Penfield woman has devoted her life to honoring a most Remarkable Rochesterian
As she shows a visitor around the George Eastman House, Kathleen Connor stops to adjust a holiday decoration, getting a garland just right.
It’s her last holiday season to fuss over the 50-room Rochester home of the founder of the Eastman Kodak Co., a mansion that’s part of the George Eastman Museum. Connor plans on retiring in April from her post as George Eastman Legacy Curator.
Connor, 66, who lives in Penfield, has been the Eastman House’s curator since 1989, watching over programs and helping lead the restoration of the imposing structure.
Before becoming the curator of the house, she had been the education curator at the George Eastman Museum, starting in 1982. All told, she is the longest serving staff member in the history of the museum. (It’s a little confusing. The museum used to be entirely in the house. With an addition in 1989, the museum includes the house and the addition, which contains the archives.)
Connor’s list of achievements is long. She started the museum’s Discovery Room in 1983, giving children and their families a hands-on introduction of photography.
In 1995, she began Sweet Creations, the annual display of Gingerbread houses that draws crowds to the museum at this time every year. (There are 52 gingerbread houses this year; there was one the first year.)
Connor organized celebration after celebration at the house, including the 2004 event noting the 150th anniversary of George Eastman’s birth. She’s dusted the house’s huge elephant’s head, and she once brought a live cow to the museum’s garden for an event. “You could actually try your hand at milking the cow if you wanted to,” she recalls.
But Connor’s greatest achievement may have been making the 35,000-square-foot Eastman House more open to the public, attracting children and adults to what had been the very private home of a very private man.
“There was always a challenge here,” Connor says. “There was always something new to do. And the thing I've learned now after 42 years is there will always be a project, there will always be a new restoration. It‘s a constant thing, it's never really going to end.”
When Connor became the house’s curator in 1989, the museum had just finished its large addition, a space for exhibitions and for the storage of the vast collection of films, photographs, cameras, and other items that had been in the house.
Most of those materials had to be moved to the new addition. This, in turn, left of lots of empty and/or battered spaces in the house.
In assuming responsibility for the house, Connor had inherited a mammoth fixer-upper. Walls needed painting. The front of the house needed restoration. Furniture had to be prepared or found (lots of Eastman’s furniture had drifted away).
The heavy lifting of renovating and rearranging continues, and it’s one reason Connor says it’s time for her to retire.
“The job has just become physically too much for me,” she says. “I can't move furniture. I can't roll up rugs and carry them, and I can't do some of the heavy stuff. That's part of the job I and I don't want to put myself or the collections at risk in any way. So, I just know it's time.”
The job hasn’t been all heavy lifting, Connor stresses. One of the perks has been meeting the film stars who have come to the museum for special events, among them, Richard Gere, Audrey Hepburn, Michael Keaton, and Michael Douglas. Her favorite? Meryl Streep. “She was just a down-to-earth person,” Connor says.
More than the celebrities, Connor says she’ll miss the people she worked with, her colleagues, the contractors and the many volunteers who helped out at the house, a structure she helped restore for all the world to see.
Remarkable Rochesterian: Kathleen Connor
For all she’s done let’s add the name of Kathleen Connor’s name to the list of Remarkable Rochesterians that can be found at: https://data.democratandchronicle.com/remarkable-rochesterians/:
Kathleen Connor (1957 – ) Beginning in 1989, as the George Eastman Legacy Curator at the George Eastman Museum, she was a key player in the successful renovation of the George Eastman House on East Avenue in Rochester. In the process, the Utica native made the home of the founder of the Eastman Kodak Co. far more available to the public. A St. John Fisher University graduate, and a graduate of Columbia University’s Teachers College, she joined the museum in 1982 as curator of education and started the Discovery Room for young people in 1985. In 1995, she launched Sweet Creations, the highly popular annual display of gingerbread houses.
From his home in Geneseo, Livingston County, retired senior editor Jim Memmott, writes Remarkable Rochester, who we were, who we are. He can be reached at jmemmott@gannett.com or write Box 274, Geneseo, NY 14454
This article originally appeared on Rochester Democrat and Chronicle: Kathleen Connor devoted her life to restoring George Eastman House
