John Sarconi

1931 - 2021

John Sarconi led a long, rewarding, and abundant life. He died on July 27, 2021, 71 days shy of his 90th birthday and 3 weeks short of his 1st wedding anniversary to his second wife, Marjorie Robinson. John was born in Denver, CO, to Marion Cullen Sarconi and Anthony Joseph Sarconi, and was raised there with his younger siblings, Carole and Pat (Tony), and a large extended family. At the age of 18 he married his high-school sweetheart, Luanne Chambliss. The following years were lean and challenging, as he worked his way through college and medical school, taking jobs as a dishwasher, fry cook, furniture salesman, and door-to-door Fuller Brush salesman, among others.

After completing medical school and an internship in Michigan, John went into active duty with the Air Force to repay the scholarship he'd received. They lived in Alabama, Texas, and Florida before moving to southern California and then to San Mateo. It was 1967, the Summer of Love, and one of the first things they did was to visit the Haight Ashbury. They never looked back.

John spent the next 29 years doing what he loved most, practicing medicine. His patients loved him because they knew they were getting his best, and his best was the best there was. After retiring in 1996, he did volunteer work, wrote poems, short stories, and a memoir, "In Pursuit of Dreams", about his early days of medical training, and studied Italian and opera (listening to, not singing!). It was in an opera class in 2017 that he met his 2nd wife, Marjorie Robinson, 5 years after the death of his beloved Luanne after 61 wonderful years of marriage. Their budding romance got a boost when, as fellow parishioners of the Unitarian Universalist Church of San Mateo, he impulsively asked for a hug instead of a handshake from Marjorie as she greeted members of the congregation. The rest is history.

John is survived by Marjorie Robinson, his children Kathy, Kristy (Neil), Mark (Claire), Matt (Jen), Claudia (David), and Zack, his beloved grandchildren, Emma (Nate), Paul (Haley), Sean Blackfield (Julia), Zoe Chien and her father, Daniel Chien, his sister, Carole Murray, and brother, Tony (Gerry), and Marjorie's two daughters, Katie Dodge and Kim Dodge.