Preschool And A Pool

Back home, she continued her work supporting local schools, helping to establish the middle school PTA and the high school PTSA. As the community planned to build its new high school on Berkshire Road, she took a call from a “grumpy old man with a lot of money who had just returned to town and was asking about this new high school we were planning.”

“We told him it was going to be wonderful, but we really needed a swimming pool,” she said. “A short time later he wrote a check to cover the entire expense, and that’s how we ended up with a high school swimming pool.”

Around the same time, Ms Schmidle said there was growing concern for the care and early education of many of the town’s young children, so she went to work establishing a community preschool in an abandoned barn at the local Methodist Church.

“At the time we only had one small bus, so every morning and afternoon, we enlisted volunteers to help drive the children to and from school,” she said. Eventually, Ms Schmidle applied for and received a grant to establish what is now the Children’s Adventure Center in Sandy Hook.

But the town seniors, who were meeting regularly for lunch in the Edmond Town Hall Alexandria Room, were also looking for a place of their own. So after a contentious but heavily stacked Town Meeting, funds were established to create a senior center.

It was Ms Schmidle’s idea to combine the preschool grant and the local senior center funding to create the Multipurpose Building that now houses both the preschool and senior center in Sandy Hook, on property she helped secure from the Board of Education after the original Sandy Hook School was constructed.

During that time, she also created a number of small books and booklets, including a coloring book featuring Newtown sights, and a modest local and state history book.

While she considers her work protecting the flagpole as a major accomplishment, Ms Schmidle was also responsible for preserving Newtown’s Pootatuck aquifer. She helped write a federal grant that created Connecticut’s first aquifer protection plan, which was only the second such effort in all of New England.

Along with her work establishing the preschool and Hawley School Library, Ms Schmidle also helped create the Society of Creative Arts of Newtown from an adult education class that was being held at the high school. And she lent her support to the Visiting Nurse Association of Newtown and its humble thrift shop in the basement of Edmond Town Hall.

Through it all, Ms Schmidle took each of her efforts and accomplishments in stride.

“This is such a great town,” she said. “And I was always willing to do my share.”

Town residents are welcome to attend the June 28 event honoring Ms Schmidle and Ms Wasserman. For more information, or to support the activity, contact the Newtown Health District at 203-270-4291, or e-mail District Director Donna Culbert at .donna.culbert@newtown-ct.gov

Chances are, no matter where you travel in Newtown, you have seen or experienced something for which either former state lawmaker Julia Wasserman or Mae Schmidle was responsible.

From the iconic flagpole on Main Street to the facilities, hills, and trails of Fairfield Hills; from the Children’s Adventure Center preschool to the farm where generations of locals have cut their Christmas trees; from the works produced by the Society of Creative Arts of Newtown to the establishment of the Hawley School Library; and from the fresh air scrubbed by Newtown’s forestland to the crystal clear waters from its aquifer, these two individuals have played roles in creating, protecting, preserving, promoting, and celebrating Newtown perhaps more than any — certainly more than many — others in the community’s three-century-plus history.

It may be as impossible to encapsulate the good works of these two humble public servants as it is for either of them to recall a fraction of their individual and collective accomplishments. But the many guests and members of the public invited to honor Ms Schmidle and Ms Wasserman at a public reception Sunday, June 28 at Newtown Congregational Church will certainly try.

The event, co-sponsored by the Newtown Health District and local Visiting Nurses Association, will occur in the church’s Great Hall from 2 to 4 that afternoon, and will include testimonials and refreshments.

In a conversation with Ms Wasserman this week, she recalled how she fell in love with the 100-acre parcel on Walnut Tree Hill Road where she and her late husband, Dr Louis Wasserman settled in 1960. While the many Cashmere goats she raised to make yarn are gone, along with 92 of those acres which were conveyed to the town in a conservation easement, Ms Wasserman still maintains her active Christmas tree business with the help of several trusted helpers.

She said her love of that open space, along with the many dear friends she has made over the past half-century, have kept her here, despite the challenges and a Vermont mountain getaway she acquired shortly after Dr Wasserman died in June 1999.

Ms Wasserman was born in Germany and came to the United States, settling in Chicago as a 14-year-old. She completed college credits at a number of institutions, including the University of Chicago and Berkeley College, and was graduated from Sarah Lawrence College with a bachelor’s degree.

Fights, Then a Proposal

She served two years in the US Army, quickly climbing the ranks from lieutenant to captain, and running a military laboratory in Fort Lee, Va. After her departure from the Army, Ms Wasserman took a job running a civilian laboratory at Mount Sinai Hospital, where she met her future husband.

“I was running the lab and he was running the Hematology Department,” Ms Wasserman recalled. “We were in a position where we had to collaborate, but we fought for an entire year. But after that year, he ended up flying to Chicago to ask my mother if he could have my hand in marriage.”

The two married in February 1957 and came to Newtown three years later. During her time living in New York, Ms Wasserman began her lifetime of volunteer and philanthropic service by volunteering in the Prints Department at the Museum of Modern Art.

After their move and a number of years living full-time in Newtown while her husband split his time locally and in New York, Ms Wasserman decided to go back to school, pursuing and receiving a master’s degree in public health in 1978.

She served actively on Newtown’s Conservation Commission and eventually set her sights on the statehouse, where she thought she could do more for her community, particularly in the areas of conservation.

Despite Ms Wasserman’s penchant for politics, she also applied her skills serving as New Fairfield’s part-time health director. And as an elected lawmaker, she was able to contribute to the legislature’s Public Health Committee — one of the many panels she served on during her 18-year tenure in Hartford.

Through it all, her husband was her biggest supporter. “He hated politics, but he always supported me fully,” she said.

Among her greatest accomplishments was helping the town conserve and eventually acquire Fairfield Hills. She also helped create laws that protect Connecticut forests and regulate logging on those tracts.

While she served under three governors including M. Jodi Rell and John Rowland, she has fond memories of her time under one-term Governor Lowell Weicker.

“I thought he was great,” she said. “He was able to recruit the best department commissioners. He always picked people that were more educated than he was — if that’s possible.”

Ms Wasserman said she liked the energy of the statehouse, although as a minority Republican representative, she and her party colleagues won few battles despite many frustrating efforts.

“If you performed well, you paid the price,” she said. “You lost a lot of sleep.”

Ms Wasserman said she loves Newtown because it is close to New York, but offers the opportunity to enjoy and explore beautiful tracts of forest and open space. She also helped add to Newtown’s open space inventory, and for her many efforts, was honored by having a state highway named after her that runs alongside the Fairfield Hills campus.

Seeing Red? It’s Mae!

Ms Schmidle grew up in neighboring Trumbull and upon her return from college, she met her husband, Robert, had three children, and in the early 1960s, moved her family a few miles north to Newtown, settling at her current home on Echo Valley Road.

One of the first things she noticed upon moving to Newtown was a lack of recreational activities for young people. As the president of the Hawley School PTA, she and a number of other volunteers helped establish an art and music program to supplement the swim classes and other activities that the fledgling town Parks & Recreation Department offered.

“We hired a teacher who became the Newtown school district’s first art teacher,” Ms Schmidle said. “And our first music teacher got hired away to head up a school music department in Florida.”

She also was acutely aware that her beloved Hawley School was lacking a library, so one day she and a friend, Van Teel, approached the principal asking for space to start one.

“He pointed to a long janitor’s closet adjacent to his office and said to use that,” she recalled. “But we had no idea how to stock a library. And there were no library science classes in Connecticut.”

So Ms Schmidle called Yale University and a staffer there offered to teach the two PTA moms the Dewey Decimal System, so off to New Haven they went.

A short time later, with a load of books donated by Western Connecticut State University, the Hawley Library was up and running, soon to be followed by libraries in the rest of Newtown’s elementary schools.

At the same time, Ms Schmidle began getting more interested in governance, so she sought and won her first public office — serving as the town clerk. During her tenure, she helped then-first selectman Frank DeLucia capture grants, and develop a community “Plan of Action” that eventually became the Newtown Plan of Conservation and Development.

She also helped secure grants and funds to build a fire station, a local dog pound, and to put young people to work at the local Highway Department and at town hall. For her efforts locally, Ms Schmidle was elected vice president of the Connecticut Town Clerk’s Association, where she caught the eye of supporters who hoped to see her elected to the state’s General Assembly.

Following a successful bid for the 106th District, she headed up to Hartford, quickly gaining a reputation as a dedicated advocate for her town, as well as a snappy dresser.

“I would mostly wear bright colors, so when I occasionally wore my brown suit, people would come up to me asking if something was wrong,” she said. “For some reason at the time red was hard to find and I loved wearing red, so after complaining to some of my colleagues, all of a sudden they all started bringing me red clothes and accessories from stores in each of their districts from all over the state.”

Ms Schmidle was so associated with her frequent red garb that Governor William O’Neill issued a proclamation honoring her with “Red Day,” or as her colleagues dubbed it, “Mae Day,” at the Capital.

Among the legislation she is most proud of is the first bill she proposed, which eventually passed and acted to preserve Newtown’s historic flagpole, which was in jeopardy of being removed by the state to improve traffic flow on Route 25. She was also a big proponent of open government and freedom of information.

“I couldn’t understand how any government agency could assume a prerogative of privacy when they were doing the people’s business,” she said.

After a run of tragic accidents involving children and school buses across the state, she was responsible for legislation that mandated the convex mirrors mounted on school buses, as well as establishing fines to punish drivers who passed those buses while they were loading or discharging children. In other action, she helped establish laws mandating equal funding for women’s sports programs in state public schools.

Preschool And A Pool

Back home, she continued her work supporting local schools, helping to establish the middle school PTA and the high school PTSA. As the community planned to build its new high school on Berkshire Road, she took a call from a “grumpy old man with a lot of money who had just returned to town and was asking about this new high school we were planning.”

“We told him it was going to be wonderful, but we really needed a swimming pool,” she said. “A short time later he wrote a check to cover the entire expense, and that’s how we ended up with a high school swimming pool.”

Around the same time, Ms Schmidle said there was growing concern for the care and early education of many of the town’s young children, so she went to work establishing a community preschool in an abandoned barn at the local Methodist Church.

“At the time we only had one small bus, so every morning and afternoon, we enlisted volunteers to help drive the children to and from school,” she said. Eventually, Ms Schmidle applied for and received a grant to establish what is now the Children’s Adventure Center in Sandy Hook.

But the town seniors, who were meeting regularly for lunch in the Edmond Town Hall Alexandria Room, were also looking for a place of their own. So after a contentious but heavily stacked Town Meeting, funds were established to create a senior center.

It was Ms Schmidle’s idea to combine the preschool grant and the local senior center funding to create the Multipurpose Building that now houses both the preschool and senior center in Sandy Hook, on property she helped secure from the Board of Education after the original Sandy Hook School was constructed.

During that time, she also created a number of small books and booklets, including a coloring book featuring Newtown sights, and a modest local and state history book.

While she considers her work protecting the flagpole as a major accomplishment, Ms Schmidle was also responsible for preserving Newtown’s Pootatuck aquifer. She helped write a federal grant that created Connecticut’s first aquifer protection plan, which was only the second such effort in all of New England.

Along with her work establishing the preschool and Hawley School Library, Ms Schmidle also helped create the Society of Creative Arts of Newtown from an adult education class that was being held at the high school. And she lent her support to the Visiting Nurse Association of Newtown and its humble thrift shop in the basement of Edmond Town Hall.

Through it all, Ms Schmidle took each of her efforts and accomplishments in stride.

“This is such a great town,” she said. “And I was always willing to do my share.”

Town residents are welcome to attend the June 28 event honoring Ms Schmidle and Ms Wasserman. For more information, or to support the activity, contact the Newtown Health District at 203-270-4291, or e-mail District Director Donna Culbert at .donna.culbert@newtown-ct.gov