From the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 10/25/15 Edition

I’d answer the phone and he’d always begin the same way.

“Hi, Brian,’’ he’d say. “Michael Connors, downtown Chalfant.’’

“Downtown’’ was his little joke. His native borough stretches only 330 yards east to west.

“The Steelers gained that distance against the Patriots last Sunday,’’ he once wrote, part of his paean to a long, handsome set of sandstone steps in Chalfant that Mr. Connors, with his own calloused hands and sweat, rescued from decades in a knotweed stranglehold. 

The man made his living as an arborist, but there are writers with advanced degrees who don’t have Mr. Connors’ ear for the American language. Now he’s gone, dead of lung cancer at 54. I wrote his obituary for Saturday’s newspaper.

On Thursday, the day after Mr. Connors died, his cousin left a phone message to let me know. I was stunned. I’d spoken to Mr. Connors some months ago and he’d made no mention he was ailing. We talked about the toppled Westinghouse Atom Smasher or some other blow to the region’s historic legacy.

Turns out he didn’t know he was dying. Self-employed and without health insurance until it came too late to help him, he wasn’t properly diagnosed until Aug. 7. By then he was in intense pain, the cancer had taken too much of him, and his end was nigh. He disconnected his phone and instructed his loved ones not to tell anyone.

That was him. He’d much rather talk about the Allegheny Arsenal explosion of 1862 or the Atlantic Refinery fire of 1923 than say the first word about himself. If you care at all about Pittsburgh’s history, or just a good story well told, you’ve probably read something by Mr. Connors in the pages of this newspaper.

So let me share just a little more about the man. At the Wilkinsburg home of his cousin, Kasey Connors, I sat with his loved ones and heard Michael stories. The love of his life, Gretchen Milton, had told me years ago that he was in the cool crowd and she wasn’t when they were both at Churchill High in the late 1970s, so they didn’t connect until the early ’90s.

Ms. Milton and Michael’s older sisters, Patty and Cheryl, were talking about his high school hair.

“As wide as it was long ... it grew out before it came down  ... beautiful blond.’’

Man oh man, Mr. Connors would hate reading that much detail about himself. Yet were he writing the story of a working-class hero of generations past, as he so often did, he’d cherish and share such particulars.

By the time I knew him, his hair was graying, close cropped, accented by a thick mustache and the pleasantly grizzled look of someone who’d spent his life outdoors. Lanky and strong in a Lincolnesque way, Mr. Connors could move a piano across town or a pile of logs up a hillside while others might wait around for help or machinery. 

“His physical strength, along with the strength of his soul, is unconventional,’’ Ms. Milton said.

Writers and historians respected and enjoyed his research and writing, but few knew him well. He was a frequent correspondent of the great historian David McCullough, and last week Mr. McCullough had high praise for Mr. Connors’ knowledge of Pittsburgh but no idea of his love for the outdoors before I told him.

As a young man, Mr. Connors lived in New Hampshire with his oldest sister, Patty Little, and he later lived in a cabin he built himself deep in the Maine woods. But when Mrs. Little asked in a visit two months ago if he wanted to stay with her, he immediately declined.

“I was born in Pittsburgh,’’ he told her. “I love Pittsburgh. This is my home and I’m going to die here.’’

A stoic to the end, he chose a dignified death rather than additional surgery that could only add a couple of months of profound pain in intensive care. Mr. Connors dictated his last wishes to his love, Ms. Milton — “Scatter my ashes where it’s convenient’’ — joked away a complaint a sister made about the hospital, and soon died.

As I left the people who loved him, I said truthfully, “He was a tremendous man and a great Pittsburgher.’’

Put that in his story, one said, and so I have.

Michael Connors began contributing to the Post-Gazette in 2007, mainly to the Sunday Next Page feature. Here are links to some of his articles about Pittsburgh history:

November 2007: “Finding Private Enright,” about a Pittsburgh soldier who was one of the first Americans to die in World War I.

December 2008: “The Steps of Chalfant, Ascending Still,” about the “solid and elegant public steps” of his tiny borough, built by the WPA during the Depression.

September 2010: “The Allegheny Arsenal Explosion: Pittsburgh’s Civil War Carnage,” on the 1862 blast that killed 70, mostly young girls.

May 2011: “Lawrenceville Ablaze: The Atlantic Refinery Fire of 1923,” about the large oil fire in the city.

From the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 10/24/15 Edition

Michael Connors made his living caring for trees, but his passion was Pittsburgh’s history, and he spent most of his adult life doing his best to ensure that the region’s legacy was preserved and honored.

He put his own sweat and time into clearing the zigzagged sandstone steps built during the Great Depression in his hometown of Chalfant, wrote often in this newspaper on everything from forgotten war heroes to the toppled Westinghouse Atom Smasher, helped launch Doo Dah Days to honor Stephen Foster in Lawrenceville, and successfully proposed renaming the 16th Street Bridge for the renowned historian and Pittsburgh native David McCullough.

Surrounded by his loved ones, Mr. Connors, 54, of Chalfant, died Wednesday morning, of the lung cancer that had been diagnosed only 11 weeks ago.

A strong, lanky, laid-back man who spoke up for others often but only rarely spoke of himself, Mr. Connors was self-effacing to the end. He dictated his last wishes to Gretchen Milton, who has been his love for nearly a quarter-century. (“Love” was all he’d write in the relationship box when he had to fill out a form.)

“Scatter my ashes where it’s convenient,” he told her.

There is no shortage of places in and around Pittsburgh that have been touched by Mr. Connors already.

Mr. McCullough, two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his biographies of presidents, said Mr. Connors would often send him historical tidbits and treasures — a photograph, a coin or a newspaper clipping — that excited them both.

“I never met anyone who had more love for the story of Pittsburgh than Michael,” Mr. McCullough said. “He not only just cared about it, but he knew about it in detail. It was great fun to talk with him and visit with him, and I’ll miss him.”

Arthur Ziegler, president of the Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation, said Mr. Connors would provide the foundation pages of handwritten notes on preservation problems, but wouldn’t stop there.

“He was not just a person who saw problems, he helped solve problems,’’ Mr. Ziegler said. “He was a preservationist on all fronts.”

The people Mr. Connors celebrated were most often working-class people like himself. He was a longtime vice president of the Lawrenceville Historical Society, and he’d carry to its meetings boxes of old maps, atlases and newspapers. He particularly loved newspapers and, as Jim Wudarczyk of the society aptly put it, he’d pen “pointed, well-researched and folksy” stories on overlooked historical figures and incidents for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Old-school to the bone, Mr. Connors wrote everything longhand, but his cousin Kasey Connors or another of his friends and allies would type his newspaper pieces for him.

“All sorts of people walk in the doors of a newspaper office and declare that they are writers. Then there was Michael,” said David M. Shribman, the Post-Gazette’s executive editor and, not long after he met Mr. Connors, a friend of his. “Michael wasn’t quite sure he was a writer, but anyone who read even a paragraph of what he wrote knew that he was — a deeply sensitive, intuitively creative, profoundly caring writer. But as good as a writer as Michael was, he was even more sensitive, creative and caring as a person.”

Michael Connors, the youngest of three children and the first son, grew up in Chalfant with a love of the outdoors. He was the boy who’d bring salamanders and snakes to the front porch, and as a young teenager he received early entry to a demanding Outward Bound wilderness program in Colorado.

After graduating from Churchill High School in 1979, he moved to Manchester, N.H., to live with his older sister, Patty, and her husband, Al Little, and entered a Comprehensive Employment and Training Act program for forestry. He’d later build a cabin by himself, deep in the woods near Lee, Maine. After returning to Pittsburgh in 1985 to visit his parents, Regis and Susan Wallach Connors, he decided to stay and launch his business, Tarzan Tree. That was most often a one-man operation until the day he could work no longer.

Ms. Milton said one of the great moments of his career came about a decade ago when he landed an eight-week job to trim and care for the trees at Fort Necessity and Friendship Hill, the 18th century home of statesman Albert Gallatin in Fayette County. The man with a passion for Pittsburgh’s past found at least one modern product he loved: a JLG boom lift.

“He was like a little boy with a fire truck,’’ Ms. Milton said.

In addition to Ms. Milton, Mr. Connors is survived by his sisters, Patty Little and Cheryl Oliver. A memorial service will be held from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. next SaturdayOct. 31, at the Landmarks Preservation Resource Center, 744 Rebecca Ave., Wilkinsburg. The family asks that donations in Mr. Connors’ name be sent to the animal shelter of the donor’s choice.