John P. Cooke: 

Outspoken Olympian

John Cooke accomplished at least two things that no other Ridgefielder has: He won a gold medal in the Olympics and he was the only member of a third-party ever elected to local public office, at least in the 20th Century.

Cooke also led the committee that oversaw the construction and fine-tuning of the Ridgefield High School on North Salem Road.

John Patrick Cooke was born in Ansonia in 1937, starred at high school football, and entered Yale University where he expected to continue to play football. As part of efforts for footballers to stay in shape over the winter, he rowed in the tanks at the university’s gymnasium. 

He fell in love with rowing. “I’m a short stocky fellow, not usually the type that rows,” he admitted in an 2001 interview.

Just 20 months later, he was rowing in the 1956 Olympic Games in Melbourne on what has been described as “the most successful U.S. rowing team ever to compete in the Olympics.” The team won two gold medals, three silver medals and a bronze.

Torrey Cooke, his wife, recalled meeting him for the first time at a wedding in Philadelphia. Though he was an Olympics medalist — and, later events would show, was interested in making an impression on her — he didn’t even mention the Olympics.

“Never said a word — he never bragged about it,”  she told The Press’s Macklin Reid. “Somebody else said, ‘Do you know that guy has an Olympic gold medal?’” 

He rowed in an eight-man shell. “He was the number three man, and that’s usually the steam engine,” Mrs. Cooke said. “He was a powerhouse. He was a terribly strong young man.”

He went on to coach at Yale and stayed active in rowing throughout his life, refereeing, judging, and being involved in various rowing associations. He was a referee for the Head of the Charles race in Boston for 20 years, and officiated at many other competitions in the eastern United States.

In 2001 he earned the United States Rowing Association’s Jack Kelly Award for “superior achievements in rowing, service to amateur athletics, and success in their chosen profession, thereby serving as an inspiration to American rowers.”

As a sign of his love of the sport, Cooke hung a rowing shell — more than 20 feet long — from his living room ceiling.

After graduating from Yale in 1959  with a bachelor’s degree in industrial

administration, Cooke enlisted in the Marine Corps and was commissioned a second lieutenant  in 1960. Two years later, he planned the loading and initial combat array for a secret mission — the 1962 invasion of Thailand — that was one of the early involvements of U.S. troops in what became the Vietnam War.

Later on,  he helped found the detachment of the Marine Corps League in Ridgefield.

During a 28-year career with Emery Air Freight, he oversaw the construction of buildings all over the world, including Emery’s “hub” in Dayton, Ohio, a project that occupied him for seven years.

His expertise in construction proved useful to Ridgefield  in 1967 when he became chairman of the Ridgefield High School Building Committee.

“We completed the new high school on time and under budget, the only school in Ridgefield that was under budget,” he said. 

A resident since 1965, Cooke had been outspoken on many issues over the years. He was a pioneer member of the Independent Party and in 1993, was elected to the Zoning Board of Appeals on the Independent ticket — and continued to serve on the board until a year before his death. 

In 1995, he ran for first selectman as an Independent because “I’ve become disenchanted and upset, like many other people, with the self-appointed, elitist group which runs the town.” Though he came in third behind Sue Manning and Barbara Manners, he collected a respectable 1,578 votes. 

He died of cancer in 2005.

John Cooke’s causes over the years included outspoken opposition to a variety of government endeavors including the Super 7 expressway,  the building of an elaborate visitor’s center at the Weir Farm National Historic Site, and what he felt in later life had become excessive school construction in town.

“It never scared him to get up and say his piece at a town meeting,” Torrey Cooke said. “He said, ‘You know, when you believe in what you’re talking about, it doesn’t bother you.’ He was encouraging to me, always, to be able to do that.”

Winifred Carriere:
Quotable on Cats

When it came to cats, Winifred Carriere was quite quotable. Just Google her name and you’ll find scores of websites recalling her observations. Probably her most repeated pronouncement is: “Cats always know whether people like or dislike them. They do not always care enough to do anything about it.”

Carriere loved cats, enough to write a book, Cats, 24 Hours A Day, published in 1967 and again in 1975. “There is no doubt that Winifred Carriere is ‘possessed’ by her cats,” said Kirkus Reviews,  “and for 20 years she has been happily ‘without a catless moment.’”

However, her interests extended beyond the feline to the floral.

Winifred Osborn Carriere was born in Ridgefield on April 20, 1912,  the daughter of Richard C. Osborn and Beulah Sanford. Her father, who worked for the family-owned lumber yard that is now Ridgefield Supply, died when she was seven  Her mother went off to Manhattan to become a nurse, married one of her Columbia University professors named Harry Clinton France,  and eventually became a leading authority on child care. She wrote articles for more than 100 magazines, was editorial director of American Baby magazine, appeared often on TV, and wrote two books, How to Have a Happy Child (1952) and How to Have a Happy, Healthy Baby (1964).

 Young Winifred stayed in Ridgefield with her great-aunts, Annie Tallman Osborn and Carolyn Winifred Osborn, at the Osborn homestead at Main and Prospect Streets.

 She graduated from Syracuse University, where she met and married Albert Carriere, an aspiring playwright and actor. They had a daughter and were later divorced.

After the divorce she moved to New York City, and began a career in editing. She worked

at Prentice Hall, McGraw-Hill and the Institute of Radio Engineers before turning to magazines. For many years she published and edited Professional Florist Magazine, a trade magazine. 

Her interest in flowers led her to join with Vernon Johnson in 1964 in writing An Easy Guide to Artificial Light Gardening for Pleasure and Profit. A New York Times reviewer with a sense of the pun said the book “provides illuminating answers to questions about equipment, construction and care of light-gardens.” 

She retired to a house on Wooster Street in the 1960s and 1970s,  working for a while as office manager for Buck Argenio’s Buck Realty. She died in an assisted care home in Sharon in 2002 at the age of 90.

While flowers were her profession for many years, it is cats that keep Win Carriere’s name alive today. Other of her observations that are often quoted include:

• If a cat did not put a firm paw down now and then, how could his human remain possessed?
• I suspect that many an ailurophobe hates cats only because he feels they are better than he is — more honest, more secure, more loved, more whatever he is not.
• The cat is the mirror of his human’s mind. The dog mirrors his human’s physical appearance.

Lois Bannerman: 
Harpist With A Kick

Lois Bannerman had an unusually interesting life, starting off when she was 10 and used her skates to fight off two male attackers, and ending with the elegance of antique Savannah townhouse.

In between she was one of the nation’s top harpists.

Lois Tiffany Bannerman was born in New York City in 1920 and grew up on Long Island, where at the age of seven, her harpist mother began teaching her the instrument. By the time she was 15, she was winning major awards in New York City and at 16, was invited to play at the White House.

But it was when she was 10 years old that she first made headlines. And what headlines!

TWO FAIL IN ATTEMPT TO KIDNAP HEMPSTEAD GIRL: TALENTED CHILD ESCAPES CLUTCHES OF KIDNAPERS declared the headline on a story that occupied the complete front page of the Nassau Daily Review on Sept. 3, 1931.

GIRL SKATER, 10, BATTLES 2 KIDNAPERS said the five column headline in the New York Daily News.

According to the accounts, “two swarthy-complexioned men” pulled up alongside Bannerman as she was roller-skating along a sidewalk near her home. One man hopped out of the car, grabbed the girl and covered her mouth with his hand. When she began fighting, the second man got out of the car and tried to hold her.

“Kicking and struggling, she used her steel-shod feet to such good advantage that the men dropped her, leaped back in their car and fled as another machine approached the scene,” said the Nassau County newspaper.

The Daily News put it this way: “She put up such a stiff struggle that the driver of the car was forced to come to his companion’s aid. He had a length of rope in his hands, and when he stooped in an

attempt to bind the girl’s legs, she felled him with a blow from her skate-clad foot.

“‘Look out! I hear a car!’ cried the fallen man and both leaped into their car and sped away.” They were never caught.

By the time she was 15, Bannerman was winning awards — including a scholarship to Juilliard — and performing in major concert venues in New York City. She went on to have a long career as a harpist, appearing with many major orchestras, on Broadway and frequently on early television. (A video of her in her 20s, performing in a light-hearted version of “In the Gloaming” in 1944, can be found on YouTube.)

In 1947, she married Harold Henrick, a 27-year-old Marine trainee, and the couple had a son, Mark. However, the marriage ended tragically in 1955 when Captain Henrick was piloting a private plane from his base in New Bern, N.C., to Long Island to spend Christmas with his wife and son. Almost within sight of his destination, the plane crashed into the Atlantic. A week later, his body washed ashore at the Rockaways.

Ten years later, Bannerman married John L. Senior Jr., a wealthy Harvard and MIT-graduate businessman, who had a “gentleman’s farm” in Ridgebury. The farm spread across the towns of

Ridgefield, Danbury and North Salem, N.Y., off Turner and Saw Mill Roads. While the main house may have been in Danbury, the couple always gave their address as Ridgefield. (The Senior farm is now a mix of pastures for horses, multifamily and single-family housing, and the corporate headquarters of Belimo — a maker of heating and air conditioning devices.)

In the late 1960s the couple moved to a house on the shore at Southport but soon after, they divorced.

In the 1960s and 70s, Bannerman continued performing, but spent part of her time working on supporting the Berkshire Music Center, home of the Tanglewood summer concerts, as well as teaching the harp. One of her students was her own son, John L. Senior III, who, like his mother and grandmother, became a professional harpist.

Bannerman eventually married Howard Crawford, a Connecticut architect and builder, and the two retired in the mid-1980s to a four-story 1854 Greek Revival townhouse in the city of Savannah, Ga. where they operated a bed-and-breakfast. Bannerman died in 1992 at the age of 71.

In the 1960s, composer John Downey was commissioned to compose a harp concerto for Lois Bannerman, but for reasons that are unclear, she was never able to premiere it. The work lay unplayed for years until her harpist son, John Senior, began championing its performance in memory of his mother.

In 1998, with Senior on the harp and John Downey conducting, the   Concerto for Harp was recorded by the Warsaw National Philharmonic Orchestra and is today available from MMC Recordings.

Rosamond Dauer: 

Bullfrog’s Mother

“Excuse me,” says the little voice to the woman walking down Main Street, “but aren’t you Bullfrog’s mother?”

“Why, yes I am,” replies the woman. 

A young girl smiles, thanks her and runs off to tell her friends she just talked to the lady who wrote some of her favorite books. 

She was one of many children in the last third of the 20th Century who enjoyed the tales  of Rosamond Dauer, a Ridgefield writer, editor and mother. But writing children’s stories was not a career Dauer had contemplated as an English major at Middlebury College.

Rosamond Mueller Dauer was born in 1934 in New York City. After graduating from Middlebury in 1956, she taught advanced writing, literature and drama at Colby-Sawyer College and then took a job with Grolier publishing as an editor of the Encyclopedia Americana. Later she became curator of education at the Staten Island Institute of the Arts.

After she married John Dauer, head of a leather supply company, and had two children, she stopped writing for others and began writing for herself.  However, she said in a 1980 interview, “when I started writing again, it was poetry.”

Her poems were published in Poetry, Yankee, and other periodicals. 

Then she started doing humorous poems for kids — and her own two boys, Matt and Chris, thought they were pretty funny. That, in turn, led to stories for children and, with the help of illustrators, books for children.

The first was Bullfrog Grows Up, inspired by the boys’ bringing home a frog in a bucket captured from a pond near their house on Olmstead Lane. She made them return the frog, but turned their find into a story about a family of mice adopting a small frog that winds up growing many times larger than the mice — and even their mouse house.

It was followed by Bullfrog Builds A House and Bullfrog and Gertrude Go Camping.

Other tales included My Friend, Jasper Jones, about a child who gets tired of cleaning up after his make-believe friend, and Mrs. Piggery Snout, about  “the mess and confusion her family creates at home [that] keeps Mrs. Piggery Snout from writing her newspaper column, until she takes some drastic measures.”

Another book was also inspired by her sons. “My kids think our cats are too big and I thought, what if a cat started to grow and just got bigger and bigger and bigger,” she said. The result was The 300 Pound Cat, which one critic called “fun for grownups, with great sound effects for reading to little ones.”

 Dauer was also interested in antiques and old houses — she lived in an 18th Century farmhouse on Olmstead Lane from the mid-1970s to the early 1980s. She retired from writing books in the mid-1980s and, over the subsequent years, lived in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Florida where she was active in volunteering in schools and libraries.

She died in 2014 at the age of 79.

While Rosamond Dauer had written a half dozen children’s books, her favorites were the Bullfrog series.

“I’m now getting paid for doing things that used to get me in trouble when I was a child, being an oddball, a non-conformist,” she said of their story lines. “I harness in words the same fantasy life I had as a child.”

And, she added, “there is a large child lurking within me that’s not going to give up.”

Macolm Davie: 

The Piping Preacher Who Listened

Malcolm Davie spent much of his life trying to help others. One way he did that was being a blowhard — not with words, but with pipes. 

Davie was best known in Ridgefield as a bagpiper, but over his long life he was also a minister, a violinist, a math teacher, a poet, a songwriter, a counselor, and an ice-cream maker who held four university degrees. And he was a man who was always willing to listen to the problems of others.

Malcolm Henderson Davie was born in 1918 in North Bay, Ontario, into a family that included four professional concert singers. A talented musician himself, he played the violin and taught himself to play the bagpipes.

Davie earned  a bachelor’s degree from the University of Western Ontario in 1945, a master's from the University of Toronto in 1947, a bachelor of divinity degree from Andover-Newton Theological School in 1950, and a master’s in psychology from Boston University in 1959. He became a U.S. citizen in 1955.

At various times he worked for the Davie family ice cream business, taught math, was a minister, and served as a counselor at several institutions. His ministerial work included serving at the United Church of Christ in Monroe  and with several congregations in Massachusetts.

“Malcolm could always be counted on to engage in a thought-provoking conversation on any one of various philosophical or ethical topics,” said one longtime friend. “A former minister, Malcolm readily sensed the troubles or concerns of others and could be counted on for a sympathetic ear and appropriate words of wisdom.”

For 20 years he toured the United States with his own musical program, “A Wee Bit of Bonnie Scotland,” playing his bagpipes in full Scottish regalia and offering his audiences tales and humor of Scotland.

He made many piping appearances in Ridgefield where he spent the last 30 years of his life. He was also well known by many area children as the man who operated the carousel at the Danbury Fair Mall a couple of days a week and by many athletes as the man who managed Yanity Gym for the Parks and Recreation Department.

His interest in poetry was also seen locally in poems published in The Press and elsewhere. In honor of Arbor Day in 1987, he wrote the poem, “The Hills and Trees of Fair Connecticut,” and composed music to go with it. He performed it at the Ridgefield Community Center and, at the suggestion of then State Rep. Barbara Ireland, presented it to the State Legislature on Earth Day.

His 1990 poem “Spring Comes to Connecticut” ended with this stanza: 

Spring in Connecticut! 

Our old familiar land, refurnished! 

No human effort brings it here. 

No human hand prevents its coming. 

Take it as your own, 

This lavish gift from heaven.

He died in 2006 at the age of 87.

Davie once told an interviewer: “The greatest satisfaction in life is not self-interest but interest in the people around you — to give a person a boost or to let them know they are important to talk to.”

However, his help for troubled souls wasn’t always verbal, as Ridgefield artist Bob Crofut found out. 

“We were good friends,” Crofut told Ridgefield Press editor Macklin Reid. “We used to talk a lot, used to have dinner down at Friendly’s a lot. One time I went to see him over at the old gymnasium and I was kind of discouraged about something — something was bothering me.” 

Davie listened, but didn't offer advice.

“Instead of talking to me, he grabbed the pipes and he played ‘Scotland the Brave’ — in the gymnasium. It reverberated like crazy. It’s very moving — they play it in battle. No other words were needed. I left kind of lifted up.”

Richard M. Powers:

The Art of Science Fiction

Millions of  readers — especially of sci-fi — have seen his pictures, but few knew the name of Richard M. Powers, the artist whose work revolutionized science-fiction art and has appeared on the covers of more than 800 of the best science fiction books.

Powers’s career spanned more than 50 years. “During that time he established himself as one of America’s preeminent illustrators for science fiction novels as he transformed that style of illustration with what he once termed ‘abstract surrealist expressionism,’ nearly creating a style of fantasy art,” wrote Ridgefield Press reporter Jonathan Pingle in 1996.

In 1983, Locus, the science fiction industry’s newspaper, described his work as having “revolutionized science fiction book cover art in the fifties.” 

Richard Michael Gorman Powers — he sometimes used the name Gorman Powers, reflecting his mother’s maiden name — was born in Chicago in 1921. He studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Illinois, and during World War II served with the Army Signal Corps. After the war he continued his studies at The New School in New York.

In 1949 Powers began doing art for Doubleday’s science fiction hardcover books, and was an almost immediate success. He wound up doing the cover art for such classics as Isaac Asimov’s Pebble in the Sand and Theodore Sturgeon’s More Than Human. 

In 1952 he was included in the New Talent Exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, where his work is now part of the permanent collection. Over the years he has also exhibited at  the Metropolitan Museum of Art,  the National Academy, and at the Whitney Museum, all in New York, and the Corcoran Gallery in Washington.  

In 2001, Jane Frank, Vincent Di Fate, and son Richard Gid Powers wrote a book, The Art of Richard Powers.  DiFate, a science fiction artist, said Powers had “an emotional rhythm that is captivating, plumbing the depths of the human spirit and challenging the will of that spirit to survive in a future life with danger. These paintings are far more than insightful, they are, in a word, brilliant.”

As an illustrator, his work went beyond science fiction, appearing in all areas of publishing from the late 1940s to the 1990s. He produced literally thousands of book jackets and covers including the first edition of Bernard Malamud’s The Natural, the Dell Laurel Poets series, and most the Easton Press’s editions of Hemingway’s works.

He also did the book jacket and some interior illustrations for Silvio Bedini’s Ridgefield in Review, the 1958 history published for the town’s 250th anniversary celebration. In 1983, for the town’s 275th birthday, he did a poster of the Battle of Ridgefield.

 Powers and his family moved to Ramapoo Road in 1954, then to Old Branchville Road. In 1966, he sold his Old Branchville Road house, building a smaller home on his remaining land on Bloomer Road. 

He died in 1996 in Madrid, Spain, where he had been wintering each year with his daughter, Elizabeth. (His son, Richard Gid Powers, is a history professor and author of such books as  Secrecy and Power: The Life of J. Edgar Hoover and Broken: The Troubled Past and Uncertain Future of the FBI.)

Richard Powers was posthumously inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2008 and the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame in 2016. 

He was also honored in a rather unusual way. In 2017, Andy Partridge, former frontman of the British New wave band XTC, released a CD of music inspired by Powers’ art. According to Partridge, as a boy, he used to borrow three science fiction books a week, take them home and instead of reading them, he’d stare at the Richard Powers art. “Mesmerized by the covers,” he imagined his own stories to match the paintings as he stared at them, sometimes for hours.  Later, he created “a sort of soundtrack to the paintings,” as one critic put it.  “The resulting album [is] a musical accompaniment to the variety of alien landscapes which Powers illustrated so profusely.”

The name of the CD album? “Powers.”

Roger Kahn: 

A Boy Of Summer

Roger Kahn’s 1972 bestselling book about the Brooklyn Dodgers was so famous that when New York Governor George Pataki created a commission in 1997 to explore bringing the Dodgers back to Brooklyn, he named Kahn a member. 

The Boys of Summer, which had led the New York Times bestseller list for weeks, told the story of the 1950s Dodgers. Called by James Michener “the finest American book on sports,” it sold hundreds of thousands of copies and is still in print. In 2002, it was ranked #2 on Sports Illustrated’s list of the best 100 sports books of all time  (A.J. Liebling’s The Sweet Science, about boxing, was #1.)

Roger Kahn was born in Brooklyn in 1927 to a trivia-loving father who provided questions for the radio quiz show, “Information Please,” and a baseball-hating mother who taught her son poetry and Shakespeare. Both were teachers.

In the early 1950s he quit New York University after three years to join The New York Herald Tribune as a copy boy (he admitted to Ridgefield Press reporter Linette Burton that he got the job “by using a clever device, which was: my father knew the managing editor.”). 

At the age of 24, he was assigned to cover the Dodgers. “It was a rich time in the game’s history, especially in New York, the undisputed center of the baseball universe, home to three teams and three perfervid fan bases,” said The New York Times.

He spent two years reporting on the Dodgers and was then assigned to cover New York Giants’ baseball.

In the mid-1950s, he left the Herald Tribune to work as a sports editor for Newsweek, and to freelance for Sports Illustrated, The Saturday Evening Post and Esquire.  By the 1960s he was writing books on religion and sociology, including The Passionate People: What It Means to Be A Jew in America. 

Then came The Boys of Summer, the first of what was to be many books about sports and sporting personalities, but clearly, the best of them all.  The Times called it “as influential a baseball book as has been written in the last 50 years,” but Sports Illustrated qualified that, terming it “A baseball book the same way ‘Moby-Dick’ is a fishing book.”

The Boys of Summer was coming out  just as Kahn was moving to 830 North Salem Road in 1971, and the promotional tours and interviews that the book prompted made writing tough. 

“Each day I keep kicking the wastebasket and beating my brains to get out one page a day,” he told Nelson Merrell of The Press in June 1972. 

During a long promotional-tour period, Kahn was twice interviewed on the TV show of future Ridgefielder Dick Cavett, but he most remembered being terrified by having to appear on Johnny Carson’s show, knowing that Carson liked clever “one-liners” from his guests. “Nervous as hell on the night of the show, I got called to go on,” he told Merrell. “After the introduction, I sat down and Carson asked, ‘How’s it feel to be an instant smash?’ Then I delivered my rehearsed reply, ‘Better than a shot in the mouth.’” 

While in Ridgefield he also did a stint as a visiting professor of creative writing at Colorado College. He moved back to the city around 1976.

Kahn went on to write more than 20 books — many still in print — including, 

• Rickey & Robinson: The True, Untold Story of the Integration of Baseball, an account of how his close friend, Jackie Robinson, got to be a Dodger.
• Memories of Summer: When Baseball Was an Art, and Writing About It a Game, with stories of his Depression-era childhood, his reporting career, and his personal acquaintances with many great ballplayers.
• October Men, about the 1978 Yankees championship season.
• The Head Game: Baseball Seen From the Pitcher’s Mound, examining the psychological battle between hitter and pitcher.
  
• Joe and Marilyn: A Memory of Love, about the marriage of Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe.
• Good Enough to Dream, covering the lives and hopes of players in the lower minor leagues 

Kahn died in February 2020 at the age of 92.

Over his years of covering the game, Roger Kahn made many friends among the old-time ballplayers but few were as close as Early Wynn, a hard-drinking, Hall of Fame pitcher who was a longtime Yankee nemesis.

In 1973 he told The Press’s Merrell that Wynn was a good writer who did a regular column for the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Editors at the Saturday Evening Post wanted Kahn to get his friend to write an article about the 1959 World Series between Chicago White Sox and the Los Angeles Dodgers (in which Wynn was 1-1). They offered Wynn $1,250.

Wynn did the piece but when the Post editors insisted on his rewriting it, the pitcher balked and told Kahn he wanted $1,500.

“I called the editors, told them Wynn wanted more money, and got him $2,000,” Kahn said. “He’s bought my drinks ever since.”