An Obituary for My Dad

J.C.G. Conniff, c. 1971 (Photo: Richard Conniff)

James C. G. Conniff, an author  and writing professor, died Saturday at his home in Montclair, N.J.  He was 92.

At St. Peter’s College in Jersey City, he taught the craft and love of writing to generations of students, many of whom 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.

“He was the best English teacher I ever had–tough, demanding, and inspirational,” one student recalled.  Many former students 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,” wrote another, “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 well—and his intolerance for lousy writing—challenges 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, who grew up in Woodlawn section of the Bronx, 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.  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.

In one widely-noted article in the New York Times magazine, Conniff wrote about the decision with his wife Dorothy to raise a Down syndrome child at home with their other children, at a time when institutionalization was standard. He noted 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, the two men 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 local library at a time when the town had proposed turning the Andrew Carnegie-endowed Bellevue Avenue branch over to developers.

Conniff’s wife Dorothy died in 1999.  He leaves his sister Julia Demarski, daughters Susan Manney, Deborah Suta, and Cynthia Cavnar, sons Gregory, Richard, and Mark Conniff; 12 grandchildren, and 9 great-grandchildren. Visiting hours Fri. 2-4 p.m., 7-9 p.m. at the Moriarty Funeral Home in Montclair. Funeral mass 10 a.m. Saturday at St. Cassian’s.  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.

Tinkering and Puttering

This is a story I wrote about working with my father.  It ran in the New York Times magazine in 1985:

I stand before you today to confess that I honestly like the pastime known, God help me, as home repairs. I like the perfect dimple my hammer leaves in wallboard when I drive home a nail. I like the drifts of sawdust across the floor and the curlings of wood when I plane down a door. I even like the language of home repairs, with its blind nailing of floorboards and floating of concrete, its snapping of chalk lines, sistering of beams and doubling of headers.

I say “God help me”` because tinkering about the house is, in truth, a pastime with no heroes and no social status. Considering how many people are involved (61.7 million households, according to an industry survey), “doing it yourself”” suffers under a remarkably dismal image. On television, in comic strips and elsewhere, the business of home repairs is practiced by bungling husbands, who usually end up with bruised egos and swaddled thumbs. In the minds of many people, the do-it-yourselfer is a well-meaning fellow who has been hit on the head and rendered permanently middlebrow by a falling 2-by-4.

I’ve been thinking about this lately because of an article in Time about movie actor Harrison Ford. A photo showed Ford standing in the shell of a house, which, as the article noted incredulously, he is “actually constructing.” Ford, who once worked as a carpenter, was quoted discussing a bedside table he had made: “It’s a simple piece with turned legs and a band- sawed skirt. I just like the work itself.”

Now this had a surface incongruity that I found pleasing: that an “interstellar swashbuckler,” a “dashing romantic,” a star of five of the 10 “highest grossers of all time” should bother to be his own carpenter! That a Hollywood leading man talking about “skirt” could mean something capable of being band-sawed! It was so square, so reassuring to my do-it-yourself sensibilities. But I also recognized something familiar about that offhand tone and something false about that phrase “just a simple piece.”` I bet Harrison Ford sweated more over that band-sawed skirt and those turned legs than he did over the viper pit in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

A sort of low-key, self-deprecating machismo is, in fact, common among do- it-yourselfers, and it suggests one of the main reasons why this pastime is so discreetly popular. The ability to use tools intelligently is, after all, one of the defining characteristics of the species, and it is still part of the measure of a man. In the Time article, Ford is described as an actor who “plays somebody you can rely on, who will take care of whatever it is, from a kid’s hurt finger to a murder to saving the galaxy. He has that quality.”Carpentry, not space fantasy, is what makes me feel that way. Men may readily assert that they don`t know one end of a hammer from the other; but secretly, all of us like to think that, at the very least, we can drive a nail straight.

I’ve been tinkering around the house ever since my father taught me as a child to take apart a window and make the pulleys work again–a sort of domestic epiphany. Before then, I knew only that windows went up and down, or refused to go up and down. But what my father showed me within the sides of the window was a system of sash cords and counterweights that had the unexpected beauty, even elegance, of engineering. It was, moreover, engineering that a child could fix. And fixing it, I felt competent.

My father and I rarely if ever played catch. What we did was

Family Business: Manchild Coming of Age

My Dad died Saturday, age 92.  He was a writer and a passionate teacher of the craft and love of writing.  I’ll post an obituary later, but this is an article he wrote for the New York Times magazine about my brother Mark, who has Down syndrome, and about raising him at home when institutionalization was the more standard practice:

MY YOUNGEST SON, MARK, has his suits and jackets fitted with extra care, because, 5 feet tall, he weighs more than 170 pounds and is built like a padded fire hydrant. He is dieting to fight that image, though, and has 27 Special Olympics awards on his wall to prove it, right beside life-size posters of Michael Jackson, Kenny Baker and Barbara Mandrell. Mark is a powerful swimmer, and five of the awards are for first place in the category.

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.

I remember the night call, hours after he was born, and the doctor’s trying to be gentle as the darkness around me grew suddenly deeper: ”I regret having to tell you your new son

Green Highways: Saving Nature at 65 MPH?

Monarch butterflies could use some roadside relief (Photo: Chip Taylor)

Not long ago, a biologist took Florida landscape architect Jeff Caster aside and suggested that he ought to be designing highway margins not just for safety or scenic value, but as habitat, to help address the nation’s drastic decline in pollinating insects.

Caster passed the idea along to his boss at the Florida State Department of Transportation (DOT), who looked at him as if he were crazy. Even in the best of circumstances, highways are notorious for fragmenting habitat, spreading pollution, causing roadkills, and otherwise disrupting the natural world. Highways are where insects go to be splattered on windshields. “You expect the DOT to do research on bees?” she told him. “Get real.”

Instead, Caster walked her through the reasoning behind the proposal from University of Florida entomologist Jaret C. Daniels: The population of feral honeybees has dropped more than 50 percent nationwide over the past half-century. Pathogens, pesticides, and habitat loss have also decimated native pollinating insect species. But in Florida, agriculture is the second-biggest contributor to the state economy, after tourism, and roughly 100 valuable crops depend on pollinators. Florida DOT not only manages 186,000 acres, about 0.5 percent of Florida’s total area, but its land, says Caster, is “next door to, or one property away from, almost every farm in the state.”

Caster’s bosses all eventually signed onto the proposal, a decision no doubt made easier because the state is now also actively promoting highway wildflower tourism. A $90,000 study to determine how changes in the DOT mowing regimen might benefit roadside pollinator populations is now underway.

In most places, the public may still largely want their highway margins “to be either tidy or flowery,” as a roadside biodiversity report for Scottish Natural Heritage put it early this year. They are not looking for Darwin’s “entangled bank.” But in countries around the world, ecologists, and transportation engineers are increasingly joining in an improbable alliance to turn roadsides and other travel conduits into functional habitat.

In France, highway stormwater runoff ponds have become critical amphibian habitat. In the U.S. Midwest, naturalized roadsides have become prairie corridors and nesting grounds. Hawaii has developed an elaborate program to keep invasive plants from spreading along roads. And, in Florida, researchers are now testing a sophisticated new system to alert motorists to

The Last Butterfly: An American Beauty Faces Extinction

Papilio aristodemus male (Photo: Jaret Daniels)

The survival of a spectacular American species depends this week on a small band of volunteers wandering in the dense tropical hardwood hammock of the Florida Keys. Despite the heat and humidity, the searchers must wear heavy jackets, gloves, face masks, and other protective gear to keep off the swarming mosquitoes. It’s backcountry work, often knee-deep in the water, constantly scanning for Schaus’s swallowtail butterfly, a beautifully colored creature with a wingspan as big as a man’s hand, and which is now on the brink of extinction.

Since the emergency collecting effort began back in April, the searchers have found just a single adult, a female. They netted her two weeks ago on Elliott Key in Biscayne National Park and kept her there for four days in a special container, hoping she would produce a crop of up to 400 eggs. But rainy weather worked against them, and she yielded …  TO READ THE REST OF THIS ARTICLE CLICK HERE.

Murdered for a Turtle Egg Aphrodisiac

Mora working with a marine turtle nest (Photo: action.seaturtles.org)

It’s no secret that protecting wildlife can be dangerous work. As many as 1000 wildlife rangers and conservationists around the world have been murdered over the past decade by poachers, illegal loggers, ranchers, drug dealers and militias, according to one estimate. Still, Costa Rica, long regarded as one of the greenest and happiest countries on Earth, is just about the last place you would expect it to happen.

But late last Thursday night, a young Costa Rican conservationist, together with three women from the United States and a fourth from Spain, found out otherwise.

The group was driving back from patrolling a beach where endangered leatherback sea turtles make their nests in the sand. A downed palm tree blocked their way on a remote stretch of road, and when 26-year-old Jairo Mora Sandoval got out of his Suzuki 4×4 to move it, five masked man with guns suddenly appeared. The kidnappers took the group to an abandoned house, where they tied up the women and stole their cellphones and money. Then two of the kidnappers drove off with Mora in the Suzuki.

Playa Moín, where the incident took place, is … to read the rest of this story, click here.

Mammoth Blood, Yes. Cloning? Not So Fast.

There’s nothing quite like fresh blood on the ice to stir excitement in the journalistic community, especially when it’s the blood of an extinct mammoth. It’s an irresistible leap of the imagination to the idea of Jurassic Park-style cloning, and the vision of extinct giants rumbling out of the Ice Age into the modern world. Mix in an element of the Asian wildlife-trafficking mafia in hot pursuit of ivory—from animals now living, or very, very dead—and you have a story.

But let’s stick with the facts, for now.

The blood turned up earlier this month when a team of Russian paleontologists began to excavate a newly discovered carcass of a female mammoth on the Lyakhovsky Islands, off the north coast of central Siberia.

“The lower part of the body was resting in nearly pure ice, and the upper part was found in the middle of the tundra,” team leader Semyon Grigoriev told a Russian newspaper.

The temperature was -10 Celsius (about 14 degrees Fahrenheit) and the researchers were working around the carcass with a poll pick, a miner’s tool like a crowbar. Suddenly, they hit a pocket underneath the ice, and to their amazement, liquid blood came flowing out …    To read the rest of this story click here.

The Dragon Mother of King Kong

One fine evening in the mid-1920s, W. Douglas Burden, a New York City gentleman “with sporting tastes and a real interest in natural history,” came home to ask his wife “how she would like to go dragon hunting.”

Burden was a great-great grandson of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, with a bank account to match, and a track record as an adventurer in his own right. So this was the sort of whim he could readily indulge. In 1926, with the blessings of the American Museum of Natural History, Burden and his expedition set out in the S.S. Dog for an obscure island in the Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia, where the existence of a huge reptile had been reported.

Burden was seeking what he called “a primeval monster in a primeval setting.” Rumors of dragons had been repeated by Dutch sailors in the East Indies as far back as the 1600s. Finally, in 1910, a Dutch colonial administrator with a double-barreled name, Lieutenant van Steyn van Hensbroek, visited the Lesser Sundas, and came back with the skin of a six-foot-long Varanus lizard. Van Hensbroek published the first scientific description and named the species Varanus komodoensis, after the island of Komodo, where it was found.

That account inspired Burden to undertake this expedition in pursuit of bigger specimens. But even very big Varanus lizards did not match his sense of adventure, so he dubbed them “Komodo dragons” instead. The destination also needed to be suitably mythic. When his expedition first laid eyes on the island … to read the rest of this story, click here.

Skull and Bones: The Pleistocene Diet

 

Flick-blade marsupial lion (Illustration: Peter Schouten)

Let me admit up front that I am an enthusiastic admirer of predatory behaviors. I have taken unseemly delight in the spectacle of a cheetah tackling and disassembling a wildebeest. And once, while tracking radio-collared African wild dogs in Botswana, I had the great privilege of arriving at the scene of the kill before the rest of the pack. (The smell of fresh blood in the morning. Hmmmm.) When a television documentary dwells mournfully on the plight of an aging zebra no longer able to keep up with the herd, I am generally rooting for the killers.

And I have a hunch I am not alone. Research on predatory behaviors has been in the news a lot lately, starting with the discovery of the earliest known archaeological evidence of our own past as predators, and as scavengers on other predators’ kills. Writing early this month in PLOS ONE, Baylor University anthropologist Joseph Ferraro and his co-authors describe new finds from the Kanjera archaeological site [photo] on the shores of Lake Victoria in western Kenya.

For our hominin ancestors two million years ago, this was the perfect picnic spot, a grassy plain between the shore of a lake and the wooded slopes of nearby hills and mountains. And the menu? Mainly small to mid-size antelopes like Grant’s gazelle and topi, but with the occasional buffalo or hippopotamus as a special treat.

The authors of the new paper note that when modern lions or hyenas kill small antelope, they generally consume the carcass within minutes after death. “As a result, hominins could only have acquired these valuable remains on the savanna through active hunting.” The fossil bones also show evidence of tool use “consistent with both defleshing and disarticulation activities,” including marks of fist-size hammerstones for … To read the rest of this article click here.

Introducing Antibiotic Resistance to the Wild

Cute but a carrier (Photo: Ben Bishop/WWF-Aus.)

A few weeks ago, I reported that antibiotic resistance had jumped from humans to wildlife in a remote national park in southern Africa.  Now a new paper reports that it is happening in Australia, too, by way of a captive-breeding reintroduction program.

Here’s the story from PLOS ONE, where the study is being published:

Endangered brush-tail rock wallabies raised in captive breeding programs carry antibiotic resistance genes in their gut bacteria and may be able to transmit these genes into wild populations, according to research published May 22 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Michelle Power and colleagues from Macquarie University in New South Wales, Australia.

Brush-tail rock wallabies are currently being raised in species recovery programs and restored to the wild to bolster populations of this endangered species. Here, researchers found that nearly half of fecal samples from wallabies raised in these programs contained