Freak crash a violent end to gentle lifetime on foot
By Frank Gray
The Journal Gazette
They’ll bury Richard Conner today, and the squirrels and birds of the world will lose a friend.
So will others who may have known him only by the nicknames they gave him.
Conner was killed downtown on Friday when a truck that had been hit by a car that had run a red light jumped a curb, smashed his car and struck him as he put money in a parking meter after what was, for him, a rare trip by car.
Conner, it turns out, was an unusual man, a loner, a workaholic and, for most of his life, a walker.
He had worked for 44 years at Fort Wayne Newspapers, in what is known here as P&D. The department is in an area with noisy machines and rolls of newsprint, where the overhead conveyor belt that carries papers from the press finally ends.
A former supervisor recalled him as a workaholic. He could work circles around other people and still could today, even at 71. He actually had to suspend Conner from his job once – for coming to work on his day off.
Conner’s home was always an apartment and always on the edge of downtown. Over the course of 44 years he never lived more than 12 blocks from the paper, his family said.
Still, surprisingly, he was unknown to most people at the paper. He seemed to like it that way. In fact, when he retired in 1997, he did so suddenly, just so no one would throw a retirement party for him, his sister, Mary Welch, said.
But if you drove the streets of Fort Wayne, you had probably seen him. He was wiry-thin, usually had a brown paper bag with him, and he walked.
To New Haven, to U.S. 24 and I-69, to Washington Center Road, to Southtown, and everywhere in between.
And the bag was full of unsalted peanuts. He walked to Scott’s on State Boulevard to buy them, and he’d feed them to the squirrels, who would often eat from his hand.
But why did he walk?
Vickie Majors, his niece, offered an explanation. She remembers when she was about 6 years old. It was in the 1960s. Conner, her Uncle Dickie, had bought a brand-new car, an Oldsmobile, with electric windows and all the other bells and whistles.
Not long after that, Conner was driving in Fort Wayne when a car ran a red light in front of him. He hit the car, and in the crash, someone in the other car was killed.
After that, Conner never drove. He always kept a license, but he spent practically the rest of his life traveling on foot.
“He didn’t want to hurt anybody, even though it wasn’t his fault,â€
