Erik Nitsche: 

Self-Effacing, Top-Ten Designer

Most people have never heard of him. Even those who work in his field of graphic design might shrug their shoulders if you posed his name today. Yet millions of people have seen the work

of Erik Nitsche, who has been called progressive and trend-setting by both scholars and critics. In fact, Michael Aron,  a professor at the Parsons School of Design, places him  “on the top-ten list of the best 20th-century designers in the world.”

 Over his 60-year career Nitsche was involved in art direction, book design, typography, illustration, photography, film, signage, exhibits, packaging, industrial and corporate design, and advertising. He created scores of posters, book and record-album covers, ads, postage stamps, and even typefaces. Some of his work, particularly posters, are in the collections of top museums.

“He was among a handful of progressive designers and artists who imbued American graphic design with a modern European sensibility,” said The New York Times.  

 Erik Fredi Nitsche was born in Switzerland in 1908 and studied at the Collège Classique of Lausanne in his home town. He began his career working as a graphic designer for magazines in Switzerland and Germany before moving to the United States in 1934. 

He spent two years in Hollywood, where he was friends with composer Frederic Holländer, actress Marlene Dietrich, and MGM special-effects director Slavko Vorkapich. Two years later, he

moved to New York where expanded his range of work, but continued to do art for the film industry, producing many posters. 

 In New York, he began doing covers and illustrations for such magazines as Harper’s Bazaar, Fortune, Town and Country, Vanity Fair, House and Garden, and Look. He created newspaper advertising campaigns for department stores like Ohrbach’s, Saks Fifth Avenue and

Filene’s, drew subway posters for New York Transit, and designed more than 200 record album covers for Decca, virtually all of them for classical music.

In the late 1950s, he worked for General Dynamics, which was building the Nautilus, the first nuclear submarine.  Nitsche was commissioned to develop “a visual image that would introduce this submarine to the world and at the same time emphasize the company’s peaceful concerns,” The Times said. “The design for the submarine was top secret, so Mr. Nitsche devised a symbolic solution based on the message ‘Atoms for Peace.’ ” Posters from this campaign, published in six European and Asian languages, have become classics among modern posters and are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, The Smithsonian, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.  

He also did memorable posters for Universal Pictures and 20th Century Fox. One of his best-known was for “All About Eve,” the 1950 film starring Bette Davis and featuring a little-known Marilyn Monroe.

Nitsche moved to Ridgefield in 1954 and lived in a large, turn-of-the-century house on Lounsbury Road in Farmingville, which he renovated in dramatic fashion in collaboration with the acclaimed architect Alexander Kouzmanoff. He later lived on Old Branchville Road. In 1974, he moved to Europe, but eventually returned to this country and was living on Mill Plain Road in Danbury when he died in 1998 at the age of 90.

His former wife, Margaret “Gretl” Nitsche, was a longtime Ridgefielder who worked as a

real estate agent with the Gordon Walsh Agency in town. A native of Germany, she died in 2005 at the age of 94.

Erik Nitsche’s name may be unfamiliar even to some who are knowledgeable about the history of graphic design, probably because he was reluctant to seek publicity. He believed his work should speak for itself. 

In a 1950s essay about Nitsche, designer and author P. K. Thomajan wrote: “Self-effacement, he finds, keeps the blighting shadow of the ego out of one’s work.”

Allan Nevins: 

Historian Who Loved Ridgefield

For a small town, Ridgefield has had a wealth of historians, with no fewer than three full-sized histories written about it, plus many shorter works. One of those brief histories was penned by one of the nation’s most prominent historians, a rare winner of two Pulitzer Prizes for historical writing. 

Allan Nevins was still a young man when he came to Ridgefield in the 1920s, perhaps to work on a thesis in graduate school or to complete one of his early books on journalism. He lived at The Elms Inn and was so taken by the town that he wrote a 50-page profile, published by The Elms as a booklet entitled “An Historical Sketch of Ridgefield.” While the book is undated, it was published in 1922 and was one of the first written by Nevins, who went on to complete 50 volumes of history and biography, including the acclaimed eight-volume story of the Civil War, called “Ordeal of the Union.”

Born on an Illinois farm in 1890, Nevins earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English at the University of Illinois and then moved to New York City where he became a reporter for the New York Evening Post. That job inspired one of his first books; combining his work with his love of history, it was called “The Evening Post: A Century of Journalism,” also  published in 1922.  He may have been working on “The American States During and After the Revolution, 1775-1789,” published in 1929, when he was living in Ridgefield. Or perhaps his time here inspired that book.

His historical research and writings led to an appointment in 1928 to the history faculty at Columbia University where he remained until his retirement in 1958. He then moved to California and continued to write; he was still working on his Civil War series when he died in 1971. His biographies “Grover Cleveland: A Study in Courage” (1933) and “Hamilton Fish: The Inner History of the Grant Administration” (1936), each won a Pulitzer.     

Professor Nevins was a friend and supporter of John F. Kennedy, and wrote the foreword to Kennedy’s “Profiles in Courage.” He also wrote the foreword to Silvio Bedini’s 1958 history of the town, “Ridgefield in Review,” in which Nevins sings Ridgefield’s praises like a chamber of commerce director:

“When I made acquaintance with Ridgefield some three decades ago, it delighted me for several reasons. The chief was that it made an ideal center for long country walks, as picturesque as those from a Cotswold or Burgundian village, and a good deal wilder…Ridgefield is set in a remarkably diversified terrain of hills, streams and woods, where no factory smoke stains the sky, and the distant train whistle seldom interrupts the cawing crows.

“My second reason for taking pleasure in the place lay in its historic memories. For it cherishes and fittingly exhibits its relics of colonial and Revolutionary days. Perhaps this filiopietistic trait has developed because Ridgefield has grown and changed but slowly. As a third reason for delight in the place, I liked its neat elegance. It is not merely shining and well improved; it has a distinct and old-fashioned gentility. Finally, it seemed to me a remarkably successful amalgam of new and old, of the provincial and the cosmopolitan.”

Bedini, incidentally, was no amateur historian himself. A Ridgefield native who became a curator at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, he went on to write more than 20 books of history after completing “Ridgefield in Review,” his first book, in only three months.  Perhaps a bit of his inspiration came from Professor Nevins, who was teaching at Columbia while Bedini was a student there before World War II.

Hardwick Nevin: 

Playwright, Actor and Poet

He possessed one of the most colorful names any Ridgefielder ever had, and led a fairly colorful life. But few people today remember Hardwick Marmaduke Nevin.

Hardwick Nevin was a playwright, an actor and a poet whose careers on and behind the stage peaked in the 1920s and 30s. 

Born in 1897 in Pennsylvania, Nevin was studying at Princeton when he left to enlist in the American Field Service in World War I, providing medical support for French troops. He received the Croix de Guerre for bravery from the French government.

After the war, he returned to Princeton, not to study but to help start the Princeton Theatre.

He also associated with many of the young literati of the period, including the poets Edna St. Vincent Millay and Edward Arlington Robinson, and the actor Claude Raines. 

He began his career as an actor, appearing in smaller parts in Broadway plays.  In 1923, he performed in Cyrano de Bergerac, starring the famous stage actor from Ridgefield, Walter Hampden. In 1925 he appeared with Bela Lugosi in “Arabesque” on Broadway.

Soon he was writing plays of his own. In 1929, “Young Alexander,”  about Alexander the Great, was staged on Broadway and among its cast members was a young Jessie Royce Landis, who later lived on Old Branchville Road and is buried here.

“What Ever Possessed Her” was produced on Broadway in 1934.

He wrote other plays and one, “Blue Haze,” was to be produced by Leslie Howard, but the actor died before production began, and it was never staged.

Nevin, who wrote poetry, was a great fan of Walt Whitman, and was involved in an unsuccessful effort  to save a Long Island schoolhouse where Whitman had taught for a year, He and his friends had more success in getting Whitman’s birthplace four miles away preserved.

Nevin had lived in Ridgefield, then moved to Redding (where his house burned to the ground, destroying much of his writing), and finally in Wilton where he died in 1965 at the age of 68. He is buried in Hillside Cemetery on Route 33 in Wilton.

He married twice, first to actress Patricia Barclay; they were divorced. His second wife, Edna Hoyt Nevin, survived him.

Vaclav Nelhybel: 

Prolific Composer

Vaclav Nelhybel was a prolific composer — more than 400 of his 600-plus works have been published — and many of the remaining 200 are in the process of being published. Some  were composed during his five years living at the Ridgefield Lakes.

While his works have been performed by leading orchestras such as the Vienna Symphony and the Orchestra de la Suisse Romande, “Nelhybel’s passion for composing was all encompassing and left him little time for ‘marketing’ his works; for this reason, many of his compositions, though commissioned and performed, remained unpublished,” reports the University of Scranton, where he was composer in residence during his last years. 

Scranton is a Jesuit institution and Nelhybel had a fondness for Jesuits — he studied eight years at The Archbishop Gymnasium in Prague, a Jesuit school. 

Born in Czechoslovakia in 1919,  Nelhybel studied composition and conducting in Prague and Fribourg. By 1948, he’d escaped from the Communist bloc and was composing for Swiss National Radio, and in the early 50s, served as the first music director of Radio Free Europe. 

In 1957 he moved to this country, becoming a citizen in 1962. 

He composed symphonies, ballets, a ballet-opera, and hundreds of other works for orchestras and bands — even several works for handbell ensembles. He conducted music and lectured at universities and schools in more than 30 states – including at Ridgefield High School. 

More than 1,000 people attended the April 1973 Vaclav Nelhybel Festival in Ridgefield, with the composer leading junior and senior high bands. 

“Although Nelhybel wrote the majority of his works for professional performers, he relished composing original, challenging pieces for student musicians and delighted in making music with young players,” Scranton said.

In 1980, the Ridgefield Symphony Orchestra premiered his work, “Six Fables for All Time,” commissioned in honor of the 35th anniversary of the United Nations. In a review of its premiere, composer Noel Regney described the piece in The Ridgefield Press as a “monumental prayer of hope and peace, through all the ups and downs of human life.”

“De Profundis,” a demanding piece for trumpet, was premiered in 1975 by Doc Severinson and has been performed by Seneca Black, who has served as lead trumpeter with Wynton Marsalis’s Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra. 

Nelhybel and his wife had a home on Lake Road from 1968 to 1973 when they moved to Newtown and subsequently to Pennsylvania. He died in 1996 at the age of 76.

Charles S. Nash: 

The First Chief

Charles S. Nash, the town's leading carpenter and builder for many years, has had the unusual distinction of having his birth and very early life recorded in a diary that has been published in The Ridgefield Press and is available online. 

On Friday, Oct. 8, 1865, Jared Nash, his father, inauspiciously wrote in pencil in his diary: “Clear, some warmer. Dug potatoes in orchard. Went to P.O. Just at night Chas. S. Nash born.”

Later entries talk of “Charly” and the toys and shoes his father made for him, his sicknesses, and his first birthday and baptism. 

As a boy Charles Nash attended the old Flat Rock School on Wilton Road West and the West Lane School, now a museum on Route 35.

He learned the carpenter's trade from William H. Gilbert, and took over his business when Gilbert retired. William F. Hoyt joined him and as Nash and Hoyt, they did much of the building in Ridgefield during the first quarter of the 20th Century, including mansions like Casagmo. 

Unlike his diarist dad, who stuck to the farm, Charles Nash was very involved in the town. He was the first chief of the Ridgefield Volunteer Fire Department, helped organize the Boy Scouts here, and was a member of the Board of Burgesses that ran the old village borough. He later served on the Board of Finance, as a trustee of the Methodist Church, a director of the Ridgefield Savings Bank for many years, and vice president of the First National Bank and Trust Company. He ran for state representative on the Democratic ticket in 1906 and 1910.

Nash was also very sharp. The Press once reported that while on the Board of Burgesses, “Mr. Nash figured out how to connect the sewer line for the new Bryon Park development into the borough’s main sewer system, rather than to build a new treatment plant. Mr. Nash was quite proud of that accomplishment because the skilled civil engineers who had been called in to study the problem said it couldn’t be done.”

He died in 1929 at the age of 64. Among the  pallbearers at his largely attended funeral was Francis D. Martin.

Lillian Moorhead: 

Ahead of Her Time

Men had populated the Board of Selectmen for 265 years, when, in November 1973, that all changed: Lillian Moorhead was elected the first woman ever to hold a seat on the board. 

“Womenpower” did it, she said the day after the election. “I hope my election will encourage more women to run for office.”

It may, indeed, have have helped do just that, for in the years after her election, women began winning more and more seats in town government, often holding majorities on boards and commissions. And eight years after her pioneering win, Ridgefield elected its first woman chief executive, Elizabeth Leonard, who, ironically, defeated Moorhead for the job of first selectman.

“I was in favor of a state income tax and Liz creamed me,” Moorhead said 10 years later. (In 1991, after years of debate, the income tax was finally adopted. “It takes the state a while to catch up with me,” Moorhead said afterwards with a smile.)

A native of New Jersey, Moorhead was born in 1932. She and her husband, James, had lived in the South and on the West Coast before moving to Ashbee Lane in 1963.

She was a liberal Democrat who won the 1973 election alongside First Selectman Louis J. Fossi, also a Democrat, but more of a conservative. Despite Ridgefield’s heavy Republican majority, the two Democrats controlled the board, holding two of its then three seats.

“Lou is a native, a very popular guy,” Moorhead said, explaining the win years later. “Also, there was Watergate and the beginning of the women’s movement.”

Moorhead was re-elected four times, holding her seat until 1983 when she retired. As a selectman, she was an especially strong advocate for creation of the Housing Authority that eventually built the Ballard Green senior housing project.

“There were few believers in the Housing Authority in those early days,”  Fossi told Moorhead in front of more than 200 people who gathered for her retirement party in 1984. “But you acted out of concern for people who are less fortunate than most of us.”

Fossi and Moorhead often disagreed on issues, and votes sometimes found her in the minority, despite party affiliations.

“It’s better to be ahead of the times than behind them, and Lillian, you were ahead of them,” said Judge Romeo G. Petroni, a lifelong Republican, at the retirement dinner. “You have your principles and you stood behind them, even when Lou didn’t understand.”

Moorhead later served many years on the Housing Authority she helped to create. She was also on the Youth Commission, was a trustee of Danbury Hospital, and was a board member of the NAACP, and Regional Y. She was a founding member of the Women’s Political Caucus, which was active here in the 1970s and 80s, and which successfully pressed for the conversion of the Boys Club into a Boys and Girls Club. She also belonged to Friends of the Library, Meals on Wheels and the League of Women Voters.

Professionally, she tried on several different career hats, last of which was as a Realtor. She was well-regarded at that: In 1984, Governor William O’Neill appointed her a member of the Connecticut Real Estate Commission.

When she was moving to Martha’s Vineyard in 1991, she told a Press interviewer, “I used to be a newcomer. Now I’m a townie. It happened in the blink of an eye.”

A 1984 Press editorial said of Moorhead: “One of the most independent thinkers among recent selectmen, she was not afraid to stand up for positions that may have been unpopular with the administration and even with her party. Yet always her positions were enlightened ones, well-considered and with the community’s best interest  in mind.”

When Moorhead died of cancer in 1997 at the age of 65, her daughter, Sarah, observed, “My mom was one of those individuals who truly touched the souls of everyone who was lucky enough to have met her. She embraced life with such determination and zest and tried to impart that to others.”

John Ames Mitchell: 

The Father of Life

Magazine publisher, architect, artist, novelist, mystic, mystery: John Ames Mitchell was a Renaissance man who kept to himself but influenced many. 

Born in 1845, the Harvard-educated architect designed a number of buildings including the beautiful Unity Unitarian Church in Easton, Mass, but soon decided architecture wasn’t for him. He went to Paris and studied at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, and in 1883 founded the original Life magazine, promising “to speak out what is in our mind as fairly, as truthfully, and as decently as we know how.”

Much more like today's New Yorker than the Life of the later 20th Century, Mitchell's magazine discovered and encouraged many fine writers and artists at the turn of the 20th Century, such as Charles Dana Gibson, the illustrator who created the Gibson Girl. It covered the literary scene as well as political and social issues. His staff  included the Harvard graduate and founder of Harvard Lampoon, Edward Sandford Martin. 

Life was purchased in 1936 by another Ridgefielder, Henry Luce, who turned it into a picture magazine. Mitchell and Horace Greeley of The New York Herald Tribune founded the Fresh Air

Fund, which for many years operated the Life Fresh Air camp for city kids on the site of today's Branchville School. 

Mitchell also penned a half dozen novels, the most famous of which, “Amos Judd” (1895), was made into the 1922 silent film, “The Young Rajah,” starring Rudolph Valentino. 

He was “a man who planted many seeds,” said Abraham Puchall, who has a much more than   passing interest in Mitchell. He has lived and worked in Mitchell’s world for years.

The headquarters of Mitchell's Life is now The Herald Square Hotel in New York, a gift to Mitchell from Charles Dana Gibson in appreciation of the publisher’s having seen and developed his potential as an artist. The hotel is operated by Puchall, whose Ridgefield home on West Lane was once Mitchell’s home, called Windover.

Puchall has spent countless hours researching John Ames Mitchell’s life and philosophy. 

Mitchell loved cherubs, he said, using them in his writing and as a symbol for his magazine — Gibson had noted sculptor Philip Martiny create a cherubic Winged Life over the main entrance to the Life building. To him,  Puchall said,  Cupid personified a cheerful but unrelenting guide to truths about human nature and the creative spirit. 

Mitchell died in 1918 and is buried in Fairlawn Cemetery.

While his magazine is gone, his books mostly forgotten, and his camp has vanished, Ridgefield has one monument to John Ames Mitchell that thousands see daily. Soon after the turn of the 20th Century, Mitchell donated a watering trough for horses, handsome enough to be placed in the middle of the intersection of Main and Catoonah Streets. It had a large bowl to serve passing horses and included, at its base, a special opening for village dogs in need of a drink. The trough now stands in the island at the intersection of West and Olmstead Lanes, where it is often mistaken for a fountain.