Obituary of James Conniff

James C. G. Conniff, author, artist, and writing professor, died Saturday at home. A resident of Montclair for more than 60 years, he had lately become an articulate critic of what he saw as excessive and insensitive development in town. He also fought ardently to maintain the Bellevue Avenue Branch Library. Conniff had been a professor at St. Peter's College in Jersey City, where he taught the craft and love of writing to generations of students. Many of them went on to become writers themselves. Even decades later, they often sent letters celebrating "the legendary two-middle-initialed James C.G. Conniff," as one of them put it, and to remembering him in "his black academic robe up on the little platform with us acolytes at his feet." "He was the best English teacher I ever had in my whole life--tough, demanding, and inspirational," one student wrote. Many of them remembered Conniff's practice of requiring freshmen students to memorize great poems, and they wrote that even decades later the lines of "Lycidas" or "Ode to Autumn" still came to mind. "No matter where I worked," one student wrote, long after Conniff had retired, "I always carried the legacy of an incorrigibly intense Irishman with a Caesar haircut and a quick-triggered impatience for cant. His passion about writing welland his intolerance for lousy writingchallenges me to this day. Although I've forgotten everything I learned about classical Greece, for example, I still remember the Greek word for excrement. He sometimes wrote that word in the margin of a rushed or carelessly written assignment I submitted that had earned his unique displeasure." Conniff was the author of seven books, including Governor Al Smith, a biography of the first Catholic presidential candidate. He wrote for The Saturday Evening Post, Sports Illustrated, and many other magazines. The Congressional Record credited one of his articles with helping win the first federal funding for research into the causes of Down syndrome. Another of his articles won the American Heart Association's Howard W. Blakeslee Award for distinguished reporting on stroke prevention. Conniff and his wife Dorothy established MEGADOT, a communications firm, and represented clients from Exxon to the Franciscan religious order. With then-U.S. Congressman Peter W. Rodino, Jr., he successfully campaigned in 1982 for a U.S. first class postage stamp honoring Francis of Assisi on the 800th anniversary of his birth. Soon after Conniff wrote his Down syndrome article, his wife Dorothy gave birth to their own Down syndrome child. At a time when families routinely institutionalized such children, the couple made the decision to raise Mark at home with their other children. Conniff later wrote in the New York Times magazine about the difficulty of seeing Mark as an adult struggling "in a family of writers, to produce copy. Pages of hand-scrawled and sometimes typed letters, all higgledy-piggledy, spill from his fevered efforts to 'follow in your footsteps, Dad!''' But Conniff also wrote: "For 31 years, Mark has been a central fact of our family life, knitting us together, trying our patience, helping us laugh, probably making us better people than we would have been without him." In recent years, Conniff has actively supported Mark's annual walk-a-thon to raise funds for ARC-Essex, an organization devoted to helping developmentally-challenged women and men become independent members of their communities. This year, Mark and his father together raised more than $6000. Conniff's other great cause in recent years has been the preservation of Montclair's special character. He fought unsuccessfully against the demolition of the Marlboro Inn, and earlier this year against the demolition by Montclair Kimberly Academy of a house on Upper Mountain Avenue that had been listed on the National Register of Historic Places. He also campaigned to ensure continued funding for the Bellevue Avenue Branch library at a time when the town was considering turning that Andrew Carnegie-endowed building over to developers. In retirement, Conniff wrote poetry for his grandchildren and great grandchildren. He also enjoyed making fanciful mixed-media objects, and in 2011 his work won recognition in the Huffington Post and elsewhere as outsider art. Conniff's wife Dorothy died in 1999. He leaves his sister Julia Demarsky, daughters Susan Manney, Deborah Suta, and Cynthia Cavnar, sons Gregory, Richard, and Mark Conniff; 12 grandchildren, and 9 great-grandchildren. In lieu of flowers, please consider donations to Arc of Essex, 123 Naylon Ave., Livingston, NJ 07039 or Lamp for Haiti Foundation, P.O. Box 39703, Philadelphia, PA 19106.