True Love Comes Full Circle For Newtown Couple

By Nancy K. Crevier

It was a forced blind date that swiftly turned to blind love, said Richard “Todd” Hyde, recalling the 65 years of marriage and quiet adoration of his parents, the late Marguerite “Peggy” Budd Hyde and Captain Richard Hyde. And together as they were in life, the two members of one of Newtown’s historic families will be together again when they are laid to rest in the Newtown Village Cemetery, September 10, in the town where the first embers of love were fanned. 

“My father and mother always planned to be buried in Newtown,” said Todd Hyde, one of five children who are, he said, a living testimonial to the couple’s love. “I never heard other options, be it my Dad’s hometown of Waterbury, or the National Cemetery at Arlington. My Dad even went as far as adding his name, Hyde, to the Budd main plot headstone at the Newtown Village Cemetery years before my grandmother’s death in 1977,” said Mr Hyde.

Raised in New York, and in Newtown at 50 Main Street, currently the home of Shane and George Miller, Peggy Budd was the daughter of Florence Beecher Budd and Stephen E. Budd, and the granddaughter of Mary B. Glover and attorney William J. Beecher. Her great-grandfather, Henry Beers Glover, founder of Newtown Savings Bank, built the three-story Second Empire-style home at 50 Main Street in 1869.

She was just 16 years old the night that her sister introduced her to Richard Hyde.

“My mom’s older sister, ‘Bibi,’ or Mary, had a date, but she did not want to go out with him alone,” said Mr Hyde. “The male suitor knew my dad and somehow offered my dad as a double date candidate. My grandmother, Florence [who was born at and lived at 50 Main Street her entire life], ordered my mom to ‘get with the program’ and support her sister. Hence, the first meeting for my future mother and father was a forced blind date,” he said.

A member of the well-connected and socially important Budd family, the young Peggy Budd was considered “quite a catch,” said her son. “It is quite remarkable that my grandmother allowed that first date in 1942 — but my dad, then 24 years old, was really a catch, too, as my sister likes to say.”

A Yale graduate and officer in training with the US Navy, Richard Hyde was smitten from the first moment he met Peggy Budd, doing whatever it took to win the trust of Peggy and her mother. “My mom reported that her mother was completely charmed by my father almost instantly,” said Mr Hyde. His future mother followed suit shortly thereafter.

“I think that [my grandparents] were very pleased. I don’t think I ever heard a single word about the age difference. I did see one coy mention of being a ‘crib robber’ by my father in one of the hundreds of regular cards my mother and father exchanged and retained all of these years,” Mr Hyde said.

His father became a Naval officer and held the rank of Lieutenant Junior Grade when he and Peggy Budd married, June 5, 1943, just one day after her high school graduation from the Spence School in New York City. With World War II in full force, it was a time of upheaval and a time of urgency, moving many couples into high gear. New York gossip columnist “Cholly Knickerbocker” crowed with pleasure that spring to see the announcement of not just the engagement, but of the wedding, as well. “Not only is the engagement being announced today,” an old clipping saved by Todd Hyde tells, “but wedding plans are in the final stages. For tomorrow —and isn’t that fast luck — Marguerite dons white satin.”

“My father had just returned from convoy duty in the Atlantic early in the week and was ordered on very short notice to a new assignment in the Pacific. Secrecy and exigencies ruled the day, so everybody just rolled with the punches. It must have been frantic at 50 Main Street,” mused Mr Hyde.

Wartime Rendezvous

Shortly after the wedding, his father returned to duty, ultimately serving in both the Atlantic and Pacific theaters, participating in convoy operations and resupply efforts, and in the amphibious campaigns in North Africa and Italy. He participated in the series of amphibious assaults on Kwajalein, Leyte, and Okinawa. Meanwhile, his young wife remained at 50 Main Street, traveling to San Francisco and San Diego by train whenever her husband was on leave or training there for major operations in the Pacific.

The Hydes’ son suspects that arranging a rendezvous with a loved one during the war years “required substantial enterprise, flexibility, and imagination, because there was no certainty for anything. Communications were awful and the obligatory secrecy did not encourage long-range planning.

“I suspect it was a daunting task to hop a ride across the country [by train]. Some guile would have been handy in such times, although being gorgeous indubitably added to her success. My mom wanted to see her man. My mother managed extraordinarily well. She did not know she could not do it. She made it happen and she was only 17, barely a woman.

“My mother rapidly proved her mettle in getting jobs or volunteer work,” said Mr Hyde. “She was as accomplished as her mother was at a formative age in managing her affairs.” [Florence Beecher Budd managed the house at 50 Main Street after the deaths of her parents, and lived there with her husband, Stephen, until her death in 1977.]

Simple Devotion              Over Drama

Their love for each other was not dramatic or overblown, said their son. “They lived it, not talked about it,” he said. It was also clear to the children, Todd, now of San Diego, Gregory of Stowe, Vt., Susan of Ormond Beach, Fla., where the elder Hydes lived in a nearby assisted living facility, Matthew of Midland, Texas, and Mark of Hollis, N.H., that their mother was number one in the eyes of their father. “There was no number two, not us kids, or anything,” Todd Hyde said. “There was no greater testament than that devotion,” he said.

“My mother reciprocated in kind. She always had his back and provided the unconditional love. This support, in turn, allowed him to serve his country for so long and so well,” Mr Hyde said.

His father eventually retired from the service, after 30 years, as a captain. Following World War II, Capt Hyde served on aircraft carriers and destroyers in the Atlantic and Mediterranean, commanding a destroyer, an ammunition ship, a squadron of destroyers, and two Naval bases, as well as a communication station in England. He served through the Vietnam war era and coordinated naval communications effort in the Pacific in the 1960s.

His mother turned her back on a comfortable lifestyle to become a Navy wife, Mr Hyde said. “I asked my mother if she ever regretted running off with the dashing Naval officer and leaving behind a life of, dare I say, ‘privilege.’ After a pause she replied in a single word: No. There was such certainty in her voice, that it stuns me to this day,” he said.

The words of a letter, penned by the young Lt Hyde after the assault on the Marshall Islands in the Pacific, in February of 1944, remained true through their last days together, said Todd Hyde. “Two years have gone by since that cold winter’s night,” reads the letter in part, referring to the first date. “They have been the best and happiest of my life. My love for you, darling, has never faltered, and burns today with brighter flames than ever before. I will love you deeper each year, Sweetie, and cherish you forever.”

A Favorite Photo

A photograph taken from an island in the Mediterranean, where his parents once spent time while the captain was deployed overseas in the 1950s, hung in every home the couple ever lived in. Removing it from the wall of the last home they shared, after his father’s death, Todd Hyde pondered the meaning of the oceanfront picture. “Now, does that not titillate the soul?” he asked. “I can only imagine….”

Captain Richard Hyde died the week of July 18, in Florida. His beloved wife Peggy died in September of 2008.

A special ceremony will take place for family and friends, Friday, September 10, at 11 am, at Trinity Episcopal Church, on Main Street. A burial with military honors will follow at the Newtown Village Cemetery, at 1 pm.

Following the burial, Shane and George Miller have invited the family to tour the Glover/Budd Home, which they now own. It will be the first time the Budd-Hyde family has returned to the historic family home since 1977, said Mr Hyde, who had reminisced earlier this year with George Miller about the family’s history.

In going through his parents’ personal belongings this week, Todd Hyde came across many effects that triggered memories, including his own baptismal certificate from Trinity Episcopal Church. “Newtown was home,” he said, “but our lives often steer us in other directions.” His parents, though, have found their way back to their beginning. “It was a love story from start to end,” said Mr Hyde.