Newtown Memories

Have you ever been to Newtown? Gilda and I have, she more than I. As pained as everyone is about the unspeakable tragedy that overwhelmed the nation there Friday, a deeper anguish, I believe, may be felt by those who can personally relate to that beautiful, picturesque Connecticut community.

We lived in Connecticut from 1973 through mid-1977. While Gilda was earning her nursing degree from the University of Bridgeport from 1973 to 1975, she spent a five-month semester in a training rotation at Fairfield Hills State Hospital in Newtown. It was a psychiatric center with some 4,000 patients at its peak use. The state closed the hospital in 1995. The 100-acre site was turned over to the Town of Newtown in 2004. 

From our apartment in Seymour, Gilda would drive up to Fairfield Hills on Route 34 alongside the Housatonic River, past the village of Sandy Hook which is part of the Town of Newtown. Weekends, we would sometimes retrace that route as we explored western Connecticut around Danbury and further north, up to Litchfield. Western Connecticut back then was dreamy in its small town, Americana appearance. White colonial homes surrounded well-groomed village greens, at the side of which usually stood a stately Congregational Church, its spire reaching majestically to a blue sky. Rarely did you pass a traffic light. Of course, Newtown and the whole region have changed in the near 40 years since we traveled those bucolic roadways. The last time we visited Newtown was in 1993. Dan’s traveling all-star soccer team participated in the one-day Memorial Day Kickoff Tournament. Among the trophies still housed in his room, I found the jersey patch he received that day.

Like most parents I wanted to reach out and hug my children when they came home Friday. Alas, they are grown and have homes of their own. I talked with them, but it was not the same. 

Swept into the sadness of the tragedy was the feeling of futility experienced by many first responders, including nurses and doctors on the scene and in area hospitals who eagerly waited to tend to the wounded. But only two frail, soon to be lifeless, bodies emerged from the killing field. The medical professionals were told to go home. Eleven years ago on September 11, Gilda waited with other nurses and doctors for the injured to arrive at Manhattan’s Beth Israel Medical Center. They waited the whole day in vain.

This country is in denial. Margaret Brennan of CBS News, who grew up in nearby Danbury, said on CBS-2 Saturday, “There isn’t a gun culture here. It’s one of those small, New England towns you go to to avoid the city, and things like this don’t happen.” But how do you explain that Nancy Lanza had five guns at home, including two high-powered revolvers and an assault rifle her son used to kill 26 innocents in cold blood at short range? 

Guns permeate our society. They are so readily accessible. Remember, the Columbine shooters used guns from one of the parents. We are a culture that denigrates teachers but upholds and lauds the right to carry arms, openly in public and increasingly on school grounds.

Why do so many begrudge teachers better pay? Why don’t we realize teachers are professionals we entrust to mold the future of America? Why don't we realize that when unimaginable horror confronts our children, it is a teacher who protects them, sometimes with his or her life?

Perhaps the most heart-wrenching visual of the entire massacre was not the line of children running to safety, or individual pictures of the deceased, but rather the wooden sign hanging in front of the Sandy Hook Elementary School that simply and invitingly stated, “Visitors Welcome.” No more can such an earnest sentiment be expressed, not in Newtown or anywhere else in America.

Down Memory Lane

I was less than enthusiastic about what Gilda was set to do. I couldn't stop her from knocking on the front door of the home we lived in 38 years ago in Seymour, Conn. I'm glad she did. She is so much braver than I when it comes to nostalgia tours and necessary, potentially embarrassing, intrusions if one truly wants to go back in time and place.

With our lucky 11:11 date buttressing our plan, Gilda and I set out last Friday to retrace our early roots together, our first four years of married life when I was a cub reporter and then a bureau chief for the New Haven Register and Gilda was a nursing student at the University of Bridgeport and then a newborn intensive care nurse at Yale-New Haven Hospital.

We drove up Route 8 from Bridgeport to Shelton, my second year beat assignment and scene of the largest industrial arson in U.S. history. We had just gone to bed Saturday night, March 1, 1975, in our Seymour apartment when my boss, Don Anderson, called from nearby Ansonia to ask what I was doing home when half of downtown Shelton was ablaze. I quickly rushed to the fire and stayed there most of the night as the Sponge Rubber Products Company plant (formerly owned by B.F. Goodrich) burned down. Authorities quickly determined it was a case of arson and who did it. But the already depressed economy of the Lower Naugatuck Valley towns of Shelton, Seymour, Ansonia and Derby took a hit as 1,200 jobs were lost. Today, the site of the factory is a park along the Housatonic River.

Driving over the aptly named Bridge Street, we made out way into downtown Derby. Thirty-nine years ago, as I drove through Derby for the first time during my job hunting travels, I thought it looked like Dresden after World War II, with dark, hulking, dilapidated buildings blotting out the sun. Hours later, when the co-managing editor of the New Haven Register, Murray Farber, offered me a job, he said the assignment would be covering Seymour and Derby. I inwardly cringed at the prospect of revisiting Derby on a daily basis but quickly accepted the $150 a week position ($773 in today’s values).

Derby’s downtown is brighter today. Gone are the turn of the 20th century buildings along the riverfront. Though still not vibrant, the area is less depressing. Deeper into the city, along Elizabeth Street, Griffin Hospital, where Gilda did some of her nursing school training, where they clung to the tradition of wearing uniform hats and pins, where the nursing stations were at the far end of each corridor and the head nurses ruled with iron fists, the hospital still stands and is now affiliated with the Yale School of Medicine.

Also on Elizabeth Street is the now shuttered Dworkin Chevrolet where we bought our first car, a Vega, in 1973. A few blocks closer to the downtown the temple we attended, Beth Israel, has been turned into a New Life Community Church, the only outward sign of its previous calling being the Hebrew words etched into the façade near the roof: “The world stands on three things: justice, truth and peace." It was in Beth Israel that we sat with other congregants Yom Kippur morning 1973 wondering about and praying for the fate of Israel after the surprise attacks by Syria and Egypt.

The women of Beth Israel always were amazed Gilda had met and married a Jewish man at college. She’d gently respond that with 95% of Brooklyn College’s 30,000 student population being Jewish it would have been hard not to find a mate from the “chosen” religion.

As we drove north toward Ansonia, we passed the restaurant where we’d treat ourselves to a meal away from home, the McDonald’s on Division Street straddling the border with Derby. Spector Furniture in Ansonia is still open for business. We bought our first TV there, a Magnavox, plus a desk we still have, now consigned to our garage. Around the corner, the Register’s bureau office is long closed. It was in that office I first heard the phrase “to Jew someone down.” It was not a saying common to the Brooklyn shtetl I grew up in.

Before visiting our first home, we entered downtown Seymour, dominated by a post office two to three times the size required for a town of 13,000. As related by local historians, the town benefited from a bureaucratic mistake. Seems the post office the head of the congressional oversight committee had earmarked for his hometown of Seymour, Ind., had mistakenly been erected in Seymour, Conn.

The locals are trying to remake downtown Seymour into an artsy community, with antique and curio shops. They need more restaurants, though the one we lunched in, Jimmie’s Place, was a classic throwback saloon with lobster roll, French fries and cole slaw for $8.99, a hard to beat price.

The house we lived in had been divided into a two-family dwelling. We had three rooms on the first floor: a big country kitchen where Gilda learned to cook, a living room and a bedroom with bright red walls when we first moved in but quickly painted over to reflect Gilda’s more refined sensibilities. Upstairs, our landlord’s daughter and son-in-law lived.

As I stood at the bottom of the porch steps, Gilda knocked on the door. The twenty-something woman who opened the door cheerfully let us in. Her big dog, and really big husband, gave her the confidence we weren’t going to harm her. Their family had bought the house from the previous owner and converted it back to a one family home. Our bedroom was now an office. The kitchen had been expanded and updated. They seemed happy there.

As we drove to and through New Haven where we lived for two years in a subdivided Tudor mansion off Forest Road (Gilda’ couldn’t gain access to that apartment unit), we reflected on how far we had come during the last 39 years. More on that, perhaps, another day.

Saturday Night Bombings

The botched blowup in Times Square over the weekend brought back memories of a different Saturday night bombing 35 years ago.

Gilda and I were living in Seymour, Conn. I was a reporter for The New Haven Register. The nearby city of Shelton was my beat.

We had just settled into bed when the phone rang shortly after 11:35 pm., March 1, 1975. My boss was calling, asking why I was going to sleep when half of downtown Shelton was on the verge of being wiped off the face of the earth. Bombs had exploded inside the 475,000-sq.ft. Shelton Sponge Rubber Products Co. Plant 4 along the Housatonic River. It was, and possibly still is, the largest case of industrial arson in the United States.

I quickly dressed and drove the several miles to Shelton. Firemen and equipment, most from volunteer fire departments, converged on Canal Street from more than 20 neighboring towns. As the two-city-block-long factory burnt to a crisp shell, rumors started circulating. It was the work of radical Weathermen, it was said. Turned out the arsonists had kidnapped three plant employees and while tying them up safely in a woods in an adjoining town, one said they were part of the Weather Underground. It didn’t make sense. The plant was not vital to the Vietnam War effort. It made pillows and mattresses and other foam rubber products. But the reference to the Weathermen brought the FBI into the investigatory mix.

Within days authorities traced the suspects to a rented yellow Ryder van used to transport 500 pounds of dynamite and 24 55-gallon drums of gasoline into the factory. Among the 10 arrested were Charles D. Moeller, president of the company, and David D. Bubar, a Baptist minister and self-proclaimed psychic who counseled Moeller. The government alleged Moeller’s purchase of the plant from B.F. Goodrich the year before had financially strapped him. To relieve the burden, Moeller, under Bubar’s influence, had financed the arson, it was charged.

Moeller twice beat the rap, in federal and state court, though a civil trial found him responsible (much like the OJ Simpson situation), thus absolving his insurance company from any requirement to pay $68 million in damages on the building and its contents. Bubar, on the other hand, was found guilty of second degree arson. He served six and one-half years of a 20-year sentence. Seven other defendants also served time. The tenth was acquitted.

As spectacular as the fire was, the real tragedy of that night 35 years ago was the impact it had on the lives of the plant’s 900 workers and their families. The business never came back. The site was turned into a park. Other plants along the river either closed down or relocated. From being a once vibrant factory town, Shelton has evolved into a bedroom community for New Haven, Bridgeport and even New York, where another vehicle, an SUV, might prove vital in revealing who was behind the attempt to blow a hole in the middle of the crossroads of the world.