Robert Blume: 

A Hero with Roots

Ridgefield was in Robert Blume’s blood. But the boy whose ancestors helped found the town had too few years to enjoy the community.

In 1708, Jonathan Rockwell joined two dozen other men from Norwalk and Milford in founding  Ridgefield, building his house on Main Street a little north of today’s  Keeler Tavern.   After the Revolution, some of Jonathan’s family joined many other New Englanders in moving to western New York state in search of more open and less rocky land to farm. 

A century and a half later, a great great great great great great grandson of Jonathan Rockwell was born in Ithaca, N.Y.  Happenstance would lead him to the town of his ancestors. Tragically, it would be his last home, for Private First Class Blume was among some 20 Ridgefielders who lost their lives in World War II.

Robert Nichols Bloom was born in 1925, a son of Adrian F. and Jeannette Nichols Blume. His mother was a direct descendant of Jonathan Rockwell; his father, a World War I Army veteran, was a college-educated landscape engineer. The family came to Ridgefield in the mid-1930s when Adrian took a job as a foreman with the huge Outpost Nurseries operation here.

Young Robert was a Boy Scout and a member of the Fellowship Group at the First Congregational Church. He graduated from Ridgefield High School in June 1943 and the very same month, joined the Army.

He was sent to Iowa State University for a specialized Army training program there — his name appears on a plaque at the Iowa State Memorial Union, honoring students who died in the war. 

Private Blume became a radio operator and was sent to Europe with the Fifth Infantry Division of General George S. Patton’s Third Army. He fought in the Battle of the Bulge  and was in Luxembourg when, on Feb. 10, 1945, he was killed in action. He was only 19 years old.

Blume was posthumously awarded the  Bronze Star with One Oak Leaf Cluster and the Purple Heart. According to his Bronze Star citation, “Private Blume, a radio operator, volunteered to go forward over exposed terrain which was under enemy artillery and mortar fire to clear an enemy machine gun emplacement which was bringing devastating fire on our troops. Despite the danger involved, Private Blume succeeded in making his way forward and silencing the weapon. On his return he was fired upon by an enemy sniper. While in search of the sniper he was killed by another sniper. His courage and devotion to duty was a great inspiration to all men of his company and reflects greatly upon himself and our armed forces.” 

PFC Robert Blume is buried in the 17-acre Luxembourg American Cemetery and Memorial alongside 5,000 other American soldiers, including his commander, General George S. Patton. 

His parents were also buried in a military cemetery — Adrian, who died in 1963, is interred along with his wife at the Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery in San Antonio, Texas. 

Anthony Scaduto: 

Covering The Bad and The Beautiful

During his long life as a reporter and as a biographer, Tony Scaduto covered the bad and the beautiful — from Maffia dons to masterful musicians like Bob Dylan and the Beatles and celebrities like Marilyn Monroe. 

A man who was known for wielding words well even when in high school,  Anthony Scaduto was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., in 1932, son of a food importer and a seamstress. After graduating from high school, he got a job as a part-time copy boy at the New York Post to help pay for his tuition at Brooklyn College. He quit college after two years.

“I gave that up after I realized I was getting a better education on the streets of New York than I’d ever get in college,” he told Press interviewer Rick Honey in 1975.

One of his first beats was the police headquarters in Brooklyn. “That’s where I learned a lot about cops, some of whom I hated and some of whom I loved,” he said.

His coverage of the police included a much-praised 1964 series on the NYPD that, said The New York Times in 2017,  “captured the tensions of that time, dynamics still evident a half-century later.”  

Scaduto had written, “The New York policeman today is a perplexed, sometimes frightened man. From the cop on the beat to the highest-ranking superior, he points with pride to the praise the force has received from some quarters for its careful, bend-over-backwards handling of civil rights demonstrations, which are often admittedly deliberate attempts to provoke arrest. At the same time, he is bewildered, honestly shocked, to discover that a large number of Negroes and Puerto Ricans distrust and fear the police uniform and are expressing their hostility more and more openly.”

Covering crime — especially the mob — was one of Scaduto’s specialties at the Post. He grew up in a Brooklyn neighborhood controlled by the Maffia and, coming home from playing baseball one day when he was 12, saw the victim of a mob hit on the sidewalk in front of his friend’s house. “I was constantly aware of who the so-called wise guys were — the men in the mob or on the fringes of it,” he told Honey.

After 20 years at The Post, he left to focus on freelancing, mostly books, the first of which was  Bob Dylan: An Intimate Biography,  published in 1972. It took a journalistic look at Dylan’s life and work, and has received much acclaim over the years. “It is regarded as an influential book in the field, being one of the first to take an investigative approach to writing about his subject,” said one critic.

Among the fans of the book was Dylan himself. “I like your book,” the singer-songwriter told Scaduto after reading the manuscript when it was 80% complete. “That’s the weird thing about it.” Scaduto had allowed Dylan to see the incomplete manuscript if Dylan would consent to giving a rare interview. Dylan did.

In 1976, Scaduto produced Scapegoat: The Lonesome Death of Bruno Richard Hauptmann, an investigation into the trial of the man who was executed in April 1936 for kidnapping and killing the Lindbergh baby. “Mr. Scaduto, aided by his experience covering crime for The Post, built a convincing case that justice had not been served,” The Times said. “He found evidence that had been withheld, witnesses who had bent the truth, and more.”

“Scapegoat should be compulsory reading for those who fear that postwar rulings by the Supreme Court, protecting the rights of the accused, have tied the hands of justice,” a Times reviewer had said.

Scaduto also wrote biographies of Mick Jagger, Frank Sinatra,   and the Beatles as well as many articles for Playboy, Penthouse, Rolling Stone, and Newsday, the Long Island newspaper. His Lucky Luciano: The Man Who Modernized the Mafia,  published in 1975, was written under the pen name Tony Sciacca.

He also tried his hand at fiction, turning out a 1988 novel, A Terrible Time to Die, for G.P. Putnam’s.

Scaduto may have been introduced to Ridgefield in the early 1970s when he came to town to write an article for The Post about the growing battle over the use of certain books in the Ridgefield schools — part of the so-called “book burning.” While he didn’t like how the school board was handling the issue, he did like the town. In 1973, he moved to 125 Grandview Drive. “I was tired of New York City and its craziness,” he said.

Eventually, however, he apparently missed his old stomping grounds — by 1980, he had moved back to Brooklyn. During the 1990s he wrote many pieces for Newsday, the Long Island newspaper.

He died in 2017 at the age of 85.

Even as he was digging into and writing about popular musicians and unpopular crime bosses,  Tony Scaduto as a Ridgefielder kept his eye on the local scene, penning pointed letters to the Press about the goings on.

In 1975, for instance, he quickly took on a Ridgefielder who had written a letter to the editors, opposing spending town government money on the privately owned Ridgefield Library. 

“The library building is such a terrible waste of space and our master planners should find other uses for the property,” Scaduto responded the next week. “Let us sell all the books for kindling — I hope no one objects that that smacks of conservation, so pinkish a word — and tear down the building and then construct on the site an old-fashioned bowling green. And when the Rip Van Winkles of this town awake, they’ll feel perfectly at home.”

Samuel Sidney St. John:

A Man Who Loved To Teach

Nearly two centuries ago, Samuel St. John opened the Ridgefield Boarding School, offering a secondary education to teenagers near and far. Then only 26, St. John would spend the rest of his career in education, leading some of the earliest free schools in New York City.

Later in life, St. John would experience — and survive — much family sadness.

Samuel Sydney St. John was born on a Ridgebury farm in 1806. When he was 12, his father, Thomas, moved to the city and sent his son to the best schools available there.

Samuel graduated from Columbia in 1828 and while he was admitted  to the New York bar, never practiced law. Instead, he moved back to Ridgefield and opened a store in Ridgebury. A year later, he married Lucy Amy Brush, who’d grown up on a  Ridgebury farm about a mile south of the St. John spread. 

Perhaps because of the fine schools he had attended, St. John had a love of learning. In 1832, he  decided to open his boarding school. “As a teacher he excelled — patient, laborious and conscientious, he soon made his school famous and successful,” an obituary said. “It was patronized not only by the citizens of Ridgefield and adjoining towns, but by many from New York City.” His graduates went on to major institutions such as Yale.

The school, which offered college-prep and commercial curricula, was in the village, probably on Main Street, though its exact location hasn’t been found. It operated long before Ridgefield — or most towns — had a public high school; eighth grade was then the highest year of schooling for most Americans. However, if a young man wanted to go into the clergy, medicine, or law,  preparation for college was usually needed, and the Ridgefield Boarding School offered that, along with vocational training for banking and business. 

Tuition was $25 a quarter or $100 a year, which in modern dollars would be about $2,700. If you wanted French or math in that curriculum, the total would be around $3,200.

An 1833 advertisement that appeared in The New York Journal of Commerce  never mentions the sex of students. While the school may have been only for young men, the ad’s wording seems careful not to be gender-specific, and it’s possible young ladies were also admitted. (The Rev. David Short’s private school, which followed St. John’s, was co-ed.)

The advertisement gives interesting glimpses of some aspects of secondary education back then, and a look at how Ridgefield was promoted in the first half of the 19th Century:

RIDGEFIELD BOARDING SCHOOL

This institution is permanently located at Ridgefield (Fairfield Co.) Connecticut, and no exertions will be spared by the Principal to render it worthy a continuance of the liberal patronage it has hitherto received.

Ridgefield is one of the most healthy and retired villages in the State — noted for the morality and intelligence of its inhabitants, and possesses every requisite to make it an eligible situation for youth. It is fifty-four miles from the city of New York, with which it has a direct and daily communication. The course of study will be adapted to the wishes of the parents or guardians of each pupil — preparation for the Counting House or College. The French and Spanish Languages will be taught, if required.

The yearly course of study will be divided into two terms, of twenty-four weeks each — the first to commence on the first Monday of May — the second on the first Monday of November.

Terms for Board, including Tuition in English studies, $25 per quarter — Languages, or Mathematics, an additional charge of $5. No extra charges except for Books and Stationary.

The Principal is a graduate of Columbia College, and has liberty to refer to the President and Professors of that institution. Also, Rev. Wm. A. Clark, D.D.; Rev. Edmond D. Barry D.D.; Dr. Wm. Hibbard; Aaron H. Palmer, Esq; Messrs. S.C. & S. Lynnes; John Moras, Esq.

SAMUEL S. ST. JOHN, Ridgefield, Aug. 19, 1833

The school lasted until around 1841 when St. John received an offer from the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen to run its school in New York City. Founded in 1820, before there were public schools in New York, the Mechanic’s School was one of the first two free schools in that city.

In 1842, the New York City Board of Education was created  and began operating free public schools. A year later St. John was hired as principal of  School No. 26 in the 4th Ward and not long afterward was given general supervision of the other schools of the Ward, overseeing more than 4,000 pupils.  By 1848 his reputation had grown to the point where he was named commissioner of the schools in the City of New York, a post he held for two years. 

While he was leading public schools, St. John also continued to teach privately. “He has had numerous private pupils in the classics, in which he always took great delight,” an obituary said.

St. John retired in 1859 and returned to Ridgefield, living on the family farm on Ridgebury Road, a little north of George Washington Highway. The St. John homestead still stands at 620 Ridgebury Road.

Like his father, Samuel had an interest in public service. In 1837 when he was running his boarding school, he served as a  state senator for the 11th Connecticut District. In 1864 he was elected a Ridgefield state representative  to the General Assembly and served as a selectman a year later. He was also a county commissioner in the days when Connecticut had county governments.

“While he was a man of decided convictions, he was extremely reticent and retiring, never obtruding his opinion upon others unless called upon, or he saw good special reasons for so doing,” his obituary said. He was “a sincere lover of his country and its institutions, ever loyal and hearty in his support — a politician in the best and truest sense of the word, but never an office-seeker.”

Samuel St. John died in 1882 at the age of 75.

He and Lucy had a son who, at age 18, graduated from his father’s alma mater, Columbia. Thomas Platt St. John became a respected attorney in Manhattan and was also a promising political official  — in 1851 at the age of 21, he was elected as a state representative from a district of New York City, and was subsequently reelected.

Thomas St. John was also an accomplished writer and scholar — Annus Mirabilis, a long poem he wrote and read before the Philolexian Society of Columbia College, was published as a small book in 1848 that is still available today in reprints. “He was a great admirer of Shakespeare, and would quote with remarkable accuracy voluminous portions of that celebrated author,” said a biographer in 1881.

However, Thomas apparently tired of the pace of the city. He and his new wife, Mary Louise Runyon, opted in 1859 to join his father in his return to Ridgebury and the life of a farmer. 

Ridgefield, alas,  proved to be a place of sadness. Thomas and Mary lost their infant child soon after they arrived.  Four years later, Mary, only 32 years old, died during a miscarriage. Thomas was despondent and died a year afterward at the age of 35. The official cause was given as diabetes.

Bob Gustafson: 

Ridgefield’s Cartoonist

Several nationally known cartoonists have lived here, but none has taken up Ridgefield as a subject for his art as Bob Gustafson did. The Ridgefield Press’s cartoonist for more than 40 years produced literally thousands of cartoons for the newspaper. Some teased town officials for their actions or inactions, others illustrated community problems,  many promoted good causes in a good-natured way, and a few were just good gags. 

 A native of Brookline, Mass., Robert D. Gustafson was born in 1920. He  was a paperboy as a youngster, served as a pilot in the U.S. Army, pitched semi-pro baseball in the Boston area, played drums in a band, and studied at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts School. 

Before he was 21, he was sending cartoon gag ideas to The New Yorker, and several were purchased and used. He later did cartoons for magazines like Good Housekeeping and Saturday

Evening Post.

“You have to come up with something you like and let everybody judge it,” Gustafson said in a 1991 interview about his work. “Sometimes it flops. It’s not like being a plumber — when you go in and fix a pipe and turn the faucet on and the water comes out, you know it’s OK.”

After working for a Boston magazine and a newspaper, he got a job with King Features, ghosting several comic strips and eventually taking over the nationally circulated strip, “Tilly the Toiler,” which had started in 1921 when he was only a year old.  He later worked for Mort Walker on both Beetle Bailey and Hi & Lois. And on the side, he did cartoons for The Press.

“Cartoonists never stop learning,” he said. “They’re always observing.” 

Although he lived in Ridgefield only from 1954 to 1960, Gustafson continued to “observe” town affairs at his Greenwich home through the pages of The Press, which he read thoroughly for ideas. He’d also chat by phone each week with the Press’s editor, looking for ideas on timely issues — and giving the editor hell if he had changed a word or two in a caption the previous week.

Gustafson had several favorite subjects, including the Cass Gilbert fountain. He was aghast at suggestions that the landmark be moved from its island at Main Street and West Lane, complaining repeatedly about that work of art’s being sacrificed to “the almighty automobile.” In cartoon after cartoon, he dealt with the issue. Saddened by cars all too often crashing into the monument, he’d offer entertaining suggestions for protecting it — one shows the fountain, raised on a mound and a

tunnel running under it to carry the traffic. But one week, seemingly giving up hope, he drew another showing the fountain, well-protected from cars by big railings, being hit by an airplane.

He also attacked vandalism, often portraying vandals as evil-looking thugs. Being a senior citizen himself, he encouraged help for Ridgefield’s elderly, and would offer suggestions on how to

improve their lot. He supported many town organizations, but especially the Community Center — he was active in the center in its early years and, as an accomplished photographer, used to take publicity pictures for them.

One of his favorite subjects in the 1950s and 60s was Leo F. Carroll, the colorful and charismatic first selectman and former state police leader. Carroll, who lived directly across Wilton Road West from Gustafson, was often teased for his pronouncements such as when he declared that

Ridgefield’s dump was “the most delightful dump in America.”

Though most of his Press cartoons were very local in nature, some captured wider attention. When controversy erupted over a new gas station’s need to cut down some large trees to make access to the highway safer, Gustafson drew a cartoon showing a couple of giant trees like the redwoods in California with a big opening so people could drive through them. Shell Oil Company offered to buy the cartoon. 

A gag, playing on the idea that we’ve all seen supermarket shopping carts in strange places,

showed an Arab on a camel in the middle of a desert coming upon a shopping cart. Grand Union later bought it.

Gustafson won many awards for his work including commendations from professional cartoonist organizations and from the New England Press Association. 

For relaxation, he enjoyed golf and following the Boston Red Sox. For many years he loved teasing Yankee fans, but by the late 1990s had come to enjoy watching the Sox’s arch enemy — he especially admired Derek Jeter.

Bob Gustafson died in 2001 at the age of 81. 

Matilda Ziegler: 

The Heiress Who Helped the Blind

A wealthy heiress who found Ridgefield a retreat spent much of her life aiding the blind. Nearly a century after her death, she still is helping the visually impaired. Inspired by a young son who lost his sight, Matilda Ziegler founded a magazine and a foundation, both aimed at the blind. 

Her Main Street mansion is now Wesley Hall, part of the Methodist Church complex.

Electa Matilda Curtis was born on a farm in 1841 in Saratoga County, N.Y.,  and, when she was about 18, married a local boy, Edward Gamble. They had a son, Charles, who was blinded in an accident as a child. By 1870, she was divorced and living with the 10-year-old boy at her parents’ farm in Schuylerville.

Within 15 years, her life had changed dramatically. Mrs. Gamble was living in New York City when she met William Ziegler, a millionaire industrialist. Born in 1843 of Pennsylvania Dutch farmers, Ziegler had worked a printer’s apprentice, clerked in a drug store, learned telegraphy, pharmacology, and chemistry, went to business school, and worked for a wholesale drug and chemical company before he wound up acquiring and heading a large company that produced baking powder and other cooking chemicals.

William and Matilda were married in 1886.

William Ziegler later  became famous for financing several unsuccessful expeditions to the Arctic in an effort to plant the American flag at the North Pole. He also created one of the most valuable estates in America. In 1902 he bought Great Island on the Darien shore and built a mansion as the center of a spread that included a huge 20-stall stone stable with indoor ring, a polo grounds, and a yacht basin. In 2016, the Ziegler family placed the 63-acre property on the market for $175 million, ranking it at the time as the fifth highest-priced home for sale in the entire United States. The price was reduced two years later to $120 million. The property is still owned by the family.

Ziegler himself got to enjoy his estate only three years, dying in 1905 of complications from a runaway carriage accident the previous year.  He left behind an estate worth some $30 million ($884 million today), of which $18.5 million went to his adopted son, William Jr. (who was actually his nephew).  Matilda was bequeathed $50,000 a year ($1.4 million) as well as lifetime use of their Fifth Avenue mansion and the Great Island estate. After a lawsuit challenging parts of the will, she wound up with another $2.5 million  ($70-million) in cash and stocks. 

Soon after William’s death,  Mrs. Ziegler — she  went by Matilda Ziegler, E. Matilda Ziegler or Mrs. E. M. Ziegler, but never by Electa Ziegler — began devoting herself to the needs of the blind. In 1907, she founded the Matilda Ziegler Publishing Company for the Blind in New York City.

“As the loving mother of a son who lost his sight in childhood, Mrs. Ziegler knew from personal experience how few resources were available to enrich the lives of the blind,” says the E. Matilda Ziegler Foundation for the Blind.  “At the time, communications reading material in Braille was limited. By creating and distributing a monthly, general-interest magazine in Braille, Mrs. Ziegler helped break through the isolation that defined the lives of blind people.”

When the magazine started in 1907, circulation was 6,500 copies and a subscription cost only 10 cents a year — a nominal fee that was charged to make the publication eligible for an inexpensive second-class mailing rate. About a year  later, a law was passed, making periodicals for the blind postage-free, and the magazine itself became completely free.

Each 48-page  copy, looking like a large scroll when it was delivered,  included a summary of current events, scientific advances,  a short story,  poetry,   popular music,  reports from blind people describing their successes in various fields, and sometimes even raised maps as “illustrations.” By 1919,  the magazine was producing 96,000 copies annually, which required printing more than 6,000,000 pages per year on a special Braille press. The print edition lasted until 2009, but the magazine continued online with audio feeds until 2014 when it shut down.

Along with the magazine, Ziegler built a printing plant that produced not only the magazine, but books for the blind.

In 1929,  Ziegler established the E. Matilda Ziegler Foundation for the Blind to pay for the magazine and for other services that benefited the blind.

Meanwhile, in 1912, she bought Hawley Cottage, later called Ashton Croft, the Main Street

mansion built about 1892 by Henry E. Hawley, a tea importer. His widow, Elizabeth, sold the 11.4 acre estate to Ziegler for an undisclosed sum. The property then extended from Main Street along King Lane to High Ridge Avenue.

Why Mrs. Ziegler bought a house in Ridgefield when she already had a six-bedroom mansion 15 miles away on Great Island is unclear. Also unclear is why the renovated the exterior, which had been shingled, into a Tudor-style design of posts, beams, and stucco. (The only other Tudor building on Main Street, built at about the same time, is the so-called Pizza Block of stores and offices in the central business district.) One of the exterior changes  she made to the house was facing porches and chimneys with stone, similar to the look of the manor house at her Darien estate.

It’s also unknown how often she was in Ridgefield instead of her Manhattan and Darien homes. She must have spent some time here — she had three automobiles registered in Ridgefield in 1914.

In 1924, when she was in her middle 80s, she sold the house  to Sanford H.E. Freund, a New York City attorney. Tax stamps on the deed suggest that the price in today’s dollars was about $720,000. The Odd Fellows bought the estate from the Freund family in 1956. Three years later,  the organization sold most of the property — retaining the carriage house for its lodge — to Jesse Lee Methodist Church, which planned to eventually build  a new church there to replace the old one at Main and Catoonah Streets. 

Matilda Ziegler died in 1932 at the age of 91.

Her adopted son, William Ziegler Jr. (1894-1958), continued her work, serving as president of both the foundation and  publishing company  as well as the American Foundation for the Blind, and the American Foundation for Overseas Blind. His son,  William Ziegler III, his son, became president of the foundation and the publishing company, serving until his death in 2008.  

Today, while the magazine is gone, the foundation is alive and quite active in providing money for vision research — in the past decade, more than $4.5-million in grants were awarded to “scientists whose research holds the promise of major impact.”

Timothy M. Cheesman, M.D.:

The Doctor’s Stone Legacy

Timothy Cheesman didn’t get to spend much time in Ridgefield but he nonetheless left behind an edifice that has been a part of helping humankind in various ways for nearly a century. 

Which is fitting, since Dr. Cheesman had spent his life trying to heal others.

Although descended from old Quaker stock in Philadelphia, Timothy Matlack Cheesman was
born in New York City in 1824, a son of a local physician, John Cummins Cheesman. Following in the footsteps of his father, he graduated in 1859 from the College of Physicians and Surgeons, now known as Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons.

Even before completing his medical training, Dr. Cheesman was serving as a surgeon in the 7th Regiment of the New York National Guard, starting in 1853. In 1861, he was mustered into national service in the Civil War as a surgeon with rank of colonel on the Staff First Division of the New York National Guard. He remained in the guard after the war, retiring in 1874.

He maintained a practice in New York for many years and was the father of Dr. Timothy Matlack Cheesman Jr., also a Columbia graduate who became a pioneer in the teaching of bacteriology. 

In the late 1880s, like many other wealthy city folk, Dr. Cheesman Sr. and his wife, Maria Louisa, decided to build a country home in Ridgefield. They chose nearly 30 acres on the east side of East Ridge, an area that was being touted as “Prospect Ridge” for its view.

Cheesman was probably ill and may have been seeking the clean air of the country climate to help his health or at least as a place to rest. He had Bright’s disease, which would lead to kidney failure and prove fatal for him (and for his son in 1919). 

In 1886, he made out a will, distributing his property to his wife and children. But on March 1, 1887, he added a codicil to the will, noting he had recently “purchased certain property at Ridgefield, Connecticut, upon which I am about to erect a dwelling house.” He added,  “I give and devise unto my wife Maria Louisa Cheesman in addition to the bequests and devises to her in said will contained, the use of said land and any dwelling house which may be thereon erected at the time of my death, with the furniture, plate and pictures which may then be contained therein…” (“Furniture, plate and pictures” was an old legal term for “contents.”)

This showed Cheesman was concerned about his family’s future; at the same time he was dating the construction of the house at 1887.

He named the place “Matlack,”  an ancestral name in the family of his mother, Mary Matlack Hicks Cheesman. The exterior of the house was almost all stone, perhaps reflecting the fact that it was built on a rock outcropping that projects well into the cellar of the house and is quite visible there.

Dr. Cheesman died July 8, 1888, at Matlack. He was only 63 years old. (His son was 66 at his death in 1919.)

Maria Louisa Cheesman continued to use Matlack until her death in 1903. 

In 1922, the estate was acquired by the Holy Ghost Fathers (officially now called the Congregation of the Holy Spirit), who set up a school for novices — new members of the order — who would get their initial training to be priests or brothers there.  Holy Ghost missionaries were  sent to countries around the world. Many of them spent their lives helping the poor in poverty-stricken nations. 

The order enlarged the house, especially for dormitory rooms, and built the addition with stone to match the original dwelling.

Declining numbers of candidates for the order caused the Holy Ghost Fathers to shut down

the novitiate in 1970 and move operations to their seminary at Ferndale in Norwalk. The town bought the property in 1971, paying $395,000 ($2.4 million in 2019 dollars) for 26 acres and sundry buildings.

Matlack and its dormitory addition were soon used as headquarters for the  public school administration offices, overseeing a growing school system that reached as many as 6,000 students in the early 1970s.

Outbuildings on the property became Ridgefield Guild of Artists gallery, Ridgefield Theater Barn performance center, and Marine Corps League quarters. Some of the estate land is the Bark Park and Fitzgerald Little League Field.  The town also donated some of the land for 25 units of

privately developed affordable housing called Halpin Court along Halpin Lane, opened in 1991.

In 1987, soon-to-retire First Selectman Elizabeth Leonard announced plans to turn the main building into congregate housing for the elderly. The facility at 51 Prospect Ridge opened in 1991 as “Prospect Ridge congregate housing,” and includes 34 one-bedroom apartments with 24 hour supervision, housekeeping services, and a common dining room with one meal a day.

The town also built 20 two- and three-bedroom affordable apartments at Prospect Ridge soon afterward.

Dr. Cheesman would probably be pleased to know that the refuge he built during his final illness had turned into a place that has provided help for the poor, education for the community, housing for the elderly, and even a spot for dogs to play.

Capt. Everett Roberts, 

Lifetime in Defense of His Country

Ridgefield had many heroes in World War II, but among the native sons who seem to have been forgotten is Everett Roberts, a naval officer who once was adrift for more than a day in the

South Pacific after his destroyer was sunk in a major battle. 

Roberts went on to spend a long career working on the defense of his country, both in the Navy and in civilian life.

Often called Bob, Everett Earl Roberts Jr. was born in Ridgefield in 1916, son of E. Earl and Alice May Stevens Roberts. His dad was a longtime electrician and local businessman who was also Ridgefield’s dealer in the once famous Locke mowers. His sister was Marion Roberts Haight, wife of the town’s second police chief, John F. Haight Jr.

Roberts was accepted at the U.S. Naval Academy where he became known for his abilities at tennis and sailing. After graduating in 1940 as an ensign, he was assigned as gunnery officer on the USS Indianapolis, based in Pearl Harbor. Fortunately for the Indianapolis and for Ens. Roberts, the heavy cruiser was conducting Marine landing drills 800 miles away at Johnston Atoll when Pearl Harbor was attacked on Dec. 7, 1941.

While stationed in Hawaii, he met Dorothy Ida Bechert whom he married in 1942. 

After his tour on the Indianapolis,  Roberts was promoted to lieutenant commander and assigned as the executive officer on the destroyer escort USS Samuel B. Roberts — its namesake, not a relation, was Navy Coxswain Samuel Booker Roberts Jr, who posthumously received the Navy Cross for rescuing stranded Marines from Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands earlier in the war. The ship participated in the Battle of Samar, a part of the Battle of Leyte Gulf, which has been described as “The U.S. Navy’s finest hour.” The U.S. forces lost 3,500 people, and six ships while 10,000 Japanese were killed, and 27 of their ships sunk, including four aircraft carriers.

After it made repeated torpedo runs against a Japanese cruiser, the Samuel B. Roberts was sunk on Oct. 25, 1944.  

Everett Roberts made it to a life raft. A U.S. Navy historical account of the Samuel B. Roberts says  that for those aboard the raft, “The long ordeal, marked by sporadic shark attacks and lack of food and water, lasted for 18 hours. Nearly every survivor was covered head-to-toe in thick black oil. Rubbing one’s eyes only made them burn more and many, accidentally ingesting it, began retching and vomiting. One sailor removed his oil-smeared clothes in order to help him swim easier, but in doing so, exposed the lower portion of his pale white skin not covered with oil. An attentive shark swam up to the naked survivor and nudged the exposed portion. The man quickly put his clothes back on.”

Lt. Cmdr. Roberts’s raft that drifted three days in the oil slick. On the third day they were spotted by a rescue ship that was on its way back to base after giving up hope of finding more survivors. The rescuers were wary, “worried the men in the water might actually be Japanese, known to play possum before attempting to kill any U.S. sailors trying to rescue them from the sea.”

As the rescue boat approached, “the sailors on board, with guns drawn, were ready to fire. One of the rescuers on the bridge yelled out, ‘Who won the World Series?’ Several survivors shouted back, ‘The St. Louis Cardinals!’” The Cardinals had played their cross-town rival St. Louis Browns, winning the series in six games only 16 days before Samuel B. Roberts went down. 

In all, 120 men of Samuel B. Roberts’s crew of 220 survived the sinking.

Back in Ridgefield  Roberts’s wife and parents waited weeks to learn his fate. By mid-November 1944, they knew that his ship had been sunk in what news reports were calling “the Second Battle of the Philippines.” Then, The Ridgefield Press reported Nov. 30, “Mr. and Mrs. E. Earl Roberts and Mrs. Everett Roberts enjoyed a belated Thanksgiving dinner last Sunday at the Roberts home on Mountain View Avenue following receipt of a letter on Friday from Lt. Everett Roberts which stated that he was safe and well and hoped to be home on furlough sometime in December, preferably for Christmas.”

Roberts received the Legion of Merit  for “exceptional meritorious conduct in the performance of outstanding services” during and after the battle.

After the war ended,  Roberts remained in the Navy and eventually became the commanding officer of the destroyer escort USS Marsh and then commanded the destroyer USS Porterfield.

Meanwhile, he was promoted to captain and  in 1954 earned a master’s degree in bioradiology from the University of California, Berkeley. Captain Roberts was working with the Military Liaison Committee to the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission at the time of his retirement from the Navy in 1958. (The AEC eventually became part of the U.S. Department of Energy.)

After his retirement from the Navy, Capt. Roberts worked for 24 years for RCA in Moorestown, N.J. where he was involved in the development of the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS) and the U.S. Navy’s AEGIS Combat System used for guided missiles. After his retirement from RCA, he was active in various civic service organizations in the Moorestown area.

Captain Roberts died in 2007 at the age of 91 and is buried in Lewistown, Pa., next to his wife, who died in 1999.