| By Beth Mason, November 15, 2003 |
Sally Wiseman sat at the kitchen table of her home on Hunting Ridge Lane early last June surveying the surrounding bare walls and the stacks of packed cartons ready for the arrival of the moving van.
“I’ve had a thirty-three-year love affair with Wilton,” she said. “Wonderful neighbors, great schools, a stimulating atmosphere—and oh, such friends. How I have treasured my friends.”
But, she said, “Eventually something starts you thinking about the price you’ve been paying to stay here.”
 Sally & Bob Wiseman Photo by Kristin Burke |
For Sally and her husband Bob, the process that led to their decision to move to Williamsburg, Virginia last spring was a gradual and, they both admit, at times an emotionally wrenching one. Sally thinks the tipping point may have been reached when they realized how many of their friends were moving away. “You see that they are happy in their new locations, and you start to think, ‘Well, maybe we can do it, too.’”
The decision to leave is an increasingly common one for many Wiltonians of a certain age (usually their sixties). Most of them are still in excellent health, physically active, involved in hobbies and volunteer work, and still able, for the time being, anyway, to live comfortably, if carefully, on their retirement income. They raised their children here. Their investment of time and energy in the community they love spans decades, and they have truly contributed to making Wilton a better place. This has been their town.
When the Wisemans moved to Wilton from California in 1970, they knew they had found the place where they wanted to put down permanent roots. But Bob was with IBM, and over the next two decades, the company sent him on assignments lasting between two and three years, first to Washington DC, then twice to Paris. After each assignment—three times in all—he and Sally and their family joyfully returned to Wilton. They built their house in 1979, between their two stints in France, and finally moved back—“forever,” so they thought—in 1989. Their four children all attended Wilton schools and were sports-minded. The family played tennis and paddle tennis at the Wilton Riding Club and were active Pop Warner and Wilton Lacrosse Association members. Sally, an accomplished watercolor artist, was an early participant in the formation of the Wilton Arts Council, and she volunteered for Minks to Sinks for 25 years. Both she and Bob were active in their Wilton church right up to the day of their move, when Bob, as Senior Warden, stepped down from the highest lay office at St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church.
Bob’s retirement from IBM in 1992, far from causing him to curtail his involvement in the town, allowed him to increase his commitment. After a number of years as a member of Wilton’s Board of Tax Review, he was elected to the Board of Finance in 1997 and served until 2001. He describes the experience as “totally positive and rewarding.” It also expanded his knowledge and broadened his perspective on the factors causing many retirees to move away from Wilton.
Finances are the most obvious reason for leaving, of course. But just as compelling, he maintains, are perceptions that shift, as we grow older, as we react to changes in the culture, even as our most deeply-held community values undergo change. “Our tradition, as corporate families moving into town back in the 1960s and 70s, was to buy the most expensive house we could afford. It was what made the most economic sense in those days, and we struggled to pay our mortgages and make ends meet. No one was putting $200,000 additions on back then. We had job security and savings plans, and we had company loyalty, but we weren’t getting rich—certainly not by today’s standards.”
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He cites the shift from the former corporate profile (“we car-pooled to work, we socialized together, we coached our kids’ games together”) to today’s more entrepreneurial mode, where jobs change and companies implode with dizzying frequency, where two working parents are the norm, and more residents are self-employed or telecommute from their homes in relative isolation. These changes have an obvious impact on a town, he says. “People our age have trouble adjusting to the reality that life isn’t as simple as it used to be, that volunteers aren’t as plentiful, that the long-term commitment to the community we have cherished doesn’t appear to go as deep.”
Finally, he says, “You look around you and say, ‘This is too much house and too much property to maintain.’ You realize you don’t have all the time in the world left. You want to begin to limit your commitment of energy and resources to what means the most to you now.”
But if leaving is unthinkable, downsizing in order to stay on is difficult, if not impossible. The cost of selling a house in Wilton can be as much as 10%, with realtors’ and lawyers’ fees, taxes owed, state and town transfer fees based on the price of the house, and the additional, unanticipated costs which almost always result from inspections. Smaller, maintenance-free, more “affordable” homes are hard to come by in Wilton, taxes keep going up, and, indeed, a move within town can only truly be economically viable when it is accompanied by a pared-down lifestyle. Few people are willing to make that tradeoff, especially when they realize that they can replicate elsewhere, for much less, what they have had here. In many parts of the Southeast, including Williamsburg (so many have moved there in recent years that some now refer to it as “Wiltonburg”), taxes and home costs can run as much as 50% lower than they are here.
 Bill & Lee Rading Photo by Kristin Burke |
“That doesn’t sound like a reason to put your house on the market,” she says, “but somehow I knew the time had come. Our nest was empty, our ties to the community weren’t as strong anymore, and the house had become a burden.” Bill was reluctant to sell at first, but Lee had definitely made the emotional break. Frustrated and fed up by the deer problem (as Sally Wiseman also claims to be), she felt her passion for gardening had run its course. “The yard and gardens, the family antiques, polishing silver, all of those things that once were so important suddenly weren’t anymore,” she said. “All of a sudden, I had no problem with the idea of dumping stuff.”
The house sold almost overnight. Lee got advice from some of her realtor friends about a fair price, created a brochure herself, and 90 phone calls of inquiry came the day the For Sale sign went up. “It was a good time to sell, pre-9/11, and the economy was still strong,” says Bill, a former executive with Marketing Corporation of America in Westport. They had bought the house in 1974 for $105,000. It sold in 2001 for $1,150,000. Their four grown children were distressed at first, and Bill and Lee created a scrapbook of memorabilia and photographs of the house for them, with a letter written to them by Bill, reminiscing about the happy years the family had spent there.
The Readings bought a condominium at Lambert Commons on Westport Road for just under $400,000 and had it completely renovated before they moved in that September. “Those first few months in the condo,” says Lee, “every time I walked in the door, I said, ‘Thank you, God!’” She loved the new fixtures, the fresh paint, and the freedom of being able to lock up and take off—for the golf course with Bill, for visits with their Wilton friends who had moved away, or back to Black Diamond Ranch, the golf and country club community in Florida where the Readings have since bought property and where they will move permanently sometime in the next year or two. Lambert Commons has been a perfect interim solution, giving them time to reflect on their three decades in Wilton and consider their options—but they have decided to go.
While Bill and Lee seem less ambivalent about leaving than Bob and Sally Wiseman, their attachment to Wilton has been strong and, like the Wisemans,’ their history of community involvement is long and impressive. Active from the start in Republican politics, Bill managed the winning First Selectman campaigns of Rosemary Verrilli in 1975 and Peggy Gill in 1981. He served on the Zoning Board of Appeals for 12 years and on the Fire Commission for 8 years. He and Lee were the originators of the 4th of July Frivolity Bowl softball game between the Republican and Democratic Town Committees. The aluminum bucket “trophy” that is still presented to the winner each year came from the Readings’ garage and was used for car-washing before Lee appropriated and decorated it for the annual event.
Lee had a busy, successful career for many years as co-owner of Reading and O’Reilly Inc., producers of art appreciation educational media. She was active in the Wilton Y, and was an Arts Council founder. She and Bill taught high school CCD classes together at Our Lady of Fatima Church, and participated, also like the Wisemans, in their children’s many sports activities. Both are avid golfers, conceding that their love for the game has played a big part in their decision about where they will live.
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“Yes, money is an object,” says Bill. “Our lifestyle here is expensive.” They belong to Shorehaven Golf Club in East Norwalk, where the annual $20,000 fee is the biggest line item in their budget. The club membership and their taxes are too high for the three or four months they would be spending in Wilton each year. Like the Wisemans, they will be leaving children and grandchildren behind when they move south, but their hopes are pinned on frequent visits. (Sally Wiseman counts on their six-bedroom house in the Governor’s Land community of Williamsburg being “kid bait,” with golf, tennis, and swimming close at hand. Bill Reading is somewhat less sanguine. “There’s no substitute for being able to drive up to Newtown on the spur of the moment on a Monday afternoon and take your five-year-old grandson to see Finding Nemo,” he says. “Those things are important. That’s what kills me about leaving.”)
Lee and Bill have only positive feelings for Wilton and gratitude for the good life it has given their family. During their years on Old Belden Hill Road, Bill turned down more than one job offer in order to be able to stay in town. But these days he feels validated in the decision to leave by his perception that the Wilton of today is a town for young people. “And that’s not a criticism—in fact, it’s probably the way it should be,” he states. He stops at Starbucks occasionally on his way home from a morning workout at the Y and sits there people-watching while he has his coffee. “They’re all young,” he says. “That’s what Wilton is now.”
Whether or not his perception is widely shared, there is little doubt that more and more retirees are pulling up stakes—either because they have made the choice not to continue maintaining their high-priced lifestyles here, or because they simply can no longer bear the cost of staying.
In a letter to the editor of The Wilton Villager last May, Nancy Faesy of Kellogg Drive recalls the town of the 1960s and 70s, where people of diverse ages and incomes could live and “equally enjoy life and contribute to the community.”
She continues: “Consider how difficult (and perhaps humiliating) it is for an older person to rise at a town budget hearing and say, ‘I can’t afford to live here. Please give me a tax break…’ These longtime Wilton residents are either moving out of town or going through savings too quickly. We have seen too many friends leave town and we miss them. These people enrich the community and we need to keep them.”
Tax relief for seniors has been a recurring theme and an increasingly sensitive topic here for almost a decade. Even “Wilton Dearest”—an uproarious amateur variety show of musical spoofs and sketches about the town—took on tax relief in its second incarnation in January of 1996. The original “Wilton Dearest” in 1990 had included a light-hearted number called “The Route 7 Antiques,” in which some of the town’s well-known seniors celebrated their age in song and dance, ending with a rousing chorus of “Thank God I’m Old…” Six years later, in “Wilton Dearest 2,” the song “Bunnies in Wilton”(set to the tune of “April in Paris”) featured a group of seniors with canes and walkers observing two realtors touring a house with some young parents and their very numerous offspring in tow. The seniors sang:
Bunnies in Wilton,
Where do they come from?
Too many kiddies
Crowding our schools.
Bunnies in Wilton,
To pay our taxes
We’ll have to hock
All our jewels . . .
The suggested solution came at the end of the song with the lines:
New parents under forty-three
Will have to pay a breeders’ tax…YES!
Most of the audience howled, but some claimed they felt tension in the auditorium.
In February 1996, a letter to The Wilton Bulletin from David Close, at that time a 40-year resident of Nod Hill Road, proposed an amended property tax ordinance that would provide a system of relief for “tenured” senior homeowners (those over 65 who had lived in town for a specified number of years) as an incentive for them to stay in Wilton. The letter received almost 200 responses and sparked a dialogue that has continued off and on to the present. For the most part, the discussion has been thoughtful and respectful, conducted primarily through letters to the editors of the town’s newspapers. Typical headlines for such letters read: “Solutions to help stop senior citizen exodus;” “Help seniors without compromising education;” and “Wilton is ‘Wilton’ because of us all.” To this day, however, some older residents recall a comment by a citizen speaking in support of the education budget at a crowded Town Meeting in May 1996. The gist of his message to the seniors was: you’ve worked, you’ve educated your own kids, you’ve got your pension and Social Security; if you can’t hack it here, maybe it’s time for you to go.
One observer called it “a transition moment,” the end of the traditional civility of Town Meeting discourse. In any event, at that point the issue was finally out in the open. At a public hearing on a proposed new tax deferral program conducted the following January by the Board of Selectmen, several longtime residents spoke out, and their message was clear: “The very people who made this town are being pushed out.”
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Over the years, town officials and citizen committees have worked diligently to upgrade the town’s elderly tax relief program. Nevertheless, many say the plans still provide significant help only to the neediest seniors, and do not do nearly enough to relieve the pressure on longtime homeowners who might be able to stay on if eligibility requirements were expande.
 Al & Jan Galletly Phot by Kristin Burke |
When Al took early retirement from GTE Corporation in Stamford in 1992, the Galletlys stayed on in Wilton for almost another nine years in their house on Salem Road. Jan was working full-time as a corporate relocation consultant; their daughters were grown and out of college; and there was no particular urgency about making any drastic changes in their lifestyle. Al joined the Wilton Kiwanis Club and got more seriously involved in his bicycling avocation, arranging and leading several bike tours for groups in the U.S. and Europe. He did two U.S. cross-country tours, a solo one in 1993 in which he raised $270,000 for Alzheimer’s research, and another in 1999 with18 fellow riders, including Jan, who was able to join him for part of the trip. They both remained active members of The Wilton Singers, a group they helped to found in the 1980s, and they also sang in the Wilton Presbyterian Church choir. Jan was a deacon in the church and also volunteered as an ESL tutor. Al, known by many in town as “the Piano Man,” was a popular, sought-after accompanist and soloist for musical events and parties, and an on-call supply accompanist for the Wilton High School choral music department.
Toward the end of the 90s, they began talking about how and when they should “unload,” as Al put it. They wanted a smaller home that they could walk away from when the travel bug bit. They loved the New England seasons and didn’t want to move to the South (with the possible exception of Florida, where they had lived in the Tampa-St. Petersburg area before moving to Wilton, and where one of their daughters now lives). Ideally, they wanted to stay in Wilton, but, having set the price limit for their next home between $250,000 and $300,000, they were pretty sure by then that it wasn’t going to be possible. They went ahead, though, and got their house ready to put on the market. Like the Wisemans’ and the Readings’ homes, it sold fast.
Meanwhile, Jan’s office had moved from Norwalk to Danbury, and she was making a longer trip to work each day. She and Al continued to look at houses and condominiums in the area, still hoping the right place in Wilton might come on the market, but time was running out, and they had to get out of the Salem Road house. Eventually they decided to rent a condominium in Danbury for a year. It would ease Jan’s commute and give them more time to think about their next step.
A week before their move, Jan was told that her company had been sold. That news was followed by moving day from Salem Road…on September 11, 2001. A week later, Jan’s Danbury office was closed and her job ended. The losses of her home of 19 years, her job, and the trauma of the 9/11 attacks were devastating. The Galletlys decided to take a trip to Florida and do some serious house-hunting.
They came close to putting money down on a property near Bradenton, but walked away from the deal, partly because of a last-minute price glitch, but more because Jan was having grave second thoughts about leaving the northeast and their Wilton friends. They headed back to Danbury and continued to search. One day at a Wilton Kiwanis meeting, Al got into a conversation with Bruce Blanchard, who had recently sold his home in town and moved to a condominium in Stratford’s Oronoque Village. “He claimed it was the best value for the buck in Fairfield County,” says Al. “I said, ‘Stratford? No way!’ It sounded like the end of the earth to me.” Nevertheless, he says, “I snuck up there to take a look, came right home and told Jan she’d better see it.” Jan liked the mature trees and plantings, the lack of cookie-cutter sameness of the Florida places they had looked at, and the spacious floor plans. Their year in Danbury had convinced her that they could handle condo life. “We can do this,” she decided.
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They found a realtor, and after four more visits to Oronoque between April and July of 2002, they settled on a 2,400-square-foot unit for $262,000, plus common charges of $219 per month covering trash collection, cable service, snow plowing, and lawn care. Their taxes are $5,200 (compared to the $7,200 they were paying when their Wilton house sold in 2001). Golf, tennis, a pool, and a fitness center are available, along with many other amenities.
They are 22 miles and a 30-minute drive from Wilton Center, where on any given day they are encountered by friends and acquaintances at the Village Market, at Starbucks, at the library, and elsewhere. Jan has taken a part time job with Literacy Volunteers in Norwalk, and she has recently assumed a major volunteer commitment as co-chair of the Wilton Library’s book sales. Al was hired last year by the Wilton Presbyterian Church as their part-time interim music and choir director, a job, which is likely to carry over into 2004. He continues to play the best “party piano” in town for any number of good causes and festive events. He joins Jan at the Wilton Library to help with the book sales, and they both continue to be loyal and enthusiastic Wilton Singers.
“We haven’t looked back,” says Jan about their decision. They find the commute easy, and they’ve learned the best back roads to use when traffic on the Merritt Parkway piles up. They’ve been able to stay with their church, their music, their volunteer work, and social activities. Wilton friends have supplied them with house keys for whenever they want a shower, a meal, or a bed for the night. They continue to enjoy their frequent travels. For now, at least, they are happy campers—and as much a part of Wilton as ever.
Concern for fellow citizens is frequently mentioned when people describe what they think is unique about Wilton. “It’s a wonderful town,” they say—and when asked what’s so wonderful about it, their first responses invariably center around community values and the old New England ethic of neighbors helping neighbors. Granted, these are universal responses heard in any town loved by its people—but the feelings seem unusually genuine and deep, especially among older citizens who have long histories here. Ample testimony can be found in a Ken Burns-style documentary, “Recollections & Remembrances: Stories of Wilton’s Yesterdays,” made to celebrate Wilton’s bicentennial anniversary last year. It is a beautifully produced record of the town’s early days, woven together by interviews with 32 longtime residents who share their memories and stories. When asked about the many changes they’ve witnessed over the years, their expressions grow wistful; but none of them would leave. The last words of the film are those of Walter Bassett, age 96, who has lived in Wilton since 1923. “It was a rural town back then,” he says. “Now they’re trying to make a city out of it. But it’s still the best place to live—and I hope to stay here…” (he pauses for a long moment) “…till the end.”
Evidence that the spirit of neighborly concern is alive and well in Wilton could be observed as recently as last May at a meeting between the Board of Selectmen and the newly-formed Committee for Senior Housing. The two groups came together to begin discussions about building, possibly on town-owned land, a non-profit assisted living facility for seniors with modest incomes. The housing committee began two years ago as a loosely organized group of local church members and people connected with town social services. At first, it was based solely on volunteer energy and diffuse, anecdotal information pointing to a growing need in the community—one which appears in striking contrast to the stories of sixty-something retirees who are still in a position to make choices about their future.
There are currently two for-profit facilities in town, Sunrise Assisted Living, Inc. and The Greens at Cannondale, both of which provide the bridge between independent living, such as that available at Wilton’s Ogden House, and the nursing home care of a Wilton Meadows. The cost of the assisted living facilities runs from $3,500-$6,000 a month, way beyond the means of elderly people living here in what Rev. David Graybill, a member of the Committee for Senior Housing, describes as “the shadow of affluence.” The dilemma of Ogden House residents outstaying their capacity for independent living, and having nowhere to go, he says, is an increasingly common scenario.
In the two years since its inception, the Committee for Senior Housing has written a mission statement, appointed as their chairman George Ciaccio, president of the Wilton Senior Council, and raised enough money to fund a feasibility study conducted by Becker & Becker, a New Canaan-based company specializing in affordable housing. Their May presentation to Wilton’s selectmen was well-received and accompanied by a promise of future discussion—even the hope of getting a project underway by 2005-2006. If that should happen, it would be a ground-breaker in every way both for the town and the state.
Rev. David Graybill speaks enthusiastically about his own commitment to the project and about the people who have given so much to Wilton, those who have the means to remain in their homes, and those at the other end of the spectrum whose choices are forced, not free. Having a choice is what matters, he believes. When asked if he will continue to live in Wilton after he retires, however, he smiles and shakes his head. “It probably won’t be possible,” he says.