s Drug Store, that he shared with his daughter Mabel and her husband, Mally Knapp.

“Frank was in the driveway between St. Stephen’s Church Parish House and S.D. Keeler’s store (now Deborah Ann’s Sweet Shoppe). Frank hurried to the front of the store, as best he could. He was somewhat impeded by an affliction that caused him to throw his right foot out forward, in a rather awkward manner. This encumbered his stride and earned for Frank the nickname, ‘Steppy.’ It was, however, never used in disrespect.

“Steppy had never really needed to hurry because his very commanding presence generally brought everything else under control, and word of his expert marksmanship was well known to those he must keep in line.

“Frank’s alert mind took in the scene being enacted on the other end of the street, and with his powerful voice, he yelled at the men to halt. Unfortunately for them, these men had not heard of Steppy’s prowess with the weapon that he carried.

“This huge gun was known as a ‘hawg leg’ and was actually a greatly oversized revolver of .45 calibre. It was not as large as the sawed-off rifle carried by Steve McQueen in the movies, but it would remind you of it.

“At any rate, the two men had entered the post office and were not returning and carrying the little safe that probably weighed about 250 pounds. Another command from Frank went unheeded and he drew his long revolver.

“His first shot sounded just as the men had hoisted the safe and were about to lower it carefully into the back of the buckboard. The bullet struck one of the thieves in the leg and caused him to relinquish his hold on the safe, and it went crashing through the floorboards of the wagon, landing in the graveled roadway.

“The wounded thief was hauled up into the wagon. All thoughts of thievery had dissipated as the buckboard and its occupants took off up north Main Street.

“So the thieves got away, but without their loot. The attempted robbery was never solved, but the grand old man had scored again and sleepy little Ridgefield was spared the embarrassment of having its post office safe stolen.”

In the mid-1920s, Frank Taylor was transferred from night duty to become the first daytime patrolman of the village, a job largely devoted to traffic and parking problems. 

For many years he was also active in the fire department, served as a registrar of voters, was chairman of the Democratic Town Committee, and led the local Odd Fellows lodge. 

“Mr. Taylor was kindly and cheery in disposition, always ready to do a good deed or to assist in any good cause,” his obituary said. “Yet he had the courage of his convictions. He never arrived at hasty conclusions in important matters, but carefully weighed the merits or demerits before reaching decisions.”

John Atherton, 

Art and the Fish

Jack Atherton, who lived on Branchville Road, had three great passions in his life. He combined two, art and fishing, into a book that has become a classic. His third passion was his wife, who wrote the book’s introduction and who often fished at her husband’s side.

John Carlton Atherton was best known for that first passion: He was an artist who created scores of magazine covers enjoyed by millions, whose paintings are in major American museums, and who with the likes of Norman Rockwell founded the Famous Artists School.

Atherton was born in Minnesota in 1900 and served in the U.S. Navy during World War I. By 1920, he was in California, studying at the College of the Pacific and what is now the San Francisco Art Institute.

In 1929, he won the first prize in the Bohemian Club’s annual art exhibit, enabling him to move to New York City where he entered the world of commercial art. There he gained a reputation while producing advertising art for General Motors, Shell Oil, Dole, and others.

His notoriety nationally increased when he did a striking poster for the 1939 World’s Fair, depicting the Earth in the lap of Liberty.

In 1941, as America was preparing for war, the Museum of Modern Art awarded him first prize in a National Defense Poster Competition, sponsored by the government. His painting, Buy A Share in America, showed a handshake in front of a factory. He went on to do many posters for the war effort.

It was during World War II that he began producing magazine covers for Saturday Evening Post, His first, “Patient Dog.” done in a Norman Rockwell style, shows a loyal dog watching over the  hunting equipment and the framed picture of his owner in uniform.

While he did covers for Fortune, Holiday and other magazines, he was best known for his more than 40 covers for Saturday Evening Post, including the famous Ben Franklin quotation series that began in 1944 and continued annually until 1961, just before his death.

Atherton was also known for his “serious” art and had his first solo exhibition  at the renowned Julien

Levy Gallery in New York in 1938; Levy represented him throughout the 1930s and 1940s. His work was considered Magic Realism. “This new work primarily consisted of symbolic, often bleak landscapes that were becoming a favorite subject of the new surrealist movement in America,” said one biographer.

His paintings are in the collections of many museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Wadsworth Atheneum.

In 1948, Atherton was among the founding faculty of the Famous Artists School, created by a group of members of the New York Society of Illustrators. Other founders included Norman Rockwell, who did 322 Post covers, and Robert Fawcett, a fellow Ridgefielder.

When Atherton was a boy, he loved to go fishing, a sport he grew to love more as he got older. He fished with some of the best anglers in North America and wound up writing a classic book on fly fishing, “The Fly and the Fish,” still in print more than a half century after his death. 

“Jack was a romantic realist, and his exuberant outburst of wonder over any natural phenomenon helped me see this Earth of ours as the magical place it really is,” said his wife Maxine in the introduction to a posthumous edition of “The Fly and the Fish.” 

Maxine Atherton said that when they lived in Ridgefield, her husband became close friends with Harold “Pinky” Gillum, the Ridgefielder who “built marvelous flyrods and refused to produce them in mass production, so there are relatively few in existence. Each rod he made of especially selected bamboo and with a specific angler in mind. I know a man who compares his Gillum trout rod to a Stradivarius violin.

“Pinky and Jack enjoyed many a day fishing together, and I recall Pinky saying that he would rather sit on a bank and watch Jack cast a dry fly than fish himself.

“Both of them were perfectionists, and they never seemed to tire of discussing the art of building the perfect fly rod.”

And it was fly fishing at a favorite spot on the Miramichi River in New Brunswick, Canada, with his wife near his side, that Jack Atherton died of a heart attack in 1952 at the age of 52.

“Jack, who was too young to die, had frequently said that when his time came, he hoped it would be when he was in fishing waders,” Maxine Atherton said.

John Hyde Preston: 

Debunking Liberal

John Hyde Preston made himself a bit unpopular with some of the populace back in 1933 when his book, “Revolution, 1776,” attempted to debunk many popularly held beliefs about the American Revolution.

The book declared among other things that the Declaration of Independence was made on July 2, not July 4, that John Hancock did not sign it until 47 days later, that the Liberty Bell never pealed the glad tidings, and that Betsy Ross did not sew the country’s first flag (Frances Hopkinson did, the author said.)

Preston also maintained that more Americans probably served with the British than with the Continental Army.

John Hyde Preston was born in 1906 in New York City. He wrote articles for Harper’s, The Atlantic Monthly, McCalls, Holiday, and other magazines and lived in many places both hereabouts (Ridgefield, Wilton and New Canaan) and in the world (Italy, Denmark, and Iceland). He spent his last 10 years in Canada where he died in 1980 at the age of 74.

Preston wrote both novels, such as “Portrait of A Woman” and “The Liberals,” and non-fiction, such as “Mad Anthony Wayne, Gentleman Rebel” and “Revolution, 1776.”

Herschel Brickell, the editor and critic who lived and died in Ridgefield, wrote of “Revolution 1776,” “Mr. Preston is no conventional historian. He knows his subject as well as anyone, but he breaks with tradition in writing entertainingly. This is a fine book. “

However, Howard Fast, the historical novelist who lived in Ridgefield years later, decried Preston’s work in a long essay, published in 1950 in a scholarly journal.  For instance, citing Preston’s questionable description of a revolt of troops corralled by Mad Anthony Wayne, Fast asks, “Where did Mr. Preston get his information and what prompted this gratuitous slander of brave men – so much in the style of today – who had fought tirelessly and well for five years?”  

Preston  lived in Ridgefield in the 1930s and was better known locally for “The Liberals,” his first novel, in which the Gilbert and Bennett wire manufacturing company in Georgetown was cast in an unfavorable light. The “left-wing novel”  (written in 1938 on yellow paper that  Preston bought at the Ridgefield Press office) features the head of the wire mill who is good to his employees but who hates

unions, and a young playwright who is love with the daughter of one of the mill workers battling the boss. A New York Times critic said the book “digs into the foundations of the modern economic structure and exposes much of the rot which undermines it.”

While it has a liberal slant, the novel also points out problems of liberals and their intellectual floundering. “We weigh everything until it evaporates,” says the playwright’s girlfriend. “We’re like John Dewey, taking the 10-year-old intelligence tests and failing them. Dewey knew so many answers to every question that he tried to give them all and when he was through, he flunked a test that any normal 10-year-old could pass. And that’s what we do. We doubt and juggle and re-examine until we can no longer give the simple answers.”

Preston, incidentally, described the mill as being in a small village near the town of Hatbury, Conn. The Times reviewer said he should have said Danbury (once the hat-making capital of the U.S.).  “The fictitious substitute seems needless and often is unreasonably irritating.”

Benjamin Washburn: 

Bishop of Newark

Ridgefield has been home to many ministers, priests and rabbis, but perhaps only one bishop.

The Rt. Rev. Benjamin Martin Washburn, D.D., a retired Episcopal bishop of the Diocese of Newark, N.J., spent his last eight years living on Barrack Hill Road.

He was long active in the administration of the national Episcopal church, but also known for his outspoken criticisms of one of New Jersey’s biggest political bosses.

Bishop Washburn was born in 1887 of old New England stock in Vermont. He graduated from Dartmouth in 1907 and studied at the General Theological Seminary of the Protestant Episcopal Church in New York where he received his degree in divinity in 1913.  He later earned a doctor of divinity degree from Dartmouth, and a Doctor of  Sacred Theology degree from General Theological Seminary.

Washburn served as a minister in parishes in New York City, Kansas City, Mo., and Boston before being named bishop coadjutor of the Diocese of Newark in 1932. Three years later he was named bishop, serving until his retirement in 1958.

Despite his many duties as bishop,  Washburn was also involved in many other areas of church leadership during his 23-year tenure, and during his retirement. He was a member of the board of trustees of the General Theological Seminary, served as president of the Episcopal Church Pension Fund, was on the board of the Church Life Insurance Corporation, and also sat on the board of the corporation that produced Episcopal hymnals. On the civic side, he was active in the New Jersey Historical Society. 

Washburn was also a vocal supporter of free speech. In 1938 he helped lead a battle against Mayor Frank Hague of Jersey City, then vice chairman of the Democratic National Committee, who’d been called “the granddaddy of Jersey bosses.” 

To keep his critics at a minimum, Hague had enacted a law requiring permits to speak in public. At a rally opposing the law,  various permitless people spoke, including two congressmen; a longtime political opponent, who was beaten up and jailed; and Norman Thomas, the presidential candidate (who had once had homes in Ridgefield), who was subsequently “deported” from the city.

Bishop Washburn declared that Hague had not only threatened  “personal and political freedom by his dictatorial actions, but threatens also the right of religious liberty.” 

(That same year, Mayor Hague told the Jersey City Chamber of Commerce, “We hear about constitutional rights, free speech and the free press. Every time I hear those words, I say to myself, ‘That man is a Red, that man is a Communist.’ You never hear a real American talk in that manner.”) 

Washburn and his wife, Henrietta Tracy de Selding Washburn, had one son, Seth (1921-2016), an MIT graduate who became a Bell Laboratories engineer and wrote a seminal book on the design of switching circuits. Seth was also an accomplished musician and a civil rights activist.

Bishop Washburn died here in 1966 at the age of 79.