NewCanaanite.com (https://newcanaanite.com/tag/rick-crolla)
This week on 0684-Radi0, our free podcast (subscribe here in the iTunes Store), we talk to New Canaan’s Rick Crolla (here’s Laura Ault’s “Who Knew?” on him). It’s the third installment of our “New Canaan Lifers” series, profiling longtime residents of the town. Here are recent episodes of 0684-Radi0:
‘Who Knew?’ is sponsored by Walter Stewart’s Market. It becomes evident, after enough time, that living in New Canaan is a lot like living in Richard Scarry’s Busytown. While the jobs people have in 2024 may be more deskbound and spreadsheet-y than the anthropomorphized animal metermaids Scarry’s pen brought to life, there’s still a delightfully wholesome level of personal connection in this small-ish town.
You might have a beer with the librarian, bump into the grocer at a fundraiser, and have in-jokes with your mail carrier. That our cars aren’t apple-shaped (though I wish they were) doesn’t make our existence any less storybook; New Canaan is most assuredly a town with character. And what gives a town character?
Growing up in her family’s Main Street home, Calie Crolla often heard the phone ring at the crack of dawn or a pager go off right before bed. Both parents owned and operated their own businesses—her mom, Barbara, the Day Care Center of New Canaan and her dad, Rick, an optometrist at New Canaan Eye Associates on East Avenue since 1984. Another child may have been envious of the attention those jobs demanded. Yet for Crolla, it provided firsthand knowledge of the responsibility that small business ownership entails, instilling a work ethic that would lead the New Canaan resident to launch her own enterprise. On July 25, 2018, she opened Skin Care by Calie in Norwalk.