Dr. Patrick Neligan: 

Raising Health Standards

 In 1970, when Dr. Patrick Neligan was appointed Ridgefield’s director of health, the town was in serious trouble. Scores of septic systems, some only a few years old, were failing because of poor design and improper installation and placement. Wells were being polluted. Restaurants weren’t being inspected. 

“This town needs some drastic changes for the better,” Dr. Neligan warned the selectmen. 

Dr. Neligan was appointed and immediately created the town Health Department. He  hired George Frigon as the town's first full-time, registered sanitarian, and the quality of health-related services immediately began to improve. 

In the 34 years that followed, Dr. Neligan, through the Department of Health,  ensured strict compliance with the state’s public health code. 

In 1985, he also initiated and aggressively promoted the concept of having paramedics provide around-the-clock medical care through the Ridgefield Fire Department, and the next year, they were in place. In 1974, working with the Ridgefield Visiting Nurse Association, he established the annual spring Health Fair that has continued to this day.

A native of Ireland, Patrick Neligan was born in 1926 and graduated from the University College Dublin School of Medicine in 1951. While attending medical college, he was editor of the “National Student,” a literary quarterly published by students of the university.

He came to the United States in 1954 on a fellowship to study at Cornell, sponsored by Sir Daniel Davies, who’d been physician to King George VI, and Sir Alexander Fleming, discoverer of penicillin who was a friend of Dr. Neligan. 

In 1956, he and his wife, Veronica, moved to Ridgefield and he opened a family practice on Main Street. A year later, he joined the staff of Norwalk Hospital and in the years that followed he served on almost every committee of the medical staff and held many offices. In 1975, his peers elected him chief of staff and he served three two-year terms. From 1985 until his retirement in 1995, he was vice president of medical affairs, medical director and director of medical education. 

In 1996, he was given the William J. Tracey M.D. Award for “exemplary commitment and philanthropic leadership” at Norwalk Hospital. 

But retirement from the hospital and the practice of medicine did not mean retirement from promoting and advancing good quality medical care. Dr. Neligan immediately set about solving a problem that had long concerned him: The desperate need for good health care services for the people of South Norwalk. 

No primary care physician had opened a private practice in South Norwalk in decades, and the poverty was so extreme that many people could not even afford transportation to go to the hospital for medical help. 

“I know what it's like to be poor,” he said, recalling his work as a medical student helping the destitute in the slums of Dublin. 

In April 1999, the 10,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art Norwalk Community Health Center opened. Today, an even larger successor facility cares for 12,000 of Norwalk’s residents, and provides over 48,000 medical office visits a year.

“Everyone in this country has a basic and fundamental right to quality health care — a place where the sick, the poor, and the indigent, can get quality health care in their own community,” Dr. Neligan said.

He retired as Ridgefield’s director of health in 2004 after 34 years in the job.

Patrick and Vera Neligan raised a large family in town. They lived at first on Main Street and then, in 1964, moved to an 88-acre estate, which they called Innisfree, off West Mountain Road. 

In 2013, with Dr. Neligan in failing health, the couple moved to the Meadow Ridge community in Georgetown. He died a year later at the age of 88.

When he retired 10 years earlier, Helena Nicholas, head of the RVNA, wrote a tribute to Dr. Neligan, saying he’d “worked tirelessly to promote health and wellness in all settings — he has always been accessible and giving of himself….The community has a great deal for which to thank Dr. Neligan.”

He often volunteered at the RVNA flu clinics, and, Nicholas noted, at one clinic, “we recorded 250 vaccines given in under two hours' time, single handedly, by the good doctor.”

Hugh Mulligan: 

Globe-Trotting Journalist

Few people have seen the world as Hugh Mulligan had. 

He drank with John Steinbeck, covered the death of three popes and President Kennedy, was the only reporter — British or American — at the wedding and the funeral of Princess Diana, and was dining with Salvador Dali when the artist was booted from a restaurant because his ocelot defecated on the floor. 

He covered both the rise and fall of the Berlin Wall, accompanied Pope John Paul II on two dozen journeys, went to the North Pole in a Navy blimp, and rode an 18-wheeler up the Alcan Highway in the middle of winter. 

Mulligan had thousands of stories to tell of his half century as an Associated Press reporter, covering everything from wars to weddings, in 146 countries. 

A favorite anecdote concerned Steinbeck, with whom Mulligan had tried for months to get an interview at the author's Long Island home.  He gave up when he had to go to Vietnam. Three weeks later,  Steinbeck checked into the same Vietnamese hotel where Mulligan was staying. When the author, whose wife was trying to wean him off alcohol, discovered Mulligan had liquor, he started visiting the reporter’s room every night. 

“I finally had to tell him, ‘Steinbeck, for three months I couldn’t get an interview with you and

now I can’t get you out of my room!’”

Mulligan earned many awards, but his most prized was the 1967 Overseas Press Club Award for his coverage of the Vietnam War (about which also he wrote one of his three books, “No Place to Die: The Agony of Vietnam”). 

A native of New York City,  Hugh Aloysius Mulligan was born in 1925. He served in World War II as a rifleman in the Army's 106th Infantry Division in Europe. After the war, he resumed his schooling, graduating summa cum laude from Marlboro College in Vermont. He then earned a master's in English from Harvard and one in journalism from Boston University, both awarded in the same week without either school knowing he was also attending the other. 

After a stint teaching Latin and Greek in Boston, Mulligan joined AP in 1951 in Baton Rouge, La., and after 1956 was based in New York, except for a 1970s assignment in London. He retired in 2000.

A devout Catholic who had once studied for the priesthood, he covered 26 trips made by Pope John Paul II. He was so nervous when he met the pontiff for the first time that he dropped a bag of rosaries. But the pope blessed them, “even the broken ones,” Mr. Mulligan wrote later.

The Associated Press reported that “colleagues joked that Mr. Mulligan could find a way to mention the Catholic church in any story, no matter the subject. He said the first person he visited in any new place was the local priest, because ‘they always know what’s going on.’”

Among the many celebrities he interviewed were Marilyn Monroe, Margaret Thatcher, the Shah of Iran, John Glenn, Joe DiMaggio, Bob Hope, Brendan Behan, Tennessee Williams, James Jones, and, of course, John Steinbeck.

Mulligan moved in Ridgefield in 1977 and occasionally wrote columns about his experiences

in his hometown.

He was a voracious reader and diligent researcher who “gloried in finding obscure nuggets of fact and history,” a colleague once said. His Ridgefield home, which he named “Hardscribble House,” featured a wall-size bookcase with the works of Irish writers.

He often sent observations to The Ridgefield Press and in 2001, when the current fire chief, also an amateur actor, retired from firefighting to pursue his avocation, Mulligan offered this letter:

“Now that Dick Nagle has hung up his chief’s helmet and turnouts to pursue an acting-singing career, he might put together a cabaret show of old firehouse favorites. Like:

“Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.

“Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight.

“I don’t Want to Set the World on Fire.

“Too Darn Hot.

“My Old Flame.

“Setting the Woods on Fire.

“Having  A Heat Wave.

“Great Balls of Fire.

“My Heart Burns from Firehouse Cooking.

“Days of Lines and Hoses.

“Hunk of Burnin’ Love.

“Good Night Si-reen.”

Mulligan died in 2008 at the age of 83.

“Hugh's beat was mankind,” former AP president Louis D. Boccardi said at Mulligan's death. “He had a love affair with the world, and we of the AP loved him for it. There won’t be, there can’t be, another Hugh Mulligan.”

Joe Pisani, a Hersam Acorn Newspapers writer who had known Mulligan for 30 years, called him “a man who epitomized all that was honorable about journalism back before accountants and ad directors invaded the newsroom, back before publishers threw around terms like monetize and user-generated content as if they were voodoo incantations that could save this business, back before it was fashionable for journalists to wear their opinions on their sleeves.”

George Henry Smillie: 

Artist of Old Ridgefield

      One trip to the West gave George Smillie years of inspiration. And so did Ridgefield.

     A leading American landscape artist at the turn of the 20th Century, George Henry  Smillie lived for many years on Main Street in the house just south of the Keeler Tavern. Here he painted scenes both local and quite distant.

     Born in New York City in 1840,  Smillie (rhymes with Millie) belonged to an active and influential family in the city’s art circles. His father was an engraver who transferred many landscape paintings of noted contemporary artists into engravings, which were popular in the 19th Century. “Quite naturally then,” the Smithsonian American Art Museum says, George “was able to embrace a wide range of landscape subjects, from quiet New England meadows to bold mountain passages and rocky coastlines.”

His older brother, James David Smillie, was also a painter and instructor with a fine reputation. 

George studied in Europe and under James McDougal Hart, a well-known American landscape artist.

In 1871 Smillie headed west, sketching and painting, particularly the Rockies and California’s

Yosemite Valley. Many sketches served as models for years of oil and watercolor landscapes he was to paint in New York City, Ridgefield and Bronxville, N.Y., where he lived over the years. Many of the resulting paintings showed mountain scenes as well as American Indians.

He also painted scenes he saw locally, and one of his most interesting Ridgefield works is a view of the old Stebbins homestead, painted in 1892 shortly before the house was torn down to make way for the Casagmo mansion (which itself was torn down). 

However, probably his best-known local picture is “Mill Pond at Ridgefield.” Another, called simply “Near Ridgefield,” is also an excellent example of his work. Both are in private collections.

Besides the Smithsonian, his work is in the collections of many  major museums including  the

Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the National Gallery of Art in Washington,  and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. His paintings have fetched as much as $130,000 at recent auctions.

Smillie exhibited extensively including at such major venues as the Boston Athenaeum, the Salmagundi Club, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Pennsylvania Academy of  Fine Arts, and the

Corcoran Gallery at Washington. He exhibited almost every year at the National Academy of Design from 1862 to 1921, becoming a full academician in 1876. The Society of  American Artists honored him with a medal in 1907.

In 1881 Smillie married Nellie Sheldon Jacobs (b. 1854-1926), a painter of genre pictures, who had been a student of his brother. He died in 1921 in Bronxville.

The National Gallery of Art, which owns several Smillie works, said Smillie “was less interested in objectively rendering optical effects than in conveying feelings and moods through his strikingly simplified compositions. He marveled at the fact that while landscape painting could be defined as a horizon crossed by a diagonal, it was a formula capable of expressing an endless variety of emotions.” 

Kirk Browning: 

From Eggs to Emmys

How does an egg deliveryman get to be a major television director and win a dozen Emmy Awards?

By living in Ridgefield.

Kirk Browning, a Ridgefield chicken farmer, a World War II ambulance driver and, just for fun, a pianist, became the award-winning director of  “Live from Lincoln Center,” the acclaimed series of television concerts on PBS.

He also directed such pioneering works as Frank Sinatra’s first TV show and the world premiere of Gian Carlo Menotti’s “Amahl and the Night Visitors,” the first opera written for television.

Kirk Browning was born in Manhattan in 1921. His parents, William and Elizabeth Miner Browning, had a farm on Spring Valley Road for more than 40 years.

Kirk attended Cornell University but dropped out after only a month and, still a teenager, got a job as a reporter for a newspaper in Waco, Texas.

When he tried to enlist in the Army during World War II, he was rejected. So instead, he served as an ambulance driver in the American Field Service with the Eighth Army. In late 1943 in Italy, he had arrived with his ambulance on the north bank of a river just after midnight, carrying two badly wounded New Zealand soldiers. The river was so swollen by floods that he could go no farther with the ambulance.

“He waded through the swirling, chest-high waters of the River Sandro with stretcher bearers who carried two wounded men,” The Ridgefield Press reported in January 1944. “On the south bank, Browning commandeered a Jeep and raced to the nearest medical post where he summoned an ambulance. The two wounded men were speedily transferred to the medical post and have a good chance of recovery.”

After the war Browning came back to Ridgefield to work on his family’s Ridgebury farm.

It was while delivering eggs to his neighbor up the road, Samuel Chotzinoff, that his “big break” came. Chotzinoff was music director of NBC, the man who brought Toscanini out of retirement to lead the NBC Symphony Orchestra, and the man who commissioned Menotti to write “Amahl and the Night Visitors.”

Chotzinoff saw something in Browning, a fellow fan of the piano, and offered him a job filing scores in NBC’s music library. From there Browning began working his way up, becoming  a stage manager and then being chosen by Chotzinoff to direct telecasts of the NBC Symphony Orchestra, led by Toscanini. 

Browning enjoyed telling how he got that job. 

Toscanini was doing a concert at Carnegie Hall instead of at NBC’s big studio. Since the concert was outside the studio, “they assigned a sports truck and a sports director because it was a ‘remote’ and that’s the team that does it,” Browning said. 

“The sports director, knowing nothing about music — all he was used to was taking pictures of whatever he saw — he read that there was a piece called ‘The Girl with the Flaxen Hair’ [by Claude Debussy], so he goes out and he hires a lovely blonde girl and backstage puts her on a rock in front of a mirror pool...and as Toscanini is conducting, he ‘supers’ over this girl combing her hair. 

Chotzinoff and Browning were watching the broadcast together. Chotzinoff was aghast when the blonde appeared.

“Chotzinoff turned to me and he said, ‘Kirk, from now on, you’re directing.’

“That’s how I got my job. He took one look at what this guy was doing with that broadcast. There were no guidelines then — I mean Shotzi had no idea at that time what should be done and what shouldn’t be done. But he had enough taste to know that when you have Toscanini on, you don’t put a model combing her hair over his face.”

 Browning went on to direct 185 broadcasts of  “Live from Lincoln Center,” winning 10 Emmys. He also directed telecasts of the NBC Opera Company.

 Along with his Lincoln Center Emmys and three primetime Emmys for other productions, Browning earned two Christopher awards, a CITA award and a George Foster Peabody award.

He never retired, and when he died in 2008 at the age of 86, he was beginning work on another “Live from Lincoln Center,” a New York City Opera production of Puccini's “Madama Butterfly.” It had been a favorite opera of another Ridgefielder from the past, Metropolitan Opera star Geraldine Farrar.

Theodore Sorensen: 

The President’s Man

When President John F. Kennedy challenged the nation at his inauguration,  “Ask not what  your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country,” he was relying on the wordsmithing of a young man named Theodore Sorensen.

Sorensen was not only a speechwriter for the president, he was a trusted adviser and confidante.

Even Richard M. Nixon was in awe of his abilities. “You need a mind like Sorensen’s around you that’s clicking and clicking all the time,” Nixon once said. 

Sorensen, who lived in Ridgefield in the 1970s, headed  Kennedy’s staff for the eight years he was a U.S. senator, and then spent three years as the president’s special counsel on domestic affairs. 

Theodore Chaiken Sorensen was born in Nebraska in 1928.  His mother was a social worker, feminist and pacifist and his father, a Republican lawyer and Nebraska attorney general, had named his son after Theodore Roosevelt.

He graduated from the University of Nebraska with a law degree and in 1952 moved to Washington where he worked as a government lawyer. He was soon hired by Kennedy, a new Democratic senator from Massachusetts. The two shared many political ideals and values.

Kennedy often made use of Sorensen’s skill with the English language and, according to The New York Times, when Kennedy’s bestselling book, “Profiles in Courage,” was published in 1956, “it was no great secret that Mr. Sorensen’s intellect was an integral part of the book. Sorensen later admitted he drafted most of the chapters. “I’ve tried to keep it secret,” Sorensen told The Times.

During several years of traveling the country with Kennedy in preparation for his 1960 run for president, the two worked closely together on honing a message and voice. “He became a much better speaker,” he said. “I became much more equipped to write speeches for him. Day after day after day, he’s up there on the platform speaking, and I’m sitting in the audience listening, and I find out what works and what doesn’t, what fits his style.”

One of the Sorensen-written campaign speeches has been widely credited with helping turn the tide toward a Kennedy victory. The nation had never elected a Catholic president, and millions of voters were suspicious of his Catholicism. On Sept. 12, 1960, in an address to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, Kennedy said,  “I am not the Catholic candidate for president. I am the Democratic Party candidate for president who also happens to be a Catholic. I do not speak for my Church on public matters – and the Church does not speak for me.”

While Sorensen’s job in the White House was domestic policy, Kennedy often sought his help with international issues, including when the Cuban missile crisis confronted the new president in 1962 after the CIA discovered the Soviets building missile sites in Cuba. “When he became president and was faced with the Cuban crisis, the first nuclear confrontation in history, I was involved,” he told Linette Burton of The Ridgefield Press. “The president had his own foreign policy advisers including, of course, the secretary of state, in the White House, and he called in 12 men whose judgment he trusted” — Sorensen among them. “No one had had experience in a thing like this, but we hammered it out together.”

Sorensen wound up drafting a sensitive letter from Kennedy to Soviet premiere Nikita Khrushchev. “Time was short,” he later told The Times. “The hawks were rising. Kennedy could keep control of his own government, but one never knew whether the advocates of bombing and invasion might somehow gain the upper hand.

The letter called for a peaceful solution to the conflict. “I knew that any mistakes in my letter — anything that angered or soured Khrushchev — could result in the end of America, maybe the end of the world.”

Soon, however, negotiations and a U.S. quarantine on Soviet ships approaching Cuba led to Khrushchev's withdrawing the missiles.

Sorensen admitted worshipping Kennedy and when the president was killed, he was devastated. He dropped out of government service for a while, but returned in 1970, two years after Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated. He ran for Bobby Kennedy’s senate seat from New York. He later admitted it was a mistake. “I simply thought that if I were to carry on the Kennedy legacy, if I were to perpetuate the ideals of John Kennedy, as Robert Kennedy tried to do, that I would need to be in public office. Frankly, it was an act of hubris on my part.”

After his defeat he returned to his law practice. But when he moved to Bennett’s Farm Road in 1972, Sorensen told interviewer Burton, “I’m young enough to think I’ll be back in government.”

And he was right.

In 1976, President Jimmy Carter nominated Sorensen to be director of the Central Intelligence Agency. However, after a storm of protest connected with charges he had leaked classified information as a Kennedy adviser,  Sorensen withdrew. 

The next year, Carter named him to the Presidential Advisory Committee for Trade Negotiations and he was involved in the late 1970s negotiations that led to turning the Panama Canal over to Panama in 1999. 

He served President Clinton as a member of the President’s Commission on White House Fellowships and endowed a grant of his own: the Theodore C. Sorensen Research Fellowship at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston; it helps scholars of domestic policy, political journalism, polling, and similar subjects. 

Sorensen wrote several books, including “Kennedy,” “The Kennedy Legacy,” and “Watchmen in the Night: Presidential Accountability after Watergate.” 

He later lived in Bedford, N.Y., and practiced law in New York City.  When he died in 2010 at the age of 82. The Times called him “one of the last links to John F. Kennedy’s administration … who did much to shape the president’s narrative, image and legacy.” 

Mary “May” Rockwell: 

A Hotel of Culture

A house with a lot of history was torn down in 2014, but little of its former glory was left by then. The large Victorian on Governor Street, which had long been an office building, was razed to make way for the new Ridgefield Visiting Nurse Association headquarters. It was a building that had led four lives in its two centuries, including several decades as the House of Friends.

The building originally stood on Main Street, in front of today’s Community Center, where it had been the home of the Perry family, which produced three prominent Ridgefield physicians. It then became the home of Gov. Phineas Lounsbury, who turned a colonial-style structure into a Victorian. When he decided to build a grander place, today’s Community Center, he moved his old house to Governor Street where it became the home of  Mr. and Mrs. John W. Rockwell and and their daughter, Mary. John, longtime owner of The Elms Inn, probably paid a modest price because the Rockwells and Lounsburys were relatives.

 Mary Hester “May” Rockwell was born in 1874 and received an education that was well above the average schooling for a Ridgefield native of the era. In 1889, when she was only 15 years old, she was studying at Centenary Collegiate Institute, a Methodist-owned college preparatory

school in Hackettstown, N.J., that is now Centenary University.

In 1891, when she was 17, her parents sent her to Europe and she spent six months studying music in Berlin, Germany. She later also studied at Oberlin College.

“Miss Rockwell was a tall, stately woman whose life was clouded by poor eyesight,” wrote Karl S. Nash in 1980. “She was an albino with one-quarter of normal sight in one eye and none in the other.

“In the 1920’s when she was in her forties, she left the Methodist Church where she had grown up and embraced Christian Science. She threw away her thick-lensed glasses and never wore them again. In embracing the teachings of Mary Baker Eddy, she became more calm of spirit and more able to cope optimistically with her infirmity.”

Rockwell was an accomplished pianist who taught piano to hundreds of Ridgefield children over more than 30 years, at first with her cousin Faustina Hurlbutt. The Hurlbutt-Rockwell School of Music regularly gave public recitals at her home.

Her house became rather large for a single woman, so in the 1910s May Rockwell began

renting rooms in a boarding-house fashion. She didn’t rent to just anyone, however; she sought guests who were intellectually interesting as well as congenial, and she called the place the “House of Friends.”

   Among those friends, best known was Mabel Cleves, her companion of more than 40 years (previously profiled in Who Was Who).  Columbia-educated and Montessori-trained,   Cleves began teaching here in 1898, and established not only the first kindergarten in town but also a public preschool.  She also founded the PTA in Ridgefield.

In late life, Miss Cleves bought an automobile and learned how to drive it. She would take Rockwell and other friends on fairly long rides around the countryside. “Sometimes Mary and Mabel would go wading at Compo Beach or Sherwood Island,” Nash said.

Besides long-term clientele, guests at the house included actors and actresses doing summer theater, and teachers and professors on summer break. The place had a “high cultural level,” The Ridgefield Press once reported. 

At Oberlin, Rockwell had studied under Professor Charles K. Barry who later became a regular summer visitor at the House of Friends.

Among the more unusual guests there were Mr. and Mrs. William Picke. Mr. Picke was a tutor

for the Doubleday family of Westmoreland. “He was a distinguished-looking man with a goatee and a British accent,” said Nash, who then recounted this widely told incident:  “At the silent movies in the town hall one Saturday night, Mr. Picke looked about and whispered to his wife — loud enough for somebody to hear— ‘Oh, my dear, we are the only ones of the upper class here.’”

Frail and infirm, Rockwell sold the house in 1947 and died two years later in a nursing home. Mabel Cleves died in 1952. 

David Weingast: 

Superintendent and Scholar

A few days after he accepted the job of Ridgefield superintendent of schools in 1967, Dr. David Weingast was offered a college presidency. 

“I have often wondered what would have happened if I had accepted that instead,” said Weingast in a 1977 interview. But, he added, running a college was “no bed of roses” then, and “I have no regrets. Ridgefield has been a tough superintendency, but you have to remember that I became superintendent at a time when the academic world was a very tough place to be.” 

Weingast, the second longest-serving of the town’s 20 or so superintendents, had indeed worked through tough times, a decade of turmoil with one crisis seeming to come on the heels of another: school building debates, problems with overcrowding, book burning controversies,  budget battles, a very unhappy teachers’ union, and many lesser issues. 

But, he said, it was also a period of accomplishment: the creation of a modern, balanced program of studies, the introduction of greater emphasis on writing, the expansion of fine arts offerings, the increasing use of community resources, the hiring of capable staff, rewriting the whole curriculum from kindergarten through 12th grade using teams of teachers, and the improved management of money. 

“I think we’ve achieved a good balance between teaching the basics and promoting student creativity,” Weingast said. 

The most scholarly of Ridgefield’s superintendents — he wrote four books — and the only one to settle permanently in town,  David Elliott Weingast was born in 1912 in Newark, N.J., and began teaching elementary school there in 1931 at $1,300 a year. 

He received his master’s from Columbia in 1936 and moved to teaching history at Newark’s prestigious Weequahic High School. He got a Columbia doctorate in 1948, was made department chairman, and in 1961, became assistant superintendent for secondary schools in Newark, responsible for nine high schools and six junior highs. 

Meanwhile, he was writing four books: “Walter Lippmann: A Study in Personal Journalism”

(1949), “Franklin D. Roosevelt: Man of Destiny” (1952), “This Is Communism” (1959), and “We Elect A President” (1962). The last two have appeared in several editions, and the Roosevelt book was once chosen one of The New York Times best books for young people.

Before coming to Ridgefield, he received a Ford Foundation grant for study in Europe, concentrating on political systems and the rising tide of communism in Italy. 

In 1975,  Dr. Weingast spent a month visiting Russia, Switzerland and England as one of 25 school superintendents on a trip sponsored by the American Association of School Administrators. He admired the rigor, though not necessarily the approach, of the Russian schools. 

“The program is academically strong, the spirit competitive,” he wrote  after returning. “Academic offerings in the secondary school are compulsory and there are no electives. The Russians would, I think, be bewildered by our system of electives and of our effort to fit a program to every child.”

He retired here when he reached 65, and became a consultant on education, working out of his Main Street home. Like his wife, Bea, he was an active citizen, participated in Rotary and other organizations,  but seemed content to remain on sidelines of Ridgefield politics. 

Occasionally he wrote letters to The Press on issues that interested him — opposing condominiums on north Main Street, supporting expansion of the library.  In 1981, with characteristic thoughtfulness, he opposed a zoning variance to allow an expansion of hotel uses on West Lane. 

“The people who ask for exceptions to the zoning rules mean Ridgefield no harm,” he wrote. “But each applicant wants what he wants. The sum of their wants is more cars, more blacktop, more congestion, more noise, more dirt, more pollution... Beautiful towns don’t decline overnight; they surrender, one building at a time.”

In retirement he had been researching and writing a new book, “The President’s Choice: The Story of the Presidential Cabinet,” but the book had not been completed when Weingast died in 2007 at the age of 94.

His longtime home on Main Street is now the residence of First Selectman and Mrs. Rudy Marconi.

Over his tenure here, his employer, the school board, had caused Weingast much aggravation — at one point the board even voted to fire him, then changed its mind and gave him a new contract. 

When Weingast retired, he was asked if he might ever run for a seat on the school board. 

He laughed loudly.  

“Never!” he said. “I couldn’t be dragooned or seduced or bought!”