Blanche Shoemaker Wagstaff: 
Beautiful, Talented & Gutsy

Blanche Shoemaker was no ordinary New York City socialite. The glamorous former debutante spent two years driving injured soldiers from battle zones in World War I and was a poet so popular she was nominated for a Nobel prize — by a member of the Nobel family.

As Mrs. Donald Carr, she once lived in Ridgefield with her  dog- and golf-loving husband on an estate they called “Birchglade.”

A native of Manhattan, Blanche Le Roy Shoemaker was born in 1888 to a well-to-do family — her father had been a railroad pioneer and president. She began writing when she was only seven years old and by 16,  Town and Country magazine had published her first poetry.

She made her social “debut” in 1905, the same year she was painted by the noted French portrait artist, Theobald Chartran, and the same year her first book of poems, The Song of Youth, was published. She was only 17.

In 1907, she married 1904 Columbia graduate Alfred Wagstaff Jr. who had apparently not yet found gainful employment after his recent motor trip around Europe. The New York Times coverage of the wedding gushed over the bride, calling her “highly cultured and exceedingly handsome,” noting that her first book of poetry had come out two years earlier and a second volume of verse, Woven of Dreams, was due out soon.  (Harrison Fisher, an artist once famous for his paintings of young women — especially for magazine covers,  later pronounced her “America’s most beautiful woman.”)

Blanche and Alfred had one child, Alfred III, born in 1908, and were divorced in 1920.  He served many years as president of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and died in 1930. Though she had divorced Alfred, she continued to write her books under the name of Blanche Shoemaker Wagstaff for the rest of her life.

When the United States became involved in World War I, Blanche Wagstaff helped found organizations that  provided stateside war support such as feeding, caring for and transporting soldiers, veterans and war workers. Apparently feeling her work stateside was not enough, she went to France and became an ambulance driver for two years, hauling wounded soldiers from war zones to hospitals.

It was perhaps through her war work that she met an Army veteran, Donald Carr, who had also served in France. They were married in a small ceremony in 1921 among only a few close relatives and friends, said The Times which, nonetheless devoted more space to this small Vermont wedding than it had to her first full-scale ceremony in New York City.

And The Times offered glowing coverage of her life as a young woman, including listing her six books published so far and noting she was founding editor of the Boston Poetry Review.

“She was presented at the Court of St. Jame’s shortly after her debut here and later had a private interview with Pope Pius,” the Times continued. “She has traveled extensively in Italy and in the Orient and has made several campaign trips in the great Sahara desert. She was engaged in war work, driving her motor at the front, was in the War Camp Community Service, and was one of the founders of the National League of Women’s Service and other war organizations.”

       A descendant of a couple of Mayflower people, Carr was a real estate broker, a writer, and loved dogs and golf. His canine speciality was springer spaniels and he was widely used as a judge of hunting shows involving those dogs. As an accomplished amateur golfer, he was well known, especially in Westchester County, and won a number of tournaments.

       Meanwhile, Blanche continued to write poetry, turning out a total of nearly 20 books in her lifetime. Early on she became known for sensual poems — a dozen of her verses appeared in a 1921 anthology called Poetica Erotica, which contains poems from Latins like Catulus and Ovid right up to modern writers. Her interests apparently changed a bit as she grew older; in 1944, she wrote The Beloved Son, a life of Jesus in verse.  She even turned to drama, writing a couple of poetic plays. H.L. Mencken praised one of them, Alcestis, for its “constant novelty and ingenuity of epithet,” but also criticized her for sometimes letting “her adjectives run riot.”

Her poetry was popular not only here, but in Europe, and in 1933, Ludwig Nobel, nephew of the founder of the Nobel prize awards, nominated Blanche Shoemaker Wagstaff  for the poetry award. Her book, Mortality and Other Poems, “is popular in Scandinavia,” said the Associated Press at the time.

The Carrs had been living in Bedford, N.Y., before coming to Ridgefield in the mid-1930s. The Social Register lists their home here as “Birchglade,” an estate we have been unable to identify but which they probably leased or rented.   In 1939  her son, Alfred Wagstaff III, became involved in establishing a summer theater, called The New England Playhouse, located in the Congregational Church House on West Lane. (The church house, which had been the old Ridgefield Clubhouse, burned down in 1978.)  Although  the operation struggled in its first two years, it was starting to draw sizable audiences when World War II came along and the effort ended.

In 1940, the Carrs were living on Ridgefield Road in nearby Wilton. They were in Hendersonville, N.C., by 1961 when Donald Carr died there at the age of 74.

Blanche was living with her son Alfred and grandchildren in Egham, Surrey, England when she suffered a stroke and died in 1967 (many profiles of her incorrectly report she died in 1957). She was 81. Blanche and Donald are buried together in Woodlawn Cemetery, the Bronx. Her son died in 1982.

Reflecting her husband’s interest in springer spaniels, Blanche Wagstaff wrote the 1927 book,  Bob, the Spaniel: A True Story, which among other things told how their dog saved them from their burning farmhouse.  Bob had also saved another dog from drowning and in 1930, Bob received a silver medal from the “Dog Hero Legion” in New York City.

Blanche may not have gotten her Nobel, but Bob got his silver.

Kurt Waldheim: When the UN Chief
Had A Country Home in Ridgefield

One of the best-kept secrets — or not — in the late 20th Century Ridgefield was the presence in town of one of the world’s top leaders. From 1972 to 1981, United Nations Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim maintained a country home off Wilton Road East and Spectacle Lane.

While he had the residence here, his presence was kept secret, though just how secret might be debatable. However, The Ridgefield Press agreed to keep him out of the local limelight of its printed pages.

It happened this way:

On Aug. 1, 1972, Karl F. Landegger sent a letter to Karl S. Nash, editor and publisher of The Press, explaining the situation. Landegger was a multimillionaire pulp and paper mill owner whose office was 200 Park Avenue in New York City and whose estate, Flat Rock House, covered more than 100 acres between Wilton Road East and Nod Road. He was, like Waldheim, a native of Austria. 

It was a very diplomatically written message. 

“Dear Mr. Nash,” he wrote. “I have lived in Ridgefield for the past 25 years, and I believe that some twenty years ago we met at some party.

“I am writing to you at the request of Dr. Kurt WaIdheim, Secretary General of the United Nations, who for the past ten years or so has spent many weekends with his family at my home in Ridgefield while he was Austrian Ambassador to the United Nations and, later on, Foreign Secretary of Austria and visiting here. 

“Dr. Waldheim is about to conclude negotiations for a four to five year lease on the house owned by Mr. Henri Doll on Spectacle Road, adjacent to my property. Dr. Waldheim and his family plan to use the house as a summer and weekend home.

“Dr. WaIdheim and I are personal friends and ride horseback together regularly on my property and in its vicinity. He has asked me to write to you and submit his request that he would greatly appreciate it if no mention were made in the locaI papers of his renting a house or living in Ridgefield.

“In New York, he is a public figure and as such under great pressure all the time, but he would like to be a completely private person in Ridgefield. There is also the aspect of personal safety. Although due to the nature of his position, he and his family are protected by security guards, we all know that there are a lot of ‘nuts’ around who may wish to attack a public figure.

“Dr. Waldheim would greatly appreciate your collaboration in this matter, about which I write to you in an entirely unofficial manner, although with his knowledge and approval.

“During August the house will be redecorated, and Dr. Waldheim and his family expect to move in about mid-September.”

While Waldheim’s being in Ridgefield was not publicized, it was hard not to notice the very tall and stately Austrian when he was shopping or dining in town — which was not infrequent. “Many people knew Mr. Waldheim was here and saw him from time to time about the village, but The Press never mentioned it,” Nash wrote in a 1984 story.

Karl Landegger died in January 1976. Waldheim was planning to retire at the end of that year and in August, Karl Nash sat down at his Underwood and two-finger typed a letter, just as diplomatic as Landegger’s, addressed to the secretary general:

“When you came to Ridgefield four years ago, your friend, the late Karl F. Landegger, wrote me at your request, asking our paper to respect your privacy in our town. We have done this and gladly.

“Now, with indications that you are about to leave, we would like to let our readers, the people of Ridgefield, know that you have been here and what you have thought of their New England town and of them.

“Could you, therefore, arrange for a member of The Press staff to talk with you briefly when you are here again in Ridgefield? Or in lieu of an interview, could someone here talk with you by telephone? As a last resort, would you care to pen a message to Ridgefield upon your departure?

“Mr. Landegger spoke highly of you and your friendship with him as you can see from the copy of his letter to me, which I send you. I am sure you must miss him greatly.”

Waldheim agreed to be interviewed. He arranged for Dick Minnig, a Press reporter, to meet with him at UN headquarters. 

But then Waldheim somewhat unexpectedly was named to another term as secretary-general, and he cancelled the interview, again not wanting the publicity in Ridgefield.

In 1981, Waldheim ran for a third term but failed, largely thanks to China, which repeatedly vetoed his candidacy.

However, he did not immediately go home and spent two years as a professor of diplomacy at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.

In 1984, news that Waldheim would be returning to Austria to run for president sparked Karl Nash into writing a brief article about the diplomat’s dealings with The Press in the 1970s. 

“Kurt Waldheim, former United Nations secretary-general, has had his picture in the papers this week, riding a horse in Rock Creek Park in Washington,” Nash wrote. “This never happened to him in this paper during the decade when he was ‘at the vortex of world conflict,’ as one headline writer put it. And with good reason. At least it seemed so at the time.”

He went on to explain the letter from Landegger and the decision to not mention the secretary-general’s presence in town. The story appeared under the small headline, 

Now It Can Be Told: 

Waldheim Lived Here

As many will recall Waldheim soon became involved in a “vortex” of a different sort of conflict back in Austria. As he ran for president of Austria in 1985-86, revelations began to appear that he had lied about his military service during World War II, and that he had been an officer in the German army who had been involved in the deportation of Greek and Yugoslav Jews and others to death camps. The charges have been extensively debated over the years, but a U.S. Justice Department investigation allegedly found evidence that he was, indeed, involved in the deportations. 

Consequently, the United States government banned Waldheim from entering this country — so did most countries of the world. Waldheim nonetheless served six years as president of Austria (1986-92). He died in 2007. 

His old Ridgefield friend, Karl Landegger,   incidentally, had fled Austria in 1938 when the Germans annexed the country as part of the Third Reich. He came to New York in 1940 and moved to Ridgefield in the early 1950s.

His family, who still live here, have been major philanthropic contributors to the community over the years.

Francis A. Rockwell: 
Candlesticks and Wine

Francis Rockwell was a man of many talents who led what his obituary called “a prominent, useful and well-rounded life.” He was an inventor, an industrialist, a pomologist, and a winemaker. His metallic products were used throughout the nation — many are now well known in the antiques world — while his liquid products were consumed,  apparently with pleasure,  throughout the region, including New York City.

A member of one of the founding families of Ridgefield, Francis Asbury Rockwell was born in 1818, a son of a local cabinet-maker. In 1840 he married Mary Lee, who also had deep roots in the community and was a daughter of a local Revolutionary War captain.

Unlike his father, who was known as Uncle Tommy, Francis was more interested in metal than wood early in his career. He and his brother, John Wesley Rockwell, founded in the 1840s a company that at the beginning produced tin candlesticks but eventually expanded into many other products, all wrought of not only tin, but also iron and brass.

Francis Rockwell was not satisfied producing ordinary candlesticks and came up with many innovative variations, several of them patented. One was a design with a spring inside a candle-holding tube that forced the candle upward as it burned. Another had a canister to hold matchsticks attached to the candlestick base.

Their line of products expanded to include tools such as augers and drill bits; small farm implements, like hog scrapers (used to remove hair from the hide of butchered pigs); and even newspaper holders, devices from which periodicals were hung on a rack in a library reading room, making issues easy to display, remove, read, and replace.

One of the more usual Rockwell products was a “letter clip,” an ornate gadget that people  could use to hold small piles of letters together. Those were the days when letter-writing was not only popular, but almost an art. The clip could lie on a desktop, holding missives awaiting responses, or it could, hung from the wall near the front door, hold completed letters waiting to be taken to the post office.

A bedclothes clip Francis invented received wide attention in newspapers around the country. For instance, the Fayetteville North Carolinian reported in 1850, “A Yankee named Rockwell, of Ridgefield, Conn., has invented a little clasp, to be attached to bed rails, to keep the bed clothes from being removed by restless children, or others. It is no doubt very useful in cold weather.”

The Rockwell brothers started their manufacturing on Main Street in a small factory across from today’s First Church of Christ Scientist that later became the site of the Bailey Inn. They then moved to Catoonah Street, and twice had their facility heavily damaged by fire.  One of their buildings was called Catoonah Hall, which led to the road’s being called Catoonah Street.

Soon after the loss of Catoonah Hall to an 1868 fire, the Rockwell brothers decided to pursue different paths. John focused on turning his father’s homestead and woodshops into the Elm Shade Cottages, forerunner of The Elms Inn, on northern Main Street. Francis retired to his home at 305 Main Street, today often called “Red Chimneys,” to pursue pomology — the science of fruit.

Francis Rockwell’s earlier interests had not been entirely machined products.  As distant cousin and historian George L. Rockwell wrote, he was “interested greatly in the culture of fruit and products of the soil.”

Combining his knowledge of industry and of the fruit, Rockwell in the 1850s had begun manufacturing wine, both from grapes and from blackberries. At least some of his products, however, were probably not the sort one would consider “wine” today, but were more like sweetened fruit juice. It appears that his widest selling varieties were non-alcoholic, and were particularly appreciated by clergy for use as sacramental wine.

Thus, it was not surprising to find that The Church Journal, a 19th Century Episcopal newspaper circulated nationally, carried an 1859 article about Rockwell’s wines, heaping praise on the concoctions which it called “pleasant to the taste and genuine in manufacture.”

The Journal went on to say, “the Rev. Mr. Williams, rector of St. Stephen’s, Ridgefield, who has lived next door to Mr. Rockwell for the last six years, vouches for the purity of the wines from personal knowledge and observation, and specially commends some of the varieties for sacramental purposes.” (The description conjures up images of Messrs. Rockwell and Williams sitting on a back porch, conversing while sampling some of the less sacramental and more potent varieties!)

The New-York Tribune gave Rockwell’s wines even more news coverage, but was somewhat less exuberant. “It undoubtedly is pure, so far as any admixture of alcohol is concerned, but it is not pure grape juice, because it has a large admixture of sugar, which in our opinion is of no more advantage, and for which there is no more necessity.”

Nevertheless, The Tribune added that “the taste of this wine will please the mass of wine-bibbers.”

It also pleased judges at The American Institute of the City of New York for the Encouragement of Science and Invention, which awarded him a gold medal for the best Native Grape Wine and a silver medal for best Blackberry Wine in 1859. (For many years Gulden’s mustard had a copy of its American Institute Gold Medal Award shown on its jar label.)

For a while at least, Rockwell must have been producing a lot of wine because he was advertising “Rockwell’s Pure Grape and Blackberry Wine” in such publications as The Church /Journal as available in kegs of five gallons or more, for $2 a gallen. Bottles were $8 a dozen.

How long he kept up his winemaking is unknown, but during the Civil War, Rockwell was conducting business in Washington, D.C., where he was probably supplying small devices for the war effort. There he was also active with Connecticut’s efforts to aid wounded soldiers and, so doing, “he found greater opportunities for developing his love for his fellow man,” said The Ridgefield Press.

In retirement he focused on his interest in pomology.  At his Main Street home opposite Market Street, he planted many varieties of pear and apple trees, and was a proponent of the little known Baker apple, a variety discovered a century earlier by Ridgefield physician Dr. Amos Baker. 

“As a cooking apple, from its half-grown state until the time of its decay, it probably has no superior,” Rockwell said of the Baker apple. “As a market apple, its appearance and quality commend it to the good sense of the apple merchant, who always finds for it a ready market at the highest price.” He added that the fruit, yellowish striped with crimson, was “very tender, middling juicy, with a subacid pleasant flavor.”

Rockwell died in 1881 at the age of 63. “He has in one short week been stricken down from the full health and vigor of manhood, but as his whole life has been only an apprenticeship to a higher, he passed away entirely prepared, and in the full possession of his faculties to the last,” The Press said of his unexpected death. 

Neziah Wright: 
Stamped In History

Anyone who has ever been a stamp collector will instantly recognize the pair shown here: They are the very first two United States postage stamps, and were issued in 1847.

Along the bottom edge of each stamp are the initials R.W.H.&N. The W stands for a man whose mortal remains are spending eternity in Ridgefield, but who probably never lived here — though he had a close attachment to the town.

Neziah Wright was born in 1804 in Grafton, N.H., where his father was a local physician. The family soon moved to Bradford, Vt. 

Little is known about his early life but by the 1820s he was in New York City, working as an engraver. In 1828, he and Freeman Rawdon established an engraving firm that soon grew into Rawdon, Wright, Hatch & Edson, a leading producer of bank notes, bonds, and other finely engraved printing.

On March 3, 1847, a federal act authorized the postmaster general to use postage stamps for the prepayment of postage on letters. Within two weeks Rawdon, Wright, Hatch & Edson had submitted a proposal to design and print those new postage stamps, and they quickly got the contract. 

The result was the 5¢ Benjamin Franklin and 10¢ George Washington issues that went on sale in New York on July 1, 1847. Franklin was the first postmaster general, appointed by the Continental Congress in 1775, and Washington, the first president.

  

Some three million of the five cent stamps were printed and 863,000 ten centers. Back then postal rates were determined both by the weight and the distance that the letters had to travel. Letters going 300 miles or less were 5¢ per half ounce;  over 300 miles were 10¢ per half ounce.  

Wright’s company continued to merge with others, but held majority control when it became the American Bank Note Company in 1858, with Wright as its first treasurer. The company created not only the first stamps, but the first paper money, called “greenbacks,” issued by the federal government in 1862.

 A close inspection of the first greenbacks shows why American Bank Note was considered an expert in producing currency that was difficult to counterfeit. In fact, Neziah Wright had been a co-author of a book,  New Security for Protecting Bank Notes from Alterations & Photographic Counterfeits, published in 1858.

By the 1860s, Wright was considered a leading businessman in New York City. In his 1875 History of Bradford, Vt.,  the Rev. Silas McKeen quaintly describes  Neziah Wright as “a man well-known and highly esteemed in financial and commercial circles, who is said to possess a sufficiency of wealth, acquired by fair and honorable means. The amiable and excellent wife of Mr. N. Wright, deceased some years since, leaving no child but a virtually adopted daughter, Jane [sic], a worthy young lady, who married Mr. Phineas Lowndesbury, of Ridgefield, Ct., a gentleman worthy of such a wife.” (McKeen had some problems with names; the adopted daughter was Jennie, not Jane, and Phineas was Lounsbury, not Lowndesbury.)

      Therein lies the Ridgefield connection. Phineas Lounsbury was born in 1841 on the family’s Ridgefield  farm, The Hickories, in Farmingville.  After the Civil War he was running a shoe factory in New Haven, later in Norwalk, reports Lounsbury historian  Jeremy Main. “Phineas built ties with the New York banking society and sealed them by marrying Jennie Wright, daughter of Neziah Wright, a founder and treasurer of the American Bank Note Co.,” said Main. That wedding occurred in 1867.

Jennie and Phineas lived on Main Street, eventually building Grovelawn, the mansion now used as Ridgefield’s Community Center. When Neziah died in 1879, his will named Phineas Lounsbury as his executor.

Neziah Wright must have liked Phineas Lounsbury and Ridgefield a great deal because both he and his wife — and his sister — are all buried in the Lounsbury section of the Ridgefield Cemetery. His adopted daughter is nearby, with her husband, Phineas. The huge main monument — one of the tallest in Ridgefield — is shared by both the Wrights and Lounsburys.

The company Neziah Wright helped to create in the 1820s is still alive today, called ABCorp, with American Bank Note as a subsidiary. While it still does fine, secure printing, the company has branched out into such fields as “dual-interface (contactless) payment debit and credit cards” and business-to-business distribution services in more than 100 countries. Its headquarters are just down the road, in Stamford, Conn.

Konrad Bercovici: 
Gypsies and Gusto

Konrad Bercovici, a self-styled “gypsy,” was a popular American writer and journalist whose friends included Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. His successful lawsuit against Charlie Chaplin generated many a headline three quarters of a century ago.

Although his home was literally on the state line along West Lane in Lewisboro, N.Y., Bercovici always considered himself a Ridgefielder. In fact, his mailing address was Ridgefield because the Ridgefield Post Office delivered his mail.

A native of Romania, Konrad Bercovici was born in 1882 to an intellectual Jewish couple who taught their children Greek, French, and German as well as Romanian. At a young age he became fascinated with the Roma — what he always called gypsies. “He spent much of his youth among the tents of gypsies who poured into Romania from the borders of Hungary, listening to their songs and learning their language,” said the New York Times.

When he was 11, his father was killed in an anti-Jewish riot and the family soon moved  to Paris where they began socializing with the literary community. He studied the organ under Charles-Marie Widor — the man who taught Albert Schweitzer — and was soon proficient enough that he gave a recital at the Cathedral of Notre Dame. 

While still a teenager, he began to write professionally, often about the Roma. He sold short stories for $5 each, while also working at a variety of jobs, including painting the frame of the Eiffel Tower.

He met his wife, Naomi, a sculptor, in Paris. The couple moved to New York City in 1904. There, to earn a living while pursuing his interest in writing, Konrad shoveled snow from the city streets, played piano in silent picture theaters, sold artificial flowers, and worked in sweatshops.

His first book, Crimes of Charities, appeared in 1917 and criticized what he considered the indifference of organized charities to the people they were supposed to be helping. 

The same year, he joined the staff of the New York World, writing sports stories and features, and three years later moved to the New York Evening Post, covering stories in many parts of the world. At the same time he continued turning out short stories for literary magazines.

During the 1920s he also wrote a dozen books of fiction and non-fiction, soon gaining an international reputation as a lively and interesting author. He became one of the Algonquin Table “regulars” that included  Irving Berlin, Robert Benchley, George S. Kaufman, and Alexander Woollcott. Among his circle of friends were such artists, writers, actors, and musicians  as Melvyn Douglas, Diego Rivera,  F. Scott Fitzgerald,  Paul Robeson, Ernest Hemingway, Wilhelm Van Loon, Frank Lloyd Wright, and the Gershwin brothers. A  portrait of him sketched by the young Amadeo Modigliani is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Over his long life, he produced around 40 books, many of them about the Roma — his Story of the Gypsies has been considered a standard work on the subject. However, he also wrote fiction and non-fiction on historical figures, including That Royal Lover, about Romania’s King Caroll, and Savage Prodigal, a biography of the French poet Rimbaud.

The Bercovicis moved to West Lane around 1930, but also maintained a residence in New York City. Among his local friends was author Margaret “Peggy” Shane of North Salem Road, mother of Betty Grace Nash, longtime managing editor of The Ridgefield Press and wife of publisher  Karl Nash.

Karl Nash was well acquainted with Bercovici whom he described as “a frequent speaker at service club meetings over the years, tackling his subjects with a gusto that marked his writings.” In one talk that Nash covered in June 1945, Bercovici told the Ridgefield Lions that he favored imprisoning the entire nation of Germany for the war and its atrocities.  “There is no reasonable argument why a whole nation that has proven itself asocial should not be treated by the civilized nations of the world as an asocial individual is treated by society,” Bercovici told the club. “The crime committed by a thousand or a million or ten million is not less a crime because it has been committed by a mass.”

Some of Bercovici’s books became movies, including The Volga Boatman (1926), produced by Cecil B. DeMille. He himself worked as a screenwriter  for several years in Hollywood where he became friends with Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and Charlie Chaplin. It was Chaplin’s hit The Great Dictator (1940) that was the subject of a 1947 lawsuit in which Bercovici  sued Chaplin, charging that he plagiarized material that Bercovici had written.

 

Bercovici was represented  by attorney Louis Nizer. In his book My Life in Court, Nizer explained that “The claim was that Chaplin had approached Bercovici to produce one of his gypsy stories as a motion picture and in the course of those friendly negotiations, Bercovici gave him an outline of ‘The Great Dictator’ story about a barber who looks like Hitler and is confused with him.” The case was settled, with Chaplin paying Bercovici $95,000 ($1.1 million in 2020). but with Chaplin also gaining rights to a couple Bercovici books that he could turn into movies.

In his autobiography, Chaplin insisted that he had been the sole writer of The Great Dictator’s script. He came to a settlement, though, because of his “unpopularity in the States at that moment and being under such court pressure, [he] was terrified, not knowing what to expect next.” 

Bercovici died in 1961 at the age of 80, leaving four children including journalist Rion Bercovici, artist Mirel Bercovici, and author Revolte “Rada” Bercovici.

Eddy Brown: 
Child Prodigy Turned Radio Pioneer

If you were a fan of classical music in the first half of the 20th Century, you knew the name Eddy Brown. A child-prodigy violinist, Brown performed with orchestras across Europe and the United States early in the century and then turned to radio, where he became a pioneer in bringing classical music to the airwaves. He was the first director of WQXR, the New York City station that is still broadcasting classical music today and, thanks to the internet, has listeners worldwide.

A native of Chicago, Eddy Brown was born in 1895, son of an amateur violinist who had immigrated from Austria and a Russian mother who was a follower of Christian Science —  she named her son after Mary Baker Eddy, the religion’s founder.  The family moved to Indianapolis when Eddy was 4. Fascinated by his father’s violin playing, little Eddy began imitating dad and, showing considerable talent, was put into the hands of teachers at Butler University’s music conservatory in Indianapolis.  At the age of six, he gave his first public recital.

Continuing to show great promise, Brown was sent to Budapest at the age of nine to study at the Royal Conservatory of Music under such teachers as Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály. In 1905, at age 10, he made his European concert debut in Berlin and a year later, he won the Budapest Concerto Competition — the second-place finisher was a fellow student, Jeno Blau, who later changed his name to Eugene Ormandy.

After graduating in 1909, he began performing with orchestras throughout Europe, including a concert that year in Royal Albert Hall with the London Philharmonic. The following year, while continuing concert tours, he began studying in St. Petersburg, Russia, with violinist Leopold Auer. A fellow classmate was a young Jascha Heifetz.

Brown returned to the U.S. in 1916, making his debut in his hometown of Indianapolis with the New York Symphony, and a few days later, performed the same concert at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. Late that December, he gave a recital in Carnegie Hall. A New York Times reviewer observed: “Mr. Brown is one of America’s young artists who have come before the public at a time when war has sent all the greatest to these shores, and native talent must meet a competition never matched oversea.  He has maintained his place before the public by force of ability and character and a large audience greeted him yesterday.”

Over the next dozen years, he continued to perform in recitals and with orchestras around the country and abroad. 

Brown was signed by Columbia Records, for whom he produced more than 60 recordings between 1918 and 1927. In a 1923 interview, he said that it was harder to record the sound of a violin than the voice of a singer. “The great problem is to retain the peculiar timbre and quality of the violin expression to get the feel of the bowing, and the fingering, and to hold the distinctiveness which marks the violin from all other existing musical instruments,” he said. But, he added, “I am confident that it will be only a little while when the magicians of the phonograph laboratories will have captured the secret of violin tone.”

In 1930, perhaps weary of the concert life, he turned to radio, becoming one of the first people to bring serious classical music programming to the airwaves. His first post was as music director with the Mutual network’s WOR in New York, where he produced — and sometimes appeared in — many musical programs. His wife, Beth Lydy, a former Broadway musical actress, wrote  scripts for the programs. 

In 1936, he was named director of the brand new WQXR,  the first classical-only station in the United States. He became a part-owner and remained at the station until 1942. (Two years later it was sold to the New York Times; today it is owned, along with WNYC, by New York Public Radio.) He also became a station personality, hosting shows over the years. And, according to a station history, he was not narrow in his programming tastes, inviting guests like conductor Wilfred Pelletier of the Metropolitan Opera to hear Benny Goodman. “Brown’s mixing of jazz and classical artists produced a vibe of mutual appreciation that spilled over to WQXR programming,” the history said. “At a time when 80% of airtime was devoted to classical music, the station began broadcasting blues, jazz and swing.”

In 1944, Eddy and Beth Brown bought the former Carnall family homestead on Peaceable Street, described by The Ridgefield Press at the time as “a Colonial residence with attractively landscaped grounds, a tennis court, gardens and a two-car garage.” They maintained the place for several years but by 1949 the couple had moved to Italy to work for the  U.S. Department of State in a program to establish cultural ties between European nations and the United States. While there he and the Italian government established the Accademia Internazionale di Belcanto, a school and theater for young singers. He also created a program that allowed young American singers to perform in Europe and study at the Accademia. 

In 1956, the Browns returned to the States to become coordinators and teachers at the University of Cincinnati College Conservatory of Music. He later returned to Indianapolis to become the artist-in-residence at Butler University — where he had begun violin lessons 70 years earlier.

While on a 1974 trip to Europe where he was to lecture, he died of a heart attack in Italy. He was 78 years old. Beth Lydy Brown died five years later at 83.

In his younger concert-playing years, Brown did not make a lot of money. To help support himself, he collaborated with Louis Gruenberg, his pianist in many performances, to create the musical, “Roly-Boly Eyes,” which played 108 performances on Broadway in 1919 and then went on the road.  

Brown called it the most profitable thing he ever did.

 Marian Cox: 
‘Lady of the Orchids’

 “New York’s Famous ‘Lady of the Orchids’ Bares the Hidden Story of Her Fabulous Society Life.”

The headline stretched across the top of two pages of the San Francisco Examiner’s Sunday magazine in 1934 for two weeks in a row. In the two-part article, Marian Cox explained why she “seeks to bury her ‘Parasite Past’” by selling almost all of her possessions, including Stonecrest, her estate-farm along North Street in Ridgefield.

Cox, an author and feminist who was considered both talented and beautiful, may also have been one of the wealthiest women to live in Ridgefield. Married to a multimillionaire, she rubbed shoulders with the literati and the “400” in the city and entertained the likes of presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan both at both her Manhattan and Stonecrest mansions.

A daughter of a well-to-do Southern family from St. Louis, Mabel Marian Metcalfe gave her birth year as 1882, although there is some evidence she was born in 1878. In 1899, when she said she was only 16 years old, she married  Dr. John Watson Cox, a wealthy New York City chemical manufacturer who was 43.

“There was I,” she told the Examiner, “a child of 16 thrown into the mad whirl of New York society, straight from a sheltered, quiet home in the old South. Immediately I must play hostess to distinguished guests and be mistress of a 20-room mansion and 14 servants.”

She succeeded, it seems, and her mansion — which stretched from East 38th to 39th Streets in the fashionable Murray Hill section of Manhattan — became a destination. “The foremost statesmen, leaders from the field of literature and most of the social greats, frequented the Cox mansion, which was as impressive and grandiose as any in the New York of its day,” said the Examiner, which shared the story with many Hearst newspapers across the country.

In between a life of hosting parties and managing a household of 14 servants, Marian Cox started to write. She turned out several books, the first of which was The Crowds and The Veiled Woman, published in 1910 by Funk and Wagnalls. Her stories were considered feminist, featuring strong women. The San Francisco Chronicle said the book “sounded the most distinctive and ambitious note in recent American fiction.”

When her book, The Dry Rot of Society, was published in 1919, a male reviewer in The New York Sun called Cox “one of the few great feminine writers of English. She has a lucid style [and] she has that rare gift among women — irony. She has vision. She mocks, she scorns, she pities. She thinks without sinking into mere philosophizing...She has beautiful wisdom.”  

However, Cox confessed in the 1934 article that, at Murray Hill and Stonecrest, she grew addicted to her possessions, which, she explained, gave her a sense of identity. As she became an increasingly popular hostess, they served as anchors in a sea of social events. 

“I delighted in showing off my wonderful home and champagne goblets with the longest stems in New York (so I was told), jeweled Bohemian glasses, Royal Crown Leighton and Copeland china — all sorts of superlative things to make a grace of the mere animal functions of eating and drinking,” she wrote.

At least one guest did not seem to impress her. A devoted Democrat, Dr. Cox was treasurer of the Democratic National Committee and two-time presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan would often stop by their home on his visits to New York. Bryan was the famous orator, who would later add to his notoriety by opposing Darwinism in the Scopes trial.

“From my long-stemmed champagne goblets, he always drank grape juice while the rest of us drank wine, and he preached prohibition while manifesting such a Gargantuan appetite for food that he was the first person who impressed me with the truth of the adage:

“We compound for sins we are inclined to,

“By condemning those we have no mind to.”

“Bryan never drank himself into life,” she added, “but he ate himself unto death, in my inconsequential opinion.”

Dr. Cox died in 1928 and six years later, Marian Cox decided she had had enough of being saddled with millions of dollars in possessions and the responsibilities — and guilt — that came with them. She auctioned off virtually all of her furnishings and art, as well as Stonecrest.

“We possessed this city home of 20 rooms and a country home of 30 rooms and now I am wondering if I have ever had a home at all,” she said in 1934. At Murray Hill, “my salon was like frozen music, Louis 15th in style, with all its furniture reproductions of historic pieces at the palace of Versailles, Fontainebleau and Museum of the Louvre. My bedroom was a copy, even to the silk upon the walls, of the bedroom of Marie Antoinette.”

Of Stonecrest, which the Coxes bought around 1908, she said she emulated Marie Antoinette and attempted to convert the farm into a prosperous dairy. However, she admitted, she was unable to transform herself into a successful business woman.

After she left both homes  and their furnishings, Cox lived in various places until late 1940, when she returned to Ridgefield, acquiring the former home of artist George Stengel on lower Main Street.  “It seems I am only following the instinctive lure of the past in returning to Ridgefield to find the home for which I have been vainly seeking ever since I left there,” she wrote in a long essay in The Ridgefield Press about returning to town.

However, her stay was not long. During the war she met James Fay Logan, the captain of a Liberty Ship that was transporting war supplies in the North and South Atlantic, and Indian Oceans.  Captain Logan was at least 17 years younger than she. They were married in 1943 and later moved to New York City.

 Although she spent much of her life in the limelight and seemed to thrive on publicity, Marian Cox Logan faded from the scene late in life. She apparently died in the early 1970s — her exact date and place of death has not been discovered. Captain Logan died in 1981.

In 1967, still using the name Marian Cox, she self-published her memoirs, The Sphinx Wore An Orchid. The title was a reference to her reputation decades earlier as an orchid lover. In fact, she confessed at the time she was selling her Ridgefield home, “At my country estate, ‘Stonecrest,’ in Connecticut, there was a conservatory and a gardener for the sole purpose of raising rare orchids for me. Twice a week I received a huge box of flowers for the house and orchids for myself. I was then, truly, a Lady of the Orchids.”

She found symbolism in her love of “such strange orchids raised solely for me. As strange as those I had seen in the botanical gardens of Buitenzorg, Java. Orchids like little tarantulas pinned to my heart. Spotted orchids like blooms corrupted by the sun. Pure orchids so white they seemed innocent of every touch of the sun. My young life in its flowery grave of solitude and splendor!”

But, she added, “this is what made me write — in a superb sublimation of sex and humanity. Four books of mine were published during this gala period, books strange as Java orchids for an American girl to write.”