A requiem Mass for John Conner, a champion international and national age-group runner who built affordable houses here that enabled many to remain in their hometown, is to be recited at Most Holy Trinity Catholic Church in East Hampton at noon on Saturday, with burial to follow in the church’s cemetery on Cedar Street.
Mr. Conner, who lived with his wife, Henrika, on Old Stone Highway in Springs, next door to the Springs School property, died on Dec. 18 at the age of 89.
His wife, to whom he’d been married for 41 years, said Benedictine monks had early on instilled in her husband the importance of serving others, a precept that she said guided him throughout his life.
Born in Hollis, Queens, on Feb. 24, 1935, the son of George and Alice Kelly Conner, Mr. Conner attended St. Clare Catholic Academy, the Brothers of the Sacred Heart boarding school in Huntington, and the Delbarton School in Morrisville, N.J., a Benedictine college preparatory school where he co-captained the football team and ran track before matriculating at Brown University. He graduated from Brown with a bachelor’s degree in 1960. He served as a corporal in the Army from 1956 to 1958.
A man of many interests and talents, which included painting and acting, and the possessor of seemingly indefatigable energy, Mr. Conner moved from New York City to Springs in the mid-1960s. He was remembered recently by fellow runners and friends as “an amazing guy,” as “a legendary coach and mentor,” as “one of a kind,” and as someone who always had the interests of others at heart, “always willing,” in Cliff Clark’s words, “to share what he had learned so they could be better, particularly when it came to running.”
When it came to getting on in the world, Mr. Conner, before he became a successful builder here, led the proverbial nine lives, his résumé including stints as a New York City taxi driver, as a New York State Thruway Authority employee, as a New York University admissions officer, work with the 1968 Mexico Olympics committee, and as a building contractor for the Manhattan Art and Antiques Center.
In East Hampton, his wife said, Mr. Conner directed the Head Start program in its early days, which led him to suggest in the late 1960s that the artists and writers who played softball at Sag Harbor’s Mashashimuet Park on summer weekends contend in a fund-raiser for Head Start in East Hampton Village’s Herrick Park. He was chairman of the town Democratic Committee when, in 1973, Judith Hope became the town’s first Democratic supervisor since the 1930s, was a founder of the Old Montauk Athletic Club, and was a member of American Legion Post 419 in Amagansett.
When it came to running, he, along with Mr. Clark, Andy Neidnig, Howard Lebwith, Tony Venesina, Ray Charron, Billy O’Donnell, George Watson, John Kenney, Kevin Barry, Bob Semlear, Bob Nugent, Tim Fitzpatrick, Merritt White, James Consiglio, Burke Koncelik, Barbara Gubbins, Diana Nelson Fitzpatrick, and Diane O’Donnell, among many others, was a full-fledged participant in what could be called the sport’s Golden Age here, an era that spanned the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s. Mr. Venesina in Sag Harbor, Mr. Watson in Montauk, Mr. Clark on Shelter Island, and Mr. Conner, most notably at the Miss Amelia’s Cottage 2-Miler in Amagansett, also served periodically as race directors.
During that period, Mr. Conner, a self-described “miler,” who always could be found at the front of the pack in local races, whatever the distance – winning those races outright sometimes – won the national 40-to-44-year-old indoor mile championship in 1977 in 4 minutes and 48.5 seconds; won the national 50-to-54-year-old national 1,500-meter championship in 1985 in 4:27.6; ran the Fifth Avenue Mile in September of 1985 in 4 minutes and 40.1 seconds; was a top-10 finisher in the 1987 World Veteran Games’ 800 and 1,500-meter races in Melbourne, Australia; set 55-to-59-year-old world records in the 800 and 1,500 in 1990, and set a 60-to-64-year-old world record in the mile in 1995.
Well into his 50s he was running times that high school runners, many of whom he mentored here, would be proud of.
Never one to give in, he walked the last six miles of the 1979 New York City Marathon after his legs froze. “It was a deeply humiliating experience to walk when you know you can finish in around three hours,” he said afterward, adding, however, that it was “good for the soul.”
Hit by an inattentive driver near the Maidstone Club as he was on a bicycle training ride at the turn of the 21st century, an accident that shattered his hips, Mr. Conner nevertheless came back to become a top age-group competitor in triathlons.
“When I heard footsteps, I knew whose they were,” the then-26-year-old Mr. Consiglio said after edging Mr. Conner, who was twice his age, by three seconds in the Montauk Chamber of Commerce’s mile race in July of 1987. “I wanted to make you suffer a little,” the 52-year-old runner-up said before suggesting that the winner “hit on the outside of your foot and roll in – you’re wasting energy with all that pounding.”
In 2018, the Old Montauk Athletic Club announced that the cup given out to each year’s winner of the Montauk Mile would thereafter be known as the Montauk Mile John F. Conner Cup, “because,” Mike Bottini said at the time, “when it comes to the mile John’s the guy.”
Mr. Conner always wanted his reach to exceed his grasp, as it were, when it came to running, and when it came to life for that matter. In one of a number of Star interviews, he said, “To make a runner takes five years, sometimes longer. I tell the kids who come to my workouts that I’m not out to make them faster, I’m out to make them stronger so that they can get more glucose and oxygen to their muscles. . . . If you’re in shape you can win that struggle against yourself, the cruelest of competitors, as Glenn Cunningham, a great miler of the ’40s, once said.”
On hearing Mr. Conner say at an awards ceremony for the 1993 Thomas Crapper five-miler in Springs that he had begun to fade after the first four miles, Irv Markowitz said, reassuringly, “You never fade, John.”
In addition to his wife, Mr. Conner is survived by a son-in-law, Mario T. Sireci; a granddaughter, Sarah M. Sireci, and by six cousins – Patricia Cirigliano, Eileen Mulliken, Charles Kelly, Frank Kelly, Maryann Kelly, and Charles McRoberts. He was predeceased by a stepdaughter, Mary Sireci.