Elizabeth Leonard told her Board of Selectmen that it was her last meeting as first selectman before the November election, the Sept. 24, 1987, Press reported.
Selectman Sue Manning thereafter served as acting first selectman for Mrs. Leonard, who was scheduled to undergo surgery the following week and expected to be in a leg cast for six weeks. Mrs. Manning and Selectman Michael Venus were the Republican and Democratic candidates, respectively, for Mrs. Leonard’s job.
The Planning and Zoning Commission rejected, for the fourth time, the proposal of a Norwalk developer for 212 condominiums located to the east of the intersections of Routes 35 and 7. The project was called Laurel Hill condominiums. The chief opposition to the project was its proximity to Great Pond, even though the developer offered to turn over the lakefront part of the property to the town.
The Board of Selectmen, swayed by suggestions that a buyout of some 50 acres of the property might be construed as an illegal “contract zoning,” declined to investigate the purchase of the land. Instead, the board called for the town to acquire the land through normal zoning channels as part of a plan for future development on the site.
After nine years of training and ordaining traditionalist Catholic priests in defiance of church hierarchy in Rome, the St. Thomas Aquinas Seminary by Lake Mamanasco planned to leave Ridgefield. The converted mansion was to become a retreat house, as it was once before, when the Jesuits owned it.
Telephone customers in the Ridgefield exchange area started receiving ballots to choose their desired long distance telephone company. Customers could remain with AT&T or select another company.
East Ridge Middle School teacher Cynthia Biagiotti was selected as “Teacher of the Year.”
The board of directors of the Ridgefield Savings Bank named Paul S. McNamara as chairman of the board and Edwin B. Allan was vice chair. Gary C. Smith was hired as bank president.
Erland van Lidth de Jeude, an actor who was a Greco-Roman wrestler and computer consultant, died at 34. A native of the Netherlands, Mr. van Lidth de Jeude graduated from Ridgefield High in 1971. He turned down a scholarship to play football at Harvard and instead went on to MIT, where he took up wrestling for the first time. “I found it was more fun to throw people — they come back,” he said in a 1978 interview. He was the New England collegiate heavyweight champion in 1976.
Corp. Cliff Scharf was named Officer of the Year by the Ridgefield Police Commission.
