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Ruth Ogden Carroll, 96

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Ruth Ogden Carroll, 96, of New Canaan, CT, passed away peacefully October 8, 2021, at Norwalk Hospital with her family by her side. Ruth was born April 12, 1925, to Howard M. and Esther (Ahearn) Ogden in the family home on Ogden Rd. in New Canaan that stands nearly unchanged today.  She spent many happy hours roaming the rural north end of town and passing time in her grandfather Stanley Ogden’s shop on Lukes Wood Rd., where he had a furniture repair and chair caning business.  Her father Howard ran the Blue Arrow Garage for many years, reportedly the first service station to sell gasoline in New Canaan. Ruth told many tales of growing up in a far more rural New Canaan which seem like a distant fantasy given what the town has become, a change which she never failed to find both amusing and infuriating.  She was a regular volunteer at the New Canaan Historical Society for many years, and was involved with the Sellecks Corners Cemetery Association all her life, working to preserve the cemetery and its 1851 chapel on Barnegat Rd. Ruth married John Otis Carroll in 1967, meeting him while working as the secretary at the Silvermine Arts Center; the two remained happily married until his passing in 2010.  Aside from a couple years in the wilderness (Greenwich!) when she was first married, Ruth spent her entire life as a New Canaan resident.

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Eleanor Brennan Meredith (1956-2021)

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Eleanor B. Meredith passed away on October 2, 2021 at her home in New Canaan surrounded by her husband and children after privately struggling with bile duct cancer for several years. A caring wife and loving mother of four; owner of her own publishing business and an entrepreneur at heart; and a friend to many and a sounding board to all. Born in Trenton, New Jersey in 1956, Eleanor grew up in Pennington, New Jersey, with horses in her backyard – which started her life-long passion and love of riding horses. She attended Stuart Country Day School of the Sacred Heart in Princeton, where she excelled in a variety of sports and was the president of her senior class. She then went to Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., graduating with a degree in English Literature, where she made a permanent mark on the university’s athletic program in several ways.

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Richard Gilroy, 62

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Richard Gilroy passed away suddenly on Sunday, October 10, 2021.  He was 62 years old. He was the son of Robert and Mary Gilroy.  Richard was born in Norwalk and attended New Canaan schools. He is survived by his brothers, Robert of CA and Thomas (Judy) of New Canaan. He was predeceased by his parents and his brothers, Michael and William Gilroy. A Mass of Christian Burial to celebrate Richard’s life will be held on Saturday, October 16, 2021 at St.

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Ruth Richardson Montgomery, 91

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Ruth Richardson Montgomery, 91, of Carleton-Willard Village in Bedford, MA passed away on September 28, 2021, after a short illness. She is survived by her children, Charles Richardson Skeele (Jennifer), Harrison Fowler Skeele (Virginia), Sarah Hayden Post, and her stepdaughter, Cynthia Kowalski (Ronald), her sister, Alice Hayward Forker of Columbia, MO, her seven grandchildren and five step-grandchildren, her four great-grandchildren and five step-great-grandchildren. A graduate of Adelphi Academy (1948) and Mount Holyoke College (1952), Ruth and her former husband Robert and their children lived in Nassau, Bahamas, from 1955 to 1964, in New Canaan, CT from 1964 to 1975, and in Houston, TX from 1975 to 1982. Thereafter, she lived in Darien, CT with her late husband Sigmund John Montgomery who predeceased her in 2017. In 2020, she moved to Massachusetts.

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Tony Thompson, 87

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Tony (Carlton Woodruff) Thompson died, surrounded by family, Monday night, September 20. After outrunning the condition for years, idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis finally, and quite suddenly, caught up with him. 

Tony was born in 1933 in Flushing, NY and grew up in Los Angeles. He attended Phillips Academy Andover, finished high school at the Harvard School (LA) and graduated from Stanford University. He was a First Lieutenant in the U.S. Air Force, flying helicopters from Japan at the end of the Korean Conflict. Tony’s sister, Nancy, introduced him to her UC Boulder roommate, Nancy McDonald and he married the love of his life in 1960. 

In the first phase of his career, he had myriad roles in half a dozen cities at Time-Life, Inc., including Associate Publisher of LIFE Magazine en Español in Mexico City, running Time-Life Books South Pacific in Sydney Australia and, finally, helping to start (and, legend has it, coin the name for) Home Box Office (HBO) in New York.