He was moving to a less lofty Back Bay address down the street from where he and three friends opened their legendary ad agency, Hill, Holliday, Connors, Cosmopulos, in 1968. Each partner ponied up $1,500 to launch their collective future. To make his stake, Mr. Connors borrowed $1,000 from his father.
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His innovative finesse guiding the agency to national success made him wealthy, and gave Mr. Connors contacts in nearly every niche of Boston’s power structure and civic life — friendships he tapped into time and again when philanthropy became his essential focus. For a half-century, his influence was unparalleled.
“Will there ever be another Jack Connors? No, there will never be another Jack Connors,” said Martin J. Walsh, a former Boston mayor and US labor secretary.
“No one can come close to replacing Jack Connors,” Walsh said. “Every mayor can be followed, every president can be followed, but Jack was more than all of that. He was more than a leader in our community. He gave more in his life than he ever received.”
Chairing some of Boston’s most significant boards, including Partners HealthCare, Mr. Connors helped shape a game-changing merger between Mass. General and Brigham and Women’s hospitals and shepherd the evolution of his alma mater, Boston College, from a commuter school to a destination of academic prestige.
“When issues came up for mayors, for governors, Jack was the person to call,” Governor Maura Healey said. “Jack was the person that people looked to, the person people depended on, and he delivered time and time again. He was a champion for the Bay State — its people, its institutions. No matter what it was, he pursued everything with savvy and tenacity and compassion.”
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Along with donating nearly $100 million of his own money, Mr. Connors helped raise hundreds of millions for an array of philanthropic endeavors through the relationships he formed as Boston’s key connector, knitting together causes and people who otherwise might never have met, let alone work side by side to improve lives.
He conceived and helped create his last great venture, Camp Harbor View, 17 years ago with then-Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino — one of many high-ranking politicians and dignitaries who made pilgrimages to the tower-topping office Mr. Connors inhabited, where with a glance he and his visitors could survey the city they wanted to improve.
Mr. Connors had long worked to address Greater Boston’s historic financial inequities, which he had seen firsthand in his own life: He paid his way through Boston College in part by driving a cab.
Camp Harbor View began as a summer retreat on Long Island, in Boston Harbor, to help middle-school children from the city’s poorest housing projects and neighborhoods forge bonds and avoid falling prey to crime and violence.
Then it evolved into a major antipoverty agency, crafting a pilot program in recent years to provide families in financial straits — predominantly people of color — with a guaranteed monthly income.
Mr. Connors, who had already raised funds to build and support Camp Harbor View, reached into his own pocket for $1 million to launch the guaranteed income initiative.
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“I promised the mayor if he gave me a shot at that land that I would raise $10 million, and we’ve raised $200 million,” Mr. Connors, his health failing, recalled in an interview on Wednesday for this obituary. With his trademark self-effacing wit, he added: “So I think we’ve come close.”
The camp’s endowment now stands at $55 million, he said, his voice still firm, “which means there’s a future.”
Just as he had done in the business world, Mr. Connors nurtured Camp Harbor View’s success through leadership, rather than expertise with the operation’s nuts and bolts. He often noted as president of the Hill Holliday ad agency that his talents didn’t shine on the creative end — writing ad copy or sketching storyboards.
“I couldn’t write an ad to get out of here,” he told the Globe in 1986, when Hill Holliday snagged top national and international advertising association honors.
Flush with charm and charisma, and rich in the epiphanies of common sense, he had ensured Hill Holliday’s prosperity and burgeoning reputation early on with a counterintuitive approach: working for free.
Hill Holliday created pro bono ad campaigns for charities whose boards were populated with powerful executives — most of whom were potential new clients for the fledgling ad agency. A particular focus was providing free assistance to foundations fighting diseases.
“We didn’t care what part of the anatomy they were trying to cure,” Mr. Connors told the Globe in 1995. “We just wanted to know who was on the board of directors.”
Cultivating those connections became his greatest strength then and in the decades ahead as the agency’s Back Bay headquarters became an advertising destination that rivaled Madison Avenue firms in New York City.
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“Boston advertising established a national reputation for the first time under his leadership,” said Anne Finucane, a retired vice chair of Bank of America who formerly was part of Hill Holliday’s executive management team.
“His business pitches were legendary,” she said. “He would say to these clients, ‘I’m not a creative guy, I’m not an art director, I’m not a writer.’ He would minimize his role when we met the client — then he would absolutely dominate the room.”
Boston College-educated and descended from Irish immigrants, Mr. Connors fit comfortably into the predominantly Catholic power structure of Irish- and Italian-Americans who had run the city, yet he knew change lay ahead, and he believed it could be for the better.
Mr. Connors raised campaign funds for Boston Mayor Michelle Wu — a daughter of Taiwanese immigrants who in 2021 became the first woman and first person of color elected to that office.
“Even before I personally got to know Jack it was clear that he was trying to open doors for many in Boston who hadn’t seen themselves reflected in the conversation, or in places of power,” Wu said.
In 2023, Mr. Connors predicted in a Boston magazine interview that the city’s future leadership “will look different. It won’t be Irish. It won’t be Italian. It won’t be as white. But the important thing is that different is fine. We need to embrace different.”
Throughout his career, Mr. Connors was a go-to problem solver for the region’s powerful institutions.
Nearly two decades ago, Cardinal Seán O’Malley sought the assistance of Mr. Connors, who drew praise for his major role in rescuing Catholic education in Greater Boston by reimagining how it could be administered in a more professional and financially stable manner.
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“Jack brought his widely esteemed business acumen to his life as a citizen and a Catholic,” O’Malley said Tuesday in a statement, adding that while “his gifts of intelligence and wisdom enhanced the Archdiocese of Boston in multiple ways, it was the education of children which captured his heart and engaged his enormous energy.”
To benefit the public good, Mr. Connors didn’t hesitate to seek out other people. He was so successful at securing eye-popping donations from the affluent that some rich executives joked that they automatically reached for their checkbooks when they heard Mr. Connors was on the line.
Little in Boston lay beyond his attention and philanthropic reach. During the pandemic, he was a key player in helping raise more than $32 million for a City Hall-run fund to help those most affected by COVID-19.
All such efforts harkened back to his oft-offered advice to never forget who you are and where you’re from.
“I am a Boston guy. I am a homeboy,” he told the Globe in 2007. “I live less than two miles from the hospital where I was born. I live less than four miles from the house I was raised in. I live less than 10 miles from the high school I went to. I live four miles from the college I went to. I am a local.”
Born in Boston in June 9, 1942, John Michael Connors Jr. lived in a two-family Roslindale house until he was 11 and his family moved to Dedham.
His father, John Sr., repaired heating and air-conditioning systems in buildings downtown.
Jack Jr. called his mother, Mary Horrigan Connors, “a real force in my life.”
Born into a poor Irish immigrant family, she was a secretary for a business executive until she was fired when working became difficult because of the pain of colon cancer.
She died when Mr. Connors was a Boston College junior.
More than 35 years later, Mr. Connors donated $5 million to Brigham and Women’s on Mother’s Day in 1999. What was then the largest gift in the hospital’s history created the Mary Horrigan Connors Center for Women’s Health and Gender Biology.
At Boston College, from which he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1963, he covered tuition costs through jobs such as hawking concessions at Fenway Park and driving a Checker Cab. Mr. Connors kept his hackney license framed in his office long after he measured his net worth in the hundreds of millions, instead of the night’s cab tips.
In 1966, he married Eileen Marie Ahearn just after she graduated from Boston College. They had four children and she later returned to BC for a master’s in social work.
From the beginning of his career, selling was his strength. After graduating from BC, he sold Swanson TV dinners and other frozen foods for Campbell’s Soup Co., before joining Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn — the prominent New York City ad agency known as BBDO.
As a rising executive, he was told that a BBDO vice presidency, based in Detroit, lay ahead. Unimpressed, he left and returned to Boston with Eileen. Mr. Connors said he wasn’t interested in working hard if “the brass ring was a life sentence in Detroit.”
As Hill Holliday’s president and eventual chairman emeritus, Mr. Connors was one of Boston’s most public figures, but he was just as legendary, if not more so, for one-on-one acts of spontaneous generosity. One day he took his former third-grade teacher to lunch, and then to a car dealership — where he bought her a new Volvo.
During his leadership, Hill Holliday grew to a staff of about 500 spread among offices in Boston, Framingham, New York, and Fort Lauderdale. Annual company revenues were more than $100 million.
Interpublic Group bought Hill Holliday in 1998 and Mr. Connors remained as president. He left in 2006.
Chief among other businesses in which he had a substantial stake was M/C Communications. It was the largest commercial provider of continuing education to physicians by 2004, when he and a partner sold it to Bain Capital for $450 million.
Long one of Boston’s leading Catholics and an informal, trusted adviser to Cardinal Bernard Law, Mr. Connors broke with him at the outset of the clergy sex abuse crisis, criticizing the cardinal for trying to downplay what turned out to be widespread criminal acts.
“I do not believe it is asking too much for the leaders of our faith to tell the truth,” Mr. Connors said in April 2002.
By 2023, when the Campaign for Catholic Schools honored him and Cardinal O’Malley for helping rescue Catholic education in Boston, Mr. Connors was advocating, in a Globe interview, for significant changes: letting women serve as priests, allowing priests to marry, and opening the sacrament of marriage to all Catholics, regardless of their sexuality.
Mr. Connors, who had twice tried unsuccessfully to buy the Globe in partnerships with others, was his own hub of important Boston information. His office often fielded up to 100 calls daily from those seeking advice and asking for favors.
“What I’ve tried to do,” he said in the interview a few days before he died, “is make sure that the folks whose net worth is $10 get a break, too.”
Mr. Connors and his wife, Eileen, divided their time among Brookline, Cape Cod, and Naples, Fla.
In addition to his wife, Mr. Connors leaves their daughter, Susanne Joyce of Westwood; their three sons, John III and Tim, both of Westwood, and Kevin of Dedham; his sister, Margaret Hanks of Dedham; and 13 grandchildren.
A wake for Mr. Connors will be held from 3 to 8 p.m. Monday in Saint Ignatius of Loyola Church in Chestnut Hill, next to the Boston College campus. A funeral Mass will be said for Mr. Connors at 10 a.m. Tuesday in the church. The funeral Mass will be livestreamed. Burial will be private.
“I just turned 82,” Mr. Connors said in the interview last week. “My life has been kind of a magical tour.”
He often told friends he didn’t want to be remembered simply as an “ad guy” who had done very well. He wanted his true legacy to be helping others someday dine on the fruits of success.
Mr. Connors focused much of his efforts in recent years on making sure Camp Harbor View would help children find a path out of their Boston neighborhoods, as he had, to their own heights of accomplishment.
“It seems to me if you have some success, you’ve got to go back in and be helpful,” he said. “It’s called service.”
Such devotion to others made Mr. Connors “a special person,” said former mayor Walsh.
“God makes special people once in a while,” Walsh said, “and one of them was Jack Connors.”
This report has been updated to add information about the wake and funeral Mass for Mr. Connors.
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Bryan Marquard can be reached at bryan.marquard@globe.com.
