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.

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New Canaan There & Then: Look! Up in the Sky! It’s a Bird! It’s a Plane!

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‘New Canaan There & Then’ is sponsored by Brown Harris Stevens Realtors Bettina Hegel, Joanne Santulli and Dawn Sterner. In Steven Spielberg’s madcap (sometimes) comedy “1941” starring John Belushi, a ragtag group of California civilians work furiously to make their city defensible from a misperceived attack by the Japanese, in the wake of a real attack on Pearl Harbor days earlier. 

The genesis of the movie’s plot was the so-called “Battle of Los Angeles,” where a similar false rumor in the late and early hours of Feb. 24-25,1942 triggered the largest antiaircraft barrage on U.S. soil in history, causing significant property damage, injuries and several indirect deaths. Luckily for New Canaan, the good women and men constituting its local “plane spotters” were far more circumspect in their identification of aircraft than their contemporaries on the west coast. 

The period between 1940 and 1960 saw the United States on an almost perpetual war footing, between its involvement in World War II (1941-1945), the Korean War (1950-1953), and the Cold War (1945-1991). Apart from actively fighting “hot” wars abroad, either directly or by proxy, The United States also built up an unprecedented defensive capability at home, most notably through its possession of thousands of intercontinental nuclear ballistic missiles, as well as the legendary B-52 Stratofortress bombers and other assets of the U.S. Strategic Air Command. 

A vastly simpler but often overlooked component of America’s comprehensive defense system was its “plane spotters.” During World War II, the U.S. established a massive volunteer network, the Army’s Ground Observer Corps (GOC) (later called “Skywatch”), involving over 1.5 million civilians to identify enemy (i.e., Japanese, German or Italian) aircraft.

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New Canaan There & Then: Friday Night Lights—A Brief History of Dunning Stadium

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‘New Canaan There & Then’ is sponsored by Brown Harris Stevens Realtors Bettina Hegel, Joanne Santulli and Dawn Sterner. The site Niche.com recently named New Canaan the 8th-ranked “Best School District for Athletes in America” for 2026, out of 9,934 school districts reviewed. Given the townspeople’s somewhat obsessive enthusiasm for athletics generally, that ranking is, as the inimitable Captain Quint quipped in the movie Jaws, “Not a bad reputation for this location.”

At least a small part of the ranking is undoubtedly due to the existence of Dunning Stadium, which since 1997 has been the home of the New Canaan Rams in multiple sports, served as the High School’s annual graduation venue, hosted events such as Division 1 NCCA lacrosse games and the NFL’s Northeast Regional Flag Football Tournament, and been acclaimed as “one of the premier high school athletic facilities” in New England. The genesis of Dunning Stadium was simple: a desire for Friday night lights. 

It’s hard to believe, but the New Canaan High School football team wasn’t always the veritable colossus that it is today. Indeed, in 1980 the New York Times wrote about, “New Canaan Football Fans; Hope for Better Times,” reporting on the painful fall of the team from excellence in the late 1960s and early ‘70s to three consecutive years without a single victory in 1978-1980.

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New Canaan There & Then: Murder in the Next Station to Heaven

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‘New Canaan There & Then’ is sponsored by Brown Harris Stevens Realtors Bettina Hegel, Joanne Santulli, Dawn Sterner and Pam Stutz. The blazing inferno could be seen from miles away, despite the mid-November gloom enveloping New Canaan that morning in 1898. 

Lewis P. Child saw the smoke from his stately home on West Road and immediately set out for town on his bicycle to raise the alarm. By the time he and other responders made it to the farm on Cheese Spring Road, it was too late. Both house and barn were already gone. But what came as a complete shock to the would-be rescuers was the sight of a middle-aged man dangling from the limb of a lonely apple tree near a stone wall abutting the property.