Conrad Rockelein,

90-Hour Weeks

Conrad Rockelein was the epitome of the hard-working immigrant, a man who spent years of 90-hour weeks at his craft of haircutting. But his legacy to Ridgefield is not old pictures of ancestors who are well-coiffed, but one of Ridgefield’s first “neighborhoods.”

Rockelein was born in Germany in 1867, came to this country at the age of 14, and spent most of his life in Ridgefield.

On April 22, 1889, when Rockelein put up his first barber’s pole on Main Street, old “Doc” Reynolds was operating the only other barber shop in Ridgefield. But, according to newsman and historian Karl S. Nash, “Doc liked to go fishing and he closed his shop most any time he thought the fish would be biting. So his new competitor wasn’t long in getting his shop on a good paying basis.”

“Back in 1889, I opened my shop at 7 a.m. and stayed at my chair until 9 p.m. every day except Saturday when the shop was open till midnight,” he told The Ridgefield Press in 1940. “And then I was on the job also from 7 a.m. to noon on Sunday. 

“The price of a haircut in those days was 25 cents. A shave cost 10 cents, or 15 cents with bay rum.”

His business grew quickly and was prospering when the Great Fire of 1895 burned down most of the commercial section of town, including Rockelein’s shop. “But the embers had hardly cooled before he was temporarily set up for business again in the back room of Will Benedict’s Store,” Nash wrote.

Soon he had a shop running over where Deborah Ann’s Sweet Shoppe is now and in the years that followed, he moved to various locations around the village, including his own home  (from 1900 to 1908, he was in ill health — possibly due to those 90-plus hour weeks of work —  and mostly retired from barbering).

In 1938 when he observed his 50th year in business, Rockelein estimated he had performed 20,000 haircuts, but he would not venture a guess on the number of shaves. He finally retired in 1945.

Rockelein lived on Mountain View Avenue, in a sizable neighborhood he himself subdivided. In fact, he could be considered one of Ridgefield’s first developers. 

By 1910, he had acquired 19.4 acres of hayfield which he laid out into 75-by-250 foot lots.  A new subdivision plan, filed in 1927, called the neighborhood Mountain View Park and named its three roads Island Hill Avenue, Hillsdale "Street" and Mountain View Avenue.
He felt his development would serve many of the immigrant Italian, German and Irish families that had been coming to town and were becoming prosperous enough to build houses of their own. 

He named the development for its views of Titicus Mountain to the west and Copps Mountain to the north — views obscured today by trees that have been planted and have matured since Rockelein bought the treeless hayfield.

Despite all his work, Rockelein found time to be active in the Jesse Lee Methodist Church, where he was a steward, trustee and treasurer. He also belonged to the Masons.

He died in 1954 at the age of 87.

Gail Roberts: 

Tough Dog Warden

As late as the mid-1970s, the sight of a roaming dog was commonplace in Ridgefield. But by the time Gail Roberts died in 1997, a roaming dog was as rare as a gray fox. 

The town’s dog warden from 1977 until her death, Ms. Roberts was especially tough with people who allowed their dogs to roam because, she repeatedly pointed out, many loose dogs were maimed or killed by cars. 

She told of once coming across a dog “flatter than a pancake” on Barry Avenue. She called the owners and when they said they thought the town should take care of the dead dog, she ordered them to pick up the body.

 “By the way, bring a shovel and a box,” she told them. 

“When an owner has to do that,” she said later, “they will think twice about letting a dog roam.” 

Gail Roberts started as assistant warden in 1973, became full-time in 1977, and during the quarter century she did the job, facilities and treatment of animals improved considerable. She was also known for working hard to try to find homes for abandoned dogs. 

Joseph Roach: 

The Wounds of War

Some people are killed in war. Others can die of war injuries long after combat has ended. 

The latter may have been the case with Joe Roach, who was wounded in World War I but lived with his injuries and contributed considerably to his community until 1948 when he finally succumbed to war wounds at the age of 53.

Joseph Aloysius Roach was born in New York in 1896, and came to town as a child,  attending local schools and graduating from Ridgefield High School. He went to work for his father’s stone-cutting business, but when the United State entered World War I, he joined the Army’s Yankee Division. 

After instruction in intelligence work with the French Army, he wound up in combat in France. At Seicheprey, “he was knocked unconscious in an enemy raid, sustaining four bullet wounds and eight shrapnel wounds,” The Ridgefield Press reported. 

Still unconscious, Roach was taken prisoner by the Germans and sent to Darmstadt prison camp, where he was treated for his injuries. From there he was transferred to a prison camp in the Westphalia region of Germany, from which he escaped to the border of Holland 43 miles away. He crossed the channel to England, was returned to the United States, and was discharged from the Army. 

Back home, he became of the a founder of the American Legion Post and its first commander, served on the Board of Education, was a grand knight of the Knights of Columbus, was active in the Republican party, and operated the stone-cutting and gravestone business of his father. He was also active in Boy Scouting and was considered an excellent boxer, back in the days when boxing was a popular sport in Ridgefield.

The Press described his last days in 1948. “Mr. Roach died unexpectedly Sunday afternoon at the Veterans Hospital at Rocky Hill whence he had been transferred two days earlier from the Veterans Administration Hospital in Newington. For several months he had been under treatment for a lung condition directly traced to the bullet and shrapnel wounds in the 1914-1918 war. At Newington, one lung had been removed and he had shown sufficient improvement to be moved to Rocky Hill, although his condition remained serious.”

Town Historian Richard E. Venus knew Roach well and suggested that his death at a relatively young age may have been exacerbated by inherited problems and by his job.

“Joe came from a large family, most of whom were plagued by what was commonly called consumption,” he wrote in a 1982 column. “Today we refer to it as tuberculosis of the lungs.

“As I was aware of the history of this family problem, I always felt a twinge of sadness when I saw Joe inhaling the dust as he made the engravings on the pieces of granite. Later, a mask was developed as protection against the dust.”

George Doubleday: 

The Man of Westmoreland

George Doubleday was the once-famous, rich and powerful head of Ingersoll-Rand Corporation, but his legacy in Ridgefield is a house of worship and a neighborhood. 

Born in 1866 in Michigan, George A. Doubleday had no connection with the book publishing company (as is sometimes reported in town). He joined Ingersoll Sergeant Drill Company in 1894 as an auditor, soon became treasurer, and when it consolidated into Ingersoll-Rand in 1905, was named a vice-president. By 1913, he was president, a post he held until 1935. He was chairman of the board till 1955, the year he died at the age of 89. 

When he took over the company in 1913, a corporate history says, “Doubleday was determined to make Ingersoll-Rand the leader in its product areas — drills, air compressors, jackhammers, pneumatic tools, and industrial pumps.” He kept the company very profitable and debt free, but in the end was criticized for failing to diversify. After his death subsequent leaders did just that. Today, Ingersoll-Rand owns such brands as Schlage locks, Thermo King transport temperature control equipment, Bobcat compact construction equipment, and Club Car golf vehicles.

Ingersoll-Rand had major plants in Phillipsburg, N.J., Easton and Athens, Pa., and Painted Post, N.Y. “In these locations, Ingersoll-Rand was the major employer,” the company history said. “Community life centered on the firm: Many workers lived in company-owned houses, and community and school events were held in company buildings. 

“Doubleday hired boys off the farm and trained them to become skilled machinists through a seven-year apprenticeship. These artisans accepted the company’s credo of pride in personal work, and only a handful of quality-control specialists were needed. Doubleday charged a premium price for the high-quality machinery this system produced.”

George Doubleday was a rather private individual — he would not even provide a picture of himself for the press and images of him are exceedingly rare. He carried this trait over into his operation of the company, the history said.  “He provided a bare minimum of information about

Ingersoll-Rand. Under Doubleday the company never released a quarterly report and its annual report was a single folded sheet of paper containing only the figures the New York Stock Exchange required.”

  In 1939, the House Ways and Means Committee listed the highest salaried men in the nation, and George Doubleday, at the then-tidy sum of $78,000 — equal to $1.4 million today — was the only Ridgefielder on it. 

Doubleday made Ridgefield his home for 40 years, buying the former Francis Bacon mansion, “Nutholme,” on Peaceable Street in 1915. He proceeded to acquire much of the neighboring land, mostly to the west and totalling nearly 300 acres. He gave his vast estate a new name, “Westmoreland,” presumably because it was moorlike and west of the village. 

In town, he was president of the nearby Ridgefield Golf Club (later Ward Acres) for many years, and his first wife, Alice Moffitt Doubleday, was active in the Ridgefield Garden Club and sang in St. Mary’s Choir. (Her sister was Mrs. John H. Lynch, whose West Mountain estate is now the Ridgefield Academy.) After Alice Doubleday died in 1919, George married his secretary, Mary White, and she, too, was active in the garden club and was a founder of the Ridgefield Boys’ Club. 

In the early 1960s, Doubleday’s heirs offered the town 250 acres of Westmoreland, some of which was talked of as the site for a multiple school campus; town fathers turned it down as expensive and unneeded. A Massachusetts firm quickly bought the property and subdivided it into 150 house lots, which the late Jerry Tuccio developed. 

In the early 1970s, the estate’s mansion was acquired by Temple Shearith Israel, now Congregation Shir Shalom, which still uses it as its temple and school.

George’s son, James M. Doubleday (1907-1970), became well-known in town. Over the years the Princeton graduate and local banking leader bought  several estates, razing the old mansions and replacing them with more modern and efficient equivalents. One place was the old Hillaire estate off West Mountain Road where his new home was called Hobby Hill. The estate was later subdivided and a road serving it, Doubleday Lane, today recalls James.

Cyril Ritchard: 

‘Captain Hook’

Millions knew him, not by his name but by his character. For Cyril Ritchard played Captain Hook alongside Mary Martin when the acclaimed Broadway production of “Peter Pan” was staged live for television March 7, 1955, making TV history with its huge audience and high quality production. 

His face and his voice were famous and he enjoyed telling of the time he was spotted by a rough-looking gang of teenagers who surrounded him. 

“I thought they were going to attack me, but instead they stared and exclaimed: ‘You're Captain Hook!’ I'm glad the reason for their attention was curiosity, not animosity.”

The witty actor from Australia starred in countless stage and screen productions around the world and over a career that started before World War I and ended in 1977 when he collapsed on stage of a heart attack. 

Born Cyril Trimnell-Ritchard (a name he shortened to fit on marquees) in 1898,  Ritchard was

the son of a hotel manager father who wanted him to become a doctor. However, he quit medical school at the age of 19 and took to the stage, making his debut in the chorus of a Sydney musical. Three months later, he was performing the lead.

From there he went on to appear over the next half century in innumerable comedies, Shakespearean plays, musicals, and even operas.

“I have four notes, two of them good,” he said of his singing abilities. 

Ritchard also made six movies, including “Half A Sixpence” in 1967.

Shakespearean comedy fascinated Ritchard, who often performed at the American Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford, Conn., and worked to raise money for its survival. In an effort typical of both his

energy and his versatility, he directed the play and performed two parts (Oberon and Bottom) in a 1967 production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” at Stratford.

“It’s really a mental feat,” he said at the time. “The changes would be quite impossible if my mind panicked...But I like the challenge.”

Throughout his career he was known for his smile and his sense of humor. He once told Leonard Lyons of The New York Post That he was unaffected by small audiences in theaters. “Fortunately,” he said, “my sight is bad, so I can’t even see the empty seats.”

“He was a very funny and witty fellow,” said actress Kathleen Eason, a longtime friend and fellow Ridgefielder. “His stories and anecdotes of happenings to him on and off stage were

hysterically funny. Once, when he was very young and just starting to be successful, a fan asked for his autograph at a movie premiere. Cyril brightened right up and with his pencil poised, began laboriously to write: ‘Best wishes and good luck, Cyril Ritchard’ The irate fan said: ‘Come on, hurry up, don’t write a book. Here comes Greta Garbo!’ ”

He maintained that he developed his abilities at comedy as a child. “As I was taken to my room to be spanked by my father, I had to think of something to make him laugh,” he said. “If I could, it was a pretty weak spanking.”

He bought his Danbury Road home, which he called “Lone Rock,” in 1960, and “absolutely loved Ridgefield and that little house,” Eason said. “He couldn’t wait to get out of New York and to his Shangri-La, as he called it.”

Ritchard frequently entertained guests from New York at Lone Rock. One Sunday in the summer of 1965, he bused up the entire cast and crew from “The Roar of the Greasepaint — The Smell of the Crowd,” in which he played one of his best-known roles. He had planned to serve them

beefsteak and kidney pies, but changed his mind. “I remembered about Americans and kidneys, and substituted the beef Wellington,” he said, adding that Americans are likely to find kidneys appealing only when they denote the shape of swimming pools.

He was often seen about town with his poodle, Trim (a trimmed version of his trimmed name). “He got to know a great many people in the town,” Mrs. Eason said. “He always raised his hat, helped old ladies across the road, and stopped to talk to people.”

Ritchard contributed to many local organizations including the Ridgefield Workshop for the Performing Arts. He read the Declaration of Independence at a 1976 Bicentennial ceremony at the Community Center. “I was shocked when they asked me to do this,” he told the crowd. “I'm not an American. I'm a citizen of Australia. And I love the British. So there!”

Despite his age — he had turned 79 a couple weeks before his death — and warnings from his doctor, Ritchard maintained a work schedule that would tire a much younger man. In 1974, when he was hospitalized after collapsing at work in California, he admitted that “the doctor here says in the future I should be a little less enthusiastic in my work. I had been under pressure for six weeks. I was directing (“Sugar”), but nine other people thought they were, and kept screaming.”

   A few months later the 76-year-old appeared in three concerts of  “La Perichole” in Miami and a short time after that, gave 22 performances of 11 different programs during a 2½ week Theatre Guild at Sea cruise in the Caribbean.

   “I never worked so hard in my life,” he admitted afterward.

   A devout Catholic who attended  Mass almost daily, he was a benefactor of St. Mary's Parish. His funeral in 1977 was at St. Mary’s, with the Mass celebrated by longtime friend and TV celebrity, Bishop Fulton J. Sheen. 

   Cyril Ritchard is buried at St. Mary’s Cemetery next to his beloved wife, actress Madge Elliott, who had died five years before he moved to Ridgefield — he loved the town so much he had had her remains moved here from New York.

Under his name, Cyril Trimnell-Ritchard, on the gravestone, it says, “Captain Hook.”

Joan Risch: 

The Woman Who Vanished

A one-time resident of Ridgefield, who had been a homemaker and mother, became the center of one of New England’s most publicized mysteries of the 20th Century.

Joan Carolyn Risch and her husband, Martin, had lived on Rowland Lane in the 1950s, moving to Lincoln, Mass., in 1961. Seven months later, on Oct. 24, 1961, Mrs. Risch disappeared from her home, leaving behind two children, aged 4 and 2. 

Martin Risch was away on a business trip that day. In the morning, Joan took her four-year-old daughter to the dentist, did some shopping and returned home for lunch. She put her two-year-old in a crib for a nap and sent the daughter to a neighbor’s house to play.

Police were summoned after the daughter came home at 4 and found her house empty, except for the two-year-old in his crib. 

“Mommy is gone and the kitchen is covered with red paint,” the daughter told a neighbor. 

A trail of blood led from the kitchen to the driveway where a neighbor reported seeing her earlier, standing by her car, looking dazed. Mrs. Risch, who was 30, was never seen again. 

In the kitchen, the phone had been ripped from the wall and some bloody fingerprints, not hers, were found, but were never identified. A phone book was open to the page of emergency numbers. 

Investigators later said the blood in the kitchen and on the driveway probably came from a superficial wound — there was not much of it. 

There were various reports of a dazed woman walking along a highway, and of a mysterious gray car, but nothing ever came of them. 

Some people theorized that Risch, dazed from an attack, fell into a pit that had been dug as part of the construction of the new Route 128 beltway near her house, and was unknowingly buried.

Most intriguing, however, was the speculation that she had staged her own disappearance because she was unhappy with her life.  A local reporter discovered Mrs. Risch had checked out more than 20 books on murder and disappearances from the local library in the previous months. 

However, friends maintained she was devoted to her family and would not have deserted her children.

A native of Brooklyn, N.Y., Joan Risch graduated in 1952 from Wilson College in Pennsylvanian with a English degree. Adding to the strangeness of the case was the fact that both of Joan Risch’s parents were killed in a fire when she was nine years old, and she was raised by an aunt and uncle.

Anne S. Richardson: 

Benefactor Par Excellence

For most Ridgefielders, her name is the park on North Salem Road or the auditorium at Ridgefield High School. However, Anne S. Richardson was once one of the most influential women in town, “a moving spirit for its preservation and betterment,” The Press reported when she died in 1965. 

A half century after her death, she is still helping Ridgefield and the region.

Born in 1884 into a wealthy family, Richardson came here in 1915 and built her home, Mamanasco Farm, on the plateau created by the great rock overlooking the north end of lake. The estate employed many people whose families still live in Ridgefield.

Soon after arriving, Richardson became active in the community. She and her lifelong companion, Edna Schoyer, helped organize the League of Women Voters in town.

Though she lived far from the village, she promoted the beautification of Main Street, especially preservation and replacement of trees, both as a longstanding member of the Ridgefield Garden Club and as head of its Village Improvement Committee. 

In 1939, Richardson, a Republican, and Schoyer, a Democrat, were elected to the Board of Education, serving three years. (Ridgefield High School and Scotts Ridge Middle School stand on part of her farm; the land was purchased by the town from her estate for a relatively small price.) 

Richardson was appointed to the original Park Commission in 1946 and remained in office until her death. She helped found the Ridgefield Boys and Girls Club (then just a Boys Club), was active in selling War Bonds, and served in the American Women’s Volunteer Service Corps, aiding the war effort on the home front during World War II. 

In 1964, she was named Rotary Citizen of the Year. 

She and Schoyer loved travel, and visited scores of countries on every continent (after sailing up the Amazon, The Press once reported, she confided in friends that the natives on the shore were more fully clad than some of the women on board the ship). 

Her will, which bequeathed millions to trusts and charities, gave Richardson Park to the town, ordering that her house on the land be razed.  

Arguably her most significant bequest was to create the Anne S. Richardson Fund, which, since the mid-1960s, has given away many millions of dollars; in 2015 alone, the fund donated $610,000. 

Richardson specified that the gifts be in three areas: Ridgefield organizations (10 got a total of $275,000 in 2015); Fairfield County organizations (mostly helping the poor, youth and conservation); and eight organizations that Miss Richardson had a special interest in. The last group includes the Boys and Girls Club, St. Stephen’s Church, Connecticut College, Yale University, and several hospitals.