Ely Culbertson: 

Revolutionary Bridge Guru

Ridgefield has had its share of colorful characters but few could match Ely Culbertson, anarchist, revolutionary, politician, author, peace promoter, and – above all – contract bridge expert and promoter.

Born in Romania in 1891 of a wealthy American father and his Russian wife, Culbertson grew up in the Caucasus, but as a teenager studied briefly at Yale and then Cornell, dropping out and returning to Europe where he fell in love with Nadya, daughter of a Georgian princess who was deep into the plottings of the local nihilists and anarchists. 

According to his own story, Culbertson began a career as a professional card player as a means of supporting the revolutionary movement. Nadya was eventually murdered and Culbertson imprisoned after an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate a local governor. 

His father rescued him, but he eventually stowed away on a ship bound for Mexico where he took part in more revolutionary plottings, winding up in prison again. After his release, he went to Spain for yet another revolutionary effort, then finally settled in Paris where he studied at the Sorbonne. 

By 1921, he was in Greenwich Village, supporting himself by playing bridge and developing a bidding system that became world famous. 

In 1923 he married Josephine Murphy Dillon, who taught auction bridge and was a top woman player. Together they promoted his new version of the game, contract bridge. To gain publicity for the game, they’d stage challenge matches — one in 1931-32 lasted six weeks, made the front pages of hundreds of newspapers, and was covered on radio and in newsreels. 

Culbertson wrote many book on bridge during his career. “A deck of cards is built like the purest of hierarchies, with every card a master to those below it, a lackey to those above it,” he said in one of them.

In 1929, Culbertson founded and edited The Bridge World magazine, which is still published today and says it is “widely considered to be the world’s leading bridge magazine.”

“He manufactured and sold bridge players’ supplies, including the introduction of Kem playing cards, maintained an organization of bridge teachers (Culbertson National Studios), which at its peak had 6.000 members, and conducted bridge competitions through the United States Bridge Association and the World Bridge Olympics and American Bridge Olympics,” reports the American Contract Bridge League. “In its best year, 1937, The Bridge World, Inc., grossed more than $1,000,000, of which $220,000 were royalties payable to Culbertson before profits were calculated.”

In the mid-1930s, at the peak of his career, Culbertson bought the huge Lewis estate on West Lane, and while there wrote his autobiography, “The Strange Lives of One Man.” He also ran for Congress, but didn’t get far. 

By 1940, he was in financial trouble, and his home was foreclosed. It became a college, then a resort and was finally torn down and the land subdivided into the Ridgefield Manor Estates.

Over the years before and after World War II, Culbertson promoted world peace. “God and the politicians willing,” he wrote, “the United States can declare peace upon the world and win it.” he was also known for saying, “We must conquer war, or war will conquer us.”

Culbertson wrote several books proposing a United Nations-like system — he was like a one-man UN himself: he spoke Russian, English, French, German, Czech, Italian, and Spanish fluently, could read and understand Slavonic, Polish, Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian, and knew Latin and classical Greek.

He died in 1955 in Vermont at the age of 64.

The Bridge World in 1964 named Culbertson along with Charles Goren and Harold S. Vanderbilt as the first three members of a Bridge Hall of Fame, now maintained by the American Contract Bridge League. 

Dr. John Ireland Howe: 

Pin Money

The common pin is about the smallest device we commonly use, a tiny piece of metal with a sharp tip and a small head that holds one thing to another. Pins seem simple and insignificant, but to John Ireland Howe, they were the source of his considerable fortune. 

The Ridgefield native invented the first machine to mass produce them.

John Ireland Howe was born in Ridgefield in 1793. His grandfather was Epenetus Howe, a prominent local miller whose saltbox house on the corner of North Salem and Saw Mill Hill Roads is still standing today. (His mother was born Mary Polly Ireland, whence his middle name, which he always used.)

Howe studied medicine and became a physician at the New York Alms House in Manhattan. There he saw pins being made by the old-fashioned, hand-made way of cutting up wire and sharpening a tip, and adding a head — a process said to require 18 steps for each pin.

He set about designing a machine that would manufacture pins, received patents in 1832 and 1833, and with the backing of New York financiers, he opened the Howe Manufacturing Company in Derby in 1836. The company moved to the Birmingham section of Derby, Connecticut, two years later and its pin factory became one of the largest in the country.

Howe and his staff also invented a machine for “carding” pins — mounting them on heavy paper for sale.

The physician’s first foray into the world of industrial inventions was far from pins, however. His familiarity with chemistry from studying medicine led him to experiment on India rubber latex, and put it to practical uses through chemical additives that would make the sticky latex lasting as well as resilient and durable. 

“So far as I know,” Howe once said, “I was the first person who attempted to utilize rubber by combining other substances with it, but I did not happen to stumble upon the right substance.” The man who did was Charles Goodyear, a native of New Haven whose process for treating rubber latex, called vulcanization, was patented in 1844.

Howe made a fortune on pins, and his mansion in Derby has been acquired by the local historical society which plans to restore it and open it to the public. 

The miniature model that Howe used to apply for his 1841 patent on an improved pin-making

machine is now in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.  “His design was mechanically very complex,” the Smithsonian says. “The patent document comprised 20 pages of detailed text and five of diagrams.” Though only about a foot wide and a foot high, the model is extremely detailed.

Howe died in 1876 and is buried in Derby.

A grandson, John Ireland Howe Downes (1909-1987), was an impressionist painter of some repute, whose work is in the National Gallery of Art.  Another descendant, art scholar John Ireland Howe Baur, who once headed the Whitney Museum, was named for the artist, not the pin-maker.

William B. Lusk: 

“Daddy”

“After completing a 35-year job, many men would be content to slip quietly into retirement,” said a Ridgefield Press editorial in 1950. “Not Mr. Lusk. Long ago his stout heart committed him to a lifetime of devotion to humanity.”

Indeed, the Rev. William Lusk, rector of St. Stephen’s longer than anyone in the church's three-century history, had retired in Ridgefield, but was heading off to England on an unusual mission. He had joined the staff of London’s All Hallows-by-the-Tower Church, which despite having been bombed out in the recent World War II, was still holding “open-air” services every day in its roofless building — All Hallows had been holding services daily for 1,275 years and wasn’t about to stop because of a German bomb! Lusk was to minister to the congregation and help London’s oldest church raise money to rebuild. 

He was 80 years old when he undertook the task.

A native of Northern Ireland,  William Brown Lusk was born in 1869, and graduated from Queens College, Belfast, where he was a rugby and track star. He came to this country in 1894, graduating three years later from Princeton Theological Seminary. 

He became a Presbyterian minister in the Adirondacks, but finding the Presbyterians too dogmatic and rigid, he joined the Episcopal Church in 1907 and in 1915, was called to Ridgefield. That was the same year the current stone church building was completed. A year later, a new rectory opened. 

During his years here, he came to be known as “Daddy,” not only by parishioners but also in the community. 

“Those who knew him recall his fine Irish humor,” said Robert Haight in his history of St. Stephen’s. “He was articulate, somewhat of a nonconformist, open, warm, and comfortable with all people, though seeming to relate most closely with persons of intellect and wealth. He was an avid reader and a classical scholar, conversant with both Latin and Greek.”

Lusk was also the first rector who employed non-scriptural material in his sermons. “The texts of his sermons were often taken from books or poems he had read, or from events of the day,” Haight said. “While this is commonplace today, Mr. Lusk’s progressivism then cause some consternation among the more conservative members of the parish.”

Nonetheless, he gained a wide reputation as a preacher, and was often invited to speak at other churches, as well as at the Episcopal cathedral in Hartford and Berkeley Divinity School. 

One of the first things Lusk did in 1915 was to create the St. Stephen’s Men’s Civic League, aimed at “bringing the men of the parish closer together and to promote free and methodical discussion of questions concerning the social and moral well-being of the community.” To the latter end, the league had an orchestra that played many community concerts. But it also sponsored debates on timely topics, such as local liquor laws and the advantages of automobiles.  

The league also got involved in more controversial social issues, such as fighting discrimination being practiced against the local Italian population.

Lusk led the congregation during two world wars — in World War I, he traveled to France to visit and encourage the troops. He set up a YMCA hut for the Connecticut soldiers in France, where they could relax and have a taste of home. 

After World War II, he served on the Postwar Planning Board, which aided returning servicemen.

During his years, St. Stephen’s Church prospered, but maintained a country flavor — for most of their years here, William and Edna Lusk had chickens, a cow, and some rabbits out back of the rectory. (In 1938, the vestry ordered a halt to the brooding of chickens in the rectory basement because of the “disagreeable odor.”) 

After working in England, the Lusks returned to Ridgefield, living on High Ridge. William Lusk died in 1953 at the age of 83. Edna Lusk, also a native of Northern Ireland who was active in the Red Cross here and was known as “Monie,” died 10 years later, age 79.

Peter Wyden: 

20th Century Issues

Peter Wyden’s 15 books examined such major 20th Century events and issues as the Holocaust, the atomic bomb, the Berlin Wall, mental illness, Masters and Johnson’s sex clinic, suburban kids, and the Spanish Civil War.

But perhaps his most successful book was “Bay of Pigs: The Untold Story,” which won an Overseas Press Club Award. Research for it included a six-hour interview with Cuban premier Fidel Castro. Cautious and distant at first, Castro eventually warmed up, even occasionally poking Wyden in the belly and borrowing his notebook to map out battle movements as he described his victory. 

“He was very proud — for a good reason,” Wyden said in 1979. “How many island countries have licked the United States of America? Nobody. Look at it objectively, no ideology attached. He won. It was the most spectacular defeat of the United States in this century.”

Peter Wyden was born in Berlin, Germany, in 1923. His Jewish parents — a businessman and a singer —  fled the Nazis in 1937, and Wyden was 13 years old when he arrived in New York. 

He later wrote about his boyhood experiences in Germany in the book, “Stella, One Woman’s True Tale of Evil, Betrayal and Survival in Hitler’s Germany,” in which told the story of a girl he had known who survived the Holocaust by hiding her Jewish heritage and collaborating with the Nazis.

He studied at the City College of New York and began writing for The Daily Metal Reporter, a trade publication, in 1942, but soon joined the U.S. Army, serving as a writer in the Psychological Warfare Division.

After the war, Wyden worked for daily newspapers in Wichita and St. Louis before turning to magazines. He became Washington correspondent for Newsweek, an editor of Saturday Evening Post, a senior editor of McCall’s, and executive editor of Ladies Home Journal.

He began turning to books in the 1960s. Wyden’s writing “combined exhaustive research with a sense of the human and the dramatic,” said Macklin Reid in a 1998 Ridgefield Press obituary of the journalist. His book, “Day One: Before Hiroshima and After,” chronicled the creation and use of the world’s first atomic bomb, and his research included spending five weeks in Japan. The book became the basis for the Emmy Award-winning 1989 CBS movie, Day One.

“I think probably his favorite book — which is not necessarily the one he’s remembered for the most — is the book on the Spanish Civil War,” said his wife, Elaine Seaton Wyden. In the introduction to “The Passionate War: A Narrative History of the Spanish Civil War, 1936 to 1939,” Wyden described the pull that drew idealists from around the world to fight in Spain as volunteers: “The Republican causa stood against Hitler, the priests, the landowners, the military caste, the privileged. The opposing Nationalist Movimiento, led by General Francisco Franco, lined up against Marxism, the labor unions, the land hungry, the blasphemers.”

His last book, published a few months before his death, was one he said he didn’t write for many years because it was too painful. “Conquering Schizophrenia: A Father, His Son and A Medical Breakthrough,” detailed his 25 years of dealing with his son Jeff’s mental illness as well as modern medical treatment of schizophrenia and how families can deal with the disease. “You have to be in there, so you can quietly and diplomatically assist in the treatment,” Wyden said. “It’s a career.”

Wyden’s other son is Ron Wyden, a United States senator from Oregon since 1996. Of his father, Senator Wyden once said, “My dad probably was the one who showed me life can be silly sometimes, and you better accept it.”

Wyden was 74 years old when he died of a stroke. He had lived in Ridgefield for 24 years.

Amos Baker: 

The Apple Doctor

More than 7,500 varieties or “cultivars” of the apple have been known, and one of them was “discovered” in Ridgefield. However, you’d have a hard time finding Amos Baker’s fruit today.

Baker discovered his apple by accident. “According to the story,” Ridgefield historian Silvio Bedini wrote, “while Dr. Baker was waiting for his grain to be ground at the grist mill operated at Lake Mamanasco by Isaac Keeler, he passed the time by taking a walk through fields around the lake. He noticed a tree with brilliantly colored apples and he tasted one of them. They were of excellent quality and Dr. Baker made a mental note of the tree’s location. The following spring he returned to take some grafts from the old tree and the apple produced in this manner has since become known throughout the country.”

Bedini got this story from Rockwell’s “History of Ridgefield,” published in 1927. Rockwell also said the apple was known “throughout the country” which may have been a bit of an exaggeration. The Baker was probably never grown much beyond Connecticut and New York.

Today, in an era when you’d be hard pressed to find a store or even orchard selling more than 10 different kinds of apples, the Baker apple is virtually unknown.  Even the scientifically overseen orchards at Cornell University, with nearly 60 varieties, and the commercial Trees of Antiquity, with 176 varieties, have no Bakers.

Nonetheless, historians Rockwell and Bedini maintain that the the Baker apple was once “famous.”

The two-volume “The Apples of New York” by Beach, Booth and Taylor, published in 1905, describes the Baker as “a red apple of good size, pretty uniform in size and shape, and of fairly good quality. It is not so good a keeper as Baldwin and is inferior to it in quality and hardly equal to it in color. 

“The tree is hardy, healthy, vigorous, and reliably productive with a tendency to biennial bearing. There is a considerable loss from the dropping of the fruit. 

“Although it has been known in cultivation for more than a century, it appears to have practically passed out of the lists offered by the nurserymen in North America and evidently is nearly obsolete.”

The authors added, “It is stated that the original tree was in full bearing in its native place, Richfield, Ct., during the Revolutionary War. Forty years ago it was but little known outside the vicinity of its origin.”

Amos Baker was a prominent character in late 18th and early 19th Century Ridgefield. He was born around 1753. His birthplace is unknown, but may not have been Ridgefield. He was certainly living here by 1780 when he and his wife, Sarah, began recording the births of their children in town records.

Baker was a surgeon’s mate with Colonel Philip Burr Bradley’s battalion at the Battle of Ridgefield in 1777 and was part of Captain Isaac Hines’ Company at the Alarm at Fairfield in 1779. Perhaps his service with Colonel Bradley — whose home is where Ballard Park is today — introduced him to Ridgefield and its need for a doctor. Baker’s house, it turns out, was just north of Bradley’s, on Main Street — about across from the old Elms Inn.

Dr. Baker was an organizer back in the early 1800s of what is now the Jesse Lee Memorial United Methodist Church. “His kitchen served as one of the several meeting places for the first classes that were formed,” Bedini said.

Perhaps that kitchen also produced the world’s first Baker apple pie. 

Jeremy Wilmot: 

A Sense of Past and Place

Few people have served Ridgefield in more ways for more years than Jeremy Wilmot. A member of five town government agencies over her half century as a Ridgefielder, she was best known as a champion of historic preservation at a time when Ridgefield was losing some of its ancient  buildings and identity.

“By appearance or association, Ridgefield's architecture and local histories provide us with a sense of past and place,” Wilmot wrote in 1981. “Our landmarks root all of us to Ridgefield, no matter whether newcomer or native.”

Jeremy Griffiths Wilmot was born in New Jersey in 1929. Her family moved to Connecticut and she graduated from Greenwich High School in 1947, attended the Colorado School of Mines, and later finished her college education at Western Connecticut State University.

She moved to Ridgefield in 1955 and, along with raising a family, began her involvement with the community by joining the League of Women Voters and by penning letters to The Ridgefield Press on wide variety of issues.

As a member of the town’s first Charter Revision Commission in 1963, she got to know the inner workings of Ridgefield government. She later served on the Historic District Commission and on the Zoning Board of Appeals. In 1989, she was elected to the Planning and Zoning Commission, but in the 1990s, left to be elected a member of the Board of Selectmen.

Her most tangible legacy to the town was in historic preservation. In the 1970s, she was a founder of the Ridgefield Preservation Trust, an organization that eventually grew into the Ridgefield Historical Society. Calling herself a “field director and foot soldier,” she collaborated with fellow trust founder Madeline Corbin in researching and writing the voluminous Ridgefield Historic

Architectural Resources Survey, cataloguing the construction techniques, architectural style, and significant social history of some 600 of the town’s buildings.

The 1,500-page document was adopted as an official part of the town’s Plan of Conservation and Development, and is still used regularly by the town planning staff to make owners aware of their properties’ history.

“It wasn’t one of those programs that just died,” Wilmot said in a 1980 interview with The New York Times. “Instead it sensitized our people to the history of their houses.”

Her work in “sensitizing” people to Ridgefield’s history didn’t end there. She worked on setting up an early oral history program for the Keeler Tavern Preservation Society,  and organized a Catoonah Street Festival to celebrate that neighborhood’s varied mix of architectural styles; in the process, she helped produce a booklet describing the street’s history and buildings.

Her research and passion for preservation were involved in the efforts to save the Weir Farm as a national park and to renovate the old Ridgefield High School auditorium into today’s Ridgefield Playhouse.

Wilmot was also active in the Democratic Party, serving on the Democratic Town Committee and attending state conventions, often as a delegate and frequently challenging the party establishment on behalf of the liberal or peace wing of the party. She was also involved in the Ridgefield Women’s Political Caucus, a 1970s organization whose legal actions against the town led to the expansion of the Ridgefield Boys Club into the Ridgefield Boys and Girls Club.

For a time she made her skills available professionally as a “house detective,” researching for property owners the architecture and history of their homes. She also led workshops on how to research a property's past.

“When she wasn’t doing her research or running for office, she was in her flower garden,” said daughter, Jessica Wilmot. “This also was a love of hers, so much so that she took a job with the Parks and Recreation Commission solely to care for Ballard Park.” (Jessica, longtime owner of The Ancient Mariner, was one of her six children; another was the late Tony Wilmot, popular RHS baseball coach and restaurateur, who is also profiled here.)

Over her years in Ridgefield, she and her former husband, Clifford, owned several old homes, including one overlooking Lake Mamanasco at the end of Pond Road. She later moved to a large old house on Main Street near the fountain, and then to a historic house on upper Wilton Road West.

In the late 1990s she relocated to Lakeville for a decade or so, before returning to Ridgefield for her final years. She died in 2010 at the age of 80. 

Dominic Bedini: 

A Quiet Hero

Dominic Bedini died on June 7, 2004, a day after the 60th anniversary of his parachuting into Normandy on D-Day. It was just one of many battles he fought — the first of them when he was only a child.

“The Dominic Bedini story could rival the greatest war stories to come out of Hollywood,” said broadcaster Paul Baker, a lifelong friend and golfing partner of Bedini.

A member of “The Screaming Eagles,” the 101st Airborne Division, “Poni” Bedini was wounded three times during World War II.

The C-47s that flew them into France on D-Day had mistakenly dropped them prematurely and in widely scattered areas. Most of them lost contact with one another and many were wounded either in their descent or on landing. One of the wounded was Bedini.

When American troops that had landed from ships made it inland, they found Bedini lying on the ground where retreating Germans had left him. Attached to his uniform was a handwritten note in English signed by a German army doctor. It said: “I did all I could do for this man. I hope he survives.” The note included a signature and the fact that the German doctor had attended Michigan State University.

Bedini did survive and returned to duty. He fought in Holland, where he was taken prisoner by the Germans, but was soon released as part of a prisoner exchange for a German officer. 

He went on to fight in the Battle of the Bulge. There he was seriously wounded by machine gun fire, and spent more than a year recuperating in military hospitals.

This, from a man who had battled polio as a child.

Dominic J. Bedini was born in Ridgefield in 1920 and attended local schools, but his education was delayed by illness. As a child, he contracted polio, and required many months of treatment.

“For him to have been a paratrooper was almost unbelievable,” said his sister, Mary F. Bedini Braun of Wilton. Yet, despite the disease, “he was a strong man.”

Bedini attended Ridgefield High School but left before graduating. He did not officially graduate until the year 2000 under a special program that awarded diplomas to veterans whose educations were interrupted by war. He was 80 years old when Dr. Ralph Wallace, then Ridgefield’s superintendent of schools, presented him with a diploma at Laurel Ridge nursing home.

A mason, Bedini had worked for Morganti Inc. for many years and later for Ippoliti Construction Company. He retired in 1985, enjoyed gardening and golf, and was 84 at his death.

Although he was awarded at least two Purple Hearts and many other military commendations,  Bedini rarely talked about his war service. In the late 1990s, however, friends and community leaders convinced him to be grand marshal of the Memorial Day Parade.

“He was a very quiet man, but a generous, good man,” his sister said. “He really was a good friend to everyone.”