Wallace Connor was born in the low country town of Brunson, in Hampton County in 1916. His father, Wallace Darlington Connor, Sr., was a lawyer practicing in that county and was the Referee in Bankruptcy for the Eastern District of South Carolina. As a boy in his early teens, Wallace traveled with his father from county seat to county seat, and it is probably that association with the law that set his mind in the direction of becoming a lawyer himself.
Wallace graduated from Brunson High School in 1933. He entered The Citadel that year on a scholarship awarded to him based on his high scholarship credentials. Wallace graduated from the Citadel in 1937, in the depths of the Depression, and was able to get a loan from a banker friend of his father’s to enter Law School at the University of South Carolina, making his spending money by working for the S.C. Highway Department at night for a salary of 25 cents an hour. He received his degree in 1940.
Wallace married Polly McGill from Williamsburg county and practiced law in Kingstree from 1946 through 1993, most of that time with his brother James Connor in the firm of Connor and Connor. He was a devout Methodist and taught Sunday School in the Kingstree Methodist Church for 44 years.
His deep affection for his wife, children and grandchildren was remarkable. The extended influence of his example, “imprinting” is demonstrated in the careers of his daughter, Justice Carol Connor of the South Carolina Court of Appeals and his nephew, Circuit Judge Malcolm Duane Shuler, to whom he became a father figure after his father’s death in the Korean War.
To paraphrase a Wordsworth poem, the days of Wallace Darlington Connor, Jr. were “bound each to each by natural piety.”