Archibald Y. Paddock:

A Strange Tragedy

On Saturday, Aug. 25, 1889, Dr. Archibald Y. Paddock and his 18-year-old son, Harry, had a late breakfast and decided to go target shooting near their large home on Main Street, just south of St. Stephen’s Church. 

“Rifle shooting was a favorite diversion of both father and son,” The New York Times later reported. “They took their rifles and went to the field at the rear of the house where the butts were erected for target practice. They were never again seen alive.”

A coroner subsequently ruled that Harry was doing something with a target when his father accidentally shot and killed him, but no one knows for certain just what happened that led to the boy’s death.

“The father was overwhelmed with grief, and in an instant went to the son, whom he loved as life itself, knelt down, and with the same weapon that enacted the first scene in the tragedy, ended his own life,” The Boston Evening Transcript said. 

The father’s body was found lying atop the son’s, The Times noted.

Dr. Paddock, a retired New York City dentist, had been a pillar of the community: treasurer of the First Congregational Church, master of Jerusalem Lodge of Masons, and a close friend of Gov. Phineas Lounsbury, who lived across the street in what’s now the Community Center. By all accounts, he deeply loved his son, who had been an excellent student and athlete, and who was set to begin a career in New York City in the fall.

The coroner ruled Harry’s death was an accident, and that Dr. Paddock’s death was caused by “temporary insanity.” Harry and Archibald were buried in the family plot in Ridgefield Cemetery. For whatever reason, their gravestones are about as far apart as the plot allows.  

Dr. Paddock had also been involved in notable deaths of a different sort. In 1874, he was having some sand excavated on North Salem Road when two skeletons, believed to be Hessian soldiers who fought with the British at the Battle of Ridgefield, were uncovered. “The skeletons were lying near each other, side by side,” Ridgefield historian George L. Rockwell said. Dr. Paddock “took possession of the skeletons. One was almost perfect and Dr. Paddock exhibited it at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876.” He refused a $200 offer for it.

Samuel S. Denton, a local merchant, later acquired the Paddock house and decided to move it to the north end of Main Street. At the curve by Casagmo, the building would not fit between the Casagmo stonewall and the hill by the house opposite. Denton asked Casagmo owner George M. Olcott for permission to temporarily take down part of the wall. Olcott refused, so after leaving it in the middle of the road for a couple days, Denton sawed the house in two so it could fit. In the process, the nearly perfect skeleton was found in a sealed closet.

Half of the Paddock house still stands on Main Street just north of Casagmo—the other half, which had been located nearby, was razed years ago. 

The location of the Hessian skeleton today is unknown.

Phyllis Paccadolmi, 

The Face of the Library

When Phyllis Paccadolmi retired in 1999 after 53 years with the Ridgefield Library, The Ridgefield Press described her as “the friendly face, the kind voice, the hometown touch that made the Ridgefield Library more than a place of books and research.” 

The Ridgefield native was born in 1929. Two months after her birth, her father died, leaving her mother to raise five children. Phyllis Paccadolmi grew up here and while at Ridgefield High School, she was already pursuing her interest in libraries: She had permission to leave study hall early to assist school librarian May Boland with typing cards and mending books. 

She joined the Ridgefield Library after graduating from RHS in 1946. That was before several additions that enlarged the building. “Stacks were in the back,” Paccadolmi said. “Fiction on one side, non-fiction on the other. History was downstairs.”

“Generations of Ridgefield’s mothers and children, students and senior citizens came to know the library under Ms. Paccadolmi’s presiding spirit,” The Press said. “And in a world sometimes indifferent, sometimes too busy, they found a refuge of kindness, warmth and humanity.”

“She was the face of the library — she was the Ridgefield Library to generations of kids,” said reference librarian Lesley-Anne Read, who worked with Paccadolmi for more than a decade. Mary Rindfleisch, assistant librarian, said that “over her 53 years of service, ‘Miss P’ had a hand in literally every aspect of library operations. More importantly, however, she was a warm and welcoming presence who belied all the stereotypes of grim, scowling librarians and made the institution a true home for so many staff and patrons.”

Traditionally, the Ridgefield Library had been the object of the generosity of some famous and wealthy people. Paccadolmi knew them all — and sometimes even worried about them.  In a profile of Paccadolmi on her 30th anniversary at the library, Elizabeth Stolper told of the time the sizable Broadway actor  Zero Mostel came in with his leg in a cast. “Miss Paccadolmi hastily offered to get him anything he wanted from downstairs, but he insisted on negotiating the [steep, circular] staircase himself. She held her breath, aghast at the possibility of lifting that large object if it stumbled. Fortunately, all went well.”

During her career the library began the long process of computerizing its catalogues and other systems as well as expanded the building. When she started, she was one of two staff members. She was named head librarian in 1955 but it was not until three years later that the staff was increased to three people. When she retired in 1999, there were 18.

Paccadolmi’s other love was St. Mary’s Church where she and her sister, Gelsina, cared for the the church linens or “altar cloths,” washing them weekly with cakes of  brown soap that they made themselves. They also cleaned  and polished the church brass, especially candlesticks, and often supplied flowers for the altar from their own garden.

She also enjoyed travel. “In 1956 I started traveling — name it, and I’ve been there,” she told The Press in 1996. “I don’t go on tours. I don’t mind traveling by myself. When I went to Taiwan, I was on the plane for 24 hours.”

And what did she do in retirement? She became a volunteer with the Friends of the Ridgefield Library.

“I loved the library — I spent more hours there than at my own house,” Ms. Paccadolmi said  a few months after retiring, as she accepted the Ridgefield Lions Club’s first Citizen of the Year award. “I miss the people — the staff and the patrons.”

She died in 2006 at the age of 76.

John T. Orrico: 

A Distinguished Hero

John Orrico’s Ridgefield High School yearbook said his ambition was “to become a pilot.” Orrico became a pilot, and he used his skills in the most dangerous place in the most dangerous way: He commanded an attack gunship in the Vietnam War.

    Born in Stamford in 1948, John Thomas Orrico grew up in Ridgefield, one of three sons of Fred and Helen Casey Orrico, who ran the popular King Neptune Restaurant on Route 7 for many years (Helen had been a sergeant in the U.S. Marine Corps while Fred was a Navy seaman aboard the battleship Missouri when the Japanese signed their surrender on its deck).

    At Ridgefield High School, where he graduated in 1966, John Orrico played football and golf, was in the band, and helped in the library. He attended The Citadel before enlisting in the U.S. Army in 1968 where he underwent helicopter pilot training and was commissioned a warrant officer. 

He was sent to Vietnam in August 1969 to pilot Huey UH-1C attack helicopters. The UH-1C,  fitted with machine guns and rocket packs, was used to support ground troops in combat.

Piloting one of these helicopters in Vietnam was incredibly dangerous. Of the 696 UH-1Cs

that the Army used in combat, 415 were destroyed, according to military historian Gary Roush. A total of 167 of their pilots and 158 crew were killed. 

Of all 7,000 different models of UH-1 Huey helicopters flown in Vietnam, 3,300 were destroyed, and 1,074 of their pilots died. 

Within a year of his arrival in Vietnam, Orrico had earned the Bronze Star, the Army Commendation Medal, and the Air Medal. But his highest award, the Distinguished Flying Cross, was received Aug. 28, 1970 “for heroism in action while engaged in aerial flight in connection with military operations against a hostile force.”

However, it was not a hostile force but a helicopter that killed CWO Orrico two months later.

According to Army records, on Nov. 2, 1970, at 6:50 a.m,  Orrico took off with a crew of three from a base at Rach Gia near the very southern end of Vietnam, and was heading for the Rach Soi Airfield for refueling. After making a right turn and leveling off at 500 feet, “the main rotor system separated from the aircraft,” which then crashed and exploded, killing all four men.

Orrico was due to come home the next month.

The 22-year-old soldier was buried with full military honors at St. Mary’s Cemetery. 

He was the third and last Ridgefielder to lose his life in the Vietnam War.

Olaf Olsen: 

A Man of the Movies 

Olaf Olsen had a long career both in front of and behind the camera. 

Born in 1919 in Heidelberg, Germany, Olsen moved to England when he was 15, and began acting professionally while still a teenager. He played mostly supporting roles in 29 British films including “The Man in the White Suit,” “Lilli Marlene,” and “We Dive at Dawn,” alongside such greats as Alec Guinness, Deborah Kerr, John Mills, and Leslie Howard. 

At 18, he portrayed a German POW in the BBC production of “Journey’s End,” the first full-length drama ever broadcast over live television. 

He was only 19 in 1938 when he played Queen Victoria's son-in-law with Dame Anna Neagle as the queen in “Sixty Glorious Years,” a film about the reign of Queen Victoria. In 1953, the year of the present queen's coronation, he portrayed Prince Albert with Miss Neagle in the musical version of the Victoria story, “The Glorious Days,” which was at London’s Palace Theatre for two years. 

Olsen also appeared in more than 1,000 BBC radio and TV broadcasts. In 1954, he went to Hollywood to sign a movie contract but Jack B. Ward offered him the vice-presidency of Ward Acres Studios of New Rochelle, N.Y., a newly formed enterprise that produced TV commercials and documentaries. In 1957 he and Ward moved to a Ridgefield estate that had once been the Ridgefield Golf Club, calling it Ward Acres, and breeding and raising award-winning thoroughbred racing horses. 

He continued to produce travel documentaries as the Olsen Film Productions Company, serving as cameraman, producer, director, cutter, editor, and synchronizer. Distributed by the J. Arthur Rank Group, most were world travelogues, but some also dealt with horses and wildlife. His favorite was “Lion Country Safari.” 

One of his interests was exotic waterfowl, and he kept a number of species of geese and ducks from around the world on a Ward Acres pond alongside Lewis Drive. He gave up the hobby, he said, after both wild predators and neighborhood children repeatedly attacked his birds.

Almost as soon as he arrived here,  Olsen became active in the Red Cross. He also formed a group that visited and entertained patients — including the criminally insane — at the old Fairfield Hills State Hospital in Newtown, Southbury Training School, and other institutions and hospitals in the region. He showed his films to many organizations and in many schools. 

Did he miss acting? he was asked in 1975. “No,” he replied. “When you've had your name in lights for two years in London, what else do you want?”

Nonetheless, in 1996, when he returned to London for a memorial to Dame Anna Neagle, many fans sought his autograph and Princess Anne invited him to a party. “What a delightful and fascinating man he is,” the Princess was quoted as saying after meeting and chatting with  the long-retired actor.

Olsen died in 2000 in Ridgefield at the age of 81.

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 form 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.  

Elmer Q. Oliphant: 

An Early All-American

Who was the greatest athlete ever to have lived in Ridgefield? Quite possibly Elmer Q. Oliphant, a name almost forgotten today but known to almost every sports fan of the first third of the 20th Century. 

An Indiana native, Ollie Oliphant was born in 1892 and attended Purdue from 1911 to 1913. Although he was there only two years, he is today one of 17 members of the school’s Football Hall of Fame. Among the records he still holds are most points scored in a game (43) and most touchdowns scored in a game (5)

In 1914, he transferred to West Point. When he arrived, he was greeted by an upper-class cadet named Dwight D. Eisenhower.

“Who are you?” demanded Eisenhower 

“Oliphant,” grinned the newcomer.

“Oliphant WHAT?” roared Eisenhower.

“Oliphant, Elmer Quillen” replied the new cadet.

“You mean — ‘Oliphant, SIR,’ ” Eisenhower responded, adding, “Wipe that smile off your face. Put it in your pocket. Untack those pants. Now, forward march, up to the Guard House.”

Oliphant told the story to a newspaper columnist after he had gotten a letter from Eisenhower while the general was in Africa during World War II.

At the U.S. Military Academy, Oliphant became the first cadet ever to letter in seven sports (football, baseball, basketball, track, boxing, swimming, and hockey). 

In 1916, as an Army back, he was a football All-American; Knute Rockne later included him on his own all-time All-American team. In his college football career, he was credited with  435 points – 135 at Purdue and 300 at Army.

His abilities were legend. The New York Times once reported that “Mr. Oliphant’s most notable field goal was kicked after he had suffered a broken ankle in a game against Illinois. His kick accounted for a 3-0 victory. While playing basketball for Purdue against Wisconsin, he shot the winning basket while seated on the floor.” 

After graduating from West Point, Oliphant became a small-arms instructor at Fort Benning, Ga. In 1920 he returned to the military academy to establish the first college intramurals program in the nation — “you’re talking to the daddy of intramural athletics,” he told a Ridgefield Press reporter in 1950. The idea was copied by the Naval Academy and was soon used in colleges and universities across the country.   

He also became West Point’s first full-time coach.

After his service in the Army, he played in 1921 for the Buffalo All-Americans in the early years of what is now the National Football League. While he led the league with 47 points that year (including throwing seven touchdowns, and kicking five field goals and 26 point after touchdowns), he retired from playing after that season. He joined the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, became an executive there and retired in 1957.

In 1955, Mr. Oliphant was elected to the National Football Hall of Fame. 

He and his wife Barbara moved to Wilton Road West in the 1940s, and both — especially Barbara — were active in the Ridgefield community. They moved to New Canaan in 1952, but after Mr. Oliphant died in 1975 at the age of 82, he was buried at St. Mary's Cemetery in Ridgefield.

“The greatest value of athletics is found in the realm of character building,” Oliphant once said. “Sound hearts, strong bodies, clear minds, and high ideals in life are the objectives.”

Bill Oexle, 

Master Restorer

“I can’t imagine anybody cold-blooded enough not to appreciate something as beautiful as these things can be,” Bill Oexle told a newspaper reporter in 1976.

The object of his affection was the antique car, and Oexle had spent much of his free time over three decades restoring dozens of them.

William H. Oexle (pronounced OX-lee)  was born in New Jersey in 1908 and came to Ridgefield in 1949 after a career in Ohio where he was sales manager for the Tyson Bearing Corporation. Earlier he had worked in the precision tool field in California and in auto sales and service.

He and his wife, Lina, known as Lee, first lived on Wilton Road West and later on North Salem Road and later way out Ridgebury Road almost in Danbury only later to move back to a home built by their son Sandy Cook in back of their place on North Salem Road. Soon after arriving, he started the Oexle Supply Company, a contractors’ supply business and distributor of nuts, bolts, chain, cable, tools, and other hardware items as well as fire extinguishers. In 1964 he moved his company from the old Ridgefield Bakery building behind what is now the the Planet Pizza/Amatuzzi building to quarters on South Street, built to his specifications. His firm grew and when he sold it in 1973, he was doing business throughout the Northeast as well as Europe and South America.

In 1970 he opened the Taylor Rental Center on South Street and continued to operate that business until his death. 

Oexle was one of the original members of the town’s Police Commission, created in 1955, and was its first chairman.

His greatest love, however, was the restoration of old cars, an avocation he began in 1947. Five years later he was restoring them professionally.

 “It takes a long time to learn how to do it,”  he told the Press in 1979. “The hobby grows and for every man involved in it, some friend of his becomes interested. I would guess there are 200,000 people involved in antique cars.”

He said many restoration hobbyists get started because of fond memories of cars past. “Maybe your father or uncle had a certain kind of car, and you try to find one like it,” he said. “Some people want to get the oldest car they can get — sporty old cars are the ones that appeal to me.”

He said that “old cars give a man an outlet for his desire to use his hands, which he probably doesn’t get in the business world. By the time you have worked on an antique car, doing the mechanical work, perhaps the upholstery, painted it with paint that matches its original coat, you feel that you have put a lot of yourself into it.”

Active in the Horseless Carriage Club of America and the Antique Automobile Club of America, he won many national awards for his restorations. Every car he built that was shown in national competition won an HCCA National First Prize. “He set the standard at the time,” said Rob Kinnaird, who had assisted Oexle in his restorations.

 Several times he was chairman of the Ridgefield Antique Car Show at Veterans Park, which was co-sponsored by the Lions Club for decades and featured up to 200 old vehicles. In fact it was Oexle who convinced the Lions to sponsor the car shows with Horseless Carriage Club of America, starting in 1962. Because of his reputation, many collectors brought their prize restorations to this show. (They were discontinued around 1983 after Veterans Park became unavailable due to the installation of an underground irrigation system that a couple hundred cars could easily damage.)

Over the years Oexle restored such antiques as a 1934 Packard Coupe, 1934 LaSalle Convertible Coupe, 1923 Austro-Daimler Boat Tail Roadster,  1923 Buick Sport Touring Car, 1931 Mercer Raceabout, 1928 Chrysler Roadster, and a 1927 Gardner. His first professional restoration was a 1919 Locomobile; ironically, the last, completed after his death, was a 1920 Locomobile. In the later years, he’d was often assisted by Kinnaird, Guy Montanari and Hiram Scott. Hiram “Scotty” Scott owned Scott’s Autobody in the building off Main Street now occupied by Milillo Farms. 

His favorite car was the late twenties Packard, a number of which he restored, the last one in the late 1970s. “In the 1920s and 30s, I was a service mechanic and sold cars, mostly Packards,” he said in an interview a year before his death in 1980 at the age of 72. “I formed an attachment for 1928s — just to look at them was exciting. A ’28 roadster was a nice auto, handsome, and it performed well.”

“How do you drive a ’28 Packard,”  interviewer Linette Burton asked Oexle.

“Very carefully,” he replied with a smile. “Very carefully.”