Constance May (Collier) Shanor of Edgartown and Chappaquiddick, writer, health worker, and traveler, died on Feb. 19, 2018, at her home on Pierce Lane after a long illness. She was 88. She and her husband of 66 years, Donald, had been year-round Edgartown residents since 1985, and seasonal residents since 1973. In 1975 they also — with their own hands — built themselves a summer home on Chappaquiddick.
Constance was born in New York City on Oct. 9, 1929, a daughter of Raymond and Elsie (Crain) Collier, but soon moved to Lakewood, Ohio, where she graduated from high school. She was a 1951 graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., but had spent her junior year abroad at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. It was at Medill that she met her husband, and they were married a few months after their graduation. A few months after that, eager to travel, they had taken a freight boat carrying passengers from Boston to Liverpool, England. For the next 16 years, they lived abroad, in London and Wimbledon, England, where Don worked for United Press International, and in Vienna, Austria, and Frankfurt and Bonn, Germany, where he served as a foreign correspondent covering Eastern Europe for the Chicago Daily News. Connie, in addition to having three children, edited an English-language magazine in Germany, and worked for a radio station there providing information about the West to Communist Eastern Europe.
In 1959, they returned to the United States and lived in Demarest, N.J., and then in Manhattan, where Don taught at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and Connie worked as an editor and writer for American Heart Association publications and for the National Kidney Foundation Newsletter. In 1981, she received her master’s degree in public health from Columbia’s Graduate School of Public Health.
In 1983, the couple went abroad again — this time to China, where Don was invited to teach journalism in Beijing and Connie was a consultant to the Chinese National News Agency. When they returned to the United States, they collaborated on the book “China Today: How Population Control, Human Rights, Government Repression, Hong Kong and Democratic Reform Affect Life in China and Will Shape World Events into the Next Century.” In 2004, she and Don collaborated on another book, “After the Russians: Eastern Europe Joins the West,” based on their time in Europe. Work on a biography of an early women’s rights advocate was interrupted by her illness.
A devotee of the outdoors, Connie was an enthusiastic cyclist, tennis player, Katama Bay swimmer, and Chappaquiddick canoeist, as well as a devoted bird watcher and gardener at her Pierce Lane and Chappaquiddick homes.
She is survived by her husband; two daughters, Rebecca Shanor of New York City and Lisa Shanor of Oak Bluffs; a granddaughter, Zoe Shanor, of Oak Bluffs; a sister, Marguerite Leavy of Clearwater, Fla.; and many nieces and nephews. She was predeceased by a son, Donald Jr., and a sister, Virginia Barkdull.
Contributions in her memory may be made to Massachusetts Audubon at the Felix Neck Wildlife Sanctuary, P.O. Box 494, Vineyard Haven, MA 02568.
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