Dom D’Addario: 

A Very Good Citizen

Few people have spent more time helping their community — and their country — than Dom D’Addario.

Born in Branchville in 1925, Dominic A. “Dom” D’Addario attended the one-room Branchville Schoolhouse, still standing on lower Old Branchville Road. He began working at the age of 11 — pumping gas at a filling station in Branchville — to help support his family.

He graduated from Ridgefield High School in 1943 and immediately entered the U.S. Army Air Force. He started out a bombardier, but was then sent to navigation school, and he eventually wound up training navigators who guided World War II bombers.

After the war he remained active in the U.S Air Force Reserves for many years, finally retiring as a lieutenant colonel.

     Mr. D’Addario enrolled at the University of Connecticut on the GI Bill — “there was no way my parents could afford to send me to college,” he said in a 2004 interview.  “They had enough to do to put food on the table.”

     He studied engineering, and while still a student, met and married Mary Hrabcsak of Danbury.

     He worked as an engineer at Barden Corp. in Danbury. He also designed kitchens for Rucon Custom Kitchens in Danbury, and headed a furniture company.

In Ridgefield, Mr. D’Addario became interested in town government in the 1980s. Nearly always in company with his wife Mary, he not only attended major town meetings and public hearings but was a regular in the audience of nearly all Police Commission, Board of Selectmen and Planning and Zoning Commission meetings — week in and week out, for years.

In the 1990s, he was a founder and for many years chairman of the Independent Party of Ridgefield, which ran and endorsed candidates for town offices.

For all his interest in public affairs, Mr. D’Addario was noted for not making politics personal, always expressing his opinions respectfully, and remaining friendly with many people on both sides of different issues whether he agreed with them or not.

“He was always a gentleman,” First Selectman Rudy Marconi once said.

Perhaps it was most appropriate that he was a member of the town Ethics Committee for many years.

Both he and his wife were justices of the peace, and officiated at many marriages.

“He was one of the favorite JPs to do ceremonies, and he was always there, if they wanted to be married that afternoon, or the next day, or the next month,” said Town Clerk Barbara Serfilippi.

“Mary and I do that together,” Mr. D’Addario said. “The ceremony is only 15 minutes long, but we try to stretch it out with readings.”

He had also been active in the Laszig Fund, which provides grants that help the elderly,  the Ridgefield Historical Society, and in St. Nicholas Byzantine Catholic Church in Danbury, where he had been a trustee and served on many committees.

And if all that wasn’t enough, he had also donated more than 22 gallons of his blood to the local Red Cross Bloodmobiles.

Mr. D’Addario died in 2012 at the age of 87. Mary D’Addario died in 2016; she was 95 years old.

In 2001, the D’Addarios were both honored as “Citizens of the Year” by the Ridgefield Police Benevolent Association and the Ridgefield Police Union. “Dom and Mary D’Addario are more involved and personally invested in our community than just about anyone else in Ridgefield, and have been for decades,” the police said at the time.

Rev. Samuel Johnson: 

Founder of Church and University

The scholarly missionary who established the Episcopal church in Ridgefield was also the man behind the founding of one of this country’s oldest and most prestigious universities.

For nearly a century, Connecticut had only one, official, practicing religion: Congregational. However, in the early 1700s, the tiny Church of England in Connecticut, with help from the Mother Country, established a congregation in Stratford. The Rev. Samuel Johnson, pastor at Stratford, then began acting as a missionary to a dozen or more Connecticut towns.

In Ridgefield, Dr. Johnson established a congregation in 1725 that grew into St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church. According to old church records, he “preached there occasionally for several years, and was instrumental in bringing several families into the church.”

Soon others took over in Ridgefield, and Johnson eventually became the top Episcopal minister in the state (until 1728, he had been Connecticut’s only Episcopal minister). 

The Guilford native graduated from Yale in 1714 and started out a Congregational minister, converting in 1723; he sailed to London for his ordination at St. Martin-in-the-Fields Church. He was a “high church” Episcopalian who, as St. Stephen’s historian Robert Haight put it, “stressed the Catholic side of the church’s tradition.”

As early as 1750, Dr. Johnson was corresponding with Benjamin Franklin about establishing a new kind of college in New York. He began working with his wife’s family, former students, and Trinity Church in New York City to found a school. 

A board of trustees was formed and, in 1752, nominated him to be the college’s first president. The board decided to call the school King’s College—to help gain a royal charter from King George II. 

Between 1750 and 1753, Dr. Johnson and Dr. Franklin designed a “new-model” plan for an American college that would be used at King’s. It was profession-oriented, classes were taught in English instead of Latin, professors specialized in one subject, and there would be no religious test for admission. The curriculum included math, science, history, commerce, government, and nature. 

The charter was obtained in 1754. Johnson himself taught the first class of eight students; he included use of his own textbook on philosophy. 

Thirty years later, in the wake of the Revolution, the school dropped the “King” and selected Columbia as its name. The university is the oldest in New York State and fifth oldest in the United States.

Over his career Dr. Johnson wrote nearly three-dozen books. He has been called by various historians “a towering intellect of colonial America, a man of great curiosity and philosophical interests,” “the most erudite colonial Anglican theologian of the eighteenth century,” and the “first important philosopher in colonial America.” 

He died in 1772.

Incidentally, his son, William Samuel Johnson, was a signer of the U.S. Constitution; he chaired the Constitution’s five-member Committee of Style, which framed the final text of the document. He also became the third president of Columbia. 

James B. Lee Sr. and Sr.: 

Of  Fedoras and Finance

It’s not too often that you find father-and-son leaders in the world of business, especially when their two business worlds are entirely different. But that was the case with James B. Lee Sr. and Jr. Dad was the head of one of the nation’s largest hat manufacturers — at a time when people still wore hats instead of caps. Son was a financial genius whom The New York Times called “a pioneering deal maker and among the most influential Wall Street investment bankers of his era.”

Both had been Ridgefielders, father late in life and son, early. And both died young.

James Bainbridge Lee Sr. was born in Danbury in 1916, a son of Frank H. Lee who, in 1886 at the age of 19, founded a hat factory in that city. Long called the “Hat City” of America, Danbury at the time had 30 companies that were turning out 5 million hats a year. F. H. Lee Hat Company soon grew to be the biggest operation. By 1917, Lee was producing 12,000 hats a day. According to one hat historian, Lee “did a huge business in low-end hats but they were quite capable of producing high-grade hats as well. Usually the wider the ribbon on a Lee, the higher the grade of the hat.” 

James graduated from Canterbury School in New Milford, then Georgetown University, and served in the Army during World War II — entering as a private and winding up a captain. After the war, he became secretary of the company and then in 1950, president. But in 1960, when classic felt hats had become less popular, he sold Lee to Stetson, famed for its “western” style hats. Lee Hat had had as many as 1,500 employees in its heyday, but by the time of the sale, only 220 people worked there.

Four years later, Stetson shut down the huge Danbury factory near where the state Motor Vehicles Department is today.

The Lee family was also heavily involved in communications. In 1927 Frank had founded

the Danbury Times, which eight years later merged with the Evening News to form the  News-Times. The paper remained in the Lee family until 1960 when it was sold to Ottaway Newspapers. 

James, who lived for many years on Wilton Road West, seemed more interested in the broadcasting side of media. He was president of and the main stockholder in the Berkshire Broadcasting  Company, which was then principally WLAD Radio but is now a half dozen area AM and FM stations, including the former WREF — now WAXB — in Ridgefield.

An accomplished golfer, Lee was a longtime member of the Ridgewood Country Club in Danbury, was its golf champion several times, and also placed near the top in state amateur tournaments.

In 1964, when he was only 47 years old,  James died of heart failure. (His brother, Frank H. Lee Jr., also a Ridgefielder and chairman of the Lee Hat board, collapsed and died while marching in Ridgefield’s 250th Anniversary parade in 1958 — he was only 51. Their father lived to be 70.)

James Sr.’s survivors included his wife, Mary, two daughters, and a son, James B. Lee Jr., who was only 11 years old and a student at Veterans Park School. Jimmy, as he was known then and throughout his life, was also attended catechism classes at St. Mary’s.

“Jimmy was in my first-grade class 1958-59,” recalled Patrick Wahl, who considered Lee his best childhood friend.  “All the Catholic kids got to know each other and by second grade we

walked to the afternoon religious classes together.  Odd notion by today’s standards, but a bunch of seven-year-olds running up Catoonah Street raised no eyebrows back in the day.”

Jimmy, who was born in 1952 in Manhattan, continued in the Ridgefield schools through freshman year at RHS in 1967 when he was elected class president. He would have graduated in the Class of 1970, but his mother, then Mrs. Ed Raleigh, sent him to Canterbury School where his father had gone.  There he was a captain of the hockey and track teams and co-editor of the school newspaper. He went on to graduate from Williams College, majoring in economics and art history.

He began his career at Chemical Bank and built its investment banking business as it grew larger through mergers with Manufacturers Hanover and Chase Manhattan Banks. He ran Chase’s investment banking operations, and after another merger, became vice chairman of JPMorgan Chase. 

“He advised on some of the biggest deals, including United Airlines’ acquisition of Continental, General Electric’s sale of NBCUniversal to Comcast, and the News Corporation’s purchase of Dow Jones,” said Andrew Ross Sorkin in his New York Times obituary of Lee.  (Coincidentally, Dow Jones owned the Danbury News-Times after Ottaway sold the paper.)

He was the “behind-the-scenes consigliere to the world’s top corporate chieftains, hatching mergers and public offerings for companies as diverse as General Motors, Facebook and Alibaba,” Sorkin wrote. “He was a constant presence in the lives of moguls like Rupert Murdoch of the News Corporation and Jeffrey Immelt of General Electric.”

Jamie Dimon, his boss at JPMorgan Chase and also a close friend, looked to Lee constantly for advice. But Lee often offered more than advice. When Dimon was going through difficult times because of a Justice Department investigation, Lee arranged for Tom Brady, the New England Patriots quarterback, to call Dimon to cheer him up. 

Dimon told a 2005 gathering of corporate leaders that “Jimmy Lee has probably lent a trillion dollars to the people in this room. And almost all of it has been paid back.”

Times writer David Gelles said Lee “shaped corporate America, and the nation’s biggest bank, through a career that established him as perhaps the pre-eminent deal maker of his generation.”

Jimmy Lee died in 2015 at the age of 62. His funeral in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan was presided over by Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan. The honorary ushers were a Who’s Who of leading business people: Michael R. Bloomberg, the billionaire ex-mayor of New York; Barry Diller, the media owner; Roger Goodell, commissioner of the NFL; Jeffrey Immelt of GE; Charlie Rose, the TV host and a longtime friend; and Stephen A. Schwarzman, head of the huge private equity firm, Blackstone (Schwarzman had offered him a more lucrative job as #2 at Blackstone, a post Lee declined because he loved his work at JPMorgan Chase). 

Dimon delivered a eulogy at the funeral. “In business, you were brilliant, a shining star, one of the best we’ve seen,” he said. “You were a nuclear power, a sun of positive energy. You had unbridled enthusiasm and optimism. Your deal-making was legendary. You were simply a huge influence on the success of so many of us.”

But perhaps the most touching tribute came from his son, who told how his father left notes for him and his two sisters before catching the 5 a.m. train from Darien to Manhattan each morning. He also described his dad’s guitar talents, and how he would practice for performances with a band of JPMorgan staff members, called the Bank Notes.

“He was a star, he was a superstar, and he went out at the top of his game,” said his son, whose name is also James. His dad had also been the best man at his wedding.

Michael Skandera: 

A Record Educator

Dr. Michael Skandera may hold the record for longevity as a Ridgefield educator —  45 continuous years. Other staff members have had longer careers, but probably none spent as many years on the job only in Ridgefield. 

Dr. Skandera was proud of that. “Well over 3,000 pupils have passed through my portals during my career, and I’m thankful for the rich experience they afforded me,” he told The Ridgefield Press in 1992 when he retired. 

A Danbury native born in 1924, Dr. Skandera graduated from Danbury Teachers College (WestConn) and, during World War II, was a bomber pilot who flew 50 missions over Europe. 

He came to Ridgefield in 1947, teaching at the East Ridge School, which then housed

elementary, middle and high school years. For a long time he was the only male elementary school teacher in town. 

The starting salary then, considered high in the region, was $2,400, he recalled. “In surrounding towns, most teachers made around $2,000,” he said. ($2,400 in 1947 was about equal to $25,000 in today’s dollars.)

When Veterans Park opened in 1955 to handle elementary grades, Skandera remained at East Ridge with the fourth through sixth grades and was “teacher in charge.” When Ridgebury School opened in 1962, he went there, specializing in sixth grade science. 

Long the only elementary teacher with a doctorate in education and one of the first to be named a “master teacher” here, Dr. Skandera did stints as principal of Veterans Park School and of Ridgebury, but each time returned to the classroom because, he said, he liked teaching kids better than being an administrator. 

Dr. Skandera’s interest in nature showed itself at Ridgebury where he helped set up the nature trails at that school and used them fall, winter and spring to teach science to pupils and to give teacher workshops. 

If teaching in Ridgefield wasn’t enough, Dr. Skandera also spent many years as superintendent of the Sunday school at St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in Danbury.

As a retiree living in Danbury, Dr. Skandera was active in mushrooming, and in his favorite sport, golf, in which he may hold another record, regionally: He had five holes-in-one in his lifetime.

He died in 2014 at the age of 89.

Frederick Shrady: 

Artist Who Rescued Art

A well-taught painter turned self-taught sculptor, Frederick Shrady became  internationally famous for his art, especially on religious subjects. But as he was gaining fame as an artist, he was also helping retrieve thousands of priceless art treasures, stolen by the Nazis.

Born in East View, N.Y., in 1907,  Frederick Charles Shrady was a son of American sculptor Henry Merwin Shrady, who created the Grant Memorial on the Mall near the Capitol in Washington. He got his first taste of Connecticut when he attended the Choate School in Wallingford, graduating in 1928. He studied painting at the Art Students’ League in New York City, and then went to Oxford University in England where he graduated in 1931. 

That year, he moved to Paris  to paint and to study painting. Over nine years there, he gained

esteem as an artist and earned a medal at the 1937 Paris Exposition. His paintings are in museums in Paris, Lyons, Grenoble, Belgrade, and Zagreb. Before was 33, he had had solo exhibitions in Dublin, Paris, Belgrade, London, and New York.

Early in World War II, Shrady worked with the French underground — he was later awarded the Legion of Honor by the French government.

 In July 1943 as war raged on, he enlisted in the U.S. Army, serving at first in the Model Making Division that created elaborate decoys. But he soon became involved in even more fascinating work:  As the war was ending, Lieutenant Shrady joined the Army’s Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives (MFAA) division (celebrated in the 2014 film, “The Monuments Men,” starring George Clooney and Cate Blanchett).

According to the Monuments Men Foundation,  in June 1945 he was one of the team  that removed thousands of stolen art works, stored by the Nazis in a mine at Altaussee, Austria. Hitler had

collect them there for his planned “Fuhrermuseum” in Linz, Austria, a huge complex to showcase his plunder.  The Monuments Men were racing to rescue the art before the arrival of Russian troops who eventually took control of Austria. 

“Together, they carefully packed Michelangelo’s ‘Bruges Madonna,’ Vermeer’s ‘The Artist’s Studio,’ and the Ghent Altarpiece by Jan van Eyck,” the foundation said. “Shrady and the Monuments Men evacuated these great works of art, along with over 15,000 other works of art and cultural objects, to the Munich Central Collecting Point. In the following months, Shrady conducted inspections of churches, castles, and museums in Wiesbaden, Germany.”

It was while serving in Austria that he met his future wife, Maria Louise Likar-Waltersdorff, who had grown up in Vienna and was working as an interpreter for the Monuments Men. They married in 1946.

Back in the United States after the war, Shrady continued to paint and was turning more to religious subjects. In 1945, though he was an American Episcopalian, he had created a 14-foot high painting, “Descent from the Cross,” for St. Stephen’s Cathedral (‘Stephansdom’) in Vienna, as a gift from the U.S. Armed Forces to the church. He became the only American to have his art in this and several other major churches in Europe including a mural of St. Francis in the chapel of St. Francis in Paris and a painting of St. Christopher in the Dublin Cathedral.

     “I have a feeling for spiritual work,” Shrady once said in an interview.

     After he moved to Ridgefield in 1948 and converted to Catholicism, Shrady turned to the

medium of his father, taking up sculpture as virtually his only medium. His very first work, a bust of noted Jesuit philosopher Martin D’Arcy created in 1949, was so good, the Metropolitan Museum of Art purchased it. (Father D’Arcy later wrote the introduction to Maria Shrady’s first book, “Come, Southwind,” written in Ridgefield and published in 1957.)

      Having the Met buy a “beginner’s” work would be a tremendous boost for any artist, and Shady quickly immersed himself in sculpture.

Around 1954, he created the altar statuary, 28 stained-glass windows, 14 painted stations of the cross, and many small windows symbolizing various saints for the new St. Lawrence O’Toole Church in Hartford. The altar art included a nine-foot figure of Jesus on a 16-foot high cross. Shrady said the only way he could see for himself how the figure would look was to have himself tied to a beam and then photographed, which he did.

Frederick and Maria lived on  the northern corner of Route 7 and New Road and belonged to St. Mary’s Parish. In 1956, as St. Mary’s was building its new Catholic school, Shrady set about creating 53 sculptures for the new building. His two youngest children were among the early St. Mary students.

In 1959 he and Maria and their children moved to Easton where Shrady had purchased a large stone mansion, built in the late 1930s by the American author Edna Ferber (his daughter Mary Louise Shrady Smith lives there today). 

Shrady had become a friend of many leaders in the Catholic church and among the guests at his Easton home in 1976 was Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, secretary of state of the Vatican. The cardinal admired Shrady’s work and suggested he create a statue for the Vatican Gardens, a 16th Century papal retreat behind St. Peter’s Basilica that is usually closed to the public. Shrady liked the idea and five years later, when Cardinal Casaroli was again staying at his home, Shrady showed him a model for a statue of “Our Lady of Fatima” that he thought would be appropriate for the gardens. The model was shown to Pope John Paul II who approved the work, the first time an American artist had received a papal commission.

The 10-foot bronze statue was unveiled before the Pope in 1983 on the 66th anniversary of the apparition of Mary to three children at Fatima, Portugal. That date, May 13, was also the anniversary of two attempts to assassinate the Pope, in 1981 in Rome and 1982 at Fatima. “He is convinced that our lady of Fatima interceded for him,” Shrady told a reporter in 1984.

Among the handful of guests for the Pope’s blessing of the statue were Louise and Dan McKeon of Ridgefield, friends the Shradys and supporters of  Frederick’s work. “There we were, a small group, standing in the Vatican gardens with the Holy Father, and something we had all cared about and been involved in was finally being realized,” Louise McKeon said later. “It has been beautifully placed, under a well-pruned cedar of Lebanon.”

When the ceremony was over, “the Pope went up to the sculpture again and spoke with Mr. Shrady, bringing tears to the artist’s eyes,” McKeon recalled.

Among Shrady’s major works are:

• a statue of St. Elizabeth Seton in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York;
  
• a sculpture for the FBI headquarters in Washington that portrays fidelity, bravery and integrity;
  
• the 18-foot bronze Human Rights statue for the U.S. Mission at the United Nations;
  
• St. Peter the Fisherman casting his net, located at Lincoln Center in Manhattan.
  
• 12 bas-relief panels, depicting “The Life of Mary,” for the doors of the Basilica of the Annunciation in Nazareth, Israel.
  
• 14 Stations of the Cross in Georgetown University's Dahlgren Chapel (among the few paintings he did after becoming a sculptor).
  
• An 18-foot-high statue of St. Benedict the Moor, a black saint, erected atop a church tower on a hill overlooking a black neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pa., and aimed at being a symbol of racial “healing and progress.” (Although the 3,000-pound statue is made of aluminum, it is so big that it required a large helicopter to lift it into place and it is so high that its stand had to be designed “like a bridge” to withstand hurricane-strength winds.)
  
• A statue of St. Francis at the Egan Chapel of Fairfield University.
  
• Three works, including “The Good Samaritan” and “Flame,” in the sculpture collection of the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum.
  

One of his more unusual works was a huge bronze sculpture on the facade of St. Ann Chapel, an Anglican church near Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif. The chapel was built by Ridgefielder Clare Boothe Luce in memory of her 19-year-old daughter, Ann Clare Brokaw, a student at Stanford killed in a 1944 automobile accident. Shrady’s sculpture on the building’s facade portrays Saint Ann and the Virgin Mary, with the mother (St. Ann) teaching her young daughter (the Virgin Mary) how to read.

Frederick Shrady died in 1990 at the age of 82. Maria, who died in 2002, was the author several books. In 1961 she won the Christopher Book Award for “In the Spirit of Wonder”; other works included “Moments of Insight” and “The Mother Teresa Story,” and translations of various religious writings. 

C. Chandler Ross: 

Portrait Artist

C. Chandler Ross was a portrait artist who painted many of the captains of industry during the first half of the 20th Century, including F. W. Woolworth of the store chain, but he had also produced portraits of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S Truman.  

Born in 1887 in England, he studied art in Paris and Munich, and under Anders Zorn, a Swedish master of painting.   

 “The American business executive is not the hard, crusty individual he is supposed to be,” Ross once said. “Invariably I find that he is most delightful when he drops the guard that modern business forces him to maintain during office hours.” 

His work included even miniature portraits, done in the style of the 18th and 19th Centuries.

When not painting portraits,  Chandler turned to flowers, and his floral paintings were well known and often reproduced. Many were published by the New York Graphic Society.

In Ridgefield, Ross was better known as the man who purchased the former Ridgefield Golf Club and built the Peaceable Street estate that later became Ward Acres, home of Jack Boyd Ward and Olaf Olsen. 

Ross died in 1952 in Sarasota, Fla. at the age of 64. (He was no relation to another well-known Ridgefield artist, Alexander Ross.)

Walter Hampden: 

Star of Stage and Screen

Although he honed his acting skills playing Shakespearean roles in England, Walter Hampden was a Brooklyn-born son of a prominent New York attorney. He went on to star alongside many of the stage and screen’s greatest names in the United States. 

Walter Hampden Dougherty was born in 1879 and at 16, while studying at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, played Shylock in a student production of The Merchant of Venice. He went to France to study music, but the lure of the stage soon brought him to England, where he joined the Frank Benson Stock Company, touring Great Britain and becoming known for what has been called his “orotund voice.”

He returned to the States in 1907, and bought a Ridgefield farm on Mopus Bridge Road four years later. In 1919, he formed his own company with a predominantly Shakespearean repertory. In the 1920s, he opened his own theater in New York, playing Hamlet with Ethel Barrymore in the premier production. In 1923, he performed Cyrano to much critical acclaim, and revived the play several times during his career. 

While he continued to perform on the stage for most of the rest of his life — his last Broadway performance was in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible in 1953, he increasingly turned to film late in life, often playing “distinguished old blowhards,” as one critic put it. 

Among his film roles were as the archbishop in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), an American Indian in Cecil B. DeMille's Unconquered (1947), a pompous actor in All About Eve (1950), the British ambassador in Five Fingers (1952), and the father in Sabrina (1954).

Over the years Mr. Hampden also appeared on stage in his home town, usually in efforts to benefit one cause or another. For example, in 1938, when a movement was underway to establish a professional summer theater here, he appeared in a production staged at the Congregational Church’s Clubhouse. 

During World War II, he was also active in efforts to sell war bonds at the original Ridgefield Playhouse. On April 16, 1945, four days after President Franklin D. Roosevelt died, hundreds filled the high school auditorium for a memorial service that included Mr. Hampden’s reading “O Captain, My Captain” — he had known the president, and had visited him in the White House.

For more than a quarter of a century, Mr. Hampden was president of the Players Club in New York City; its library is named in his honor.

He died of a cerebral hemorrhage while in Hollywood playing a leading role in the film, Diana, with Lana Turner. His wife, the actress Mabel Moore, and son, Paul — a former Ridgefield Planning and Zoning Commissioner — were at his side when he died. He was 75 years old.