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Carl Ellison: A Special Birthday

Carl Ellison, a former first selectman of Essex, doesn’t think his birthday is so remarkable.

“I don’t feel any different than I did at 89,” he says. But 90 is a special birthday, and the Essex Veterans Memorial Hall will host a celebration to mark the occasion on Saturday, April 8 at 3 p.m.

The event, with a cash bar, is free and open to the public.

“We’d like people to stop in and say hello, and see that the Veterans Hall is not some kind of closed society,” Carl says. “We’d like to give it a boost. That’s why I said yes to the birthday.”

Carl’s connection with the Essex Veterans Memorial Hall, an independent organization not connected to the American Legion or the Veterans of Foreign Wars, started when he moved to town over 50 years ago. He served in the army in the days of the draft.

“Everybody had to go. We knew in high school some time or other it was going to happen,” he says.

Carl admits that there are some changes as he starts his tenth decade. “I used to have everything up here,” he says, tapping his head. “Names, dates, conversations, and multitasking. That’s not so easy anymore.

Carl served two terms as first selectman in the 1970s, one term as a minority selectman, and 20 years on the Board of Finance. Subsequently, he also served for 20 years on the town’s Retirement Board.

Carl’s time as first selectman coincided with America’s bicentennial celebration in 1976. He remembers a pageant Essex put on in the town park on Main Street, reenacting a special local moment in the struggle for independence when settlers from Long Island came over to Essex to warn that the British were coming. People, both attending as well as in the pageant, dressed in colonial costumes.

“It was such a special event,” Carl says.

During his term in office, he was also involved in working with several others to help the Connecticut River Museum obtain the property at the end of Essex Main Street. The museum was formed as a volunteer organization in 1974.

At that time, the building on the Main Street property, known as Steamboat Dock, had fallen into disrepair.

“It was an abandoned building, an eyesore,” Carl says.

The owner of the property lived in Westport. Carl remembers being a part of a group to see him about selling. The owner asked for $15,000.

“I couldn’t put the town in a position to do that,” Carl recalls, but a donor came forward with the funds.

The events to celebrate the new museum included an outdoor costumed ball even before the exhibition halls were even open. As part of the festivities, Carl and his late wife Jan rode in a horse-drawn carriage along Main Street with then-governor Ella Grasso and her husband, Thomas Grasso.

“I knew Ella well,” Carl says. Grasso and her husband had a home in Old Lyme. “She loved to come to Essex, and she loved to shop at Faraway Places,” a now-gone local store.

Jan Ellison had an unusual connection to Thomas Grasso. He had been her eighth-grade teacher in East Hartford. Carl recalls his wife’s story of what Grasso told the girls as they approached high school.

“He said they should learn something practical, secretarial, nurse, teaching,” Carl says, noting that Grasso then added the phrase “not like my wife. She graduated from Mount Holyoke and can’t do anything.”

Jan reminded her former teacher of that conversation.

“Ella just laughed,” Carl says.

Carl grew up in eastern Connecticut in the town of Sprague.

“It was a small mill town. The town had English immigrants, who worked in the cotton mill, and French Canadians,” he says.

One of the lasting memories of his childhood was the Depression.

“People have it good today, not like the ’30s,” he says. “Now there is a parachute. People have help in dire straits.”

He wasn’t surprised that he ended up in local politics. His father had, too, serving on the local board of selectmen and two terms as a state representative. As a child, Carl loved the pageantry of political campaigns. “There were torchlight parades; they passed out huge cigars; there were colorful banners,” he says.

He remembers lying in bed listening to the returns of the 1948 presidential election on the radio, Democrat Harry Truman opposed by Republican Thomas E. Dewey. Polls had indicated an overwhelming Dewey victory. Like many people, Carl was surprised by the outcome.

“I went to high school the next day and found that Truman had won,” he recalls.

Carl graduated from what is today Eastern Connecticut State University, in those days known as Willimantic State Teachers College. After teaching elementary school in Deep River for two years, Carl spent his professional life as an insurance agent.

On a recent morning, sitting in a coffee shop, Carl pointed out that as he approaches his 90th year, he still has things to accomplish.

“There are always things on my mind. I’m interested in what else I can do,” he says.

An acquaintance stopped by the table to congratulate him on the upcoming birthday.

“Still sharp as a tack,” the acquaintance said.

Carl had a ready answer: sometimes.

Carl Ellison’s Birthday Celebration is on Saturday, April 8 at 3 p.m. at the Essex Veterans Memorial Hall, 3 Westbrook Road, Essex. The celebration is free and open to the public.