R. Scudder Smith: 2006 ADA Award Of Merit Winner

A few days later, I met Scudder and Helen for dinner at their favorite restaurant, Auberge Maxime, in North Salem, N.Y. Helen arrived with a stack of papers. As the Bee's business manager, her work was cut out for her. It was a beautiful June night and we sat outdoors admiring the idyllic spot (the papers were little disturbed) before moving inside for a fine meal accompanied by good wine. The staff adored Scudder, who they had adopted into their underground world of French chefs, maitre d's and waiters, all of whom seem to know each other in the way that expatriates do.

In three meetings I had a surprisingly complete impression of the talented, original, diverse and sometimes contradictory man who the ADA is honoring. Ferociously industrious, Scudder is a devoted husband and father; the burdened owner of a generations-old business; a writer, photographer and editor; antiques collector; the visionary creator of Xanadu-like gardens; an infinitely stylish bon vivant; and a dear friend to many who know him from Newtown, the antiques circuit or St Barthelemy in the French West Indies, where the Smiths have vacationed for the past 25 years.

The ADA Award of Merit acknowledges Scudder's outstanding contribution to the industry, a marketplace substantially shaped byAntiques and The Arts Weekly over the past four decades. In announcing the group's selection, vice president Arthur Liverant noted the publication's long support of "the common interests of dealers, collectors, curators, museums, historical societies, auctioneers and show promoters." Few journals have a more catholic regard for the news: Antiques and The Arts Weekly has long been the one place where nearly every arts organization enjoys a hearing.

Antiques and The Arts Weekly, solely Scudder's invention, is a daunting accomplishment. The 161/2-by-11-inch tabloid is up to an inch thick on a typical week. An average 200 pages, it seasonally spikes to as much as 360 pages. Auction ads account for about one-third of the paper. For years, Scudder put out Antiques and The Arts Weekly with just two assistants, an editor and an advertising manager.

Since joining Bee Publishing Company in July 1961, Scudder has invested roughly 170,000 hours in the company, working 12-hour days, often six days a week. By tradition, he is the first to arrive at work and often the last to leave. Scudder's insistence on punctuality grew out of his desire to personally enforce a principle he called "Ontimemanship." Appointing himself threshold attendant, he greeted late arrivers with a sorry shake of head and the stern reprimand, "Ontimemanship!"

In Scudder's tenure, 2,300 issues of The Newtown Bee and, since 1976, when it received its own postal permit, 1,560 issues of Antiques and The Arts Weekly have rolled off the press, a defiantly antediluvian Goss Comet flatbed until 1969. The runaway success of the antiques paper, which grew from just four pages in 1963 and was an insert to The Newtown Bee between 1969 and 1976, forced the company to install new offset presses. Scudder, who harbors a craftsman's affection for printing, mourned the disappearance of hot type, produced by the Bee's old Linotype machines.

John T. Pearce founded The Newtown Bee in 1877, but it had fallen on hard times by the time that Scudder's great-uncle, Reuben Hazen Smith, bought it in 1881. The original Smith canvassed western Connecticut by horse and buggy. When he decamped to California in 1891, the paper passed to Scudder's grandfather, Arthur J. Smith, and his great-uncle, Allison P. Smith. Scudder's father, Paul S. Smith, was The Newtown Bee's editor from 1932 to 1972.

Scudder was only 38 when he succeeded his father. His first editorial on May 23, 1972, revealed his humor and grace, qualities that have served him well. Scudder might have been describing himself when he said of his father, "The door to his office has always been open to all comers and many post-editorial meetings have ended in complete accord."

Scudder was suited to newspaper work, a paradoxical world of stimulating people and confining deadlines. Born Robert Scudder Smith in Newtown, on April 12, 1935, his early years were bounded by orderly routine. The family lived in an old house on Main Street. Next door, in the town's most stately residence, were Scudder's paternal grandparents and two great aunts.

One probably shouldn't read too much into the fact that Scudder's Sunday school teacher was Margaret Winchester, sister of The Magazine Antiques' enduring editor, Alice Winchester. After what appears to have been a carefree youth, Scudder finished his secondary education at the Berkshire School in Sheffield, Mass. A gifted athlete, he was captain of both the soccer and the track teams.

Scudder followed his father to Amherst College in Massachusetts in 1953. Tired of school, he left in 1954 for a three-year stint in the US Marine Corps. He trained as a navigator in Cherry Point, N.C. On a night out with a friend, he met Helen. The Smiths married in 1956 and a year later settled in Upstate New York, where Scudder attended Union College in Schenectady. They worked multiple jobs to make ends meet and bought the occasional antique.

"We shall endeavor to do our part toward giving you a good, live, local newspaper - we guarantee our best efforts in advancing the interests in your beautiful town through our columns," The Newtown Bee had promised readers in 1877. Its mission changed little over the decades. Endearingly, the paper captured the flavor of small-town life, making it a favorite of writers who settled in the area.

"I trust that you managed to get on your exchange list the invaluable and truly marvelous Newtown Bee, of Connecticut," the humorist James Thurber wrote to fellow New Yorker contributor Wolcott Gibbs in 1954. "...When I lived near Newtown 20 years ago, it was a big, floppy, endless journal filled with wonderful announcements...".

Like his forebears, Scudder saw his editorial role as supportive, not adversarial. "Our goals for the antiques section, right from the start," he explained at the time of the Newtown Bee's centennial in 1977, "were to provide news in advance of an event, coverage when possible and a complete line of advertising. We have not limited ourselves to any one field, but go to glass shows as well as art shows, antique car rallies and the show and flea market circuit."

Antiques and The Arts Weekly fostered a sense of community among readers, who, although united in their interest in antiques, had few forums for exchanging information. As Scudder recalls, aside from The Antique Trader, a Midwest-based weekly rich in classified advertising, there were no antiques trade newspapers in 1963. Maine Antique Digest mailed its first issue in November 1973.

Scudder's timing was perfect. The 1960s and 1970s were watershed years for collecting. One milestone followed the next: in 1958, inspired by Parisian flea markets, Russell Carrell introduced the antiques field show to the United States; Gordon Reid followed in 1959 with the first Brimfield market; Jacqueline Kennedy made living with antiques glamorous with her 1962 televised tour of the White House; the Museum of American Folk Art opened to the public in 1963; and former Art & America editor Jean Lipman, one of the first great collectors of American folk art of the postwar era, collaborated with Alice Winchester on "The Flowering of American Folk Art." The exhibition validated folk art as an important American art form when it opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1974. In 1979, Sanford Smith organized the first Fall Antiques Show in New York. Martha Stewart, a little-known Westport, Conn., caterer, did the food and decorations for the preview party.

From the time they returned home from Schenectady, Scudder and Helen immersed themselves in the budding field of Americana. Self-described "weekend warriors," they exhibited at shows organized by Carrell and the team of Frances Phipps and Betty Forbes, mainly with an eye toward upgrading their growing collection. They bought redware, stoneware, baskets and quilts, packing everything into six-board blanket chests. David, who has collected redware and stoneware since he was 10, combed the fields with Leigh and Leslie Keno, also the children of country dealers. The kids slept under the stars, or under the family's Ford LTD wagon when it rained. If Scudder and Helen made $600 a weekend, they were pleased.

As their taste developed, the Smiths gravitated to folk sculpture. Weathervanes, game boards, whirligigs and carousel figures now form the core of their collection. Their first weathervane was a $75 sheet-iron horse. The couple emptied the contents of their change jar, then borrowed the balance from Scudder's father to acquire the figure. The weathervane remains in the family's collection today, mounted on David's white two-car garage.

Early in his career, Scudder met Mary Allis, his close friend and mentor for 15 years until her death in 1987. The most influential folk art dealer of the mid-Twentieth Century, Allis was well known for having brokered the sale of the Lipman collection to Stephen Clark, benefactor of the New York State Historical Association at Cooperstown, N.Y. She later built the Stewart Gregory collection, which fetched an impressive $1.3 million at Sotheby's in 1979. Never one to mince words, Allis urged the Smiths to refine their collection. She also counseled them to stop moonlighting as dealers.

"Mary Allis was always under a full head of steam to travel to shows, exhibitions and auctions," Scudder wrote in an affectionate tribute to his mentor in 1986. "Hours passed quickly as we talked of the great things purchased, the very few great things missed and all the great things that were still out there. The latter was the reason we burned up so many miles together."

Only eight miles from Nuttinghame, the Southbury, Conn., farmhouse, where Wallace Nutting launched his Colonial Revival industries in 1906, Newtown had long been a destination for antiquers. The region was peppered with small-time auctioneers. Though few of these early businesses survive, readers may remember Ansonia, Conn., dealers George and Benjamin Arons, who advertised their annual antiques sales in The Bee in the 1930s; auctioneer O'Rundle Gilbert, whose notices appeared in the 1940s; and Carrell, whose shows and markets were listed by the early 1960s. One of The Bee's oldest continuing antiques advertisers is Vallin Galleries, whose display ad for Asian art appears on Antiques and The Arts Weekly's inside front cover. From 1947 until the early 1960s, The Newtown Bee published Thomas Ormsbee's syndicated collecting column, "Know Your Heirlooms."

With a nucleus of antiques advertising, and given full rein by his father but no support from Mrs Arthur Boyer, The Newtown Bee's skeptical news editor, Scudder launched four consolidated pages of antiques coverage on June 28, 1963. He made dealer Kenneth Hammitt a columnist. Marni Wood joined in 1966 as a features writer. Scudder and Marni collaborated on heavily illustrated reports on old houses, a mutual interest. Wood also published some devastatingly honest auction reviews - the good, bad and the ugly, with prices.

The first antiques story Scudder put his initials to, on October 4, 1963, was "Pressed Glass Salt Dishes." Thereafter, he took a notably avid interest in the folk art world's latest developments. After finishing his editorial chores on Thursday, Scudder spent Fridays pounding on doors, talking to dealers and auctioneers and selling ads for the next antiques section.

As early as the 1910s, antiquers combed the countryside by car in search of treasure. The Magazine Antiques had long included a travel guide with shops listed by state, but the destinations could be hard to find.

"People drove around haphazardly looking for antiques," recalls Scudder, who created a series of maps for antiquers. The first, published on July 31, 1963, listed 64 western Connecticut dealers, among them Howard K. Richmond, then at Silvermine Tavern in Norwalk; Florene Maine in Ridgefield; Thomas D. and Constance R. Williams in Litchfield; and Moira Wallace in Woodbury.

"From then on, people rapidly became aware of our antiques section, ad revenues started to climb and circulation went up. We repeated the maps each year, for many years," says Scudder. By the late 1960s, the names Harry Hartman, Nathan Liverant and Son and Tillou Galleries, to name just three, regularly appeared in The Bee's antiques pages, along with Lillian Cogan, I.M. Wiese, Avis and Rockwell Gardiner, Roger Bacon and John Walton. Withington, Bourne, Eldred and Skinner, along with Clearing House, Pari and Josko, were mainstays of The Bee's auction pages.

By the end of 1969, Antiques and The Arts Weekly was mailed to 26,000 readers in 46 states. Each week, the paper left The Bee Publishing Company at 5 pm on Tuesday, reaching most subscribers in time to plan their weekend. The paper succeeded because it was straightforward and useful.

Looking at these early issues, Scudder's fresh enthusiasm for his subject comes through clearly. Antiques and The Arts Weekly was sprawling and enticingly unpredictable, like the market itself. To leaf through its pages was to engage in the chase, as satisfying to some collectors as the capture. For those clever enough to spot them, bargains lurked in the fine print.

A photograph taken of Scudder in the early 1940s sums up the man, says The Newtown Bee's managing editor Curtiss Clark, upon whose judgment the publisher has relied for more than three decades. Three boys - Scudder, his brother Teddy and their friend Danny Desmond - pose in their go-carts on Main Street. Two carts are ordinary, but Scudder's - a barrel-bodied contraption extravagantly embellished with a grill, oversized wheels and a flag - is pure Americana.

"Scudder always had a great eye for detail. I think his appreciation for antiques comes from the era of his childhood, when old things were still around. Scudder started gathering these items up as a way of preserving a world that was disappearing," says Clark.

In recent years, Scudder, a builder by instinct, has created a series of elaborate gardens designed around vintage structures and ornamented with garden antiques. The enterprise dates from 1966, when the Smiths acquired a 1783 farmhouse and six adjacent acres in Newtown, their home today, and accelerated after 1985, when the couple hosted their daughter's backyard wedding and reception. The imaginative expanse now includes an herb cottage, an ice house from Vermont, an antique corn crib, an arbor reproduced from scale drawings at Colonial Williamsburg, a grove of cast-iron hitching posts, and a rustic gazebo inspired by Nineteenth Century examples at Mohonk Mountain House in Upstate New York. A rustic footbridge leads to Judd's General Store, named after the youngest of the Smiths' grandchildren.

When a tumbledown fishing shack on nearby Taunton Lake was slated for demolition last fall, Scudder was soon on the phone.

"How's the outhouse? Is it a two-seater?" the collector wanted to know. By 2 pm that afternoon, he was loading the structure onto his pickup truck. As The Bee reporter Dottie Evans tells it, "The outhouse has a new home and an important bit of Newtown history was preserved. Scudder couldn't have been more pleased."

Few of us can imagine being sleep-deprived for 45 years, but that's how long Scudder has bunked with a police radio alerting him to the town's middle-of-the-night emergencies that he all-too-often responds to, camera in hand. More visible than Scudder's gift of his time, however, is The Pleasance, the One Main Street stroll garden that the publisher opened to the public in 1998. An old-fashioned gazebo, a three-tiered Fiske fountain, a monumental iron rooster and contemporary sculpture by Stephen Huneck ornament this tranquil spot where local people walk their dogs, picnic and even marry.

Scudder tells a story about a road trip to Cape Cod that he and Helen once took with Mary Allis and the late collector Herbert W. Hemphill, Jr. Scudder drove and, at Mary's insistence, the party stopped along the way at an antiques shop. Mischievously, Scudder parked the car against a hedge. By the time Hemphill struggled out of the car, Scudder had snapped up the best piece in the shop, a cow weathervane.

"We had a lot of fun," says Scudder, who through the pages of Antiques and The Arts Weekly has generously taken us all along on his charmed and infinitely interesting ride.