1938-2020

Conner Moore

SACO — Conner Moore passed away peacefully at home on Saturday, Dec. 26, 2020, in the company of his loved ones.

He was born on June 24, 1938, in Detroit, Michigan, to Jane and Robert Moore. The family moved to Larchmont, New York, after World War II, and he graduated from Mamaroneck High School in 1956, Dartmouth College in 1960, and Cornell Medical School in 1963. He went on to an internship at Boston City Hospital, at which time he met a nurse from Canada, Wendy Budge, who would become his wife of 56 years.

Conner then served in the United States Air Force at Andrews AFB from 1964-1966. It was there, at the request of the military who were minting new specialists out of necessity, that he became a pediatrician. He did his final training at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. Weary of urban life, he moved his family to Saco, Maine, where would live the rest of his life. He joined a small group practice in 1968 and went solo in 1978, converting a snowmobile repair shop in Biddeford into a doctor’s office with his own hands.

Over the course of his 40-year pediatric career he witnessed the eradication of many diseases and a substantial decrease in harmful outcomes. He was fascinated by these changes, by the demographic and cultural changes around him, by medicine in general, and especially by the peculiarities of rural living. He wrote it all of it down in his 2010 autobiography “From Black Bag to Blackberry,” with stories ranging from the horrors of leukemia to the comedy of urine samples gone wrong. Indeed, one of his favorite parts of medicine was not knowing who or what would walk through his door on any given day.

Conner was also a physician for Sweetser’s Saco campus and Thornton Academy, where he relished his position as the football team’s doctor. He helped open a clinic in Terrier Rouge, Haiti, and served as the medical staff president at Southern Maine Medical Center. Among the numerous awards bestowed upon him, he was proudest of his 1984 Caregiver of the Year from SMMC, as he was not employed by the hospital at the time.

Long after these accolades and titles are forgotten, Conner will be remembered for his tireless desire to help people in any way he could: comforting terminally ill children, pursuing and diagnosing obscure conditions, saving lives in the emergency room, and administering hundreds of thousands of check-ups. And long after those details are forgotten, he will be remembered for having treated his patients and their parents in a gentle, compassionate, wise, and humble fashion.

Although Conner spent most of his days caring for sick children and serving the community, he did leave time for hiking, fishing, reading, gardening, or simply watching a Red Sox game.

He is survived by: his wife; Wendy; his sons, Christopher, Michael, and David; and his beloved grandchildren Alice, Henry and Annabel.

A private service was held on Saturday, Jan. 2, 2021, and a public service will be held when it is safe to do so. In lieu of flowers, the family requests a donation to either the Saco Food Pantry, 67 Ocean Park Road, Saco, Maine 04072 or Sweetser Children’s Services, 50 Moody St., Saco, Maine 04072.

On-line condolences can be posted to www.dcpate.com