This is not your former First Selectwoman's Oldsmobile, that's for certain

50 Hidden Brook Road, Riverside waas priced at $8.490 million and is pending after 29 days. I remember the location, though not the house, as the childhood home of Jennie Sims, daughter of Ruth Sims, Greenwich’s first female First Selectman. A modest house for a modest, incredibly accomplished family; Christopher Sims won a Nobel Prize in Economics, Jenny earned a doctorate, went on to work in national intelligence, and taught at Georgetown for years — I don’t know what brother Bill got up to in his adulthood, but I’m sure it didn’t involve shoelace repair or chicken plucking.

Perhaps the Sims who had the biggest influence on shaping my misguided youth was one of Jenny’s older brothers — I believe he was ten years older than us — who came to Miss Cardozo’s Fourth Grade class-show-and tell at Riverside School in 1963 and recounted his story of hitchhiking across the country the summer before. I was enthralled, and could hardly wait until I was old enough to do the same; that turned out to be a wait of six years, but when I was 16, I headed out for California from the steps of the former Greenwich High School, now Town Hall, on the first day of Spring vacation, picked up Rt 66 mid-country, and to my surprise was actually in LA three days later (Oops! “Dad, I think I need some airfare if I’m going to make it back in time for school.”) I repeated that trip two more times that year, although I never could duplicate the first one’s speed (it didn’t help that on one of those journeys the state of California delayed me 3 days by holding me in the youth wing of the San Louis Obispo County Jail for the “crime” of being an unattended minor), then bought a VW bus and pretty much retired my thumb for the duration of my stay on this mortal coil.

None of which, you’ll have noticed, has anything to do with this present listing, which was built in 2014. The owners paid $2.435 million for the house and land in 2012 — asking price was $2.050 — razed the Sim’s house, and proceeded to build anew; eleven years later, they appear to have done quite well with that decision.

Riverside is very much not the same neighborhood I grew up in, but I suppose that’s progress.

Original 1954 house