Hildegarde Oskison: 

Writing Was in Her Blood

In 1950, when Hildegarde Oskison had turned 79 years old and had written nearly two dozen books, she announced that she would retire from writing and commence to enjoy what others   had written. She did not, however, retire from community involvement and continued to attend Ridgefield Town Meetings and First Congregational Church activities and could be seen each day walking to the post office from her home on East Ridge and later, The Elms Inn. 

During her long career, Oskison had probably out-produced her more illustrious grandfather, publishing 23 books and many newspaper and magazine pieces, usually under her maiden name, Hildegarde Hawthorne.

One of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s seven grandchildren, Hildegarde Hawthorne was born in New York City in 1871 but spent much of her youth growing up in England, Germany, Jamaica, and Long Island — her father, Julian Hawthorne, was a journalist, novelist and poet who moved around a lot. 

She had little formal education, outside of tutors and her parents, but clearly had inherited her family’s love of writing. When she was only 16, her first short story was published in St. Nicholas, a magazine for children, and she continued to write for young people throughout her life.

When she was 20, Harper’s published the first of her articles aimed at adults and she went on to produce hundreds of pieces on travel, gardening, and other subjects, as well as to write many ghost stories. Among her 23 books were half dozen biographies, including one on her grandfather, called

“The Romantic Rebel,”  and others on  Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau. She also wrote six Westerns aimed at young readers, several histories, a book on gardening, and many travelogues.

“The travelogues, such as Corsica (1926), are highly descriptive, personal accounts,” said biographer Jane Stanbrough. “Of her histories, ‘California’s Missions’ (1942) is a very interesting and directly related account of those missions and the men who founded them. It is a well-written work that still deserves to be read.”

As for those Westerns, Stanbrough characterized them as “superficial and hackneyed.”

In 1920, she married John Milton Oskison (1874–1947), a writer and journalist who was the first person of American Indian descent to graduate from Stanford University.  They lived for many years in California where Hildegarde became a frequent hiker and camper, and often established friendships with both backwoodsmen and American Indians. She produced three books on California and used her wilderness experiences in writing her Westerns.

During World War I, Oskison assisted the soldiers by serving with the YWCA troop support services in France and with the Red Cross. At the same time, she provided dispatches to The New York Times and The New York Herald about aspects of the war she was witnessing. In the 1920s she also wrote many book reviews for both papers.

In the early 20th Century, Oskison was active in the woman’s suffrage movement and took

part in many rallies.

She came to Ridgefield around 1940, living on East Ridge; by then, she had been separated from her husband. By the late 1940s, she had moved to The Elms Inn on Main Street. She died in 1952 at the age of 81.

Her last article, written for Reader’s Digest when she was nearly 80 years old, described her aunt, Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, a writer who after a troublesome marriage to an alcoholic who died of cirrhosis,  became a Catholic nun. In 1901, as Mother Mary Alphonsa, O.P., Rose Hawthorne established  the Rosary Hill Home for terminally cancer patients, which still operated today in Hawthorne, N.Y., by an order of nuns that she founded.

Hiram Davis: 

The Last Blue

 When Hiram Davis died in 1947, he was one of only two Connecticut veterans of the Civil War still living and one of only 47 survivors of the war in the nation who were listed on the Veterans Pension Rolls in Washington. He had also been the last living Civil War veteran from Ridgefield.

But perhaps even more significant — and often overlooked — was the fact that Hiram was just one of four brothers who all served in the Civil War.

One of them never returned.

Hiram Davis was born in 1849 on the Davis family farm in Wilton, right on the Ridgefield border, along Nod Road. A twin brother, Henry, died as an infant.

 When he was only 15 years old, Hiram enlisted in the 25th Regiment of the New York Cavalry. He served as a drummer boy in Sheridan’s army in the Shenandoah Valley and was with the general on his 20-mile dash from Winchester, immortalized in the Thomas Buchanan Reed poem, “Sheridan’s Ride.” 

After the war, he moved to Ridgefield, living here until 1929 when he retired to Florida.

He was a stonemason and, according to The Ridgefield Press, “it was said there was scarcely a chimney in Ridgefield…which had not been built or repaired by him.” 

Active in the community, Hiram served as a state representative in 1908, as a borough warden, and in the fire department. He was a Mason, Odd Fellow, and the last member of the Edwin D. Pickett Post of the Grand Army of the Republic, Ridgefield’s organization for Civil War veterans.

When he died in 1947, he was 98 years old.

Hiram was one of at least eight children of Hiram and Catherine Hoyt Davis. Three brothers, James W. Davis (1844-1927), Albert N. Davis (1929-1864), and Madison Davis, all served in the war. James and Albert enlisted from Ridgefield, Madison from Wilton.

Albert died of dysentery in a Washington, D.C., hospital nearly a year after enlisting in the Connecticut First Regiment of Heavy Artillery.

James was in the 12th Regiment, enlisting at the age of 16. He served under General B. F. Butler with Admiral Farragut and was at the surrender of New Orleans, and in the Battles of Georgia Landing and Pattersonville. He was with General Sheridan at the Battle of Winchester, and through the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, and was reportedly wounded at least once during combat. James became a minister and, in 1925, was the commander of Connecticut’s Grand Army of the Republic organization when he spoke at the dedication of the War Memorial on Main Street at the head of Branchville Road. According to one account, he “made a stirring address telling of the trials and tribulations of service in the Civil War.”

Madison also served in the 12th Regiment, was captured at Cedar Creek, Va., in 1864, and was held for several months at the infamous Andersonville prisoner-of-war camp. Among Madison’s grandchildren was Harold O. Davis (1905-1986), longtime tax assessor of the town of Ridgefield.

Hiram’s mother did not live to see her sons go off to war — she died in 1854, about 45 years old. His father, on the other hand, was like Hiram himself — long-lived. He died in 1893, 93 years old.

Harvey Lown: 

The Beloved Embezzler

Probably no arrest in Ridgefield’s history has evoked the outpouring of emotion that surrounded the case of Harvey Lown, a beloved war veteran and native son who had been Ridgefield’s tax collector for 13 years . Even the judge who sent Lown to prison had tears in his eyes when he pronounced the sentence.

When the arrest came in February of 1940, “it was as though a bomb had been dropped in our little community,” wrote former town historian Richard E. Venus.

Harvey Bishop Lown was the Norman Rockwell picture of the ideal citizen of a small New England town, a man who had risked his life for his country in World War I, who owned a successful local business, who had led many major organizations in town, who had served on the school board and as a state representative, and who, with his beautiful schoolteacher wife, was invited to many of the nicest social events in Ridgefield.

Born in 1899 in neighboring Wilton, young Harvey Lown came to Ridgefield at the age of three. He attended local schools and Norwalk High School — Ridgefield had no high school back then — and was both a good student and a fine athlete. “He was a great baseball player, an exceptionally good hitter and base runner, and played the outfield with the grace of a Tris Speaker or Joe DiMaggio,” recalled Venus. “He had a very pleasing personality and was very easy to like.”

After graduating Lown worked as a clerk in S.D. Keeler’s store (where Deborah Ann’s Sweet Shoppe is now) until the outbreak of World War I, when he joined the U.S. Navy. Lown served as a storekeeper aboard the U.S.S. Minnesota and later the U.S.S. Tenadores, which was transporting troops and war supplies to France. He sailed on seven missions to France, but on the eighth, his military career nearly ended. At midnight on Dec. 28, 1918, the 485-foot Tenadores struck rocks in the Bay of Biscay and began sinking. Lown and fellow crewmates drifted in a lifeboat for two days before being rescued by a minesweeper. He was then assigned to a destroyer, which stayed afloat till war’s end.

Back in his hometown, Lown went to work for Judge George G. Scott, who had an insurance business and was also the town clerk. It was working under Scott that Lown was introduced to a bookkeeping technique that was to be his downfall. In 1926, he bought Scott’s business on Main Street, a bit south of the town hall, and renamed it the Lown Agency. 

Lown was becoming increasingly involved in the community, where he eventually became president of the Promoter’s Club, precursor of the Lions Club, of which he was also president. He was chairman of the 1939 Building Committee that enlarged Ridgefield High School with an auditorium (now the Ridgefield Playhouse), cafeteria and classrooms. He was active in the Red Cross, the Masons, the American Legion, St. Stephen’s Church, and various relief efforts during the Great Depression.

In 1927, Lown was elected the town’s tax collector, a part-time job held over the generations by the most respected and trustworthy citizens.

At around this time he was courting a popular Ridgefield teacher, Elizabeth O’Shea (whose sister Isabel, also a teacher, became the first principal of Veterans Park School). Venus described

Elizabeth as “very pretty” and “very popular.” Harvey and Elizabeth were married in August 1929, two months before the Wall Street crash that was to figure in Harvey’s later troubles.

In 1932, Tax Collector Lown was also elected one of Ridgefield’s two representatives to the State Legislature, another sign of the high esteem in which he was held. A profile of him that year in The Ridgefield Press said the tax collector “has given the town a highly efficient administration of that office.” It predicted that, “as representative to the General Assembly, Mr. Lown will undoubtedly give the same conscientious and efficient performance of the duties as given to those of the past.”

Lown’s profile in the paper was accompanied by another — that of Judge George G. Scott, with whom Lown had worked and from whom he bought the insurance business. Scott was also a public official; serving among other things as town assessor, judge of probate, and town clerk. Lown learned a lot from Scott—including how to deal with money.

According to 1940 notes written in pencil by Press Publisher and Editor Karl S. Nash and found in an old file, “Scott’s system of bookkeeping was lax. During his incumbency, [he] kept money of town and money of his business in same pot. That was how Mr. Lown learned the business.”

Lown began doing the same thing, keeping his insurance business income in the same account as his tax collections. It simplified his bookkeeping, but led to problems.

Ridgefield in the 1930s was suffering from the effects of the Great Depression. Many people were in financial trouble. “We know of several people who went to see Harvey when they were unable to pay either their premiums or their taxes,” historian Venus wrote in 1984. “After hearing their plight, he would agree to carry them until they were back on their feet.”

To help his insurance customers, Lown started using the town’s tax income to cover premiums. He would replace the tax money when he had received enough insurance money to do so. For most of years in office, Lown was able to cover the premium payments he “borrowed” before there was any problem.

Ridgefield was not alone among Connecticut’s 169 towns in having officials who commingled funds. It was apparently a common practice, especially among smaller towns. But the Depression led to shortages in many municipal accounts in the state, and problems became so widespread that in 1939, the General Assembly passed a law requiring regular audits of the books of town offices involved in handling tax dollars.

“It was said that some officials could see the axe about to fall and were successful in getting their houses in order,” Venus said. “Several audits were made and failed to disclose any wrongdoing.”

In November of 1939, the state tax department sent auditors to look at Ridgefield’s books. Lown was at the top of his popularity; he’d just been re-elected tax collector by a huge margin and he had recently been chosen president of the Connecticut Tax Collectors Association. One town official told a newspaper, “the audit is simply the first in a routine check-up which in the future will be made at stated periods in accordance with the enactment of the 1939 legislature.”

But when the auditors stayed in town hall longer than expected, people began to wonder if something was amiss. And in early December, the state tax department disclosed it had found “irregularities” in Ridgefield’s tax collection records.

The Bridgeport Telegram reported on Jan. 9 that a preliminary report on Ridgefield’s audit had been turned over to State Tax Commissioner Charles J. McLaughlin and State’s Attorney Lorin W. Willis. McLaughlin had ordered the audit when, he said, tax receipts and bank balances over the previous two years “appeared to be out of balance.” 

Then, on Jan. 16, Lown resigned as tax collector, and was immediately arrested for embezzlement.

Ridgefielders couldn’t believe what was happening. Much loved in town and much respected throughout Connecticut, Harvey Lown was under arrest, charged with misappropriating funds. 

First Selectman Winthrop Rockwell was shaken. The fellow Republican and longtime friend of Lown called an emergency meeting of the Board of Selectmen, the people who run town government. However, when many citizens and three reporters from local newspapers showed up, Rockwell and his board tried to have them all ejected so the officials could discuss the auditors’ report in private. That sparked angry outcries. The reporters and some citizens refused to leave, believing the discussion should be public. Eventually the meeting was canceled, but the outrage at the attempt at secrecy became so widespread that the selectmen wound up releasing the report to the public.

It turned out that Lown’s tax accounts were missing some $11,500 — nearly $200,000 in today’s dollars.

Lown pleaded guilty. With the help of friends, he also made full restitution of the missing $11,500. Nonetheless, the state wanted to make an example of him so that public officials across Connecticut would heed the new, tough law on commingling tax funds.

Lown was brought before Judge Carl Foster in a packed courtroom at Superior Court, Bridgeport.

First Selectman Rockwell testified in Lown’s behalf. “He was a man for whom we always felt there was a great future,” he said. “This unfortunate situation would never have occurred had it not been for the fact that he devoted so much of his efforts and time to civic affairs.”

Rockwell argued that “it was more than a man’s job and if it weren’t for this and other civic undertakings which he shouldered and the fact that he had so many friends whom he disliked to dun for insurance premiums in the conduct of his own business, he would never have been in this position.”

State’s Attorney Willis took a different tack, telling the court that because Lown had so many friends among his clients, he was lax in pressing them for premium payments. When it came time for him to send the money to the insurance companies, he “unfortunately fell into the habit of drawing money from the town funds to make good to the companies he represented, but always with the intention of making good, just as every embezzler does.” When Lown did collect the late premiums, he would return the money to the town accounts, but he was never able to quite catch up.

Willis argued that Lown had been doing this since he first took office and each year fell further behind until the accumulated shortages reached about $11,500. “We have before us the unhappy situation which has become all too common, of a tax collector in whom the public placed its confidence and held in high esteem, and who then proves faithless,” Willis said. 

Tax collectors, he said, “fail to realize the gravity of such an offense. It strikes a blow at the orderly forms of democratic government and these things cannot be overlooked. I understand that several townspeople, including officials, are here today to testify in Mr. Lown’s behalf, but it is difficult to understand how town officers can take any stand in this matter.”

The judge felt he had little choice in the case. His decision prompted an unusually emotional 65-word sentence opening to the news story in The Bridgeport Post:

“One of the most dramatic incidents in the history of the Superior Court, a picture so rare that spectators sat breathless in their seats in stunned silence after it was over, occurred today when Judge Carl Foster, voice choked with emotion and tears flooding his eyes, sentenced Harvey B. Lown, 40, former Ridgefield tax collector, to state’s prison for two to five years for embezzlement.”

The judge, the account continued, “seemed nearly carried away by an inner emotional turbulence as he declared, prior to the sentencing: ‘This man deserves every ounce of credit, yet the law must be upheld.’ ”

Judge Foster’s sentence shocked most people, both because he’d seemed sympathetic to Lown and because State’s Attorney Willis had repeatedly referred to the fact that Lown had made full restitution of the losses and always was — and still was — highly regarded by his town. 

The sentence was tougher than those handed out today. During his first year in prison, Lown could receive only one letter a week, and his wife was limited to only two, 30-minute visits a month.

“This tragic situation had a profound effect on many people,” said Venus. “The person most affected, after Harvey himself, was his ever-loyal wife, Elizabeth, who stepped into the breech and carried on the Lown Insurance business.”

In fact, that business continued in operation for many years. Even while Lown was in prison,

many Ridgefielders would buy their insurance from his wife. People still loved Lown, and tried to help in many ways. Dr. and Mrs. Robert DuBois, for instance, doubled their amount of insurance to show their support for him.

When he was released from prison in 1943, “the strain had taken its toll,” Venus said. “The once vibrant and enthusiastic Lowns would never be the happy people they had been.”

Nonetheless, Lown remained a part of the business and social community, and was particularly active in the American Legion where he served many years as chairman of the Sailors, Soldiers and Marines Fund, retiring in 1962 because of poor eyesight. In 1964, he was elected president of the Last Man’s Club, a group of World War I veterans. In a touch of irony, his vice president was John C. Kelly, former head of the Connecticut State Police Department.

The Lown Agency was eventually sold to A.J. Carnall, which is now part of the Fairfield County Bank Insurance Services. Elizabeth died in 1959 at the age of 57. A year later, Lown married Katherine Klein English, a widow from Bethel.

When he died in 1967, the man who had once been a friend of everyone in town and subject of countless front-page stories, good and bad, had only a brief six-paragraph obituary, placed deep inside that week’s Ridgefield Press. It said nothing of his having been the town’s tax collector for 13 years — or of his arrest and imprisonment.

“Harvey’s loyal friends have always felt that he never shortchanged anyone but himself,” Venus said.—from “Wicked Ridgefield”

Michael Bullock: 

Three Friends Who Flew

Longtime Ridgefielder Mike Bullock loved flying. So did two close friends, Robert Herrman and Donald Gough. All three died doing what they loved to do.

The three met in the U.S. Marines as young jet pilots. Later all three flew fighters off the carrier USS Forrestal in Vietnam. All three then went to work for Trans World Airlines, flying 747s. 

They often did things together. For instance, Gough and Herrman spent 12 years building a single-engine Christen Eagle aerobatic biplane.

On July 17, 1996,  Gough, then off-duty, and his wife Analei, were flying as passengers aboard TWA Flight 800. Twelve minutes after the 747 took off from Kennedy Airport, the plane exploded over the ocean, killing all 230 people aboard. It was the third most deadly plane crash in U.S. history and the subsequent investigation, the most expensive in aviation history, led to a probable cause of a short circuit in a fuel tank. (The engineer aboard the flight was Richard G. Campbell of Ridgefield.) 

Two years later, Bullock and Herrman were flying the Christen Eagle that Gough had helped build. They were near the Napa Valley of California when something went wrong and the aircraft plunged into Lake Berryessa, killing both of them. Bullock was 58 years old.

A New Jersey native, Michael Edward Bullock was born in 1940. He graduated from Fairleigh Dickinson University in 1961 and immediately joined the Marine Corps, earning his aviator wings in 1963. After his military service, he flew for TWA from 1966 until 1992, earning the rank of captain. He joined Taiwanese carrier EVA Airways in 1992 and was flying 747s for them when he died in 1998.

Bullock moved to Ridgefield the same year he joined TWA and left the same year he joined EVA, splitting his time between at homes in Chatham on Cape Cod and in Taiwan.

During his years here, he was active in the community. He was a founder and commandant of Ridgefield’s Marine Corps League detachment, and was among the first to lead its Toys for Tots program in town; he was named Marine of the Year in 1979.

He was a member of the Republican Town Committee, and other GOP groups, and was active in the Lions and the old Jaycees club. He managed Little League and Pony Colt baseball teams.

Bullock was also active in the Airline Pilots Association and was its safety and training chairman in the 1980s.

“He was a very outgoing, very friendly, very dynamic type of person,” said Paul Sedlak, a fellow TWA pilot and longtime friend. “He was very active and very involved in everything he ever did. And he was always doing something.”

He had a “zest for living,” said his wife, Mickey, who had been a Ridgefield teacher. “He was a pilot’s pilot.” 

Carmela Sabilia: 

The Peanut Lady 

Few Ridgefielders in the 1920s and 30s knew the name Carmela Sabilia but, as Dom D’Addario once observed, “everyone knew The Peanut Lady.” 

Mrs. Sabilia lived in Georgetown with her grocer husband, Louis, and by 5 a.m. each Sunday, she’d be up roasting peanuts over a wood fire. She’d package them in bags, put them in two baskets and be off on a 13-mile walk that took her through Branchville and up the long, four-mile hill to Ridgefield village, selling her bags of peanuts along the way at 10 cents each. 

“She always wore a hat and two or three layers of coats or jackets,” said D’Addario, who had been a child in Branchville at the time. 

Carmela Catmo was born in 1859 in Italy and was in her late 30s when she came to the United States in 1898. Not long after her arrival, she married Joseph Sabilia, a Connecticut native of Italian parents, who was a year older. By 1910, she had a young son and was working as a “sales lady” for her husband’s “fruit store” in Georgetown,  according to the U.S. Census that year. The store was “Sabilia’s Groceries, Fruits & Vegetables, Ice Cream & Candy,” and she was known to the locals as “Mamma Joe.”

By the 1920s, she was doing her peanut route and was probably in her late 70s before she stopped her weekly treks.

 “She was, as it were, the walking forerunner to the Good Humor truck, given her popularity with the children and the distances she traveled, as far as Ridgefield,” said Wilbur Thompson and Brent Colley, Georgetown historians.  “Mamma Joe used old orange crates to roast peanuts over. She roasted them right on the side of the road. Then she put them in small paper bags and walked (sometimes rode on horseback) the roads of Branchville, Georgetown, Redding selling them.”

While Sabilia reportedly spoke little English, she was wise in the ways of American business. According to Thompson and Colley, “The peanut business was profitable and about once a week, she would travel to the savings bank to make a deposit. 

“Like many women of that period, especially Italians, she wore about 6 layers of skirts with pockets in each. In the bank she pulled up about 4 layers of skirts, found the money and savings booklet, made the deposit, and then buried the booklet back in her layers.”

When she died in 1943, she reportedly left a small fortune. 

She is buried in St. Mary Cemetery beside her husband, who had died five years earlier. Their son, Louis (1900-1970) is there, too.

Dr. Russell Lowe: 

A Physician and A Power

Russell Lowe was no ordinary local doctor. The physician practiced more than a half century in Ridgefield but was involved in many aspects of community life, including government. Although he never held an elective office, Lowe was among the handful of leading citizens who were always looked to for advice on running the town. 

Russell Walter Lowe (pronounced to rhyme with “cow”) was born 1866 in Oneida, N.Y., where he grew up and attended local schools. He graduated from New York University medical school in 1889 at the age of 21, the youngest in his class. By 1893, he had arrived in Ridgefield where he practiced for 53 years. The only break was for service in the Army  in World War I. As a captain in the Medical Corps, he treated soldiers at several camps in the South and was then assigned to the Surgeon General’s Office in Washington D.C.

Dr. Lowe was named the town health officer in 1893 and kept that job most of his career. “He has been very diligent in his duties, ever striving to maintain the high standard of health for which the town of Ridgefield is famed,” wrote George L. Rockwell in his 1927 “History of Ridgefield.”

For most of his years here, he was also the medical examiner and the school physician — he was largely responsible for instituting medical examinations for school children.  In 1897 he was named “special physician” to the Ridgefield Volunteer Fire Department.

For his first 25 years, he had his practice in the building at the north corner of Main and Governor Streets, but for the rest of his career, his office was at his home on Main Street just north of Gilbert Street — the house later owned for many years by Dr. Peter and Beth Yanity.

A longtime member of the Republican Town Committee, he was “one of the party’s most influential leaders,” his obituary in a 1944 Press said. 

Historian Dick Venus touched on that influence in a 1984 Ridgefield Press column about Harvey P. Bissell, the drug store owner who was also comptroller of the state of Connecticut. “Bissell and his close friends, Dr. Russell W. Lowe and the Rev. Richard E. Shortell, made up a triumvirate that pretty much controlled the political action in Ridgefield,” Venus wrote. “The Rev. Hugh Shields, pastor of the First Congregational Church, told a story that pretty much sums up the power that these men had in the political arena. 

Shields “told of how during the late 20s it became necessary to find a new representative to the General Assembly in Hartford. According to Mr. Shields, a meeting took place in the back room of Bissell's store, with all three of the leaders present. Mr. Bissell and Dr. Lowe argued at some length as to who the replacement would be. Father Shortell stood quietly by, listening to the other two, extolling the virtues of their candidates. When, after some time they were still at loggerheads, they turned to him and asked who his preference was. Father Shortell brought up a name that had not been mentioned and said, ‘The best qualified man is the Rev. Hugh Shields.’” And Shields soon became Ridgefield’s state representative. [Shields, Bissell and Shortell — the longtime St. Mary pastor — are all profiled in Who Was Who on the Old Ridgefield group.]

Dr. Lowe was active in the Branchville Fresh Air Association, which brought many city kids to spend part of the summer in Ridgefield.  He was a supporter of Chautauqua,  a sort of traveling educational school that included lectures, musicians and entertainers early in the 20th century.

He was a major fund-raiser for Danbury Hospital — a waiting room was named in his honor in the 1940s — and was president of the Danbury Medical Society for more than 25 years. 

Dr. Lowe was also among the first Ridgefielders to own a car, which he used primarily to make house calls. His first car, purchased around 1904, was a Stanley Steamer, and it was said that he bought a new car almost every year, apparently wearing them out quickly on Ridgefield’s rough roads.

When he died in 1944 at the age of 76, The New York Times ran his obituary under a headline that called him the “Dean of Ridgefield Physicians.”

“To have known Dr. Lowe was an inspiration — a perfect gentleman, a wonderful diagnostician, and a man who gave everything to the public and his profession,” said a testimonial in The Ridgefield Press. “In his practice, he was extremely conscientious — rich and poor were treated alike.”

Margaret O’Sullivan:

Boosting Sports for Women

In 1965,  the senior class at Ridgefield High School dedicated its yearbook to Margaret O’Sullivan who, by then, was a guidance counselor at the school. Few students at the time knew of the role “Miss O” played in helping young women be a part of interscholastic athletics.

     “Before girls sports at Ridgefield High School received an equality boost from Title IX legislation in the early 1970s, they got a formative hand from Margaret O’Sullivan some 30 years earlier,” said longtime Ridgefield Press sports editor Tim Murphy.

     Margaret Claire O’Sullivan was born in 1911 in South Boston, Mass., and graduated from Boston University with a degree in physical education. She later earned a master’s degree at the University of Bridgeport.

     When she joined the high school faculty as a physical education teacher in 1943, there were no interscholastic girls sports teams at RHS. Not one. 

     O’Sullivan quickly changed that, organizing varsity and junior varsity girls teams for one sport each season: field hockey in the fall, basketball in the winter, and softball in the spring. She later started a club team for girls tennis. 

     While turnout for the programs was good, conditions were not. The girls had limited equipment and shared fields with boys’ sports teams — mostly, they practiced and played when the boys were at away games.  But O’Sullivan always fought for more time and attention to girls’ athletics and well-being.

     She served as head of the girls physical education department at the high school until 1962, when she became a guidance counselor. 

“All of us have seen the kind of person she is,” said the staff of the 1965 yearbook. “Loyal, sincere, self-sacrificing, dedicated — these are part of Miss O’s personality. Friendly, helpful, generous, devoted — these, too, describe Miss O. This list is endless. She is the manifestation of many of our ideals.”

O’Sullivan retired in 1973 and moved to Shrewsbury, Mass., to live with a sister. When she died in 1993 at the age of 81, she had been all but forgotten locally. The Ridgefield Press had only a brief, three-paragraph obituary, provided by the sister (but did run a picture of her, smiling).

Seven years later, the Ridgefield Old Timers Association remembered O’Sullivan, giving her a Posthumous Award for her work with girls at Ridgefield High School. ROTA said she had died “with much deserved praise left unsaid.”