Around Town

‘A Tremendous Amount of Fun’: Meet Kelley Franco, Baseball’s ‘Three Inning Fan’

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Kelley Franco, eleventh and youngest sibling among the New Canaan Francos, a clan of eight boys and three girls, recalls sitting out on the family’s screened-in porch on Tommy’s Lane one day in 1982. 

She was 12 years old and one of her big brothers, Mike, had either just gotten into law school or decided to become a lawyer, she recalled. “And I also had decided that I wanted to be a lawyer—which I realize is a little young to decide your career path, but whatever—and someone made a joke at dinner out on the porch, and they said, ‘Maybe someday they’ll have a law firm together and it’ll be the ‘Franco Law Firm.’ And everyone was like, ‘Right, haha.’ Fast-forward to 2006, and I just kind of called up Mike one day and said, ‘Remember when we talked about this?’ ”

By then, she’d attended St. Aloysius School through eighth grade, graduated from New Canaan High School (class of ‘88), earned a bachelor’s degree in government from Georgetown (minor in French), studied abroad for one year in Paris, earned a law degree from the University of Connecticut School of Law, passed the New York and Connecticut bars and married a Mets fan (Tom Throop, gifted furniture designer maker of Grove Street). Franco would form Franco Law Associates with Mike after launching her own career as a litigator, doing a three-month internship in a Paris law firm and then stints at large and small firms in the United States. Amid all that, about 20 years ago, Franco—a steadfast Yankees fan who’d managed the NCHS freshman baseball team as a teen, keeping score for the squad—felt another itch to scratch, this one connected to our national pastime.

Opinion

Podcast: Talkin’ Baseball with Kelley Franco Throop

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This week on 0684-Radi0, our free podcast (subscribe here in the iTunes Store), we talk to Kelley Franco Throop, a New Canaan native and local attorney who has expertise in our national pastime. Franco Throop has been a guest lecturer at the Baseball Hall of Fame and is receiving wide attention from the sport for a video series that she launched last year on Twitter and Instagram. 

Here are recent episodes:

Around Town

Did You Hear … ?

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Seven women with direct connections to New Canaan—see the gallery above—will share their leadership experiences and encourage women and girls to pursue their goals in “Being Queen: Thoughts from the Throne,” a panel discussion hosted by NC Women Mean Business that will be held from 6:30 to 8 p.m. at New Canaan Library. Read here for more information to this free, open event. ***

A New Canaan woman spotted a bobcat on her Canoe Hill Road property on Saturday morning—the sixth such sighting in one month of the reclusive feline. “I happened to be in the kitchen and turned and looked out the window and saw a bobcat on the front lawn,” Carol Miller said of her sighting at about 4:35 p.m. Saturday. “It meandered across the driveway and headed into the woods, and not a minute later there were six prancing deer that followed it.

Business

Icon and Inspiration: Lydia Franco O’Neil, At the Store and Behind the Mousse Cake

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[This is the third installment in a four-part series “Matriarchs of Main & Elm,” profiling the women behind New Canaan’s great business families.]

Thomas George Franco II—‘Tom,’ as he’s known today on Elm Street, site of the family’s eponymous wine and liquor shop, a fixture of downtown New Canaan for nearly a century—recalls the challenge he faced as a young man in 1975, trying to acclimate back to civilian life upon being discharged from the Army following a three-year tour during the Vietnam War. Fortunately for the newly made U.S. Army veteran, Tom was one of 11 Franco siblings—all students of St. Aloysius School and graduates of New Canaan Public Schools—who knew a remarkable woman named Lydia Franco O’Neil as ‘Aunt Lee.’

At the time, Aunt Lee had a condominium in Florida with her husband, longtime local U.S. Postal Service worker Bill O’Neil, and the plan was for Tom to drive her down to the Sunshine State so that she could have a car there, and he would fly back. “That was the perfect reintroduction back into civilian life,” Tom recalled on a recent evening. “We talked all the way down—about Uncle Bill, the family, what I was going to do now, and just things in general.