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.

Tell Santa You Want to Go Swimming With Piranhas

Just got this very kind review of my current book (and perfect Christmas gift) Swimming with Piranhas at Feeding Time:

Here’s why it’d be impossible not to like Richard Conniff’s latest book: the subtitle is “My Life Doing Dumb Stuff with Animals.”

Here’s the form the book’s preface takes: a fake classified for the job Conniff does.

Two best lines from the preface:

“Willingness to shed conventional norms a requirement. The candidate must be able to contemplate in a nonjudgemental way even the animals that happen at that moment to be having sex, possibly incestuous, on his forehead.”
“[A]ll reasonable expenses will be covered. OK, yes, that will include the mud-walled hotel in western Uganda with one toilet serving all rooms. And, OK, it’s not really a toilet, but a hole in the floor. And yes, yes, yes, you may experience near total liquefaction there in the form of the week-long gastrointestinal calamit called giardia.”

It’d be impossible to choose a favorite chapter from this book—they’re all terrific reads, each engaging and told with much humor, and this is absolutely one of those books which, by the end, you sort of want to be friends with the author—but “Lemurs in Love” and “Ghosts in the Grasslands” (maybe because it’s the book’s longest, at 20 pages) are both tremendously good.

Regardless: get it. Read it. Pass it to friends. (And this is what happens when you get giardia, if you’ve got the will to look.)

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P.S.  I’ve had giardia.  So my advice is, don’t look.

Chin Chucking With Cheetahs: Hilariously Informative

Monday is the pub date for my new book, Swimming With Piranhas at Feeding Time:  My Life Doing Dumb Things With Animals, and a couple of nice reviews have come in.  

The May issue of Outside Magazine calls it “Hilariously informative … This book will remind you why you always wanted to be a naturalist.” 

And The Day, a Connecticut newspaper says: 

“Award-winning nature writer and Old Lyme resident Richard Conniff’s ‘Swimming With Pirhanas at Feeding Time – My Life Doing Dumb Stuff With Animals’ (W.W. Norton, 298 pages, $25.95) is out May 4. A series of frequently hysterical and always compelling essays, the book is a chronicle of Conniff’s myriad experiments in which he interjected himself into scenarios in the the animal kingdom. This includes the titular dip with man-eating fish and experiences with wild dogs, spiders, termite flatulence, and perhaps the most dangerous of all: human naturalists. But the point isn’t ‘Jackass’-style daredeviltry. A Guggenheim Fellow who writes for the Smithsonian and National Geographic, Conniff is eternally curious about the world and possibly peerless when he tries to explain and observe. See his blog at strangebehaviors.com “

By the way, the cheetah in the photo above was a pet at a cheetah rescue center in Namibia.  I do not otherwise recommend trying to chuck a cheetah under the chin.  On the same trip, I met a farmer who’d had a finger latched onto and slowly bitten off by a cheetah.

Reading Among the Bullet Ants

Here’s a review of my new book, sent back from a pamacari on the Amazon by Kraig Becker at The Adventure Blog:

As I noted last week, traveling is a perfect time for catching up on your reading. Long flights and layovers in spartan airports with little to do, makes you appreciate a good book all the more. And when heading to South America, I just had to take along a book I had received a few days before departing. I mean, it’s called Swimming with Piranhas at Feeding Time by Richard Conniff. How could I possibly leave that behind when I was headed to the Amazon?

Author’s Bio Note

Richard Conniff has collected tarantulas in the Peruvian Amazon, tracked leopards with Kung! San hunters in the Namibian desert, climbed the Mountains of the Moon in western Uganda, and trekked through the Himalayas of Bhutan in pursuit of tigers and the mythical migur.  His new book, Swimming with Piranhas at Feeding Time:  My Life Doing Dumb Things with Animals, is due out from W.W. Norton in May 2009.  His other books include The Ape in the Corner Office: How to Make Friends, Win Fights, and Work Smarter By Understanding Human Nature (Crown). He is the author of The Natural History of the Rich: A Field Guide (Norton, 2002); Every Creeping Thing: True Tales of Faintly Repulsive Wildlife (Holt, 1998); Spineless Wonders: Strange Tales from the Invertebrate World (Holt, 1996); and, for young readers, Rats! The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (Crown, 2002).

What This Blog Is All About

My name is Richard Conniff. I collect behaviors, the way other people collect baseball cards. That includes behaviors of humans and other animals, on two, four, six, and eight legs, plus the occasional slither. Often, the behaviors I come across in my reporting don’t fit whatever I happen to be writing at the moment. (I’m a writer of books, magazine articles, television scripts, and radio commentaries. See my bio note below.) Sometimes they’re just too weird to fit anywhere. But I love them anyway, for their own sake. So my plan is to collect them here, with the idea that readers will enjoy news and opinion from the behavioral world, and maybe also want to share some of their own discoveries

BIO NOTE

Richard Conniff is at work on a book about the discovery of species. He won a National Magazine Award in 1997 and a 2009 Gerald Loeb Award for Distinguished Business and Financial Journalism.  He was a 2007 Guggenheim Fellow.   His articles have appeared in Time, Smithsonian, The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, and other publications. He is a frequent commentator on NPR’s Marketplace, and has written and presented television shows for the National Geographic Channel, TBS, and the BBC, among others. Conniff is the author of seven books, including Swimming with Piranhas at Feeding Time:  My Life Doing Dumb Stuff with Animals (Norton, 2009), The Natural History of the Rich: A Field Guide (Norton, 2002) and Spineless Wonders:  Strange Tales of the Invertebrate World (Holt, 1996).