Last month saw the death of one of Rifton’s founding fathers. Jerry Voll grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, and studied for the ministry at Lancaster Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania. His first assignment was in Lancaster, where he and his new wife Nancy moved to begin their pastorate. While living there they discovered the Bruderhof which, at that time, had three communities in the United States. Together they felt the call to join this community movement, and they uprooted and moved with their two-year-old daughter in 1971 to the community of Deer Spring in rural Norfolk, Connecticut.
Norfolk was (and remains) a small town that peaked in the 1970s with just over 2,000 residents, but was home to several small institutions that provided residential care for children with disabilities. Ann Storck’s Nursery, Laurel School, and Ann’s Nursery for Babies were all in Norfolk, and the young people of Deer Spring visited them regularly to sing, accompany the children on field trips, or simply play on the premises.
For Jerry, the job at Deer Spring was far from a pastorate, but his commitment to this new lifestyle was complete and unreserved. He worked at the Community Playthings factory, assembling wooden lockers, bookshelves, chairs and other school furniture. That’s where he was in 1975, the year landmark legislation called the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, the precursor to the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), was passed.
Therefore, perhaps it was inevitable that soon after, therapists and teachers at nearby residences began asking for chairs modified to fit their children’s needs. Simultaneously, and in response to the new legislation, Kevin Purcell, an employee of the Connecticut Department of Developmental Services, came to Norfolk’s only elementary school to establish a program to accept newly integrated children with disabilities who arrived at its doors.
Purcell must have discovered early that the Deer Spring factory made school furniture and knocked on the door. In a partnership that has since defined Rifton’s design approach, Purcell and Voll joined forces in a joint effort to create better seating and positioning equipment for children with all types of disabilities and deformities. Their first collaborative creation was the “fully adjustable” Rifton E50 chair. The last time I spoke with Jerry, he recalled those early prototypes, smiling wryly at the ungainly fabrications of slotted plywood and plastic knobs that characterized these devices. “By then, Nancy and I were youth group leaders,” he told me, “and the Deer Spring kids never tired of making fun of me for those ‘fully adjustable’ chairs.”
But they worked, and Jerry kept working, now also helped by the therapy staff at Ann’s Nursery. His next efforts focused on a bath chair and standing structures followed. He began traveling further afield and soon discovered that therapists from across the Northeast were eager to provide his input on the design. Voll was joined in his efforts by others at Community Playthings, not only at the Deer Spring factory but also at Woodcrest in Rifton, New York, where we specialized in aluminum manufacturing at the time, and at New Meadow Run in Farmington , Pennsylvania. where they did commercial sewing. So while Jerry Voll wasn’t the only one to design this new type of equipment, his name always appears first in Rifton’s collective memory when he remembers those early formative years.
Thus Rifton was born. On November 1, 1977, the Community Playthings catalog featured a four-page spread showcasing the work of Voll and his colleagues. For the next three years, the Rifton line was carried by the larger Community Playthings, but by 1980 the product offering had expanded enough to justify its own catalog.
I visited Jerry and his wife Nancy in early July to probe their memory of those early Riftons for a longer article I was working on at the time. Deer Spring closed in 1997 and Kevin Purcell died in 2018, so some details are lost to history, but Jerry’s memories remained vivid. He was diagnosed with colon cancer in March 2016 and I found him physically tired but mentally alert and ready to remember. He was sitting in a large recliner in the living room, his hands covered in thick gloves despite the summer heat, suffering from poor circulation since cancer treatments. He was able to confirm many of the details he was looking for, and most of our conversation covered memories of the Norfolk neighborhood and the four years our paths crossed in Deer Spring while I was in middle and high school.
Jerry became very animated when he talked about the children for whom he had designed equipment, and I was reminded of the most rewarding element of Rifton’s mission. He described the moment he placed the first child in Rifton’s newly designed adjustable walker (listed in that first catalog for $69.50). “It was in a school gym,” he said. “The parents were there. I think the girl was about ten years old. We put her in the walker, the first time upright and able to propel herself independently, and she took off running across the gym floor. There wasn’t a dry eye in the room,” she marveled, her voice breaking and her eyes filling with tears at the memory of her, who was already forty-five years old.
Jerry Voll was eighty years old when he died on November 17. He leaves behind Nancy, his wife of fifty-five years, two sons and two daughters. He also leaves behind an extended family in all the places he called home at one time or another during fifty years of community life in the United States, England and Australia.
