Gert Kaufman, designer, conservationist

Gertrude Kaufman, a former Ridgefielder who spent years here taming developers and highway designers, died on Sunday, Nov. 10, in Carmel, Calif. She was 84 years old.
For more than 15 years, Gert Kaufman served on the Flood and Erosion Control Board, an agency that specialized in controlling how sensitive lands were developed. “You can’t give up,” she once told an interviewer. “I think of Ridgefield as surrounded by dikes against which the developers are pushing all the time. They leak in, unless you keep your finger in. If you get tired and move away for just a minute, you’ve lost.”
Mrs. Kaufman was born Gertrude Hollingsworth on Sept. 4, 1918, in Long Beach, Calif. Her father was co-founder of Glendale Federal Savings Bank and was a direct descendant of Valentine Hollingsworth, who was an early New England settler.
She grew up in Glendale and attended Choiunard Art College where she majored in dress design. She drew Woody Woodpecker cartoons briefly after graduating.
At art school she met Van Kaufman, whom she married in 1940. She worked at MGM studios on dress design and once did a screen test for Warner Brothers.
During the war, Van Kaufman was a member of the First Motion Picture Unit, which produced war-related films, and he got passes on weekends from his adjutant, Ronald Reagan, to visit his wife.
After the war the Kaufmans moved to Ridgefield and lived at 100 Cain’s Hill Road from about 1948 to 1976. “It was love at first sight,” she said in 1975. “The mountains, the valleys, the trickling streams — it was so beautiful, I was awed.”
In the 1950s, she learned that the state planned not only a four-lane highway up the Route 7 valley near her home, but also a flood control project that would take some of her land. However, instead of simply opposing the projects, she studied them and determined how they could be accomplished with the least impact.
For instance, she successfully led a fight to eliminate a planned Super 7 interchange at Florida Hill Road and headed an intertown council that designed an acclaimed “linear park,” complete with a 15-mile-long bikeway, that would accompany the development of the expressway. In the end, the road was never built, but there is still talk today of building the linear park on land the state bought for the highway.
The Norwalk River Flood Control Project, born of the 1955 flood, sparked her interest in flood and erosion control. The state wound up taking more than an acre of the Kaufmans’ land. “We could have chosen to argue the acquisition, but there was no point really,” she said. “They were determined...and we never planned to develop it anyway. It’s not so bad — and we need the project. You’ve got to adjust sometimes, that’s all.”
As a member of Ridgefield’s Flood and Erosion Control Board, later absorbed by the Conservation Commission, Mrs. Kaufman did thousands of hours of research, compiled countless reports and attended endless meetings. “She was a dedicated person when it came to flood and erosion control — things people didn’t talk about much back then,” said conservationist Edith Meffley. She was respected by other agencies, such as planning and zoning, Mrs. Meffley said, but she and her board “also rattled some bones, especially of developers, who felt they were too inhibited by the board.”
The Conservation Commission still has many files Mrs. Kaufman compiled more than 25 years ago. “It’s really valuable research and it’s still being used today,” Mrs. Meffley said.
Like her husband, Mrs. Kaufman was an artist. Forty years ago, the late Karl S. Nash, Press editor and owner of the parent Acorn Press, mentioned in passing that his newspaper needed a logo. “Mom happened to hear him and volunteered,” her son Kris Kaufman recalled. “She drew the acorn that appeared on the papers for many years — for which she was paid $50.”
In 1976, the couple moved to Los Angeles where Mrs. Kaufman attended UCLA and earned a degree in landscape architecture. After her husband died in 1995, she moved to Carmel.
“She always loved Ridgefield,” Kris Kaufman said.
Mrs. Kaufman is survived by her two sons: Eric Kaufman (RHS 1969) of Steamboat Springs, Colo., and Kris Kaufman (RHS 1975) and his wife, Diana Kicher Kaufman of Redmond, Wash.; her brother: John Hollingsworth of Los Angeles; and three grandchildren: Alexander, Oliver and Nicole Kaufman.
Contributions in her memory may be made to the Open Space Conservation Fund of the Ridgefield Conservation Commission, 66 Prospect Street, Ridgefield, CT 06877.