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Edwin Solon Conner

Edwin Solon Conner (15 April 1881 - 26 April 1960) was an athletic and recreational director.

Edwin was teacher and coach at Lincoln High School in Cleveland, Ohio for ten years. In 1911 he initiated the Father and Son Banquet tradition. He was then director of athletics at Lincoln High School in Cleveland. A minister in Ashtabula (east of Cleveland) asked him to speak to a meeting of fathers in his church. Edwin asked that sons be invited, too. In 1912 Edwin, Newton D. Baker, Mayor of Cleveland, and Secretary Robert S. Lewis of the Cleveland YMCA fostered a Father and Son Week in Cleveland, culminating in a banquet. Baker proposed that 500 other American cities encourage the same idea. Father and Son Banquets were a staple in the church community across America for many decades. He was also athletic and recreational director at summer camps for boys at New York's Lake George in the Adirondack Mountains where he became friends of naturalists Ernest Thompson Seton and Dan Beard. He and they were in the group which worked with General Sir Robert Bade-Powell to bring Boy Scouting to the United States. Edwin had been touted as a contender for the national boxing championship, but his wife (Vivian) protested strenuously, and he therefore did not fight.

During World War I he was employed (formally by a 23 August 1917 letter from W. H. Tinker, Placement Secretary of the National War Council, YMCA) by the YMCA as Director of Recreational Activities (responsible for fitness training, etc.) at Camp Sherman, Chillicothe, Ohio. General Edwin Glenn soon recommended him for a commission to be Division Athletic Director (letter dated 27 Nov 1917 to the Commission on Training Camp Activities) - no record of the commission has been found. After World War I he had a choice of three positions: recreational director for Goodyear, one with the federal Park Service, and an opportunity to go to Bermuda to be in a motion picture with Ann Kellerman, a famous swimmer. His effectiveness at Camp Sherman led Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. to induce him to come to Akron to provide physical exercise for 17,700 people as a pioneer in industrial athletics. Edwin coached its basketball team in the industrial league; he served at Goodyear from 12 May 1919 until he retired 1 Sept 1953. "The New York Times" May 9, 1920, Sunday - Section: Magazine Features, Page XX10: "University and Factory; Goodyear Employes May Study Anything from Three R's to Technical Courses", describes his service "in charge of all athletics and recreational work at Camp Sherman" and as head of physical education at Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co., Akron. Ed wrote portions of a widely-used athletic manual, "Duties of the Captain, the Manager and the Coach," in "[Spalding's] Official Basket Ball Rules: As Adopted by the Amateur Athletic Union and the Young Men's Christian Association Athletic League of North America," ed. George T. Hepbron (New York, 1910)

He graduated 11 June 1931 with A.B., LL.B. degrees from Cleveland Law School, but never practiced law. He started every heat of the Soap Box Derby from its move to Akron in 1935 until the late 1950s, served on the Akron Recreation Commission, 1934-51 (chair, 1941-51) and the Akron Board of Education, originated the father-son banquet and pioneered the industrial recreation movement; he was in wide demand as an inspirational speaker. His career at Goodyear was celebrated 20 January 1954 with an open house at the Goodyear Gym in Akron. Sportswriter Jim Schlemmer offered an extensive tribute in the Akron Beacon Journal the previous Sunday. He wrote, "Swimmer, cyclist, skater (he once skated nonstop from Cleveland to Akron on the frozen canal); Conner might have succeeded Jack Johnson as the heavyweight fistic champion if his desire for that kind of business had been equal to his ability... Instead, even before coming to Akron, he devoted his spare time to church work and already had won recognition as the originator and developer of the Father-Son Week idea.  ...Long years spent in Boy Scout work built intimate friendships with General Baden-Powell, Ernest Thompson Seton, Dan Beard and others.  They called him Coach or Chief like everybody else...." His obituary in the Akron Beacon Journal calls him "big in body, in voice, in mind and in ideals." He was an avid, serious fisherman, tying his own flies. He died fishing from a boat in Florida's Indian River. He is buried beside his wife in Castine, Maine.

Edwin went to sea on fishing schooners as a boy. At age 14 he was aboard a fishing schooner, probably one captained by his grandfather John F. Peterson, which was blown off course in a severe storm to the coast of Labrador - they landed near Dr. Wilfred Grenfell's mission where Edwin saw his first gymnasium and welfare work. This inspired him to return to school. He graduated from Abbot School (secondary school) and Eastern State Normal School (now the Maine Maritime Academy; his teaching certificate is dated 5 June 1901), both in Castine, and in 1906 from Bates College majoring in physical education and recreation (starring there in baseball, basketball and football and for four years on the all-state football team [once as an end, once as a tackle and twice as a fullback]).

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- "A Family of the Bagaduce: The Ancestry and Genealogy of William Conner, Jr....," by Albert E. Myers (Harrisburg, PA, 1976) - www.aemyers.net/genealogy