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New Canaan There & Then: ‘Live from New Canaan, It’s Paul Simon and Harry Connick Jr.!’

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‘New Canaan There & Then’ is sponsored by Brown Harris Stevens Realtors Bettina Hegel, Joanne Santulli and Dawn Sterner. 
Let’s be honest. No one would ever mistake the New Canaan High School Auditorium for Carnegie Hall. Yet at 4 pm on Sunday, September 29th, 2013, the venue was transformed for one magical night when music legends Paul Simon and Harry Connick put on a concert, a concert that proved to be a major historic event even for a 282-year-old town. The idea for the performance came from the late Pat Stoddard, a New Canaan citizen-stalwart and one of the founders of Staying Put in New Canaan, a much-admired nonprofit organization that assists local seniors in continuing to live in their own homes in town. Stoddard suggested that while the benefit proceeds would support Staying Put, the concert itself should be dedicated to honor New Canaan’s first responders (Fire, Police, EMT and CERT personnel).

New Canaan There & Then

New Canaan There & Then: Letters from the Civil War Battlefield

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‘New Canaan There & Then’ is sponsored by Brown Harris Stevens Realtors Bettina Hegel, Joanne Santulli and Dawn Sterner. 
In the third summer of the Civil War, Union Army Private Justus Silliman, a 21-year-old native of New Canaan, wrote home about his role in the greatest battle in American history. Hospital 11th Corps
Public School Gettysburg Pa
Friday, July 3rd 1863
My Dear Mother,
You undoubtedly will have heard of the fight before you will have received this. I am a prisoner, yet the fighting still continues. We marched from Emmitsburg Md. to this place on the morning of July 1st.

New Canaan There & Then

New Canaan There & Then: The World’s Greatest Athlete—Bill Toomey (Part 2 of 2)

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‘New Canaan There & Then’ is sponsored by Brown Harris Stevens Realtors Bettina Hegel, Joanne Santulli and Dawn Sterner. (Part 1 of 2 in this series can be read here.)
What opportunities come your way after you’ve won an Olympic gold medal and been heralded as The World’s Greatest Athlete? How about starring in a movie wearing a loin cloth? In anticipation of the 1972 Olympics in Munich (yes, that tragic fortnight), ABC Sports commissioned “Ancient Games,” a film paying tribute to the decathlon. It was filmed in the ancient Stadium of Delphi, and starred Toomey and Rafer Johnson, a fellow American who won the decathlon gold medal in the 1960 Rome Games.

New Canaan There & Then

New Canaan There & Then: The World’s Greatest Athlete—Bill Toomey (Part 1 of 2)

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‘New Canaan There & Then’ is sponsored by Brown Harris Stevens Realtors Bettina Hegel, Joanne Santulli and Dawn Sterner. The Year of Turmoil and Tragedy

October 19, 1968. It’s day two of the 1968 Olympic decathlon in Mexico City, and the 29-year-old American athlete is tired and discouraged, if not disconsolate. The prior day he completed the first five events of the competition in fine form, including a sizzling 100-meter dash time of 10.4 seconds and an even more impressive 400-meter effort of 45.6 seconds, the fastest time ever recorded in a decathlon. It had been an exclamation point to the wearisome 10 straight hours of competition that day. 

His performance in those events, which had taken place at the massive Estadio Olimpico Universitario, together with the long jump, shot put and high jump, had left him in first place at the end of day one.

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New Canaan There & Then: Top 10 List — The Perambulation Line

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‘New Canaan There & Then’ is sponsored by Brown Harris Stevens Realtors Bettina Hegel, Joanne Santulli and Dawn Sterner. In the spirit of former New Canaan resident David Letterman, we present the “Top Ten Things About The Perambulation Line”:

10. What was the Perambulation Line? The Perambulation Line was a formal, straight, generally north/south property line established by royal surveyors in 1685 that officially delineated the boundaries between Norwalk and Stamford prior to New Canaan’s incorporation in 1801. This followed decades of disputes between the two future cities, each of which sought to tax landowners on both sides of the Line. The surveyors started at the mouth of the Five Mile River, and following a south-to-north course established a border ending at the Connecticut colony line, which at that time was situated within present-day Westchester County.