By Mary A. Jacobson
While thousands of people enjoy the beauty and sanctuary of Tod’s Point, known now as Greenwich Point, few are aware of its connection to our WWII veterans. The longtime owners of Tod’s Point were Mr. and Mrs. J. Kennedy Tod. From 1946 to 1961, their former mansion served as a residence for WWII veterans and their families.
To preserve the history of Tod’s Point for present and future generations, the Oral History Project interviewed 67 narrators and published its book Tod’s’ Point, An Oral History in 1981. It is from this rich trove that the stories of the WWII veterans are excerpted.
In 1945 the Town of Greenwich purchased the 148acre property of Tod’s Point from Presbyterian Hospital, to whom it had been bequeathed upon J. Kennedy Tod’s death, for the sum of $550,000. The mansion on the property had not been used as a residence since 1939. Concurrently, with the end of WWII, veterans were returning home to Greenwich to a severe housing shortage. Approval was given by the Town of Greenwich to lease the mansion to thirteen veteran families for one dollar a year.
Before these families could move into the mansion in 1946, its thirty-nine rooms needed to be converted into thirteen apartments. The veterans formed an independent nonprofit corporation called Vetaptco (Veterans’ Apartment Corporation) and each family floated a $1,000 loan from The Greenwich Trust Company. According to resident Thiel Ficker, “We paid (monthly) rent to our own corporation. I think forty dollars was the cheapest and seventy dollars was the most expensive. Of that, twentynine dollars went to the bank. The balance went into our Vetaptco account, and from that we paid for our oil, our heat, our electric, and so forth.”
The original Tod home was beautifully appointed. “You would find lovely casement windows in certain areas with just lovely hardware, the kind that would be very, very expensive; leaded glass, that sort of thing.” To ready the apartments for thirteen families, Ficker continued, “This contractor (Peter Danziger) did the basic work and we did all the finishing work. We did all the painting and some of the plastering and a lot of the carpentry.” When the job was done, “and everybody’s apartment was finally fixed up, we decided we ought to have an open house because people all over town were curious about this… Hordes of people came down and walked through the whole place… and were quite astounded at what had been done.”
Thiel Ficker reminisced, “Because practically every woman in the place was pregnant, we called it “Stork Point” for a while… None of us would ever choose to go back to that time again, of course, but for that particular time -we were all young, just out of the army – it was fun. It was sort of communal living in a way. We kept the integrity and privacy of each individual family.”
Wintertime living at Tod’s Point had its challenges. The Town agreed to only plow snow to the entrance of the Point. On December 26, 1947, one of the worst blizzards occurred in Greenwich with 26.5 inches of snow. Ficker recalled, “Well, we didn’t have any snow shovels… so we took these sheets of aluminum and cut them up and made long wooden handles, and nailed these rectangular pieces of aluminum to the wooden handles and made about thirteen shovels…We shoveled all day long, and at six o’clock at night, we finally broke through to Shore Road where they had plowed it.”
Another emergency requiring a communal response was the inadequate septic system that gave out on Thanksgiving Day, 1946. As Ficker described it, “There was a poor old septic tank, and it just couldn’t take it any longer.” That day the men dug a whole dry field. “We dug trenches through that. We honeycombed that whole field, laid tiles, filled in gravel, and connected it in with the septic tank which was across the road. All that on Thanksgiving Day. We worked up an appetite for turkey. Although some of us didn’t have much of an appetite.”
Summertime was a busy time. “You can imagine it was like living on Coney Island on a Sunday. On a nice day in July, it was a steady stream of cars, and people used to drive up the driveway and right around the big circle there. So, we were happy when fall came and they closed the beach. Then it was peaceful and quiet.” Joseph Callachan remembered fondly the flock of snowy white egrets that would return to Tod’s Point in the fall. “Of course, Tod’s Point is, and was then, a sort of paradise for bird watchers.” Thiel Ficker remembered Sunday mornings down at the pond with his two sons. “We had a big net on the end of a long pole and we’d catch blue crabs Oh, boy! Blue crabs were all over the place!”
By 1961, the last family moved out. According to Ficker, “I think it ended simply because time had run out on it… The Town had said they wouldn’t renew the lease, and there was good reason… It was really starting to get run down. It would have taken a tremendous amount of money to put it into any shape at all… And then there was the decision to demolish the house. Of course, we were sad to see it go.” Joseph Callachan heartily agreed. “It was just a simply marvelous experience.”
On May 9, as part of the celebration of “America’s 250th|Greenwich,” Seaside Gardens at Greenwich Point will be the site of a festival of handbell choirs, featuring a commissioned work by Jonathan Vaughn entitled “Let Freedom Ring!” One might muse of the connection from the theme of this music to the brave American WWII veterans who moved to Greenwich Point eighty years ago, after their years of dedicated service in the defense of freedom.
The Oral History Project is proud to present blogs derived from its collection of recorded interviews as part of the Project’s celebration of “America’s 250th|Greenwich – Greenwich History is American History.” The OHP is sponsored by Friends of Greenwich Library. Visit the website at glohistory.org. Interviews may also be read in their entirety or checked out at the main library. They are also available for purchase by contacting the OHP office.
Recollections are personal and have not been subjected to factual scrutiny. Mary Jacobson serves as blog editor.
