John Henry, Huntington Station pillar and retired NY State Police officer, dies at 98

To those who knew him across his nearly century of life, Huntington Station’s John Henry loomed as large as his folkloric namesake.

"This man was just a pillar in the community," said Kelly Hatzmann, of Smithtown, a longtime family friend — and that metaphor in her telling is practically literal: "He was very, very tall. And he could be intimidating," she said of the former New York State Police trooper. "Yet he was so approachable. He always had a smile on his face. He always asked, ‘What's your name? What do you do here?’ He made friends with everyone."

Particularly when it came to Huntington High School, where his now-retired son Stephen was a teacher and a football and softball coach for decades. "He was such a supporter of kids in need," said Hatzmann, the school’s former athletic trainer, "whether as a grandfather figure or monetary support — just cheering every one of them on."

And there was his volunteer work with the Urban League of Long Island, helping young Black men and women develop workforce experience; with the Huntington Cold Spring Harbor United Methodist Church as a longtime usher and, for many years, head of the usher board; and Meals on Wheels, through which even in his dotage "he and his friend delivered meals to other elderly people in the community," she said.

Henry died Feb. 28 at Visiting Nurse Service & Hospice in East Northport, a month shy of his 98th birthday. The cause was complications from a stroke.

"He was a good and caring person, a family man," said Stephen Henry, of Huntington. "He loved keeping in touch with friends" — including one from as far back as elementary school in the 1930s — and making new ones. "We had season tickets to Mets games — every year, 15 games. We got to know a lot of people that sat around us, and a lot of the staff from the stadium got to be close friends with our family. Dad, he was a people person."

Indeed, he said, his father "would come up to sit in the press box" at Huntington High Blue Devils football games. "They only allow certain people in because it's not that big. But dad would come up and he was welcome and everybody knew him and the announcer, the scorekeepers, everybody looked forward to seeing him."

John Richard Henry Jr. was born March 31, 1928, in New York City, the elder of two sons of John Richard Henry Sr., a waiter on train serving cars, and Hilda Gertrude Johnson Henry. Raised initially in Manhattan, he and his brother Gilbert later moved to Jamaica, Queens, when his parents split up, and were then raised by John Kilby and Tula Richard Kilby — the boys’ grandparents.

John Henry graduated from Richmond Hill High School in Queens in 1946 and joined the U.S. Army, serving with the Army Corps of Engineers as a private through his honorable discharge in May 1949. He enrolled at New York University and he eloped two months later with Wardean Nichols, a fellow student, while attending a youth conference in Atlantic City. Raised Baptist, he converted to Methodism for her. They moved to Huntington Station in 1955 to start a family. His wife died in 2024.

After marrying, Henry left school and began working for his father-in-law, Bishop Decatur W. Nichols, an internationally known figure in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. In the early 1960s, he joined the Long Island State Parkway Police, a law-enforcement agency that patrolled Long Island state parks and parkways. It merged with the New York State Police on Jan. 1, 1980, and Henry joined that force until retiring in the early 1980s.

His sports passion, aside from the Huntington High School Blue Devils, was the Brooklyn Dodgers. When that team decamped to Los Angeles in 1957 Henry switched allegiance to the newly founded Mets in 1962. But unlike many Dodgers fans who never forgave "Dem Bums," as the team was nicknamed, Henry retained affection for them. "When the Mets and Dodgers played each other, there was that little underlying thing that he was kind of rooting for the Dodgers, too," his son said.

Another passion was cats. Although he liked and owned dogs, "he was a cat person" fundamentally, said Stephen Henry. "We had several indoor cats, and then once they passed on, mom didn't want any more in the house." John Henry began feeding feral cats outside his home.  "Once he stopped working, he would feed them three times a day," his son recalled fondly. "It got to where there were up to four cats at a time coming to the house."

"He called them his children," Hatzmann said. "I actually took a picture of him sitting on the bench in his backyard with one of the cats that had hopped up there, a little tuxedo cat." 

In addition to son Stephen, Henry is survived by son Ward Henry, of Huntington Station; four grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.

Visitation was March 9 at the M.A. Connell Funeral Home in Huntington Station. After a funeral service the next day at the Huntington Cold Spring Harbor United Methodist Church in Huntington, he was buried at Pinelawn Memorial Park.