Herb Riess was easing his legs out of his car in the Mystic parking lot the summer before he died when a young woman waved and walked over. “You’re Herb Riess,” she said. “ We met once in New York, and I never forget a beautiful human being.”
Beautiful? Until the day he died-at age 88 on Aug. 19 at Mystic Manor in Mystic, Conn..-he never saw himself that way.
Polio struck at age 16 and left him with an elongated neck, which he propped up with one arm as a young man when he stole away to ski down mountains in Italy. Baldness took his forehead.
His German accent-which caused some farm horses to ignore his commands when he immigrated to Connecticut in the 1930s-lingered so that he “wolleyed” for serve in tennis and eventually grew to love UConn women’s basketball on “teewee.”
Herbert Riess was born in 1916 in Berlin and raised in Heidelburt, Germany. His father was a calvary officer who won an Iron Cross for bravery on the Russian front.
He studied primarily Latin and Greek in Florience, Italy and moved with his mother to Connecticut. In 1936 he used an inheritance to purchase the Waterman Farm in Lebanon and adjacent 500 acres—with 30 cows that they first had to hire someone to milk because they didn’t know how.
His younger brother, Peter Danning, arrived that year from a private school in Pennsylvania in a taxi, wearing white gloves. “He asked me where his room was,” Herb recalled. “I said ‘Out there, with the manure.”
Herbert finished his degree in agriculture at UConn while at the Waterman estate his mother Gertrude, took in paying guests, primarily Europeans Jews.
Herbert became an American citizen in 1939 when he married a farmer’s daughter, Sophie Pudlo, and she taught him Englosh. He became a land developer and realtor.
In 1954 he married former German opera singer Gisela Jahn and began a career that led to his spot as one of the top-ranking certified real estate appraisers in Connecticut.
He founded the Herbert H. Riess Agency, which still operates in Norwich, and was active in the Norwich Exchange Club, Norwich Commerce Club, and Pautipaug Country Club. He moved to Mystic in the 1980’s.
He loved boating and the Mystic River, was an accomplished horseman, and kept a generous bottle of Drambuie.
He is survived by his wife, Gisela; a son, Warren Riess of Bristol, ME; four daughters, Virginia Partain of Orlando, Florence Burt of Norwich, Marianne Stone of Hawaii, and Patricia Tennison of Chicago; 10 grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.
His family will greet relatives and friends at The Dinoto Funeral Home, 17 Pearl Street, historic downtown Mystic on Sunday from 2-4pm. The service and burial will be private.
Contributions may be made to the American Lung Association.