Wesolego Bozego Narodzenia! (Merry Christmas!)

by Mary A. Jacobson

St. Paul R.C. Church in Glenville. Built in 1902 and destroyed in a fire in 1968. Courtesy of Greenwich Historical Society

For the many Polish Catholic immigrants who lived in Glenville in the early 1900s, Christmas was a time to celebrate with the traditions they had revered for generations in their former homeland.

Frances Chmielowiec Geraghty, born in Glenville in 1907, shared with Oral History Project interviewer Katherine Scanlon her early memories of Polish traditions at Christmas when interviewed in 1975/76.

“According to the liturgical calendar in Poland, all feast days begin with Christmas Eve…And it’s a great custom, handed down for generations…Christmas Eve itself was a beautiful time.” Traditionally, at Frances’s home, hay would be placed on the dinner table, under the linen tablecloth. “The hay was (to symbolize) the manger of Christ.” At the table there would always be “one place extra set for the unseen guest” Christ. “We still observe that,” she noted.

Although many special foods were enjoyed Christmas Eve, no one was permitted to eat at all that day until the first star in the sky was spotted that evening. Children were usually given the charge of citing this star, a reference to the star of Bethlehem which led the Three Kings to the birthplace of the baby Jesus. “And when you saw the star, then you could eat. That was awfully hard on little children.”

Before sitting down at the table, the family would break and share wafers. This was in remembrance of the Last Supper in which Jesus broke bread with the disciples. These wafers came either from the local parish or from Poland. “There is an exchange of letters late in November…We send our wafers; they send theirs. And then the mother takes the wafer and dips it in honey and feeds each child individually.” Each wafer featured an imprinted design of either a liturgical symbol or a nativity scene.

Frances highlighted some of the special dishes in which she delighted for the Christmas Eve meal. “Around November the mushrooms began arriving from Poland in strings, the dried ones. Oh, how we’d wait for that! We went to the post office every day. These are real field-picked, dried mushrooms. There’s nothing like it in this country – just isn’t! And that was a treat for Christmas. It’s a nutty, woodsy flavor.” Frances described how they were repeatedly soaked in water, boiled, and added to their favorite dishes.

Homemade piroghis were another delicious traditional food. Frances explained, “They’re like raviolis…They have a cheese filling or sauerkraut filling or prune filling. And they’re boiled and the next day they’re fried in butter. They’re served hot.” Of course, Frances’s mother and helpers did quite a bit of baking for Christmas. “They made what they called babkas; the braided bread with the yellow raisins and saffron . . . great big loaves yellow with saffron and egg yolks.” A cheese-filled bread was also a favorite. “That was delicious,” Frances recalled.

Interior of St. Paul R.C. Church in Glenville where Midnight Mass was held on Christmas Eve. Courtesy of Greenwich Historical Society.

The family would walk to St. Paul’s Church, which has subsequently burned down, for Midnight Mass. “The church used to be packed…Here in Glenville, we went to Midnight Mass, and then the feast came after Mass. No one slept Christmas Eve. This went on till daybreak.”

Frances could still see in her mind’s eye, the memorable, festive decorations that adorned her home. “My mother’s home on Christmas Eve was really something.” The search for the perfect cedar tree began the previous summer at Indian Spring. “All summer we’d be looking for the right tree for Christmas. And we’d say, ‘This is the one. This is the one.’” The tree would be adorned on Christmas Eve. “We had no ornaments. We made our own. We used to take crepe paper and make loops and strings. And we had candles on the tree with (tin) candle holders…And when that tree was lit, it was beautiful, truly beautiful…We used to hold hands and dance all around the tree… And we sang carols in Polish. I still have the books, the old books with the songs.” There was also time for games, including outdoor ones, like “Whichever way you hear a dog bark, that’s where your love is coming from.”

One of the most memorable gifts Frances remembered finding under the tree was “a beautiful sled, a Flexible Flyer; it would hold five of us (of her nine siblings). And that was the envy of the town. I think every child in Glenville got a ride on it.” Other gifts were simpler treasures. “We all got an orange. That was a treat. That was the only time we saw oranges…. And you wouldn’t want to eat it. You’d take it to bed and smell it under your pillow because it had to last a long time.”

Despite all these heartwarming festivities, Frances was quick to point out, “I forgot about the most interesting part about Christmas. The Polish Christmas lasts twelve days, and the climax of it is the Epiphany. That’s the Feast of the Three Kings, and that is REALLY great!”

The interview “Years Ago in Glenville – Frances Chmielowiec Geraghty” may be read in its entirety or checked out at Greenwich Library and is available for purchase at the OHP office. The OHP is sponsored by Friends of Greenwich Library. Visit the website at glohistory.org. Our narrator’s recollections are personal and have not been subject to factual scrutiny. Mary Jacobson serves as blog editor.

Christmas Eve dinner starts with family members sharing “oplatek,” a thin wafer embossed with a Christmas scene. Photo by Mary Jacobson.

 THE CLAM BOX 1939-1985

A Beloved Local Business

In 1939, Anna and George Gross rented a two-car garage on Salem Street and East Putnam Avenue in Cos Cob and opened the original Clam Box restaurant. It had a few stools in front and a take-out counter and was to serve customers in the summers only.  According to their son, Arthur Gross, interviewed by Penny Bott-Haughwout of the Oral History Project in 1986, “My parents started the original Clam Box restaurant with four hundred dollars… They painted the building white. They put an awning in front of it. They bought several truckloads of oyster shells which was put on the ground and then crushed by a crushing machine. And that became the area where people ate in their cars or ate at the stand.”

Original Clam Box
Photo courtesy of Greenwich Library Oral History Project

Business was good---so good, in fact, that “my father made more money in three months in Cos Cob than he’d made all year in New York (at his NYC spot called Cooper’s Fish and Chips near Grand Central Station). Shortly thereafter, the New York City restaurant was closed and George Gross “devoted one hundred per cent of his time in Cos Cob.” After the first year, Anna and George bought the building and opened the Clam Box year-round. Eventually, they built on both sides of the existing main stand and it became a restaurant of about 250 seats.

The Clam Box menu, front cover
Photo courtesy of Greenwich Library Oral History Project

What was the “secret sauce” to this successful small business? According to Arthur, “ . . . nobody had any seafood items cooked the way we did. The frying was completely new to this New England area… Our kitchens were open to the public. People got the aroma of the cooking. And the fact that we fried at such high temperatures . . . at 375 degrees, they were seared very quickly. An order of fried clams would take thirty or forty-five seconds in these special cooking machines that we had.” Fish and chips were also cooked at a high temperature and “ . . . in a matter of three or four minutes, we’d have a magnificent piece of fish cooked, very crispy on the outside and very moist on the inside.” Everything was cooked to order.

The Clam Box menu, back cover
Photo courtesy of Greenwich Library Oral History Project

Of course, the high quality of the food was fundamental. “We sent a man from Greenwich to New York City five mornings a week . . . to the Fulton Fish Market. He used to leave here about quarter of three o’clock in the morning… The fish was delivered to Cos Cob like ten o’clock in the morning, and it was served that evening.”

The Clam Box menu, inside left
Photo courtesy of Greenwich Library Oral History Project

How about the prices? The original Clam Box menu in 1939 lists “Silex coffee with cream” for five cents. “People remembered the fact that they got a good cup of coffee.” In addition, “Bottle Grade A Milk” was ten cents; clam chowder, fifteen cents; fish and chips, thirty-five cents; oyster stew, forty cents. The “Clam Box Special” with half cold lobster, crabmeat, shrimps, and clams was ninety-five cents.

The Clam Box menu, inside right
Photo courtesy of Greenwich Library Oral History Project

Customers, mostly locals at the time, had a different cycle to their daily lives in those early days. In the summer, before television and air-conditioning, “a man would get in the car and take a ride with his wife and they’d stop off for fried clams or fish and chips at our type of a restaurant. We also found that we were busier late in the evening---this would run until two in the morning.” Post-WWII, with the advent of television, people tended to stay home in the evenings. “Our business changed rapidly… After the war we never stayed open as late as we did prior to the war.”

George and Anna believed in their business. “Every dollar they made they reinvested back into the property, and they managed to survive, and it was quite successful after the second year.” In 1947, the Grosses purchased another building, with four hundred feet frontage on East Putnam Avenue in Cos Cob, in which the Clam Box remained until 1985. Fortunately, the property also allowed for enlargement of the restaurant facilities.

“By enlarging the kitchen, we were able to purchase additional equipment to make the same recipes… We were able to handle the many thousands of people that we did serve in the summertime… We had a wonderful reputation. We had the nicest people in the area coming out to dinner.” Arthur was proud that a family could be well-fed for under ten dollars.

The Clam Box, expanded capacity, outside
Photo courtesy of Greenwich Library Oral History Project

In 1963, with additional storage space made available for produce and seafood, the restaurant could serve five hundred and fifty patrons “plus the take-out business.” A bakery was also now contained on the premises in which fresh rolls, pies, cakes, puddings, éclair shells, and more were prepared. Over one hundred and thirty staff were employed. Arthur boasted that “ . . . we must have had seventy-five working here more than five years . . . and another ten or fifteen who worked here for twenty years or more.”   

The Clam Box, expanded capacity, inside
Photo courtesy of Greenwich Library Oral History Project

Arthur’s parents retired in 1957. His father George passed away in 1960. Arthur and his wife, Priscilla, managed the business from that time on. Arthur himself had worked in the restaurant from the age of 14 in 1939 to age 60 in 1985. “If people wanted to find me, they could reach me at 9:30 in the morning, and I was here until sometimes 9:30 at night, and I was here many a time seven days a week.” In 1985, the decision was made to close the restaurant and “sell the property, distribute the proceeds (among the corporation of family members), and go our separate ways… It’s the end of an era.”

The Clam Box postcard
Photo courtesy of Greenwich Library Oral History Project

Arthur did have to admit that occasionally he would see some tempting restaurant locations in town. “I’d come home and say to my wife, ‘You know, we could go back and open up another little stand again and just sell clams and shrimp and fish and chips.’ And she’d say, ‘No way, Buster.’”

The interview of Arthur Gross appears in the Oral History Project book entitled “The Clam Box and the Food Mart.” It may be read in its entirety at Greenwich Library and is available for purchase at the OHP office. The OHP is sponsored by Friends of Greenwich Library. Visit the website at glohistory.org. Our narrator’s recollections are personal and have not been subject to factual scrutiny.

Mary Jacobson, OHP blog editor.

 COS COB IN THE 20s AND 30s

Cos Cob is a close-knit, self-sufficient community within Greenwich with its own identity. With Long Island Sound to its south and the Mianus River to its east, it resonates with water views and a rich, nautical history that dates to the eighteenth century. It was also home to the Cos Cob Art Colony, the first impressionist art colony in Connecticut, which flourished in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This hamlet includes the sixty-one-acre Montgomery Pinetum, its own neighborhood library, restaurants, and shops. Many of these enterprises are located in “the Hub,” the commercial area at the intersection of Strickland Road and East Putnam Avenue.

 

Gertrude Riska
Photo courtesy of Greenwich Library Oral History Project

Gertrude O’Donnell Riska, born in 1920, has vivid memories of growing up in Cos Cob in the 20s and 30s. She shared her reminiscences with Marcella Raphael of the Oral History Project in 1993. In her interview, she chose to take the reader on a walk describing the sights and sounds that she experienced approximately one hundred years ago.

 

The Cos Cob neighborhood she described had no traffic lights on Post Road with “few cars. . . I would say if there were twenty cars in an hour on the Post Road, that would be a good amount.” Policemen stood in two sentry boxes to help residents cross the street and walked the street each evening “to make sure that the business people had secured their door for the night.” She observed, “There weren’t too many wealthy people in Cos Cob. It was more a working-class town.”

 

As a child, Gertrude remembered shopping for food “just about every day because you didn’t have freezers or refrigerators. You had the old-fashioned ice box where the ice man brought your block of ice if you put a sign in the window and told him to stop with it.” McKinley’s Meat Market was a frequent destination. “He had a huge, giant icebox and every time you wanted a pork chop or something. . . he’d disappear, and the door would slam shut, and then in a minute he would come out with a whole big piece of meat and cut the pork chops or whatever. . . He’d have to return it right away back to this refrigerator. . . they had huge hooks that they hung (meat) on.” 

 

Looking from Strickland Road to the Post Road
Photo courtesy of Greenwich Library Oral History Project

Down the adjacent driveway, was a “tiny-weeny store” operated by Gussie Feldman. Gussie had a large number of children and no employees. “When you entered the store, you’d hear a little bell go ding-ding. . . Pretty soon she’d look through the upstairs window and say, ‘All right, I’ll be right down’. . . Today we’d leave someone in the store with the cash register. But, those days, you didn’t.” Gussie “sold everything from thread to sneakers to odds and ends. . . She did a good business on the Fourth of July. We all went over there and got rockets.”

 

Gertrude remembered the first A&P housed near the old Cos Cob School in a block of stores built by “a very well-known builder, Mr. Schubert.” Unlike today’s supermarkets, it was a very small store with a counter on one side and, on the far side, canned goods on shelves. “You dared not take anything off the shelves.” Instead, you would wait your turn and ask for each item. “The salesman would walk around the counter, go to the far side and get the can of what you wanted, go back. . . He would write the price of each on a brown paper bag. It was very time consuming.”

 

The Clam Box
Photo courtesy of Greenwich Library Oral History Project

A favorite spot, Gertrude stated, was The Clam Box. “Everybody knows The Clam Box. . . It was almost across from about where the car wash is” on Post Road. “It was really a little square kind of a shack” run by the Gross family in the 30s. “Even people from New York would come up to the Clam Box. . . the food was really good, and the price was good.” Originally, they “had maybe two stools. . . but later they added on. They made it much, much bigger.” Eventually, it closed and was torn down.

 

Where the Mill Pond Shopping Center exists now, Gertrude states, “That was just all wetlands. It was just an empty swampland with the tide coming in and out almost up to the Post Road.” At the end of Mead Avenue, there was one roadway “that had been filled in with rocks and extended out into the channel.” Gertrude and her friends would walk out there to an area known as Lockwood’s Dock and swim. “Then you came out in your wet bathing suit and back down across Post Road. . . It was just a normal thing to do, and that was the only place that you could swim.” Between Mead Avenue and Relay Place was a little white building called White Castle Hamburgers. “They were five cents each. . . For a quarter you got five, and they were delicious.”

 

Cos Cob School
Photo courtesy of Greenwich Library Oral History Project

Of course, school was the center of activity in Gertrude Riska’s life. “. . . the Cos Cob Library (was) contained in it, to the left of the front door.” The school was also the setting for country fairs and annual Halloween parties. The fireman’s carnival was held in the school to make money to maintain the firehouse. “It was one of the two events that the whole town waited for. They had the usual booths with spinning wheels and prizes. But the real exciting thing was the dance floor and the Fireman’s Ball.” Gertrude’s father was chief of the Cos Cob Fire Department. “We waited practically breathless all year for that Fireman’s Ball. . . The jitterbugging hadn’t come in, but they were doing the waltzes. It was just nice.”

 

An Early Cos Cob Fire Engine
Photo courtesy of Greenwich Library Oral History Project

Gertrude was particularly proud of her father, Lewis O’Donnell, and his involvement with the nascent Cos Cob Fire Department, founded in 1922, in addition to his work as chief electrical engineer at the Cos Cob Power Plant.  Gertrude’s dad and some of his friends worked tirelessly to convert a donated touring car into a pumper for the fire department as “they didn’t have the funds to go out and buy the proper engines.” When their task was accomplished, “it was a great, wonderful thing for the fire department to have this unique automobile or pumper.” Meetings were originally held in the second floor of the Taylor barn. However, soon after, letters were written to potentially wealthy donors to help construct a proper firehouse. Eventually, a temporary firehouse was built in 1924 [next to where the present firehouse is now].

 

Cos Cob Firehouse
Photo courtesy of Greenwich Library Oral History Project

Gertrude Riska continued to live in Cos Cob until her death, at the age of 96, in 2016. She taught piano to hundreds of students in her home on Orchard Street and played the organ in churches until the age of 92. She and her family’s legacy contributed much to her community in Cos Cob as well as to the town of Greenwich.

 

The interview entitled “A Walk Through Cos Cob in the 1920s and 30s” may be read in its entirety at Greenwich Library and is available for purchase at the Oral History Project office. The OHP is sponsored by Friends of Greenwich Library. Visit the website at glohistory.org. Our narrator’s recollections are personal and have not been subject to factual scrutiny. Mary Jacobson serves as blog editor.

 THE TREES OF GREENWICH AVENUE

Dutch Elm Disease first made its appearance in Glenville in Greenwich in 1933. Discovered in the Netherlands fifteen years earlier, it made its way to America through shipments of logs infested with the European elm bark beetles. As the severity of the effects of the disease on elm trees became more and more apparent throughout Greenwich, and in an attempt to stop the spread of infection, aggressive attempts were made to identify, remove and destroy hundreds of these beloved elms that graced our public streets.

Gertrude duPont Howland

Enter Gertrude duPont Howland who noticed in the 1940s “that on Greenwich Avenue the beautiful elm trees that used to be up and down the Avenue were being taken down one by one. . . They were cutting off the trunk as low as they could get it and then cementing over the area, and that was it. Nothing new was being planted. And as one tree after another came down, there was nothing.”

Gertrude Howland decided to make it a personal crusade to bring attention to the “absolutely bare-looking” condition of the Avenue. Oral History Project volunteer Margaret French interviewed her in 1987 to document Howland’s relentless efforts to replant the Avenue. Contacting Joseph Cone, “head of the parks and trees department at the time,” Howland was told that “the reason he couldn’t plant any more trees, to replace the ones taken down, was that it was far too expensive to dig out those huge roots, and that he didn’t know where else he could possibly plant them.” There were concerns about disrupting utility services “which largely ran down in the street and branched out into each building on each side.” Howland was told that there was no comprehensive map of the location of the different utilities.

Looking down Greenwich Avenue from Lewis Street

Faced with these challenges, Howland decided to enlist the help of Green Fingers Garden Club to “simply trot out to the head offices of each of the utilities (electric, telephone, water and gas), get their maps and reduce them to the same scale, superimpose them on each other and presto! You’d have a real master plan of Greenwich Avenue.” This was a monumental and, ultimately, impossible task. The water company “didn’t have the slightest idea.” The electric and telephone company had sketchy maps “but they were the best they had.” The most discouraging response was from the sewer and drain department who said “some of those things went back to colonial times and were undoubtedly made of wood.” There were “no records. . . And the only way they ever found out was when something broke.”

Cone advised her to engage an engineer to examine the basement of each building on the Avenue in order to make a record of where the utilities enter from the outside. Howland approached Willard DeVaul of S. E. Minor engineering firm in Greenwich, and he not only agreed to do the job, but he did it for free. DeVaul believed the project was worthwhile and “he seemed to enjoy doing it. The three of us (including Bea Rogers, another member of Green Fingers) had a real nice time because some of those basements were perfectly fascinating. What you found there!”

This aspect of the project took a number of months. However, when the drawings were presented, yet another stumbling block to planting trees surfaced. They were told “that with all the increasing traffic up and down Greenwich Avenue, no tree would possibly live, and it was silly to spend money on planting something that was certainly going to die.” Undaunted, Howland solicited help from the Bronx Botanical Garden “to come out and advise us. . . We got a man, and he went up and down Greenwich Avenue with us, and he was terribly supportive and pleased at our idea. . . He advised two kinds: the pin oak and a very new kind of locust called a moraine.” This new thornless variety of locust was so new “he thought we would have trouble finding any big enough for a street.” After phoning countless nurseries, a number of them were found.

However, the issues that Mr. Cone, “a very respected, liked man in town and at Town Hall,” had with the prospective trees, continued. There were additional concerns that the tree roots would make the pavements uneven and that citizens would fall and sue the town; that the roots would break the water mains; that the trees would disturb the flow of air to apartments overhead; and “that the use of public moneys in so dangerous a manner” could not be approved.

Lastly, Howland lamented, before planting any trees, written permission would need to be obtained from the owner of each building. “Half the people that owned them (the businesses) weren’t even living in Greenwich.” To Howland’s surprise and dismay, she discovered that numerous store renters were opposed to trees because of their issues with leaves that drop, that become slippery in rain, and that obscure window displays.

Green Fingers Garden Club planting a
tree on Greenwich Avenue

Help came in the visage of Mr. Mayer H. Cohen, who owned several buildings on the Avenue and was president of the local merchants’ association at the time. “Somebody told us that he was very influential with the people on the street, and that if we could get him to let us plant trees in front of his buildings, it would make a great difference. . . Not only did he permit us to plant trees, he spoke to the others at some merchants’ meeting and, in no time at all, permissions were flowing in.”

Greenwich Garden Club planting a
tree on Greenwich Avenue

According to Mrs. Howland, this whole process took about eight years. Local garden club contributions and private donations helped “to keep it going.” Howland continued, “Well, you see, there were so many obstacles to be overcome, and each time I thought it was the last hurdle. But, of course, it never was.”

Joseph Dietrich, who succeeded Joseph Cone, was “not only supportive, he was enthusiastic about the idea. And he agreed that Greenwich Avenue should have trees all up and down.” At the first official planting of pin oaks, there was a gathering of garden club members, Mr. Dietrich, and the press to mark the grand occasion.

Christmas lights on Greenwich Avenue in the 1950s

Mrs. Howland concluded, “Well, it’s been satisfying. I really get a tremendous kick at Christmastime seeing those trees all covered with Christmas lights. I’m really very happy to see it.”

The interview entitled “Missions Accomplished” may be read in its entirety at Greenwich Library and is available for purchase at the Oral History Project office. The OHP is sponsored by the Friends of Greenwich Library. Visit the project's website at glohistory.org. Our narrator’s recollections are personal and have not been subject to factual scrutiny.

Mary Jacobson, OHP Blog Editor

 

Greenwich – “A Town in a Forest”

by Mary A. Jacobson

Former Greenwich Tree Warden Bruce Spaman beside a 100-year old Sycamore tree. Photo by Anne W. Semmes. Courtesy of Oral History Project.

“Don’t think of Greenwich as a town with trees in it. Think of Greenwich as a town in a forest.” So spoke former Greenwich Tree Warden Bruce Spaman, who served the Town of Greenwich from 2002 to 2018, when interviewed by Anne Semmes for the Oral History Project in 2019. “If you were to take a bird’s-eye view of Greenwich and then look down on it, you would see that…It truly looks like a town in a forest, although the part of the forest I was managing was just publicly owned trees.”

According to Spaman, Greenwich contains about 1100 acres of parks, including open-space properties, formal parks, and pocket parks. In addition, there are 250 acres of school campuses and 75 acres of athletic turf and fields. Add to that “a forest of street trees that’s probably 650 acres on over 265 miles of town roads. So, that’s a considerable forest that people drive in every day.” That responsibility only adds up to about six percent of the total land area in town.

Spaman’s interests in arboriculture and forestry began early. As a young boy, “I was in Boy Scouts . . . and I was always just out in the woods and on my own. I didn’t know you could make a job out of it.” He graduated with a degree in forestry from Paul Smiths College in Paul Smiths, New York, in the Adirondacks, in 1974. “From there, I just basically got immersed in trees in general, arboriculture doing tree work, learning the climbing, doing all that.” In the early eighties, the field of community forestry started to emerge which “brings together the arboriculture business and the forestry business . . . mostly with regards to managing municipal or town-owned trees.” Spaman worked for over thirty towns in Connecticut before being hired in Greenwich in 2002.

Spaman’s contributions over the years include a revision of the Tree Ordinance in 2009 and, within it, the Public Tree Policy “steering toward a more holistic management of the community forest.” The Nuisance Policy, for example, would enable the town to deal with a dying tree, on private property, leaning towards a public road. If, after numerous notifications, the homeowner did not remedy the situation, the town had “the power to essentially go on to the property, abate the nuisance, and charge the landowner.” Spaman was quick to point out that “we don’t remove trees for what trees do naturally. And if they’re dropping leaves, they’re dropping twigs, they’re dropping nuts, or they have wildlife living in them, that’s kind of a natural thing to us.”

One notable concern over the years was the pruning methods of power companies. “I put a section in the Public Tree Policy of how we handle utility clearing for trees in town.” Before this amendment occurred, the power companies seemed “to get more and more aggressive on their requirements for pruning trees… they said they needed to clear what they call ground to sky, which was basically taking all the branches off the wire-side of the trees. You can’t take half the green out of a tree and expect it to live very well.” The Public Tree Policy now requires a permit with rules of what can and cannot be done. “The people of Greenwich deserve reliable electric power but not at the expense of good arboriculture.”

Diversity of tree plantings was another goal of Bruce Spaman. “What we strive for when we’re managing our community forest is a diversity in species and a diversity in age classes.” Spaman could look to the destructive diseases that had plagued Greenwich’s numerous beloved Elm trees in the past or to the Sugar Maples on Lake Avenue that succumbed to old age at the same time. “…all of a sudden, we were taking Maple trees down like crazy.” Now, with replanting, “… we’ve put the large shade trees on one side of the street and the smaller ornamental trees underneath the power lines so that we don’t create problems in the future.” Spaman is also not averse to planting certain non-native trees, like Gingko or Katsura trees, that are not invasive or noxious or a nuisance. If he gets pushback for that, he responds, “… you wouldn’t want to go to a museum and only want to see American art.”

Spaman is proud of the partnerships he has maintained in the town. “… no community forestry program, park management program, can operate in a vacuum… It takes a community and volunteers and community effort and community concerns to really manage these assets.” If a garden club “wants to plant tulip bulbs, we’ll supply the tulip bulbs if they’re put on public property.” The Greenwich Tree Conservancy, founded in 2007, has also been a close and productive partner with the town, raising awareness of its tree heritage and planting hundreds of trees over the years.

In conclusion, Spaman mused, “… to make a community, it’s the people. It’s the culture. It’s the architecture… I feel the parks and the trees are part of the tapestry of what Greenwich is. It doesn’t complete Greenwich, but it’s important. And people understand that because they’re very concerned about their parks and their trees in this town.”

The interview entitled “Greenwich Tree Warden” may be read in its entirety at Greenwich Library and is available for purchase at the Oral History Project office. The OHP is sponsored by Friends of Greenwich Library. Visit the website at glohistory.org. Our narrator’s recollections are personal and have not been subject to factual scrutiny. Mary Jacobson serves as blog editor.

 

Inspiring Music Mentors

by Mary A. Jacobson

Greenwich High School marching band. Courtesy of the Oral History Project.

As the school year draws to a close, it seems fitting to highlight a few teachers who made an indelible imprint on the music program in Greenwich and inspired countless students to love and play music. George Gray and Raymond Malone were interviewed for the Oral History Project in 1989 by Mary B. Coan. Collectively, they served sixty-five years in the music department.

George Gray discovered his dad had a violin when he was a seventh grader in the Greenwich schools. “It happened, I guess, that somebody discovered I had a talent, so there you go.” At the age of twenty-four, with degrees from Juilliard and Columbia University Teachers College, George sought a position teaching strings. “Then this job opened up in Greenwich, a string teaching job, and I think it was one of the first in the country…It was exactly what I wanted to do.” The year was 1938 and the annual salary was $1,700.

As a novice teacher, Gray’s supervisor, Mary Donovan, instructed him to introduce himself to all the principals of the eleven district schools in which he would be teaching. He fondly recalled meeting Frank Parker, Principal of Hamilton Avenue School, whose reaction was, “What in the hell is a string teacher?” Gray’s job involved teaching in at least two schools a day. “It was about the best job that anybody that wanted to teach strings could have ever asked for…The kids enjoyed it and I enjoyed it…We developed a pretty good high school group, high school orchestra, and I also had an interschool orchestra that met on Saturday mornings.”

In the late 1940s, when the position of Supervisor of Music became available, Gray was encouraged to apply for it. One of his biggest responsibilities as Supervisor of Music was the selection of music teachers. “If I had maybe two opening for teachers in a particular year, I might have a hundred or more applicants for those jobs.” This responsibility also entailed some traveling. “If you couldn’t find a good teacher, you were really wasting your time trying to supervise a teacher that wasn’t any good, because they don’t change very much…I don’t think I ever hired a teacher unless I saw them teach…It makes all the difference in the world.”

One of the most memorable positions that George Gray filled was in the spring of 1956. Gray had traveled to Potsdam State Teachers College, one of the best New York State music schools, according to him, to interview a highly recommended choral conductor. His name was Peter Bagley and Gray heard “what a wonderful conductor he was, how the kids loved to perform under him.”

Gray brought him to a choral rehearsal at Eastern Junior High. “What a job he did with that! The kids loved him. There was an intensity and electricity about the man…He had every individual’s attention. He would look right at them, and he had a tremendous amount of energy.” After Peter Bagley taught four years, he left to pursue a doctoral degree. Later, in a 2012 interview as Professor Emeritus of University of Connecticut, Bagley said, “I loved being in Greenwich. I was the first African American teaching in Greenwich. That was a milestone; 1957 was pre-civil rights…. I didn’t know what to expect. And the unspoken response was, ‘You’re here. Teach. Be yourself. Do what you want to do. Do what you love.’ That’s what I did…I had some of my best years in that situation. I loved the parents, the students, the community, and I think I can safely say they loved me, too.”

Peter Bagley conducting. Courtesy of Peter Bagley

Another teacher Gray recalled hiring was Ray Malone in 1953. “I watched Ray teaching in a couple of classes…where all the desks and chairs were screwed down to the floor…The first thing he does, he puts his foot up on the desk and starts strumming his guitar and singing, and pretty soon these kids were singing. Then he had them stand up, and they were dancing in the aisles, and this was going on all at once. He had the kids all singing and dancing, and this music was going on…The kids just loved this for a music class. So, at that point he was hired. He was terrific.” Malone remained in the Greenwich school system until his retirement in 1983.

Gray mused, “There have been any number of students who have gone on professionally in music. A lot of them came up through Ray Harrington at the high school.” One of the students in particular that Gray recalled was Erich Kunzel (GHS graduate, 1953) who used to play string bass in Gray’s string ensemble. Among his many later musical achievements, Kunzel conducted the Cincinnati Pops Orchestra for more than three decades. In 2006, three years before his death, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President George W. Bush.

George Gray believed in building a strong program from the lower grades and that that was the core strength of the Greenwich music department, recognized nationally. He also believed in giving his teachers some autonomy and creative freedom. As Ray Malone said, “That was the secret to the success of the music program, because each of us had the individual freedom to follow our own pursuits, which drove us into music in the first place…The kids are going to see that. They are going to recognize here’s a guy that really loves music. That really makes quite a force on a child.”

The interview entitled “The Music Men” may be read in its entirety at Greenwich Library and is available for purchase at the Oral History Project office. The OHP is sponsored by Friends of Greenwich Library. Visit the website at glohistory.org. Our narrators’ recollections are personal and have not been subject to factual scrutiny. Mary Jacobson serves as blog editor.

Ray Malone and George Gray. Photograph by Karl Gleeson, courtesy of the Oral History Project.

Recollections of the Bruce Museum – Part II: 1979-2023

by Mary A. Jacobson

Exterior of the Bruce Museum after its 1993 renovation. Photo courtesy of the Bruce Museum.

From 1909 to 1978, the leaders of the Bruce Museum sought to oversee the transformation of Robert Moffat Bruce’s 1859 Victorian home into a museum of art, science, and history. This was the mandate stipulated by Mr. Bruce in his will when he bequeathed his home to the Town of Greenwich upon his death in 1909 at the age of 86. The newly reopened and reimagined Bruce Museum of 2023 melds this original conceptual challenge with a state-of-the-art edifice for the twenty-first century.

Robert Moffat Bruce, c. 1900, courtesy of the Historical Society of the Town of Greenwich.

In 2007 the Oral History Project conducted a series of interviews which were compiled into a book entitled “The Bruce Museum – A Century of Change.” These interviews chronicle the stories of leaders associated with the Bruce Museum from 1918-2007 in their own words and according to their own unique perspectives and recollections.

John Clark directed the Bruce Museum from 1979 to 1995. He had previously worked as Curator of Geology at the Morris Museum of Arts and Sciences in Morristown, New Jersey. From his perspective, the “museum had a lot of potential but seemed to have no storage. It seemed to have everything out on exhibit… ‘The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.’” He noted that in Greenwich, “There was a strong interest in good quality programming and exhibitions; whether it was to be a children’s museum, an art museum, a science museum.”

During Clark’s tenure, the decision was made to close the zoo part of the museum. Clark stated, “It was decided that the Bruce Museum wasn’t a zoo . . . When I first came here, we had three monkeys and three parrots.” New placements were found for them “in spite of the fact that one of the birds swore like a drunken sailor!”

As the museum continued to raise its profile in Greenwich, it added to its subsidy base from the town with growing community support from the Bruce Associates. Over time, according to John Clark, it became apparent that the museum building was in need of renovation. "It hadn't been updated or upgraded... there was a black-and-white checkerboard tile floor, like back in the fifties. One gallery was painted pink, the next one was painted canary yellow, and the next, robin's egg blue... Most of the windows were boarded up and painted battleship gray.”

Clark stated that seven million dollars was raised, and ground was broken for the construction project in December of 1992. To celebrate the onset of the project, “We closed the old building (now stripped back to the original walls) with something called a bare-bones party…We let people graffiti the walls. They left their own personal messages. And it was just a fun farewell.”

Hollister Sturges, director from 1995 to 2000, was the first museum director with an art or art history background. During his tenure, the museum received accreditation from the American Association of Museums. “I arrived at a moment of great opportunity because the new (renovated) museum had opened in 1993…I think one mandate was for a strong art program.”

Over time, “the budget expanded, the audience almost doubled…We became the second most visited art museum in Connecticut, after the Wadsworth Atheneum.” Sturges evidenced pride in the strides made during his tenure to upgrade the art exhibitions. However, he stated, “I think the biggest problem in the end for me was the transition from a volunteer-led period to a professional staff-led period. That was a transition that was taking place during my tenure.”

Homer McK. Rees, a retired businessman, acted as interim director from 2000-2001 to guide the museum while a new director was sought. “It was perfectly true that I wasn’t an art professional or a science professional, but I had run businesses before….and just simply applied the same principles to the museum that I would to any business.” A goal was to “change the mindset of the board from being a managing board to a governing board.” At the conclusion of his tenure, Rees reflected that working at the Bruce Museum “was one of the most, if not the most, rewarding experiences of my business career.”

In 2001, Peter Sutton became the museum’s first executive director. He hailed from a number of curatorial and directorship positions in the world of art. Interviewed in 2005, he stated, “We’ve managed to balance the budget and improve the reputation of the institution and raise its profile.” With fourteen to sixteen shows a year, 600 annual educational programs, 20,000 yearly schoolchildren visits, “Something is happening all the time, every day, almost every hour of every day.” Sutton stated that three-quarters of the museum’s budget must be privately raised “and it’s wonderful that it all comes to this public municipal institution.” Sutton’s vision for the future included an expansion to bring more widespread recognition of this community gem.

The “new” Bruce Museum opened to the public on April 2, 2023, under the leadership of the Museum’s executive director since 2019, Robert Wolterstorff, who hails from the Bennington Museum in Vermont. This impressive, reimagined space combines art, science, education, and community with expanded collection storage, permanent and changing art gallery venues, a new entrance lobby, café and lecture hall, doubling its size from 30,000 to 60,000 square feet.

Surely Robert Bruce would be amazed and proud to see what his 1859 home, donated to the Town of Greenwich in 1909, has become, one hundred and fourteen years later. His desire, that it be used “as a natural history, historical and art museum for the use and benefit of the public” has been more than realized and will be enjoyed by thousands more in the years to come.

The collection of interviews entitled “The Bruce Museum – A Century of Change” may be read in its entirety at Greenwich Library and is available for purchase at the Oral History Project office. The OHP is sponsored by Friends of Greenwich Library. Visit the website at glohistory.org. This blog is not intended as an historical account. Our narrators’ recollections are personal and have not been subject to factual scrutiny. Mary Jacobson serves as blog editor.

The new Bruce Museum which opened to the public April 2, 2023. Photo courtesy of the Bruce Museum.

Recollections of the Bruce Museum 1909-1978

by Mary A. Jacobson

Director Paul Howes in Dominica, West Indies 1929, collecting specimens. Courtesy of the Bruce Museum.

On April 2, 2023, the reimagined Bruce Museum opened to the public. In its reincarnation, it doubled its space from 30,000 to 60,000 square feet. It featured new educational and community spaces, an expanded exhibition space for permanent and temporary installations of art, an enlarged collection storage space, and a handsome new café. This dramatic and exciting “new” Bruce is so incredibly different from its original home, bequeathed to the Town of Greenwich by Robert Moffat Bruce in 1909, that one can scarcely believe the original structure ever existed.

Robert Moffat Bruce (1822-1909) was a Greenwich resident, textile merchant, and philanthropist whose donations to the town have benefited countless thousands over the years. When he died, he bequeathed his home to Greenwich for the creation of a “natural history, historical, and art museum.” According to Peter Sutton, Museum executive director from 2001-2019, this concept of a museum was “a very broad mission, very much a nineteenth century concept.” Bruce also gifted the town with the surrounding 100 acres of parkland known as Bruce Park. In 2007 a series of interviews was conducted by the Oral History Project and compiled into a book entitled “The Bruce Museum – A Century of Change.” The interviews chronicle the stories of leaders associated with the Bruce Museum from 1918-2007 in their own words and according to their own unique perspectives and recollections.

Paul Howes, curator from 1936-1964, explained that, since Robert Bruce’s will stipulated “art museum” lastly in the museum’s focus, it was determined at the time “…that he preferred natural history because it was first in the list in his will…No one in Greenwich and no one since knew that he had any interest in natural history. After he died, they found nothing in the house in the way of natural history specimens….and there were no art objects except for some old, very primitive little paintings of members of the family.”

Robert Bruce also willed $50,000 to employ architects, to renovate the home to make it fit for a museum, and to build a caretaker’s cottage (where I-95 is now). According to Paul Howes, by the time the work was completed in 1918, there was not much left for museum development. “.…And so, then our problem was, will the selectmen accept the museum and give us a small budget to start…? Already we didn’t have enough money for coal, so we had to keep it closed in winter and were open only during the summer.” The first annual budget amount given by the town was $5,000.

A number of plate-glass showcases were installed for collected and purchased specimens, some of which were yet to be determined. During the winter months, Howes described some of his “trips to South America, the West Indies, and different parts of our own country to collect and work for the museum…l made a trip to Dominica and spent the winter there and worked in the mountains from sea level to the summit, collecting, photographing, and bringing back material for the museum’s collection.”

School groups frequented the museum. Some of the exhibits had a P.T. Barnum aspect to them like the two-bodied rabbit and the snake with two heads. Those “did the trick of getting people’s attention, and they’d come down to see what else we had.” Another attraction was the trout hatchery. According to Howes, “We hatched hundreds of young trout there in the museum that year…It brought in not only just everyday people, but fishermen, too. People who were interested in sports. And it was very educational for the schoolchildren.”

Fund-raising was always a challenge as, at that time, there was not a membership aspect to the museum. According to Howes, “Once in a while we’d get five or ten dollars, but we never got any big amounts of money.” Fortunately, Selectman Wilbur Peck (1947-1951) supported increasing the size of the Bruce Museum budget. In addition, Howes commented, “When they put in the Connecticut Thruway (in 1958) past the museum, with the damages it did to our land, there was enough indemnity to put on that big wing in the back, which almost doubled the size of the museum.”

Raymond Owen, director from 1967-1978, also had a natural history background. He oversaw the museum as it raised its profile in the town. “I was appalled when I joined the museum at how many persons didn’t know where it was…The sign on the dog pound (which existed on the property) was about three times the size of the Bruce Museum sign.” Owen was proud to list as one of his accomplishments, the creation of the Bruce Museum Associates which “began to hold fundraising events and began to get money.”

To further increase attendance at the Museum, Owen inaugurated a lecture series of 190 talks in the eleven years of his tenure. “We had quite a wide-ranging group of people giving these talks, and that brought in people.” A children’s art show, professionally judged, was a popular new program. Portable exhibitions which could be taken to classrooms were initiated. A live zoo and a model of the solar system were draws for families. The gift shop, which started with a card table full of items, grew although its space was limited. According to Owen, he changed the museum “from a children’s museum to one for both children and adults.”

The second part of this two-part series (1979 to the present) will appear in next week’s edition of the Greenwich Sentinel. The collection of Oral History Project interviews entitled “The Bruce Museum – A Century of Change” may be read in its entirety at Greenwich Library and is available for purchase at the OHP office. The OHP is sponsored by Friends of Greenwich library. This blog is not intended as a historical account. Our narrators’ recollections are personal and have not been subject to factual scrutiny. Mary Jacobson serves as blog editor.

Exterior of the Bruce Museum, 1933. Courtesy of the Bruce Museum.

Original Robert Bruce residence bequeathed to the town of Greenwich in 1909. Courtesy of Greenwich Historical Society.

Bruce Museum visitors viewing exhibits, circa 1973. Courtesy of Greenwich Historical Society.