“CHUCK” CONNORS DEAD.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXXVI, Issue 3993, 25 July 1913, Page 8

“CHUCK” CONNORS DEAD.

MAYOR OF NEW YORK’S CHINATOWN. PICTURESQUE UNDERWORLD CHARACTER. FIREMAN, FIGHTER, BASEBALLER AND ACTOR.

“Chuck” Connors stopped outside Barney Flynn’s -saloon at Pell Street and the Bowery one night recently, and pressed his hand to his heart. A few moments later he began painfully to make his way to the three-room apartment at No. 6 Dover Street in which for some years past he had been maintained by Richard K. Fox, of the “Police Gazette/’ “Something’s got me,” he said to

“Mammy” Chinn, his negro landlady, and as ho climbed the stairs the woman saw that he had suddenly become an old man. Mrs Chinn hastened to the Chatham Club and summoned a number of the men there to Connors’s bedside. He was breathing so heavily and his ashen face was so contorted with pain that one of them proposed the calling ot an ambulance.

“Nix!” replied “Chuck.” “If I gotta go, I want to go here, where I belong.” But the ambulance was called from the Hudson Street Hospital and Dr. Shields, the surgeon, needed but k look. “Heart trouble,” he said. “Bad!” Soon after his arrival at the hospital Connors rallied. At 5 o’clock on Saturday morning, just before lapsing into coma, he protested against remaining. At 6 o’clock he died. Within air hour Chinatown was planning for his funeral.

“CHUCK” MADE CHINATOWN. Of late years it has been the habit to say tliat Chinatown made “Clniek” ivho was called its Mayor. It was the other i\ay around, however, for Connors was an institution of the triangle bounded by Moss and Pell Streets and the Bowery when the first Chinese moved in between 1872 and 1875. Chinatown came to “Chuck” Connors.

The hospital records say that “Chuck” was Charles Connors, and

that his age was 61 years. His friends doubt the correctness of the name given, and they are sure he could not have been 61 by at least nine years. He himself “guessed'” that 18G1 was the year of his birth.

Connors’s first work was as a fireman on the elevated in the days when locomotives drew its trains. He tried boxing then, although he never became much better than “a chopping block” at exhibitions. Catching for a Bowery baseball team before the adrvent of gloves “stoved” most of his fingers and put an end to his lighting.

But a new profession was ready for him. This was praying host to “slum parties” in Chinatown, the guest of honor at the first of which was Della Fox, the actress, and “Billy” Norr, then a sporting writer on the staff of the “World.” 'This party was given in 1890; others came in almofet daily intervals until two years ago.

AMERICA NISEI) ‘ ‘COSTER. ’ ’

“Chuck” took but a short time in “dressing the part” of guide. He affected a tight-rimmed bowler hat, a blue flannel shirt and snugly-fitting coat and waistcoat, all decked with dazzling, white pear] buttons —a sort of Americanised costermonger. His habit of speech was the syncopation that came, through bis fame more than anything else, to he considered the patois of the Bowery. If lie was not actually a philosopher his comments upon, men and events made, it possible to put him forward as one, and there are, columns upon columns in the files of New York newspapers to show him so. Connors liked to look hack over the roster of the parties he had guided through Chinatown. Sir Henry Irvine was one of his “’friends” as were Israel Zangwill and Hall Caine, the authors; N. C. Goodwin, Ellen Terry, Yvette Cuilbert, and Anna Held, among actors; Chauneey M. Depew, Senator T. C. Platt, and Theodore Roosevelt, among statesmen; Count Albert de Sichterwelt, Sir Thomas Upton, Prince William of Sweden, Prince Henry of Battenberg, and Admiral von Dietrich.

■ Literally thousands of others met him when they went a-slumming in Chinatown. He was in his heyday when the Chinese Theatre ran under the endowment of sightseeing car owners, when opium was smoked by Chinese men and white women who could hardly hold pipestems between their lips for grinning at the hoax of it, when the most inoffensive of merchants were pointed out as desperate “hatchet men,” and when any chance face at an upper window became the face of a “slave-wife.”

TWICE HARRIED. Connors was twice married. Nellie Noonan, whom he wedded in 1896, tought him to read 1 and write when he was iShe died eight years ago of tuberculosis. “Chuck’s” unaffected grief over her passing showed something of the man he truly was. A few years later he married Rose Brown, who died in 1911 from morphine taken in ‘an attempt to still a craving for opium.

Rose’s death hit Connors as hard as Nellie Noonan’s had. He no longer held himself to ‘rads,’” and the “hard stuff” was really responsible for the heart trouble that killed him. His one known relative is a sister, who lives in Harlem and from whose home he was buried. The Chinese made his funeral one of their state occasions. Connors achieved some notoriety on the stage. His first appearance was at Hammerstein’s in 1597, when he danced with Anna Held. A few months later he went oil tour at the head of “his own” company, in a melodrama called “On the Bowery.” A year or so afterwards he was starred in “From Broadway to the Bowery.” He was successful, but inherent improvidence kept him always, as he died, penniless.