Even the Arnold buffs in town—there are a few who brazenly argue that the man was not all bad and deserves recognition for his positive accomplishments—are leery of proposing any sort of celebration or memorial this year.

“If there's anyone who'd bring it up, it would be me and I'm afraid of the reaction,” said William B. Stanley, a Norwich stockbroker and former State Senator who has been one of the city's staunchest Arnold defenders—at least since 1947, when he got himself suspended from a local grade school for writing a term paper favorable to the general.

Mr. Stanley, along with Edward W. Leonard, the city librarian, was responsible for the last big flap over Arnold here, in 1959 when the city was celebrating its 300th anniversary. The two men convinced Philip Johnson, the president of the Society of the Founders of Norwich, that the way to gain nationwide attention for their tercentennial was by exploiting the Arnold connection.

'If you want to get our press releases in the paper,’ I told him, ‘you have to emphasize what we're famous Mr. Stanley recalled. “And what has Norwich got but Benedict Arnold and the birthplace of the Thermos bottle? It was sort of ‘Local Boy Makes Bad’ story, and it got in all the papers.”

However, he said, some people said that “we were trying to whitewash a traitor and disgracing the community.”

“Even today,” he said, “you can look at his birth records at City Hall and next to his name somebody has penciled in ‘the traitor.’ And every family gravestone but that of his mother was destroyed.”

The house where Arnold was born and lived in before moving to New Haven at the age of 21 was said to be haunted by ghosts after his disgrace, and it was demolished in 1853. And nothing is left today, in this community of 40,000 residents to remind anyone of him but a battered street sign at Arnold Place and the front‐door key, which is preserved in the town museum.