Photo provided to the Times Observer Hal and Mary Conarro have been selected as this year’s recipient of the Warren County Chamber of Business and Industry’s Community Service Award.

Mary Conarro was working for the Nassau County public health department, preparing to apply to study public health at the University Michigan.

“Along came Harry Conarro, who I had to meet,” she said. “The rest is history.”

That history resulted in decade after decade of committed contributions to the Warren community.

Those contributions have now been recognized as the Conarros have been awarded the Warren County Chamber of Business and Industry’s Community Service Award.

It’s an award that Mary Conarro said they never expected and had said they were not to be nominated to receive. Quite often, their philanthropy hasn’t been broadcast.

“I… was always taught to be gracious and accept graciously and not brag,” she said. “Hal Conarro was very (quiet) in his giving.”

Mary said that she only learned later that there were hundreds of “IOUs” in Hal’s office.

“I never heard about that. Bob Sokolski was the same way. No reason to brag. And there were others doing the same thing. It was, in many cases, many contributors for major projects.”

Hal Conarro met Sokolski while the two were studying at Dartmouth. He convinced Sokolski to come to Warren and they became livelone business partners. The gem of that partnership? What we know as Whirley Drinkworks.

Mary Conarro grew up on Long Island, studying nursing after she graduated high school in 1951.

Then she met Hal.

“We were married just before Christmas that same year and moved home to Warren, where he said we had to live,” Mary said. “To me, I was really lucky to come to Warren. I did not want to live on Long Island. The pace was getting terribly active, growing rapidly.”

Their first community involvement was with the Jaycees starting in 1957.

“I found an avenue where I was interested and kept moving,” Mary said.

That meant that the Jaycees were just the beginning of over 65 years of service to the Warren community.

Conarro highlighted three specific projects as particularly significant in her mind.

She said that she was diagnosed with Crone’s colitis in the 1980s and needed an ostomy, but there were no local nurses trained to help manage that.

“I asked Hal if Whirley would please pay for a nurse to be educated at Warren General Hospital,” she said. “That did happen.” The effort also included a support group that ran for several years.

The second she highlighted was saving Crescent Park from potential development.

“In the 90s, the hospital had a notion to increase the size of the building and expand into the park. (An) architect suggested they do that,” she said.

“Just knowing how wonderful the park was, I got the history on it” and took the fight to city council. “I thought I was really brazen to do that. They’re my friends from the hospital. I guess I presented well enough.

“The park is in pristine condition right now.”

That also served as a launching point for her election to city council.

That led to the third project – saving the CAR Pool closure.

She said the city staff a the time

“Since then Hal has been a major contributor to the lifeguard room, which was very much needed,” she said, among other improvements they’ve assisted with as recently as last year.

Warren wasn’t home for Mary, but it became home.

“Warren had such a beautiful array… it was really equal to a small city. It had everything that a city could offer.

“I didn’t ever walk the street without someone greeting me because that was natural.”

While she sees the future of Warren as a “real hard struggle,” the capstone of the Conarro-Sokolski relationship continues to be a key employer in Warren.

A philosophy was adopted at Whirley “that people who work there would be greeted as family,” Mary said. “They continued with that. Everybody was a part of a team.

“It looks very favorable for it to continue. It is so important to Warren that those people have jobs they can be sure of.”