Ruth Hurzeler: 

Breaking Down A Barrier

One of the town’s most important jobs is that of the town clerk, the person who records and preserves all of Ridgefield’s important data and documents. 

The town clerk’s office is the official repository of the records of births, marriages, deaths, and burials;  the countless documents that deal with the land and its ownership such as warrantee deeds, mortgages, liens, and releases, as well survey maps; and the minutes of all meetings of every board and commission. The town clerk supervises elections and send the results of the secretary of the state; distributes and receives absentee ballots; posts notices of government meetings; and maintains records of all town ordinances, regulations and charters. All town officials are sworn in by the town clerk or the clerk’s assistants.  The town clerk can swear you in as a new voter, issue you a marriage license, and sell you a license to fish, hunt or trap. If you’re a dog, the town clerk will sell your owner a tag.

The first town clerk was John Copp, who had also laid out the village settlement and was Ridgefield’s first teacher. And for more than 230 years, every single one of the 18 people who succeeded him as town clerk was a man. Then along came Ruth Hurzeler, and ever since, every town clerk has been female. It was one of the first traditionally male offices to be won by a woman.

Ruth Mildred Hurzeler was born in Bethel in 1917, a daughter of Swiss-German parents — Rudolph and Pauline Hurzeler — who operated the Ridgefield Bakery in the space now occupied by Planet Pizza (and long the home of Roma Pizzeria). 

After graduation from Ridgefield High School, she worked at the bakery, but in 1946 took an appointed position as assistant town clerk under Judge George G. Scott. When Scott decided to retire in 1949, Hurzeler was one of several people who ran for the office. She received the Republican

nomination without difficulty and in the October 1949 election (municipal elections were a month earlier than state and national elections back then), she handily defeated Democrat Susan C. Duncan, 999 to 586. She won the seat even though the top of the ticket was taken by a Democrat, Harry E. Hull, who received almost the same plurality for first selectman as Hurzeler did for town clerk.

Two years later, she defeated soon-to-be Postmaster Richard E. Venus (who later became town historian) by the wide margin of 1,157 to 662.

She went on to win every biennial election until the early 1970s when one of the great campaign battles of 20th Century Ridgefield was waged. A young woman named Terry Leary decided to take on the seemingly entrenched Hurzeler in the 1971 election. Leary came close, amassing 2,239 votes to Hurzeler’s 2,461. Although Leary lost, the Democratic party saw the potential for a victory in two years. In 1973, she ran again, making the town clerk’s salary her major campaign theme — a theme that appealed to both Democrats and some fiscal-minded Republicans and unaffiliateds. 

For centuries, town clerks had been compensated by the state-defined fees they charged people who were filing documents, particularly deeds and mortgages. In the 18th, 19th and early 20th Centuries, that usually didn’t amount to much, since relatively few land transfers took place. But when the Ridgefield building boom began in the 1950s, thousands of warrantee deeds, mortgage deeds, and many other land-related documents were being filed — and the income of the town clerk increased manifold.

Leary focused her campaign on making the job salaried. She estimated that Hurzeler was taking in more than $100,000 in fees that could instead go to the town coffers or to cover operating costs of the office. Hurzeler refused to reveal how much she earned in fees, saying that was her own

business, and she maintained that it was the age-old, statutory, and fair way to compensate the job. However, she said in 1972 she would be willing to be salaried, if the salary properly compensated all the work the job required. She said she did as much as a first selectman, and that job was paying $20,000 at the time (equivalent to about $116,000 in 2017 dollars).

In 1973, which would have been Hurzeler’s 13th term in office, she lost the election to Leary, who prevailed by a sizable margin, 3,350 to 2,812 — probably helped a bit by riding the coattails of Louis J. Fossi, a popular Democrat who won a landslide victory for first selectman. But clearly the salary issue was important, and Leary immediately asked the Board of Selectmen to propose that the office be salaried. The voters eventually agreed.

“We at the newspaper, who have known Miss Hurzeler for years, have received valuable and continuing assistance and cooperation from her,” a Ridgefield Press editorial said in 1974 as she was leaving office. “Some of us have tangled with her, a not unusual occurrence when strong wills come up against one another, but such occasions have left no lasting ill-will. Actually, the town clerk has had to rule with a strong hand, else things would have gotten out of hand. Many do not know of the lots of little things she had done for people, of the cases in which she has gone out of her way to be helpful.”

Hurzeler maintained the day after the election that she would run again in two years, but ill health prevented her from doing so. She remained an influential member of her party, and was vice-chairman of the Republican Town Committee when she died in 1977 at the age of 60. 

At a her retirement party in January 1974, newly elected First Selectman Fossi praised her years of hard work. “No one in Ridgefield … does not appreciate the efforts and quality of your work and your dedication over the years,” he said, adding that she would now have time to relax, enjoy life and travel.

“Now that I have time to take a trip,” replied Hurzeler with a smile, “there’s no gas.”

The nation was in the midst of the first great “oil crisis,” thanks to an OPEC embargo sparked by the Yom Kippur War.

Wayne Boring: 

Superman's Man

If you were among the many fans of Superman between 1940 and the 1960s, you saw the work of Wayne Boring, a Ridgefield cartoonist who brought the man of steel to life for millions who read the newspaper comics. 

Born in 1916 in Minneapolis, Mr. Boring studied at the Chicago Art Institute where he took a course by J. Allen St. John, the then-famous illustrator of the Tarzan books, to learn how to produce the muscular, Tarzan-like figure. 

In 1940, after a stint as a newspaper illustrator and some freelance comics work, he was hired to help illustrate the new but growing   Superman strip, started in 1938 by Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel. At first he “ghosted” strips, filling in bodies after Shuster drew the faces. 

By the mid-1940s, he was the sole illustrator of the daily and Sunday comics and by 1965 had drawn more than 1,350 Sunday and 8,300 daily Superman strips, and also did some of the comic books. 

In all of those strips and books, incidentally, he never once drew Superman changing into costume in a phone booth, a TV series technique that always annoyed the artist. 

In 1957, Boring moved to Lincoln Lane in Ridgefield. Eleven years later, DC Comics started cost cutting and dismissed several of its veteran artists, including Mr. Boring. He then ghosted backgrounds for Prince Valiant series by Hal Foster, who lived in Redding, until 1972. He also drew for Marvel comics on and off, but late in life was forced to work as a bank security guard in Florida where he died in 1982. 

"Wayne Boring's Superman is one of the most enduring characters in the comics hobby," a comic art historian has written. "Boring's stylized artwork and fine linework along with his ability to handle science fiction subjects has made him one of the most popular artists of his time, and among the most remembered in comics history."

Van and Gert Kaufman: 

Successful Persuaders

Van and Gert Kaufman were persuaders, but they used different tools for different aims. Both were very successful at their crafts.

Van Kaufman was an artist whose work was seen by millions of people and who probably helped persuade many thousands of them to buy a Pontiac.

Gert Kaufman, an environmentalist in the days before the term was commonplace, used well-chosen words to persuade not only local, state and federal officials, but also ordinary citizens to

support innovative ideas about the environment and recreation. She was the moving force behind a pedestrian path from Norwalk to Danbury — what she and others called the “Linear Park” and what a half century later is being developed as the Norwalk River Valley Trail.

A native of Georgia who grew up in California, Van Justin Kaufman was born in 1918. He loved painting from a very early age and by 10, was taking lessons at Otis Art School — a fresco he created as a student still exists on a wall of his Beverly Hills high school. By the late 1930s, he was working for Walt Disney studios, drawing the animation cells and layouts for such cartoons as Fantasia and Dumbo. “He worked on the famous dancing hippo sequence in Fantasia, and actually created the scene in Dumbo where the gorilla tries to escape his cage — which earned him a bonus,” said his son, Kris Kaufman.

In the late 30s, while attending what is now the California Institute of the Arts, he met fellow student Gertrude Hollingsworth. A native of Glendale, Calif., who was also born in 1918, Hollingsworth was studying dress design. The two were married in 1940.

During World War II he became a sergeant in the Army Air Corps’ First Motion Picture Unit,

working with such veterans as  Clark Gable, William Holden, Alan Ladd, Clayton Moore, and Ronald Reagan — his family has a weekend leave pass for Kaufman to visit his wife, signed by Captain Reagan. Among other projects he designed approximately 100 war insignias.

Around 1948, the Kaufmans moved to Ridgefield to be close to the large colony of artists that existed in Fairfield County. Van freelanced, worked for Esquire magazine and in the 1950s moved to automobile advertising in the days when both promotional brochures and magazine ads for cars

employed paintings instead of photographs. He started out with Mercury, moved to Buick, and finally settled in for many years at Pontiac.

     Art Fitzpatrick, who had begun his career as an automotive designer (he helped design the 1940 Packard sedan, among other cars), asked Kaufman to do the scenics for his car ads. The two became widely known in the business as “Fitz and Van,” with Fitzpatrick painting the cars and Kaufman doing the backgrounds.

     “These lush images depicted scenes of glamour and sophistication populated by suave,

well-attired cosmopolitan characters, always accompanied by a larger-than-life Pontiac with shimmering chrome and glistening paintwork,” said automotive writer James M. Kraus. “These were images that the aspirational car buyer could fantasize inserting himself into, and they nourished the idea that maybe he himself could gain access to this beautiful and exotic world if he went out and bought a new Pontiac.”

Kaufman and Fitzpatrick would regularly fly off to visit many of the world’s most glamorous

places — Rome, Paris, Monte-Carlo, Acapulco, Hawaii, Caribbean island, and the like — looking for inspiration and taking pictures to work into the backgrounds of paintings.

“These international locales were a departure from the conventional advertising practice in the

U.S. at the time and occasionally met with resistance in the insular world of 1960s Detroit management,” Kraus wrote. “An executive once groused to Fitz that a couple of the backgrounds looked a bit too foreign. He ended up with a tinge of red in the face, however, as the locales of the two images that he objected to were actually Upper Manhattan and Washington, D.C.”

Today,  their automobile advertising paintings — often signed “AF VK” — can bring

thousands of dollars at auctions. Hundreds of them can be viewed online.

“The reign of Fitz and Van at Pontiac coincided with the pinnacle of the era of Jet Age glamour and sophistication — an age they exquisitely grasped and captured,” Kraus observed. “Their images remain today as frozen moments in time, reflecting the spirit of idealized gracious living, 1960s style.”

Kris Kaufman once asked his father how long it took him to paint the scenes for the auto ads.

“20 years and three days,” his father replied. “Three days to paint one and 20 years to learn how.”

The Kaufmans lived at 100 Cain’s Hill Road (now the home of Howard Sanden, noted

American portrait artist). “It was love at first sight,” Gert Kaufman said in a 1975 interview. “The mountains, the valleys, the trickling streams — it was beautiful. I was so awed.”

A few years after they moved here, she learned that the state planned not only a four-lane “Super 7” highway up the Route 7 valley near her home, but also a flood control project that would take some of their land. Instead of simply opposing the projects, however, she studied them to determine how they could be accomplished with the least impact. She then successfully led efforts to modify the path of the new road and to eliminate a planned Super 7 interchange at Florida Hill Road. 

The state took an acre of their land for the Norwalk River Flood Control Project, which had

been inspired by a disastrous 1955 flood. She did not oppose the acquisition and instead joined Ridgefield’s Flood and Erosion Control Board (now merged into the Conservation Commission) to help oversee flood control efforts throughout the town. “She was a dedicated person when it came to flood and erosion control — things people didn’t talk about much back then,” said fellow conservationist Edith Meffley, adding that research Kaufman compiled in the 1960s and 70s was still being used four decades later.

But perhaps she was best known for her tireless efforts to establish the Western Connecticut Linear Park, which she described in 1971 as “an attempt to preserve the state’s natural environment for recreation purposes along a major transportation corridor. The greenbelt concept for Route 7 will allow nature trails for hiking, horseback riding, bicycling, and cross-country skiing to be provided along the full 34-mile length of the new highway.”

Kaufman, who became chairman of the Western Connecticut Linear Park Committee, said the

34-mile, 1,000-acre park would serve an estimated 450,000 population by 1990 and cost only 3% of the total outlay on Super 7. She gained widespread support for the project and was, in the end, much more successful than were proponents of the highway itself — Super 7 was abandoned in the 1990s as too expensive and environmentally troublesome.

Nonetheless, her concept of a Norwalk-to-Danbury pedestrian park lives today in the efforts to build the The Norwalk River Valley Trail (NRVT),  38 miles of multi-purpose trail connecting Calf Pasture Beach in Norwalk and Rogers Park in Danbury, passing through Wilton, Ridgefield, and Redding. In many places it would use state land acquired for Super 7 or flood control. Today, several miles of the trail exist in Norwalk and Wilton and another five or more may be completed this year.

“I won’t be able to ride a bicycle anymore by the time the bike trails are built,” Kaufman quipped in 1977. “But I’m not giving up. We’ve gotten too much, given too much.”

Her work on the linear park earned her much praise, not the least of which came from Richard M. Nixon. “It is a pleasure to learn recently of your efforts … to enhance the environment and provide additional outdoor recreation opportunities for residents of your community,” the president wrote her in 1972. “The successful results you have achieved I know will always be a source of great satisfaction to you and the members of your committee and, even more importantly, to countless Americans who in years to come will enjoy the legacy you have given them.”

Like her husband, Gert Kaufman was an artist — after graduating from art school, she had drawn Woody Woodpecker cartoons for Warner Brothers in Hollywood. Around 1960, Karl S. Nash,

Press editor and publisher, mentioned in passing that his newspaper needed a logo. “Mom happened to hear him and volunteered,”  son Kris recalled years later. “She drew the acorn that appeared on the papers for many years — for which she was paid $50.”

In 1976, after nearly 30 years in Ridgefield, the Kaufmans moved to the Los Angeles area where Gert earned a degree in landscape architecture. After Van died in 1995, she moved to Carmel, Calif.  She died there in 2002 at the age of 84.

In an interview in the 1970s, Gert Kaufman explained the drive behind her many years of fighting for the linear park and for conservation. “You can’t give up,” she said. “I think of Ridgefield as surrounded by dikes against which the developers are pushing all the time. They leak in, unless you keep your finger in. If you get tired and move away for just a minute, you’ve lost.”

The Tulipani Brothers: 

A Five Star Family

One of the happiest — perhaps one of the most amazing — stories of World War II was of the five Tulipani brothers, all of whom went off to serve in the armed forces and all of whom returned safe and sound to live long lives in their native Ridgefield.

Aldo, Joseph, Albert, Alfred, and John Tulipani, children of Vincenzo and Evelina Branchini

Tulipani, were all native sons, and grew up on the family’s 65-acre farm on Nod Hill Road.

Aldo Anthony Tulipani (1916-2003), the oldest of the boys,  graduated from Ridgefield High School in 1934. He joined the post office in 1940 as a mail messenger,  transferring the mailbags between the Ridgefield post office and the railroad mail cars passing through the Branchville Station.

In World War II Aldo served in the U.S. Army, which sent him to the Philippines with an anti-aircraft unit, in preparation for the invasion of Japan. Soon after he arrived, the atomic bombs were dropped and his duty changed to seeking out Japanese troops still holed up in Philippine caves. As the war was ending, he was transferred to a special entertainment unit, performing on the accordion in a band at various bases and outposts in the Philippines. 

Back home, he was hired as a letter carrier for the post office, and soon became well known and loved by the people on his 39-mile route through the southern part of town. For many years he would provide treats for children on his route. “Thursday was candy day,” he recalled. “But before the kids could get some, they had to say the Pledge of Allegiance.  I remember one little girl who

could barely even talk, but her brothers and sisters made her practice the pledge all week. When Thursday came, though, she said it all the way through. Oh, gosh, she was only about three years old — she could barely pronounce words like ‘indivisible.’”

He retired from the post office in 1976. 

Aldo was an accomplished accordionist, who made his radio debut in 1933 on a New York City station and later played before a crowd of thousands at the New York World’s Fair. He won the Connecticut state accordion championship in 1938, the same year he began teaching the instrument — he continued providing instruction for nearly a half century. Many Ridgefielders recall his car’s license plate, SQZBX — short for “squeezebox.” 

A founder of the local VFW post, he was the Memorial Day grand marshal in 1990. A video interview with Aldo about his war experiences is in the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress, and may be viewed online.

Joseph Anthony Tulipani (1918-2004) was a 1937 graduate of Ridgefield High School and worked on local estates before becoming one of the first Ridgefielders to fight in World War II. A member of an Army radar unit, he served in Australia,  and in the jungles of New Guinea and the Philippines. He survived Japanese bombing attacks in Australia and in the jungles, and was with General Douglas MacArthur’s forces in the liberation of the Philippines. 

Joseph was well known to the local Philippine guerrillas with whom he worked. One day a

Filipino, with pistol drawn, came upon Joseph’s brother, Aldo, also an Army man, who had recently arrived in the area. The guerrilla might have shot the stranger except that, Joseph said later, “they recognized him as me,” and let him go.

From the day he entered the Army — April 1, 1941 — until he was discharged on Aug. 25, 1945, Joseph kept detailed diaries of what he saw. “Whatever made me do it, I don’t know,” he told an interviewer in 1974. “I had this funny sensation when I got on the bus in Danbury. I sat down and until I got my pencil and pad out, this sensation wouldn’t stop. Somebody was telling me to write.” 

And write he did. When his service ended and he was being discharged, he was faced with a dilemma. He had a suitcase full of diaries that were illegal to bring home. “You weren’t allowed to take anything in writing,” he said. “No names and addresses, nothing concerning the unit.” He could have tried to smuggle them out, risking arrest and a court martial, but he decided to “play honest.” He told the inspecting officer what was in the case. “He said, ‘You know what you’ve got to do with those. You’ve got to throw them in the fire,’ ” Joseph  pleaded with the inspector, who finally agreed to turn over the suitcase to the base censors. “I never thought I’d see it again,” Joseph said. But six months after he arrived home, the diary-laden suitcase showed up on his door. 

He planned to produce a book of his memoirs, but never completed the project. (The diaries were nearly destroyed in a fire that heavily damaged his home in 2000, but were rescued by firefighters. The writer has not been able to find out where the diaries are now.) 

After the war Joseph became the superintendent of Jack Ward’s Ward Acres estate for many years. He also worked semi-professionally as a photographer. When the original St. Mary’s School was operating in the 1960s, he took many of the class and team pictures there. 

Albert Nazzareno Joseph Tulipani (1920-1994), also an RHS graduate, went on to attend a music school in New York City, majoring in string instruments. During World War II he served in the U.S. Navy aboard the destroyer U.S.S. Wilson, escorting convoys of cargo ships to Russia on the

harsh and dangerous “Murmansk run.”  The Wilson also patrolled the Atlantic for German submarines — the ship was credited with sinking two of them — and escorted ships carrying troops to England and, later, the invasion of France.

The Wilson then moved to the Pacific Theatre, participating in such battles as Wake Island and Guadalcanal. Albert also served aboard three aircraft carriers during his three years and 10 months in the Navy. He received the Presidential Unit Citation for service while on duty in the Atlantic and decorations and citations for service in the Asiatic Pacific Campaign, China-Burma Theatre, North Africa Campaign, Middle East Theatre, Solomon Islands, and Casablanca.  

Back home, he was a guitar teacher who also played professionally in the region until the early 1960s. He was also a familiar figure at Brunetti’s Market, where he worked for many years, and later at the Grand Union.

Alfred Anthony Tulipani (1921-2013), the last of the five brothers to die, joined the Army in 1942 and spent most of his service in Canada. He was stationed with an Army anti-aircraft unit, guarding Great Lakes locks during the war. 

Alfred maintained that his wife, Mary, was “the first war bride in Ridgefield.” The two met

in 1943 at a Woolworth’s in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. They were married a year later.

While he was still in the service, his new bride had to get a special “border crossing card” to be able to travel between Ontario and the U.S. While she was in Ridgefield at one point in 1944, she needed to go to Hartford to pick up the card. The only way to get there was on a troop train that stopped in Norwalk. 

Brother-in-law Aldo Tulipani drove her to Norwalk and the two boarded the train for Hartford. The 18-year-old newlywed was the only woman on the train, a fact that did not go unnoticed by all the soldiers on board. Several asked the conductor if he would stop the train and allow Mrs. Tulipani to walk down the aisles of the cars. The conductor did, Mary agreed, and she was greeted with countless cheers and much applause.” 

After the war, Alfred became a superintendent of local estates, including Casagmo on Main Street, as well as a landscaper. Late in life, he frequently contributed reminiscences about the “old days” in town to The Ridgefield Press. He and Mary had been married 69 years when he died.

John Vincent Tulipani (1922-2002), the youngest of the brothers, graduated from RHS in 1941 and entered the Navy two years later, serving with the 100th SeaBee Battalion. He was stationed in Hawaii, in the Marshall Islands where he helped build a landing field out of coral, and in the Philippines, where he built hospital barracks and other facilities. 

The Navy also took advantage of his skill at his lifelong love: baseball. As a seven-year-old

boy, John began playing on the family farm — long before there was a Little League, he and his brothers played in the fields, sometimes running into trouble with their father when they smacked fly balls into his vineyard.  He started playing organized ball at RHS in 1939; Coach Kip Holleran, who was also the school’s principal, called him the best player he ever coached.

In the service on Oahu, John played on the 1944 All-Navy All Star Team that included many former professional players. 

After the war he played on both baseball and softball teams in town and the area. He later coached Ridgefield teams, including Babe Ruth League. 

     Before entering the service, John worked for Domenic Gaeta, a Ridgefield plumbing contractor. After the war, he continued working with Gaeta, but in 1962, struck out on his own, establishing John Tulipani and Sons Plumbing and Heating.  Over the years he was noted for fashioning various tools and devices to assist in the plumbing and heating trade. “He liked to invent things,” said his daughter, Beth McKnight. “He loved to putter.” John retired in 1991.

     All five brothers were musicians. “Down on the farm was very lonely, so my father

bought us all an instrument and paid for our lessons,” Alfred said in a 2006 reminiscence. Before the war the brothers played together as the Tulipani Orchestra and in the post-war era, performed at countless square dances as the Sagebush Serenaders.  Aldo was on the accordion, Albert  guitar, Joseph sax, John drums or bass, and Alfred  bass.

All five had been active members of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, which, in 1982, honored them, observing that they were the only five brothers who were all World War II veterans and who were still active in the national VFW. 

     In 1991, Ridgefield filmmaker John Lydecker produced a 30-minute video, featuring the Tulipani brothers’ recollections of the war and called “Ridgefield’s Five Star Family.” 

Charles Cogswell: 

He Volunteered for More

Staff Sgt. Charles Cogswell had flown 43 combat missions as a waist gunner on the B-17 “Flying Fortress” and was eligible to come home and conclude his hazardous duty. Instead, he volunteered for more bombing runs.

Soon after, on March 11, 1944, his plane was hit by German fire over 

the Adriatic Sea near Padua, Italy. He was never found and was listed at the war’s end as “missing in action.”
Wayne DeForest, a nephew of Cogswell, reports that, “The letters from the War Department that my grandparents kept all these years, and that I now keep, reported that the aircraft he was on took enemy fire and exploded. The Germans reported they patrolled the waters where it went down and the only survivor was the co-pilot who was sent to a POW camp.”

Charles Gardiner Cogswell was born in Ridgefield in 1923, a son of Katherine and Richard Cogswell. His father was a local plumbing contractor and the family lived on Ramapoo Road.

Cogswell graduated from Ridgefield High School in 1941. A year later, at the age of 19, he joined the Army. By 1943 he had been promoted to sergeant.

Sometime after he was declared missing in action, “his family ... received a beautiful

memorial booklet, inscribed with his name, paying tribute to him for his flying duties, which in some cases were carried out from British bases,” recalled Charles Coles, a classmate of Cogswell at RHS.

For his service, Sgt. Cogswell earned the Purple Heart, the Air Medal Air Medal with 6 Oak Leaf Clusters, the American Campaign Medal, and World War II Victory Medal, all awarded posthumously. 

 He is listed on the “Tablets of the Missing” at Sicily-Rome American Cemetery, Nettuno, Italy.

The 1946 Ridgefield High School yearbook was dedicated to Cogswell and nine other former RHS students who had lost their lives in the war.

In 1942, shortly before enlisting, four teenagers happened to be on Main Street in front of the town hall when a Life magazine photographer was doing a photo shoot of Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Westbrook Pegler participating in a scrap drive by donating his car’s bumpers. In the background of the full-page picture that appeared in Life, one can clearly see the faces of the four Ridgefield boys, watching the goings on. One of them was Charlie Cogswell.

Thomas Fitch IV: 

Yankee Doodle’s Dad

Connecticut’s venerable Fitch family loved the name Thomas. Generations of men were named Thomas Fitch I, II, III, IV and well beyond. But it was Thomas the Fourth who had a Ridgefield connection and it was his son, Thomas the Fifth, who could be one of the most unknown,

yet at the same time hugely famous people in North America.

Thomas Fitch IV was born around 1700 in Norwalk, son of — of course — Thomas Fitch III, one of the first settlers of that town and a man of some wealth. Thomas IV was the first Norwalk man to graduate from a college (Yale, 1721), where he studied law and also earned a master’s degree. He was a representative from Norwalk in the colonial assembly and was later a chief justice of the Connecticut Supreme Court. 

He served as governor of the colony from from 1754 to 1766, a long stretch even by today’s standards. His tenure included leading Connecticut during the difficult French and Indian War, which resulted in the colony’s amassing a huge debt that led to a financial recession. However, he may be more famous as the father of  Thomas Fitch V,  reputed to have been the inspiration for  “Yankee Doodle Dandy.”

Thomas V’s gravestone as well as Musicologist Oscar George Theodore Sonneck, who was once head of the music division of the Library of Congress, maintain that Captain Fitch  assembled a company of recruits at the Fitch homestead in Norwalk in 1755  at the beginning of the French and Indian War. The recruits lacked uniforms and Fitch’s sister Elizabeth wanted these soldiers’ appearance to  have at least some degree of uniformity. So she presented each man with a chicken feather for his hat. Fitch then led the rather tatterdemalion group of new volunteers  to upper New York to fight. 

According to the monument at his gravesite in Norwalk, “Upon entering West Albany with these plumes and their homespun and forlorn clothing, their motley appearance caused Dr. Richard Shuckburg, a British surgeon, being both a poet and musician, thru derision and mockery to write the verses dubbing them ‘Yankee Doodles and Macaronies’ ”:

Yankee Doodle went to town

Riding on a pony;

He stuck a feather in his hat,

And called it macaroni.

A macaroni was an 18th Century term for a fop or extravagant dresser, and the British doctor was likening the group from Connecticut to a pack of country-bumpkin dandies.

 However, the song that had been written in sarcasm soon became widely popular among the colonials, especially after their successful campaigns.

During the Revolution two decades later, both the British and Americans used their own versions of the tune as rallying cries.  Ferenz Fedor in his 1976 book, “The Birth of Yankee Doodle,” maintains it “became one of the most famous marching songs ever written.” It’s the official state anthem of Connecticut.

So what’s all this have to do with Ridgefield? The Doodle’s dad, Thomas IV, had farmland in what is now Ridgefield.

Sometime during the 1700’s, Thomas Fitch IV acquired at least 132 acres in a part of Redding that is now Ridgefield. “Fitch’s Farm” or “Governor Fitch’s Farm,” as it came to be known, was located in the northwestern part of Redding and what’s now the northeastern part of Ridgefield. The  farm extended along what is now northern Route 7 north of Great Pond, and probably included  the vicinity of modern-day Laurel Lane and the Laurel Ridge, Ridgefield Crossings and Regency senior citizen communities.  That land was  part of Redding until 1786 when it was ceded to Ridgefield.

When Governor Fitch died in 1774, his farm passed on to his heirs. One of these was another son, Jonathan Fitch (1723-93), a sheriff in New Haven County, who apparently got into some financial difficulties. The Ridgefield land records report that in 1787, Samuel Squire of Fairfield sued “Jonathan Fitch of New Haven, sheriff of said New Haven County,” to recover a 126-pound debt, and obtained as settlement from the County Court 132 acres of land – Fitch’s Farm. 

Squire subsequently sold the land to Thomas Sherwood, noting that it “is commonly known by the name of Governor Fitch’s Farm, lying in the northwest corner of the town of Redding, lately sett off to the township of Ridgefield.”

A year earlier (1786), Sherwood and others had petitioned the state legislature that a piece of Redding be annexed to Ridgefield because most of its inhabitants found it “inconvenient ... to attend public business in said Reading.” 

William Blodgett’s map (published in 1792, but not up-to-date) shows a triangular wedge of Redding extending nearly a mile into Ridgefield, north of Great Pond. Other boundaries on the map were not very accurate, but the document gives a clue as to the location of both the farm and the annexed territory.

The terms “Governor Fitch’s Farm” and “Fitch’s Farm” appeared fairly frequently in the land records in the 1780’s and 1790’s, but thereafter disappeared. 

Although the farm had been called Fitch’s, the governor probably never lived there. He may have maintained the land for growing crops, sending up crews from his Norwalk home to work the fields. 

Fitch IV died July 18, 1774. He is buried in the East Norwalk Historical Cemetery. The Fitch house in Norwalk, which had been partially destroyed during the “burning of Norwalk” raid carried

out by William Tryon and British troops in July 1779, had been home to Fitch family descendants until 1945. In 1956, a portion of the Fitch house was relocated to make way for the construction of the Connecticut Turnpike and stands today as part of the Mill Hill Historic Park next to the Green in Norwalk.

 Thomas V finished his service in the French and Indian War with the rank of senior colonel, in command of 16 regiments. Back home in Norwalk, he became a prominent citizen during and after the Revolution. He served as a town councilman and was  in the first delegation from Norwalk to the Connecticut House of Representatives in 1776. He helped with the reconstruction efforts after the burning of Norwalk.  He died in 1795 and was also buried in the East Norwalk Historical Cemetery. 

As for that name, Thomas, it just kept on going among the Fitch family descendants, including lawyer and congressman Thomas Fitch  (1838-1923), “the Silver-Tongued Orator of the Pacific Coast.”  Attorney Fitch, a former newspaper editor who helped teach the young Mark Twain how to write well, successfully defended Virgil, Morgan, and Wyatt Earp plus Doc Holliday when they were charged with murdering Billy Clanton and the McLaury brothers in the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral in 1881.

And he had a son named Thomas, too.

Samuel Rubel: 

The Ice and Beer Baron

The life of Samuel Rubel reads like a script to a lively Hollywood drama. A penniless Latvian immigrant arrives in the United States at the turn of the 20th Century, begins peddling ice on the  streets of Brooklyn, soon creates a growing company, has his fiancé arrested for grand larceny and

then marries her, becomes a multi-multi millionaire, is indicted for heavy handed business practices, turns into a beer baron, parties with 10,000 orphans at Coney Island, sees his 32-room home burn to the ground, moves to a mountaintop mansion in Ridgefield, and soon dies. Oh, and his widow marries a supermarket magnate and lives on Fifth Avenue.

Samuel R. Rubel was born in 1881 in Latvia, then part of Russia. Around 1904, he emigrated from Riga and, with barely a dollar to his name, arrived in Brooklyn. “He went to work in a seltzer-bottling establishment and by dint of many privations and much frugality, saved enough to buy a horse and wagon,” The New York Times once reported. “He then sent to Russia for his brother, Isadore, and together they started the Independent Ice Company.”

It was the era of the icebox, long before the days of refrigerators, and Rubel sold blocks of icebox ice to the occupants of the tenements in the East New York section of Brooklyn. The  business grew, expanded to include coal for heating, and within a few years, he and his brother headed the Rubel Coal and Ice Company in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn.

In 1912, The Times published the first of dozens of stories about Rubel — this one probably the most extraordinary. In February, he pressed charges of forgery and grand larceny against Dora Nachumowitz, who had been his bookkeeper. She had also been his fiancé. 

According to The Times, testimony in police court revealed that “Rubel had promised to marry her, but the engagement had been broken. She then sued him for breach of promise. The suit is still pending. Among the witnesses against Miss Nachumowitz was Henrietta Marcus who succeeded her as bookkeeper. Miss Marcus testified to finding that Miss Nachumowitz had indorsed [sic] a check for $50 payable to the company, and had not entered the payment on the company’s books.” 

Nachumowitz was released on $1,000 bond but apparently the charges were soon dropped, for not long afterward, Rubel and Nachumowitz were married. They went on to have two daughters, and remained together until his death. She, in fact, took over his corporation when he died.

The Rubel ice and coal empire, with Samuel now in command, continued to grow. By 1913 his company was worth $2 million and in 1925, 20 years after he’d arrived from Latvia, he’d engineered a $25-million merger with several companies into the huge Rubel Coal and Ice Corporation, which became the largest purveyor of those commodities in the eastern United States. (His newspaper ads in the late 1920s proclaimed that he had “the largest coal and ice office in the world.”) He had 25 ice plants and 15 coal supply yards spread around New York City alone, and was also serving customers in northern New Jersey. Two years later he acquired even more companies, had 40 ice factories, 50 coal yards, 2,000 employees, and a value of nearly $30 million. Rubel would promote his coal with a bit of humor: “One good ton deserves another,” he’d quip.

But legal problems were beginning to arise. In 1927, a court in Brooklyn indicted Rubel and two of his officers for conspiracy to drive competitors out of business. They were also served with 28 separated civil actions.

“Among the intimidations charged to the defendants is a demand that stockholders in the Paerdegat corporation turn over their minority stock of the Rubel corporation to them on pain of being driven out of business,” The Times said. “When this demand was refused, according to the indictment, the Rubel corporation not only refused to sell ice to those stockholders, but prevented them from getting it elsewhere. Free ice was furnished to customers of the Paerdegat corporation to take them away from that corporation.” The cases were eventually settled quietly.

Later that year, one of Rubel’s own partners named Henry J. Senger sued him for $6 million, charging that Rubel had lied to him about the degree of authority Senger would have in the company — Senger said he understood he would be an equal partner when he merged his company with Rubel’s — and that Rubel even had detectives spying on him. The two settled that suit out of court a year later.

In 1930, Rubel filed a libel suit against Jay Carton, an investment broker and one of his minority stockholders, charging that Carton had written a letter to other Rubel minority stockholders in which alleged that Rubel had failed to pay them dividends and forced them to sell their stock at less than book value.

Two years later, Carton himself sued, charging Rubel with mismanaging the company and speculating on Wall Street with its funds, causing the company to lose $20 million. The Rubel company by then was said to be worth $40 million — $715 million in 2016 dollars — of which more than 90% was owned by Samuel Rubel himself. That December, after a two-week trial, the suit was suddenly and unexpectedly settled out of court.

Finally, in 1934, a New York Supreme Court judge sentenced Rubel to 10 days in jail for contempt of court after he had shown a “flagrant disregard of court mandates.” The judge had ordered him to appear in court in connection with another civil suit by a company called Paramount Ice, which had charged Rubel with using illegal tactics to take over their territory and thereby create a monopoly in Brooklyn.  Rubel failed to appear and was sentenced to jail. He appealed and escaped the sentence, but paid a fine.

Meanwhile,  if all those legal battles were not enough, in 1931, two 20-year-old men sent a letter to Rubel’s wife, Dora, threatening to kill her if she did not pay them $10,000. The two were arrested, convicted of attempted extortion and sent to prison.

And then in 1944, during World War II, Rubel’s son-in-law was sentenced to 30 days in jail and fined $1,000 after pleading guilty to 37 charges of violating the wartime Office of Price Administration ceilings on the sale of coal. He had charged five to fifty cents per ton above limits for coal sold to dealers handling small lots of fuel in poor sections of the city. The Times headlined the story: “Coal Chiseler is Jailed.”

By 1927 Rubel was seeing the future of ice beginning to melt. Refrigerators were becoming

more common and his ice sales were declining. So in what some might consider an odd move during Prohibition, he bought the Ebling Brewery Company in the Bronx, noted for making beers “aged in natural rock caves.” Perhaps he saw the repeal of Prohibition as inevitable. Probably he  got a great price in the dry decade, especially after a scandal in which Ebling’s headquarters were padlocked by police after a raid uncovered two truckloads of beer with higher-than-legal alcohol content, The Times reported. At any rate, while Rubel told authorities that he planned to use the factory for making ice cream, he probably instead produced legal “near beer,” which had a very low alcohol content, to keep the operation alive until until Prohibition was repealed in 1933.

The brewery became a big money-maker in the 30s and at least the early 40s. In 1947, Rubel was widely quoted when he decided to take part in voluntary grain rationing to help provide more food for Europe, which was still struggling in the aftermath of World War II. “When it’s a question of beer or bread, our vote is for bread every time,” he told the President’s Food Committee in Washington.

The brewery closed in 1950, the year after Rubel’s death. Many years later, developers leveled the old brewery building and were about to start foundation work for a big apartment complex when they stumbled upon the long-forgotten cluster of caves Ebling had dug a century earlier for aging its beer — 20 feet wide and up to 100 feet deep. Workers — unaware of Ebling’s old motto of “aged in natural rock caves” — at first speculated that the caverns were part of the Underground Railroad or perhaps old bomb shelters. “It was amazing,” said one building official. “I’ve never seen anything like this.”

While Rubel and his wife lived in Brooklyn, they had a country estate in Roslyn, on Long Island, consisting of a 32-room home atop a hill surrounded by 50 acres. In April 1946 a workman spread some paint remover on exposed wiring, causing an explosion. The house burned to the ground, destroying more than a million dollars worth of antiques and jewelry as well as a pipe organ worth more than $100,000 ($1.3 million today). “The ruined house presented a strange picture this morning,” The Times said. “In the cellar, which was nearly full of water, hundreds of cases of Scotch whisky and other liquors stood exposed amid charred debris.”

In 1947, Sunny Cutten was trying to sell her house, Sunset Hall, a mansion built in 1912 on Old West Mountain Road in Ridgefield. She even offered it to the United Nations as a possible headquarters site, and they came and took a look. The handsome house included eight bedrooms, six baths, nine fireplaces, a full-sized ballroom, views if the New York City skyline, and many other amenities.  

Burned out on Long Island, Rubel went looking for a new place to the north, came across Sunset Hall, and fell in love with the place. After moving in, he made some of his own entertainment modifications,  including an elaborate stone barbecue in the pool area. However, a more unusual feature was described by town historian Dick Venus. “One of the surprises for his guests were slides, similar to those on a playground, that went from the bedroom windows to the pool,” Venus reported in 1987. “This was before the day of the heated pools so it is expected that those using the slide in the early morning would be fully awake by the time they reached the cool waters of the pool.”

Rubel also lined the walls of his house with art. “It was said that Sam Rubel had so many works  of art that before long, the place began to look like a museum,” Venus wrote. “It sure looked like a museum a few years later when I was selected as one of the appraisers for the estate.”

Samuel Rubel may have been hard-nosed in business, but he was soft-hearted when it came to kids. He supported the work of many orphanages in the city and in 1933, brought more than 10,000 orphans at his own expense to Coney Island for a day of fun to mark the 65th anniversary of the Ebling Brewery. A few months before he died, he donated 1,100 acres — including the 350-acre Lake Stillwater — in the Poconos to the Boy Scouts of America. The land,  now known as Camp Minsi, is still in use today (an inlet on Lake Stillwater has been named “Rubel Cove.”) A longtime member of the Brooklyn Boy Scout Council, Rubel said the gift expressed his gratitude for the opportunities that America had given him.

On April 27, 1949, Rubel suffered a blood clot while at his New York office. Two days later, he died at Sunset Hall. He was 66 years old. 

At his  death, the value of his estate was placed at $8 million ($81 million today). Much of the

contents of Sunset Hall were sold at a 1950 auction at Parke-Bernet Galleries — now Sotheby’s. The catalogue for the sale was 142 pages long.

The estate itself was purchased in 1955 by the Congregation of the Mission of St. Vincent de Paul. It was used as a novitiate to train future Vincentian priests and brothers until the late 1960s when it reverted to a single-family residence. For many years, it was the home of actor Robert Vaughn. 

In 1959, Dora Rubel, then chairman of the board of the Rubel Corporation,  married a recent widower, Louis Daitch, one of the owners of the Daitch Supermarket chain which became known as Shopwell and now, The Food Emporium. She died in 1969 at the age of 74 and is buried next to Samuel in Mount Ararat Cemetery, East Farmingdale, Long Island.

Rubel’s colorful and litigious life included a history-making event with which he had no personal connection, yet bears his name. On Aug. 21, 1934, an armored car, collecting money for deposit in a bank, had stopped at one of Rubel’s ice and coal depots in Brooklyn to pick up a $450 deposit. A gang of hold-up men overpowered the guards and stole $427,000 — nearly $8 million in today’s dollars — from the truck. “The Rubel Ice and Coal Corporation Robbery” was famous for decades as holding the record for the largest amount of money ever taken in a robbery in New York City history.