The Good Old Days in Darien / Ed Chrostowski

Sparkling success in one career is cause for acclaim, but achieving it while also excelling in an unrelated field is a rarity and a marvel.

Such was the dual triumph of a Delafield Island Road resident with the improbable name of Trigger Alpert, jazz bassist with some of the nation's leading orchestras and, simultaneously, an accomplished photographer.

Indeed, his talented fingers were equally adept at strumming the strings of his big bass and adjusting the setting of his cameras.

Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Alpert recorded music with the likes of Glenn Miller, Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra and Louie Armstrong. He was a close associate of Miller and played in his famous military and civilian bands in clubs, theaters and movies. And all the while he became known for the unique family portraits he created with his cameras.

Finally, photography won his full attention and he left the music world in about 1970 to devote all of his time to his cameras and dark room. In fact, his photographic talents rubbed off on his son, Kip, who often brought his pictures to the Darien Review office for publication in the newspaper.

The Alpert influence also may have been at work on another Darien musician, Willie Demms, guitarist and leader of the Belevederes, a teen band that gained some renown when rock and roll first burst upon the Darien scene. Alpert befriended Demms and took him along to recording studios in New York. As the Belvederes reached college age and disbanded, Demms turned his full attention to photography and became a busy and well-known portraitist, a career he still continues at his home in Trumbull.

Photography also was the focus of a little group of stores, a sort of strip mall that went up on the Post Road a few decades ago. Leading the way was a young couple fresh from being discharged from the Army, Russ and Loretta Fairbanks, and their store is still a mainstay there.

Russ was the first to introduce one of the great wonders of the photographic world, the Land Polaroid Camera, to Darien. It was a Rube Goldberg contraption that required all kinds of rollers, careful timing and the application of an emulsion, but, presto!, in a minute you had a finished photo that could be sent to an engraver. We at the Review were thrilled; it was a great time-saver that allowed us to get "last minute" pictures into that week's edition.

Russ became the first president, elected in January 1950, to head the local business group that was only then morphing into a full fledged Chamber of Commerce. Loretta, who had served in the Women's Auxiliary Army Corps (WAAC), later added a candy business to the shop.

Multi-talented individuals were not uncommon in Darien in "the good old days." Take the Saverine family, for example. Joe was an outstanding athlete at Georgetown University and played semi-pro baseball in the area during the 1950s. Charlie was a catcher for Terre Haute, Ind., a Phillies farm team in baseball's famous Three-Eye League (Indiana, Illinois and Iowa), and Bobby played big league ball with the Baltimore Orioles and Washington Senators.

That was half the story. Joe also was a teacher in Stamford and served on Darien's Board of Education, Bobby became a stock broker and Charlie became a building inspector in Darien. There also was Sal Saverine, who ran the popular Noroton Heights bar at the corner of Noroton Avenue and Heights Road (since demolished) and Saverines were credited with building most of the houses along Joseph and Charles streets, the heart of what was akin to a "Little Italy" off West Avenue.

Melvin Corbett, the town's tax collector in the 1950s, was another example of versatility. In addition to ensuring a great rate of return on the tax bills he mailed out, Corbett was a master carillonneur at Trinity College in Hartford and was invited often to present recitals in bell towers at churches and universities throughout the Northeast.

He was known as "Jim," a reference to the great heavyweight boxing champion, "Gentleman Jim," with whom he shared the Corbett name. Darien's Corbett was a real gentleman, too, and his friends often kidded him about the hearing aid that tangled from his ear, saying the close-up clanging of all those bells in church steeples had taken a toll on his hearing.

In the meantime, readers have continued to flesh out the faulty memory too often bared in this space.

Bill Demms corrects us on the geneaology of the original orange-roofed Howard Johnson's restaurant over on the east end of the Post Road (predating by decades the one, since demolished, at the corner of Ledge Road). It didn't become the Red Coach Grille as had been suggested here. It became Cook's, a favorite after-the-movie hamburger stop for dating teenagers and a popular place for families looking to enjoy "home-cooked" inexpensive meals while youngsters were kept amused in the "game room," nothing so sophisticated as today's Wii but lots of fun with flashing lights and ringing bells. The Red Coach was a different building, erected nearby, and later became Chi Chi's and then the Red Lobster.

Other readers from far and wide have faint recollections of Captain Video, fantasy hero of the day, coming to Darien High School in a helicopter and local visits by Jacques Cousteau, famous oceanographer and undersea explorer, and Victor Borge, the Danish pianist/comedian. Can anybody clear this up for us?

Ed Chrostowski was editor of the Darien Review in the '50s. He can be reached at skicrow@att.net.