Political and community powerhouse John T. Sullivan fondly recalled

Nov. 28—OSWEGO — John T. Sullivan Jr., who loved family, politics and community, died on Monday at the age of 76.

From his roots in Oswego, where he would become mayor, Sullivan went on to rule in local, state and national political hierarchies — from the youngest county legislator ever elected (age 23) in Oswego County to several visits to the White House and as a player in national political conventions.

Sullivan worked in Watertown as assistant state attorney general, serving Jefferson, Lewis and St. Lawrence counties from 2003 to 2007. While here, he resided in Sackets Harbor.

Sackets Harbor resident Mark A. Pacilio, executive director of Tug Hill Tomorrow Land Trust, has worked in local and state government and got to know Sullivan, who he said had a huge impact on his life and career. Pacilio moved to the village in 1999 to work as the executive director of the American Red Cross NNY chapter, and simultaneously became president of the Sackets Harbor Chamber of Commerce.

Pacilio has been a village trustee and deputy mayor. He also worked as former Assemblywoman Addie A.E. Jenne's chief of staff.

"As a local politician and as a state staffer, there were things that I did in which John was very helpful in giving me the insight scoop — how things really worked," Pacilio said. "He knew how Albany worked and I learned a lot from his perspective."

Following his retirement and before moving back to New York, Sullivan was an adjunct professor of political science at Pittsburg State University in Kansas. Before then, he taught political science at SUNY Oswego as an adjunct professor and taught New York politics and government at SUNY Albany's Rockefeller School of Government for the spring 2009 semester.

Up until this past spring, Pacilio taught government at Jefferson Community College. "It's because I could hear John's voice," Pacilio said. "I thought I had so much to offer beside my experience in Albany and this was a good place to represent it. I always remember John being able to do that as well. He was a mentor in that regard."

Pacilio said that he and Sullivan would also discuss community events and how they benefitted communities. Sullivan and his wife, Charlotte, who died in 1999, were instrumental in creating Oswego's Harborfest, the annual July event that takes advantage of the city's numerous parks. The first one was held in 1988 and the festival now attracts an average audience estimated at 75,000 annually.

"We were small-ball, the Can-Am Festival, compared to Harborfest, but it was always good to trade stories about how they did it in Oswego," Pacilio said.

MEMOIRS AND MORE

Sullivan lived by a couple codes of conduct. A key one he learned at an early age, which in 2017 was used as a title for his self-published book, "Pee Not Your Pants: Memoirs of a Small Town Mayor With Big Time Ideas."

"That's classic John Sullivan," Pacilio said.

The unsavory title of the book, Sullivan told the Times in the summer of 2017, came from an episode he recalled happening when he was in kindergarten at St. Mary's School in Oswego, where, in the 1950s, social ordering came into serious play. For his place in society, the young Sullivan found refuge and camaraderie at the "red table," away from those rascally "other side of the track" students at the blue, green, yellow and orange tables.

He was directed to sit at the orange table by a nun one day after he accidentally peed his pants.

"I was so devastated by that defrocking that I never peed my pants again," Sullivan wrote in his book. "Thank you, I think, Sister Stanislaus, for that object lesson in life. Pants-pee-ers are relegated to the orange tables of life. ... It's dry-pants people who rule the world."

The cover of Sullivan's memoir featured him as a toddler atop a black pony. When it came to his experiences in Watertown, he fondly recalled metaphorically riding a white horse to work each day as the "people's attorney" for Northern New York. "That was probably one of the best jobs I ever had," he said.

Sullivan also wrote a series of "Forks in the Road" books, biographical essays about the Oswego area with titles named after the blue collar neighborhood in which the author grew up.

HE THOUGHT BIG

Sullivan was mayor of Oswego from 1988 to 1991. Marc Heller, a former Watertown Daily Times reporter who lives in Washington, D.C., and works for Politico covering agriculture and forestry, said he first met Sullivan in 1987 as the attorney ran for mayor of Oswego. Heller at the time was a senior at SUNY Oswego and a news editor at The Oswegonian, the campus newspaper.

"At the time, I recall thinking we should be writing more about the actual city of Oswego, not just the campus," Heller said.

"He impressed me as a very progressive guy," Heller said of Sullivan. "Not so much in the political sense, but just in the sense that he seemed to think big on behalf of Oswego and had all kinds of plans, and of course, that riled people up. He was really well-spoken and easy to talk to."

After graduating from SUNY Oswego in 1990, Heller covered Oswego City Hall and its lively politics for two years. "There were all kinds of complex things he had to handle," Heller said.

Issues included Sullivan's battle with the then-city police chief, a charter commission that sought to redraw the lines of the city wards at Sullivan's urging, negotiations with Niagara Mohawk (now National Grid) which sought lower assessments, and run-ins with the Oswego Metropolitan Water Board over access to and the cost of Lake Ontario water.

"As a reporter, it was great, journalistically it was fascinating — this part-time mayor in a strong mayor system set up that way, and he ran the place," Heller said.

After Heller left the Times, he occasionally visited Sullivan, as a friend. He recalled an amusing episode at Tin Pan Galley in Sackets Harbor.

"We sat outside and John was leaning back in his chair and the chair slipped, and he fell back into the full fountain," Heller said. "He got totally soaked. He was practically submerged. It's amazing he didn't hurt himself. We had a good laugh about it and continuously in subsequent years. But upon reflection, he could have hurt himself pretty badly."

A MANTRA

Sullivan, who also resided for a while in Florida and Saratoga Springs, was also co-chairman of the New York State Democratic Party from 1995 to 1998, named upstate coordinator in 2014 for Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo's reelection campaign and New York state deputy Medicaid inspector general from 2007 to 2009. From 2007 to 2009, he was New York state deputy Medicaid inspector general.

He served as chairman of the SUNY Oswego College Council and as counsel to both the cities of Oswego and Fulton, and as attorney to the Oswego City School District.

He received his bachelor's degree from SUNY Oswego and his law degree from Syracuse University. In 1967, he was an intern in Robert Kennedy's office. He had a successful law practice in Oswego for nearly 30 years. He was a regular guest op-ed columnist for the Albany Times Union and the Syracuse Post-Standard.

In 2017, Sullivan told the Times that his political mantra over the years had been "You can disagree without being disagreeable," something that now seems politically unfashionable and has left us for the worse, he said.

Among survivors are four daughters. On his Facebook page, Sullivan's family wrote: "He was a remarkable man who touched the lives of many with his kindness, wisdom, writings, political discourse and unforgettable sense of humor."

According to Nelson Funeral Home, Oswego, a Catholic Funeral Mass will be held at 10 a.m. Monday at St. Mary's Church, 107 W. 7th St.