Thaddeus Crane: 

The Spectacular Exit

If you were to go house hunting in Ridgefield during the first third of the 20th Century, chances were good that you would call on Thaddeus Crane. But he gained a fair bit of notoriety for

something quite different from selling homes and insurance: Mr. Crane may have had the most spectacular death of any Ridgefielder in the 20th Century.

In May 1928, for reasons unknown,  Crane drove at high speed onto a railroad crossing in Wilton where a northbound train, “whistle shrieking,” smashed into his Hudson sedan and hurled it into the air. The car exploded, crashed into the second locomotive, bounced through the air into the baggage car, and flipped off into a trackside signal box, which also exploded. 

Witnesses risked their lives to drag him from the burning car, but Crane died within minutes. 

Typical of fatal automobile accidents of the era, The Ridgefield Press devoted more than 20 column inches to details of the crash, but only two inches to his life. 

Thaddeus Bailey Crane was born in 1862 in nearby Somers, N.Y., a great grandson of Colonel Thaddeus Crane of North Salem, who commanded the 4th regiment of the Westchester County Militia during the Revolution. (Col. Crane, then a major, was shot through the hip at the Battle of Ridgefield in 1777, survived and later became a representative to the New York State General Assembly and was a member of the New York State Constitutional Convention in 1788 that ratified the Constitution.)

After schooling at an academy in Norwalk, Crane became a farmer and, in 1891, married Mary Lent Brown. In 1896 the couple moved to Ridgefield where they had a farm off South Olmstead Lane, and raised two daughters and a son. 

In 1909, a year after his wife died, Crane opened a real estate office, which was located  just north of where Planet Pizza (formerly Roma) is in the large Tudor-style building on Main Street. By

1920 he was one of only three real estate agents in a town that now has a hundred active Realtors; the other two were M. Estelle Benjamin and William R. Keeler.

Crane was well known in the community, serving on the school board in the 1900s and 1910s. He was a founding member of the Promoter’s Club, a predecessor of the Ridgefield Chamber of Commerce, and belonged to the Jerusalem Lodge of Masons. Active in St. Stephen’s Church, he was a member of the vestry when the parish built its new stone church in 1915.

How did Crane manage to enter a railroad crossing whose warning lights were flashing and where the train was both visible and loudly sounding its whistle?

There was a good deal of talk that Crane, in a hurry, decided to try to beat the train to the crossing. As Town Historian Dick Venus put it, “Thad one time ran a race with a locomotive in Wilton and came off second best.”

The Press provided plenty of analysis at the time. The crash occurred on what is now Route

33 near Route 7. A bridge now brings 33 over the tracks; back then, the road crossed the tracks.  “Mr. Crane was driving a Hudson super-six sedan,” the account said. “The machine was going across the railroad tracks at a fairly good clip when it was struck.

“The Wilton-Ridgefield road had been oiled recently and it had rained slightly before the accident happened. Whether Mr. Crane felt he could not bring the automobile to a stop in time to avoid the train and thus put on more speed in an effort to pass the crossing before the train will probably never be known. The danger signal was in working order and was still red after the accident.  The engineer blew the whistle of the train a considerable distance from the crossing and blew it continously when he saw the automobile.”

The train used electric engines; the Danbury line had been electrified three years earlier and

remained electrified until 1961. The engineer, Andy Dougherty, said that “he saw the crossing and apparently slackened speed. He blew the whistle for a second as an additional warning, although still thinking the car was about to stop. When he saw the automobile continuing, he threw on reverse. The train came to a halt some 200 yards north of the crossing.”

In the end, The Press concluded, “Why the accident happened cannot be understood by the authorities unless Mr. Crane, just before reaching the crossing, was unable to stop his automobile because of the wet road.”

Two years after his death, Mr. Crane’s business was sold to Arthur J. Carnall, and operated under the name, A.J. Carnall Inc. for decades.  In 1999, Ridgefield Bank, now Fairfield County Bank, bought A.J. Carnall Inc., and 10 years later renamed it Fairfield County Bank Insurance Services. It’s still headquartered in the “Carnall Building” at the corner of Main and Catoonah Streets.

Jolie Gabor: 

A Chance to Play

Jolie Gabor, the colorful mother of the even more colorful Gabor sisters — Eva, Magda and Zsa-Zsa, considered her home in Ridgefield a quiet retreat compared to her places on Long Island and in California. "I only get a chance to play bridge in Ridgefield because the social life is so busy in Southampton and Palm Springs," Ms. Gabor once said. 

She was born Janka Tilleman in Budapest in 1900 — her wealthy parents, wanting a boy, called her Jansci or “Johnny.” She became a socialite, musician and actress and, in 1936, age 35 and married, was selected Miss Hungary. She operated several jewelry stores in Budapest in the late 1930s, but fled the country when the Germans invaded.  

She came to the United States in 1945; when she arrived she had only $100 and a diamond ring. However, she was hardly without means — daughter Zsa Zsa, who arrived earlier, was married to Conrad Hilton, the hotel magnate. With Zsa Zsa’s help, she established a Madison Avenue jewelry business that thrived off the reputations of her increasingly popular and marriage-prone daughters. (One of the saleswomen at her store was Evangelia Callas, mother of future opera diva Maria Callas.)

At one point, among mom and her three daughters, the Gabors had had 21 husbands. Actor George Sanders was married to both Magda and Zsa Zsa and was attracted to Jolie. “You know, Jolie,” he once wrote her, “I think marriage is for very simple people, not great artists like us.” Zsa Zsa, on the other hand, observed of Sanders: “When I was married to George Sanders, we were both in love with him. I fell out of love with him, but he didn’t.”

With the help of professional writers, she produced two books, Jolie Gabor, a memoir, and Jolie Gabor’s Family Cookbook, a collection of Eastern European recipes.

In 1966, Jolie and her then husband, Count Odon de Szigethy, bought a modest home on Oscaleta Road and immediately set about glamorizing the place. “I like to make from a nothing something,” she told The Ridgefield Press. 

The de Szigethys sold the place in 1970 and Ms. Gabor died in 1997 in California at the age of 96.

Tom Clark: 

A Man Everyone Knew

There was a time when it might be said: If you don’t know Tom Clark, you’re not really a Ridgefielder. While Clark was hardly the most important man in town, he was or decades among the best known and most liked.

Clark’s life literally spanned the 20th Century. Born here in 1904, he was still active  when the 21st Century arrived. 

The secret of his longevity? “I haven't had a glass of water in 60 years,” he told The Ridgefield Press in 1990. “I use lots of butter, eat meat with plenty of fat, and use plenty of salt and pepper.” Yes, he had smoked, too.

 That all may not have pleased his doctor, but his good nature and his active life — including many years as a local athlete —  may have kept  Clark ticking and clicking more than his diet did. He was still driving a car and bowling at the alleys well into his 90s. And when he died in 2002, he was 97 years old.

The son of Irish immigrants, Thomas Walker Clark grew up on the family farm on Wilton Road West and, as a teenager, went to work at the Davey Brothers’ market in Stamford, part in an old food chain. He did so well that he was made manager when he was only 17 — until executives in New York learned his age and “then I had no job.” 

He worked as a carpenter for a while, but in 1932 First National hired him to run its store here.  He managed the First National in Ridgefield until 1959 when the chain wanted to transfer him to manage its supermarket in Newtown.  Clark did not want to commute to work, retired from First National and went to work for the old Wayside Market on Danbury Road for 15 years. He also did work on two private estates until he was 85.

His wife, Ann Neil Hancock Clark, died in 1978, six weeks short of their 50th wedding anniversary.

In his younger days, Clark was active at baseball and basketball, but as a bowler,  he was almost legendary. At the age of 15,  he began bowling in the two alleys in the basement of the First

Congregational Church’s clubhouse, which stood on West Lane until it burned in 1978. Throughout his life he used the same ball, a two-hole, 16-pound model that was so worn, the manufacturer’s name eventually disappeared. “I think it’s a Brunswick,” he told an interviewer, “but I can’t be sure.”

He still bowled in his 90s, the oldest active bowler in the area at the time. He belonged to the Danbury and Ridgefield Bowling Leagues, and was inducted into the Bowling Hall of Fame.

As a youngster, Clark, nicknamed Eagle Eye, was a basketball star in the days when games were played in the town hall on Main Street. “If the whole team scored 30 points, it was a big night,” he recalled. 

He later coached the American Legion’s basketball team. He was also a softball player, and a former coach of the American Legion softball team. 

In his later years,  Clark was active in the Ridgefield Old Timers Association. The organization’s annual dinner in 2001 was dedicated to Clark, who had raised many thousands of dollars for ROTA scholarships. That year alone, when he was 96 years old, he collected more than $4,000 in donations.

“Tom Clark has been and continues to be the association’s major fund-raiser,” Old Timers Chairman Tom Belote said at the dinner. Added First Selectman Rudy Marconi, “he’s the Old Timers’ Energizer Bunny — he keeps on going and going, serving the association and Ridgefield High School scholarship recipients.” 

Because his good health and eyesight allowed him to drive long after many contemporaries couldn’t,  Clark would often serve as a free taxi service for Ridgefield’s elderly — many of whom were a good deal younger than he was.

Tom Clark was also a longtime daily patron and “chairman of the board” at the Early Bird Café, where he enjoyed discussing the “old days” with fellow old-timers.

Rev. Jonathan Ingersoll: 

A Historic Minister 

Ridgefield’s earliest Congregational preachers must have found something to their liking in Ridgefield. Between 1715 and 1811, nearly a century, there were only three settled ministers. But while each served many years here, the one in the middle — the Rev. Jonathan Ingersoll — lasted longer than any minister in the First Congregational Church’s more than three centuries. He spent 39 years as the congregation’s leader, and would no doubt have continued to serve longer had he not died of  “an apoplectic fit” at the age of 64. He left behind a family that became part of the town until the 1960s.

Ingersoll’s predecessor — the town’s first minister, Thomas Hauley — was only 49 when he died after preaching 25 years here, and his successor — the Rev. S. G. Goodrich — also spent 25 years here before moving to upstate congregation.

Jonathan Ingersoll was born in 1713 in Derby (then part of Milford), a son of Jonathan and Sarah Ingersoll whose ancestors were among the early settlers of Hartford and the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts. Like so many ministers who came to Ridgefield, Ingersoll graduated from Yale, in 1736. His first preaching post was at a Presbyterian church in New Jersey (Congregationalists and Presbyterians were closely allied in the 18th Century) and in 1739, he was called to replace Mr. Hauley in Ridgefield. A year later he married Dorcas Moss, a minister’s daughter from Derby.

From all accounts he was well-respected in Ridgefield. “He is described as a man of brilliant intellect, of great strength and force of character,” said George L. Rockwell in his “History of Ridgefield” (1927).

Unlike most clergymen in Ridgefield’s long history, Ingersoll took a break from his local duties to serve in the military. He was chaplain for the town’s militia and, during the French and Indian War, he volunteered as a chaplain with Connecticut troops — including 22 Ridgefield men — serving around Lake George and Fort Ticonderoga (then called Carillon).  

According to Tim Abbott, a sixth great grandson of Ingersoll, “In 1758 he was chaplain for Colonel David Wooster’s 4th Regiment in Abercromby’s ill-fated expedition against the French at Carillon.  Wooster’s men were caught up in the attack, and Chaplain Ingersoll wrote to a fellow church colleague that God showed ‘distinguishing mercy to the Connecticut Troops’ who suffered few deaths in that dreadful slaughter.”

During Lord Amherst’s campaign the following year he was chaplain of the 3rd Regiment, again under Colonel Wooster, traveling from captured Fort Carillon to Oswego and then down the St. Lawrence.

His intellect, and perhaps also his notable family and his service with Wooster, gave Ingersoll a wide reputation and in 1761, he was invited to preach before the General Assembly on Election Day. He offered the colonial politicians a word of gentle warning: “You are the fathers of the common-wealth, and all our eyes are upon you,” he said. “See to it that your powers of mind are sanctified by grace, and always remember that you judge for the Lord. Let the interest of religion, and the welfare of the community (which indeed are necessarily connected), let these lye near your hearts.”

When it came to the Revolution, Ingersoll probably tended to be on the conservative side of the issues. When George III became king in 1760, Ingersoll had praised him as “richly endowed with all royal gifts and graces,” adding that through his influence, “we hope for the enjoyment of the best of liberties and privileges for for a great while to come.”

In “We Gather Together,” a 2011 history of the First Congregational Church, author Charles Hambrick-Stowe says, “Circumstances soon forced the church to decide how to pray for civil authorities, whether to continue to support George III and the Empire or the movement for independence. Jonathan Ingersoll probably shared  the views of his brother Jared, a political leader in the colony who hoped that compromise and moderation would resolve the Stamp Act crisis of 1765. Jared Ingersoll worked to reduce the rate of the tax and accepted the position of stamp distributor for Connecticut in order to soften its impact. His efforts were rewarded with accusations of treason that destroyed his political career.”

Ridgefield in the mid-1770s leaned to the Tory side. “Jonathan Ingersoll’s leadership is often cited as influencing a town vote opposing the Continental Congress in January 1775,” the Rev. Hambrick-Stowe writes. However, “the beginning of armed conflict at Lexington and Concord in April and the subsequent siege of Boston swayed many in town to the Patriot side.” It is unknown whether Ingersoll was among those so swayed, but many in his congregation were leading supporters of the revolutionary cause. So were three of his sons in law.

Capt. David Olmsted, who was married to Abigail Ingersoll, fought at the Battle of Ridgefield. He became a leading town and state official after the war.

Another of Ingersoll’s daughters, Anne, married Lt. Joshua King, a Revolutionary officer who was in charge of the imprisoned British spy, Major John Andre, before his execution. Because of Anne, King settled in Ridgefield, established the King and Dole store (which grew into Bedient’s Hardware), and became a major landowner. But, in the church’s eyes, what is perhaps more remarkable about this union is that it led to Henry King McHarg (1851-1941),  great great grandson of the Rev. Jonathan Ingersoll. McHarg,  a wealthy banker and railroad president, donated to First Congregational the land on which its current landmark stone church was built in 1888. (McHarg lived on Nod Road until his death in 1941 but his much younger wife, Elizabeth, remained in town until the 1960s, dying in 1976 at the age of 84.)

Another of Ingersoll’s sons-in-law, a lieutenant in the Revolution, did not fare so well afterwards. Ebenezer Olmsted, husband of Esther Ingersoll, got caught pocketing state tax money he had taken in as a Ridgefield tax collector and wound up having all his property confiscated by the town. Perhaps fortunately for Ingersoll, he had died before Olmsted’s malfeasance took place and threw the town nearly into financial ruin (see separate “Who Was Who” profile).

Ingersoll’s son, Jonathan (1747-1823), became a respected post-war political leader. The Ridgefield native, another Yale graduate, served as lieutenant governor of Connecticut and as a Superior Court judge. He was also elected a congressman from Connecticut, but declined the job before being sworn in.

Finally, his brother’s son, Jared Ingersoll, not only supported the Revolution, but also helped write the U.S. Constitution and was a signer of the document.

Although most people would not think of Ridgefield as being a place where people were enslaved, slaves were found in most Connecticut communities in 18th Century — and in the Ingersoll household. In 1730, Connecticut’s 38,000 residents included about 700 slaves. By 1770, it had more than 6,400 slaves, the largest population of any New England colony. Half of all the ministers, lawyers, and public officials owned slaves, and a third of all the doctors, reports Connecticut historian Jackson Turner Main.

Jonathan Ingersoll was among Ridgefield’s slave owners. However, in 1777, shortly before his death, Ingersoll asked the Board of Selectmen to approve making his slave, Cyphax, a free man. Under colony law, the selectmen had to make sure the freed person wouldn’t be a burden on the town. The selectmen approved of Cyphax, who was 20 years old, and he was freed. 

By 1790,  five slaves were still left in Ridgefield. 

Ebenezer Olmsted: 

Tax Collector Who Broke the Town

Scandalous behavior by public officials is everyday news in the world today. But even in 18th Century Ridgefield, miscreants made their way into the local government. One prominent leader got himself—and the Town of Ridgefield—into a lot of trouble more than two centuries ago.

Lt. Ebenezer Olmsted was part of Ridgefield’s leading society, an officer in the Continental militia who served under people like Col. Philip Burr Bradley at places like Ticonderoga, and the Battles of Ridgefield, Long Island, and Germantown. He was with Washington at Valley Forge, according to “The Genealogy of the Olmsted Family in America.”

Born in Ridgefield in 1748, Olmsted was a well-connected as could be. He was a grandson of one of the founders of the town. He married Esther Ingersoll, daughter of the Rev. Jonathan Ingersoll, second minister of the First Congregational Church; her brother, Jonathan, was to become lieutenant governor of Connecticut (his son, Ralph, was elected a U.S. congressman). 

Olmsted had a house on Main Street, just south of the Meeting House, a prime piece of real estate. 

But he wound up under arrest, and lost all his possessions, including his home and even  his desk. 

It all began on Dec. 21, 1780, when the Annual Town Meeting appointed Lt. Olmsted  a constable and authorized him “to collect the state tax for the year ensuing.” The appointment was for one year, typical of tax collecting assignments, but it indicated he was held in high esteem — tax collectors had to be trusted people. 

However, six years later, in 1786, the Town Meeting voted to “accept the resignation of Lt. Ebenezer Olmsted of his office of collector of ye state taxes on ye list of 1780, on conditions of his accounting with and paying to the Select Men the full that he has collected and received on the rates made on said list, and deliver up said rate bills and warrants to the Select Men.”

Olmsted had apparently pocketed what he’d collected, quite possibly to pay for that Main Street spread he purchased two years after being named tax collector. He paid 300 pounds for the homestead, after selling his Wilton Road West place for only 75 pounds. 

Or perhaps it was the cost of supporting his family: He and Esther had 10 children.

Why did it take five years to discover Olmsted had not turned in his tax collections? Possibly because the state was behind in its auditing due to the turmoil of the war that had been going on. In addition, the state was heavily in debt because of the war and was hungry for income.

For the next six years, the town’s records are peppered with reports of how it was dealing with the crisis. And a crisis it was.

First, the selectmen arrested Olmsted and confiscated his 13-acre homestead and all his possessions, including other land, eight tons of hay plus oats and flax, and “his desk.” They also took “2,258 Continental Dollars,” which were virtually worthless. 

His old commander, Col. Bradley, headed a committee to auction off the homestead, but that brought in only 120 pounds, far less than was owed to the town (although the amount owed is never stated). 

Col. Bradley was sent to Hartford, apparently to see if Ridgefield’s state tax debt could be forgiven, but the state was insistent. The war had been costly and it needed money.

Finally, abandoning hope of ever getting the money from Olmsted, the town went into debt, borrowing “such sums as shall be necessary to settle ye demands the state treasurer has against the town.” 

So poor and desperate was Ridgefield that, in 1792, it voted to sell its set of “books containing the laws of ye United States.”

One result of the Olmsted fiasco was that the Annual Town Meeting in 1790 voted that henceforth, a performance bond — a former of insurance — would be purchased to cover tax collectors.  To this day, the town requires — and provides — a bond on the tax collector to assure that if a shortfall occurs because of misdeeds, the town is protected.

Olmsted apparently left town in disgrace. He died in 1801 in New Haven at the age of 53. His wife lived 46 more years, dying in St. Louis, Mo., in 1847 at the age of 87.  

John H. Davis: 

An Inside Look

For many years John H. Davis had intimate access to two of the most famed families of the mid-20th Century, but when he wrote about them, he wound up an outcast.

Davis was one of the 10 grandchildren of Mr. and Mrs. John Vernou Bouvier Jr. of East Hampton, N.Y. The other grandchildren included Jacqueline Lee Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, Princess Lee Radziwill, and Edith “Little Edie” Beale, the eccentric recluse featured in the movie “Grey Gardens.”

He spent much of his life writing and talking about the Bouviers and Kennedys, as well as about the mafia — which he believed ordered Kennedy’s death.

John Hagy Davis was born in Manhattan in 1929, a son of John E. and Maude Bouvier Davis who had their summer home on East Ridge from the 1930s until his father’s death in 1966. After that his mother summered on New Street (she is profiled in Who Was Who). Davis frequently spent time at both homes.

He graduated from Deerfield Academy in 1947 and from Princeton University in 1951. He  joined the U.S. Navy as an ensign, serving as a navigation officer with the U.S. Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean. 

After completing his naval service, he moved to Naples and studied at the Italian Institute for Historical Studies under a Fulbright scholarship. He remained in Italy for 13 years, first as founding director of the American Studies Center in Naples, then as director of Tufts University's Intercollegiate Center of Italian Studies. There, he wrote an illustrated history of Venice, which was published in five countries. 

Davis flew from Italy to Washington to attend John F. Kennedy’s inauguration as president in 1961 and returned two years later to attend the president's funeral.

In the late 1960s, his mother heard reports that someone was writing a history of the Bouviers, which worried her. She told him to come and do a Bouvier book himself. “She said, ‘I’ve got the material for this book, and no one else is going to write it,’ ”   John’s sister, Maude Sergeant Davis, told an interviewer. “He just really needed to get his teeth into something. So he did it.”

The result was, “The Bouviers — Portrait of An American Family,” published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux in 1969. The book was did well, selling 166,000 copies in hardcover alone.

“The Bouviers” was not well received by the Bouviers, however. For one thing, Davis debunked the long-promoted family story that they were descended from European royalty. In fact, he wrote, the Bouviers were descended from a foot soldier in Napoleon’s army who immigrated to America in 1817 and became a furniture maker. 

His eccentric cousin Edie Bouvier Beale had some addled observations about that. “Oh yes, we’re all descended from 14th-century kings,” she told New York magazine in 1972. “Now a relative

has written a book saying it’s all a lie. He’s a professor, John H. Davis, and he’s breaking with history. Everyone is. That’s how I know the millennium is coming. ‘The Bouviers: Portrait of An American Family.’ Not a bad book, really.”

But what most irked the family  — and Jackie Kennedy in particularly — was his description of Jacqueline’s father,  the heavy-drinking, womanizing John “Black Jack” Bouvier. Among other things Davis revealed that John Bouvier was so drunk at the Jackie’s wedding to John Kennedy that he couldn’t escort the bride down the aisle.

The final straw came in 1984 when Davis published “The Kennedys — Dynasty and Disaster” for McGraw-Hill, which became a New York Times bestseller and which, The Times said, “offered an unflattering view of family dynamics.” Among other things, the book provided many details about Senator Edward M. Kennedy’s Chappaquiddick accident and the drug overdose death of Senator Robert Kennedy’s son, David. That pretty much sealed the separation between the two cousins.

“After ’84, Jackie made it pretty clear she didn’t want my brother’s company,” John’s sister, Maude, told The Times. “It’s kind of too bad; they had a lot in common. My brother was a writer at heart, as was she. But she was about family myths, and John tried very hard to write truthfully.”

While in Venice Davis had become good friends with the art patroness Peggy Guggenheim, who owned a palace on the Grand Canal.

 After completing “Venice,” he returned to New York to write The “Guggenheims — An American Epic” for William Morrow & Co. The book was named an American Library Association Notable Book  in 1978.

Davis subsequently turned his focus to the Mafia, producing “Mafia Kingfish — Carlos Marcello and the Assassination of John F.  Kennedy,” also published by McGraw-Hill. In it he maintained that Kennedy was assassinated by New Orleans mob kingpin Marcello, who he said ordered the hit after Attorney General Bobby Kennedy led a vendetta against him. For this book, he received a two-year research grant from the Guggenheim Foundation. L. Richardson Preyer, former chairman of the House Subcommittee on the Investigation of the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, told  Davis: “I believe you have come closer than anyone else to a solution of the ‘Crime of the Century.’ ”

 In 1993, he wrote “Mafia Dynasty — The Rise and Fall of the Gambino Crime Family” for Harper Collins. The book was soon followed by a Harper Paperback Original, “The Kennedy Contract — The Mafia Plot to Assassinate the President.”  

In 1996, a year after his cousin died, he published “Jacqueline Bouvier — An Intimate Memoir” for John Wiley & Sons.

His last book, “The Twilight of the Godfathers,” a sequel to “Mafia Dynasty,” was due to be published by HarperCollins in 2003, but never came out. 

Over the years Davis appeared frequently on television and radio programs, such as The Today Show and Larry King Live, discussing Kennedys and Bouviers, especially Jackie. 

“He felt increasingly like an outsider, and that was hard on him," his sister said. He became a heavy drinker,  “He wanted to pattern himself after Black Jack,” Maude explained, adding Davis' depiction of Jackie’s father had been “very sympathetic to him.”

John Davis died in 2012 after suffering many years with Alzheimer’s disease. The New York Post described him as “penniless” at the time of his death.

The Post also reported in 2013 that financial adviser Sohodra Nathu, who had helped Davis with research on some of his books and who had cared for him at the end of his life, was in a legal battle with sister Maude over the rights to the author’s eight books. Nathu told a Manhattan court that she wanted “to honor his will” by fending off Maude’s attempt to take control of the estate; Maude maintained that her brother’s legacy “would be honored if my side of the family was in control. That’s what the books were about: my family.”

There was talk of a TV miniseries for at least one of the books, but that has not happened. 

Harry Thomas: 

The Village Smithy

Harry Thomas was a taste of the past in modern Ridgefield. As late as 1970, he could be seen at the forge behind his Catoonah Street house, fashioning things of iron. For Mr. Thomas was among the last of a profession that was once common and essential to any community: the blacksmith. 

Harry Marvin Thomas was born here in 1884, a fifth generation descendant of Benjamin Stebbins, who built a house on Main Street in 1714 that became a hospital in the Battle of Ridgefield and stood where Casagmo is now. 

At 16, he began his apprenticeship, and became probably the town’s leading blacksmith through the end of the age of the horse. In a pinch he could shoe and harness a horse in seven minutes. 

Harry Thomas was a man of strength, not just in his arms, but legs – he thought nothing of walking to Norwalk or to Brewster and back, and did it often. 

In 1927, he built the house still standing between the firehouse and post office, and his blacksmith shop out back, also still standing. 

When the automobile took over from the horse, he went to work for Gilbert and Bennett in Georgetown, but on retirement, fired up the forge again for fun and for special projects that still required a blacksmith’s skill. 

In a 1962 interview,  Thomas bemoaned the fact so many of his old friends had died. “They understood me, they knew what I meant,” he said. “People don’t understand each other now. They’re always fighting.”

Thomas died in 1973 at the age of 88.