John Swope wasn’t picky about the performances he went to see at the Capitol Center for the Arts. 

“He would always call me up and say, ‘I don’t know what this particular production is about, but it looks interesting. Would you go with me?’” said his best friend, Dr. Bob Wilson.

Wilson almost always said yes. Over the years, the pair watched Taiko Japanese drummers, dance, and comedy in a theater that bore the name of the company Swope once ran. 

For Swope, a Concord business leader and philanthropist who presided over a decades-long transformation of the capital region’s art scene, the performances were in many ways a culmination of his life’s work.

Swope, who served as the prime organizational and financial force behind the Capitol Center and many other ventures across the state, died on Tuesday. He was 86.

Swope spent 62 years living in Concord, where he and his wife moved to take his first job out of law school in 1963. He quickly ascended the ranks of United Life & Accident Insurance Co., ultimately becoming president of the company that acquired it, Chubb LifeAmerica.

As his career progressed, Swope and his wife, Marjory, dove into the civic life of their new home with gusto, joining a host of city committees and boards.

“John Swope was an anomaly,” the Concord Monitor wrote in an editorial upon his resignation from Chubb in 1994. “Not many officers of a big company spend their whole career in one town. And not many chief executives of out-of-state corporations become involved in their community with the intensity that Swope did.”

Swope was raised primarily in Westchester, New York, the grandson of the former president of General Electric. He followed his older brother to Amherst College, where he met Marjory, who was studying at nearby Mount Holyoke.

“We met in open space, you might say,” Swope recalled in 2011, when he gifted the couple’s former land to the city to create the Marjory Swope Park in memory of his wife, who died in 2007. “It was a nice spring day down in western Massachusetts. We somehow got a small keg of beer and we went over to Mount Holyoke to see if anybody wanted to come and help us drink it.”

Marjory was interested and “she was a keeper,” Swope said.

After they married and John graduated from Yale Law School, the couple settled into an apartment on Pine Street so that John could start at United Life.

While Marjory would have been fine living in a major city, according to their son Kevin, John “liked trees” and “found cities a little too loud and overwhelming.” In Concord, they found the right mix of city living and open space.

Upon being hired at United Life, Swope, ever ambitious, was asked by the then-president what he saw as his role. “Your job,” the 25-year-old responded, according to Kevin.

Within 15 years, he would have it.

“He always said a company has a primary responsibility to its shareholders, but it also has a responsibility to its employees and it also has a responsibility to the community in which it exists,” Kevin Swope said. “And he really exemplified that in all of the areas.”

Swope first got involved in civic life as a member of the city’s human rights council in the 1960s, at the height of the civil rights movement. He later served on the zoning and planning boards, but spent the bulk of his time and energy on philanthropy.

As early as 1975, Swope – a fan of classical music, Gilbert and Sullivan, and comedy – became involved in turning Concord’s Capitol Theater into an arts center. The process would take two decades, but Swope stuck with it.

The Capitol Center for the Arts “would not exist without John Swope,” said Salvatore Prizio, the center’s executive director. “It’s just that simple.”

“He used his influence and his leadership over at Chubb Life to get Chubb Life to support the initial effort to get the building saved from the wrecking ball,” Prizio said. “And that was just the start for him.”

After the center opened in 1995, Swope’s financial and leadership efforts continued, and up until his death, he remained a frequent presence at events.

After retiring from Chubb, Swope applied his executive skills to public broadcasting, serving as an interim CEO and on the boards of both the New Hampshire and national PBS stations. In addition to those organizations, Swope served on the boards of many other institutions, including the Bank of New Hampshire, Northeast Utilities, the Currier Museum, and Canterbury Shaker Village, and did some legal work with the Sheehan Phinney law firm.

Swope came to be seen as a model to fellow business leaders statewide for how to engage with one’s community.

“He was a mentor to a whole generation of business leaders,” said Concord developer Steve Duprey. “And I think one of the most important lessons he imparted to us all is that if you have the privilege and opportunity to run a business in the community or in the state, you have an obligation to step up and have your business and individually to participate in the civic needs of the community.”

In addition to his business acumen and generosity, friends said Swope was known for his witty sense of humor.

“He was fabulously funny,” said Duprey. “No matter how serious the discussion, John would always have an outrageously funny observation or quip that would help make the day.”

Concord Mayor Byron Champlin, who met Swope in 1991 when he got a job at Chubb, ultimately became close friends and frequent lunch buddies with him. Champlin recalled Swope as a “quiet presence in the city” who made a big impact.

“I think that he will be remembered as someone who was as generous as he was astute,” Champlin said. “John was a very sharp man. He had a very wry sense of humor.”

In addition to his sense of humor, Kevin Swope, the middle of three children, remembered his father as intensely principled.

“He had very definite opinions and he had a very strong sense of right and wrong, which I think we all appreciated,” Kevin said.

Swope met longtime friend Wilson, an oral surgeon, some 50 years ago through their wives, and the pair became known as “the odd couple in Concord,” according to Wilson. Every summer, the Wilsons would join the Swopes at their home in Woods Hole, Mass. for a week of sailing, museums, and restaurants.

Swope convinced Wilson to get involved in the Capitol Center, where they frequently went to shows together. Swope, Wilson said, had adventurous tastes.

“He would always call me up and say, ‘I don’t know what this particular production is about, but it looks interesting. Would you go with me?’” Wilson said.

The pair went to their last performance in December. Several weeks later, Swope “sat down to watch the Super Bowl and then found out he couldn’t stand up out of his chair,” Kevin Swope said.

He was diagnosed with colorectal cancer. 

He was admitted to hospice care at Havenwood Heritage Heights in Concord. Wilson visited him nearly every day, seeing him for the last time two hours before he died on Tuesday.

“He was simply my best friend,” Wilson said, “and it really leaves a hole.”

Jeremy Margolis can be contacted at jmargolis@cmonitor.com.