Business

Five Years On: New Canaan Chamber’s Tucker Murphy Shepherds Community, Commerce with ‘Positive High Energy’

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Here’s a word that lifelong New Canaanite Beth Jones—a 1974 New Canaan High School graduate who serves on the Board of Selectmen and belongs to the Kiwanis Club of New Canaan and League of Women Voters—used Friday to describe the positive changes brought to our community by the Chamber of Commerce these past five years: “Unbelievable.”

Splintered at the time Tucker Murphy took over as executive director, with a business-led group that called itself the “New Canaan Village Association” breaking off to create the now-annual Holiday Stroll and push for more activity, the chamber today is credited not only with mending the rift and boosting the visibility of local businesses through new events, but also with creating something that’s difficult to describe—a kind of inclusiveness, feeling of shared mission and connection among not just businesses but also nonprofit groups, community organizations, individuals and the town itself. Thursday marked exactly five years since Murphy took over as executive director at the chamber—bringing in marketing associate Laura Soper Budd along the way. Asked to describe what they’ve seen happen in that time, business and town leaders credit Murphy’s enthusiasm, vitality, creativity and sense of community in forging an enviably active, mutually supportive membership. “She’s just a fabulous spokesperson for the businesses, the community, the town itself,” Jones said. “She just loves New Canaan.”

Asked about the change herself, Murphy said one touchstone for what’s happening is the fact that one new business here, Mrs. Green’s, contacted the chamber itself (and joined) entirely on its own.

Around Town

New Canaan Tradition: Fishing Derby at Mill Pond Set for April 12

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Town officials have set the date for a cherished community event at Mill Pond whose roots go back nearly 50 years in New Canaan. Derby Day—listed on the town’s website as the George Cogswell Memorial Fishing Derby 2014, named for a former New Canaan police officer—will start at 9 a.m. on Saturday, April 12 (registration opens at 8:30 a.m.), according to a press release issued by New Canaan Chamber of Commerce Executive Director Tucker Murphy. The pond, which New Canaan has dredged every other year, will be stocked ahead of the event with 370 pounds of rainbow trout, Murphy said. The dredging of Mill Pond came up recently, at a March 19 Town Council meeting, during a presentation from Department of Public Works Director Michael Pastore and Assistant Director Tiger Mann. According to Mann, Mill and Mead Ponds (neither of which were skate-able this past winter) are dredged every other year at a cost of about $10,000 each time.

Around Town

VIDEO: Happy St. Patrick’s Day from the Kiwanis Club of New Canaan

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Read their lips: Happy St. Patrick’s Day. Dropping in on the New Canaan Kiwanis Club’s popular St. Patrick’s Day dinner, we asked organizers and guests to look at the camera and wish a happy holiday to fellow New Canaanites—and warned them that they’d have to mouth the words or otherwise gesticulate, since the volume on their cutaways would be muted. We think they did pretty well—take a look (and thanks, everyone, for being such good sports):

via YouTube

A family-friendly event as promised, the dinner drew more than 100 guests—mostly local families—to St.

Around Town

‘Found Materials’ Art Exhibition Coming to Carriage Barn

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Several local businesses are helping to sponsor a soon-to-launch exhibition at Carriage Barn Arts Center that features “found” or repurposed materials, as a long-established arts culture in New Canaan increasingly integrates with other parts of the community. The exhibition, “Spectrum/Sustainable Arts Show” (the 25th annual Spectrum show) launches March 23 following a free, open reception at the Waveny-based arts center from 6 to 8 p.m. on Saturday, March 22. Among the featured New York artists is June Ahrens, now New Canaan-based, whose “Staying Afloat” uses the kinds of found materials she’s worked with for her entire career, according to a written statement from the Carriage Barn Arts Center. “Artistically, I transform discarded objects to create a visual language that evokes the experiences of impermanence and loss, fragility and vulnerability, pain and most of all healing and survival,” she said in the release. The exhibition is sponsored in part by Baldanza (whose mixed-bag kale salad is to die for, we’re told), New Canaan Wine Merchants (owned by wine-pairing expert Jeff Barbour), Karl Chevrolet (which recently donated equipment to youth baseball and softball programs in New Canaan), April Kaynor Homes, New Canaan Lions Club, Earth Garden and New Canaan Foreign Car.