Wendy Holmes

John Kennedy

Dr. John “Jack” Kennedy, 92, died gently in Hospice care in Topsham Maine on February, 24, 2023. Preceded in death by his father John Thomas Kennedy and his mother Helen Catherine Kennedy (Davis) of Wauwatosa WI, and his brother Richard “Dick” Kennedy of St Paul, MN. Jack is survived by his wife of 62 years, Nancy “Sue” Kennedy (Shanks); daughter Wendy Holmes (Kennedy) (husb Jeff Holmes), granddaughters Sarah Holmes; Chelsea Holmes (husb Kyle Martin), great grandson Theo Martin, son Peter Kennedy(wife Marianne), grandchildren Malia, Manon and Matteo Kennedy, son John Kennedy(wife Arielle), grandchildren Nicole Kennedy(husb Sam Waldschmidt), great-granddaughter Talia Waldschmidt, Guy Kennedy and Jade Kennedy, and daughter Sara Kim Kennedy. A celebration of life was held on June 10th, 2023 at The First Universalist Church of Yarmouth Maine. He was cremated at his request. Celebrating Jack… I am Wendy, Jack and Sues oldest daughter. I had a great relationship with my Dad.  I always felt acceptance and unconditional love.  Even in my darker teenage years, I knew he was there for me and was proud of me. He had faith in me, …and believe me, I was a real challenge to both he and mom.  He knew I would come around, that I would find and nurture the best in myself.  My brothers, sister and I grew up in a place of love, without judgement, and were encouraged to find ourselves. “Love, acceptance and achievement” …these were my Dad’s words of advice to the 3 essentials of raising children while speaking to numerous parenting groups throughout his life. And, he lived by these words. Dad loved to read, books were always a treasured gift.  Our house was filled with books. In his later years he read to children during story hour. He participated with a book program, bringing books from the local library to seniors in their home.  He really loved books and shared this love with others.  He would tell us “Rover” stories before bed…we loved this and even passed this tradition down to our own families. He would start out with a little song…the same every time… “Once upon time there was a dog named Rover, Rover and I how we did roam, we roamed all over the land and sea and we had a real good time”..then the story would begin.  The story was different every time. He loved nature.  Most every family trip entailed camping, packed into the station wagon, fighting over who would get the back trundle seat, no seat belts or air conditioning of course. We visited so many parks in that old canvas tent, the one that you never dared touch after a rain or the water would pour in through the sides. We learned to make campfires safely, cook over the flames, dig a good toilet hole, we swam, hiked, and gazed at the stars. Our parents taught us to appreciate nature, and the world around us, to enjoy the quiet and to be curious. Sometimes this entailed a grand adventure.  I have fond memories of hiking with Dad and my siblings along the coastline of lake Michigan between Manistee and Ludington. One year dad was a doctor at boy scout camp on a small lake, and in the evening he would take us in the aluminum boat with the outboard motor across the lake for ice-cream. While living in Michigan, I was lucky enough to take a camping trip alone with my Dad through Vermont, NH and Maine.  It was a lot of fun. I met many of his old chums in Maine from his early days. I was a chatty teen. Our evenings around the campfire were often quiet.. but silence was always comfortable while with my Dad. He loved his birds, and drawing, and especially loved music.  There was often music playing in our home.  I learned to appreciate classical, opera, and folk, even though at the time, I was into rock and roll.  In 1975 he gave me my first album, Blood Sweat and Tears Greatest Hits.  I was thrilled. He won the cool dad award that year. Dad could also tell a really good joke, and could make the joke very, very long with a good punch line at the end and sometimes would laugh so hard he would wheeze. He did not take himself so seriously…two stories come to mind. When we were youngsters we lived on a dead-end dirt road on the Wisconsin River. In the spring it would often flood, which was always an adventure. Our house sat up on a small hill so we were protected, but sometimes the road itself was impassable…which meant the bus could not get down.  We were excited because we thought that no bus meant no school! Not the case.. Dad slipped on his big waders and put us in the canoe and walked us down to the bus. He stepped into a hole and the ice cold water rushed into his waders.  He let out a scream and we laughed so hard. He also laughed at himself. The second story-There is a funny caricature of Dad answering the phone that I had always been curious about.  Dad was a pediatrician, -there was a particularly bad virus in the community, while on-call, he spent a very long night answering the phone, reassuring parents that their children would be ok, “it was just diarrhea”.  Every call was about diarrhea. At one point, delirious from no sleep, instead of answering the phone “Dr Kennedy”, he apparently answered the phone “Dr Diarrhea”. This was always a funny story and whoever presented him with this drawing also found it funny.  Dads patients really, really loved him. Celebrating Jack to me means telling his story.  He was born in 1930 in Milwaukee WI and grew up in the small suburb of Wauwautosa.  He lived 92 years!  I have been deep into family genealogy for decades. Researching, collecting, writing…to tell “our family story”.  I am so grateful that Daddy allowed me to ask endless questions about his early life. Dad had a great memory…but he did not share stories unless asked, and then, he was very generous with details. Dad grew up during the Great Depression. Milwaukee was a factory town and many people lost their jobs, their homes and were hungry. Then WWII arrived and the government started rationing food, gasoline etc. to supply the war effort. My Dad told me… (Dads words) .”I was a lucky one.  We did not have a lot of money but my father had a good job, we had a home, and always had food on the table. I never felt worried, I felt loved and safe…but I had friends that did not share the same experience. That was always a little sad for me but we never talked about it. That was how our family was, we didn’t talk about hard stuff.  My brother and I helped my mom shop at the corner grocery, bakery, my mom canned vegetables that we kept in the basement, and we were fortunate enough to have a freezer. In the early days a milkman delivered our milk. My mom did all the cooking, and my brother, dad and I always cleaned the dishes. I was in school plays, choir and was an Eagle Scout.  I rode my bike everywhere. We were protected from what was happening around us and were fortunate to have a normal childhood”.. My Dad understood gratitude. Dad went to Beloit College in Wisconsin and then on to the University of Michigan medical school, on an orthopedic track. He met my mom in 1959. While mom was attending nursing school she climbed a wall to spy on some social gathering… yes she climbed a wall, and none of you are surprised! She fell from the wall and ended up in the ER where Dad was on rotation. And their life began. 3 months later they were married. Dad decided that orthopedics was not his calling and joined the Navy.  Their honeymoon was spent camping on their way to San Diego where he was stationed. He was a ships doctor on the USS Ticonderoga, and left for 9 months to Hawaii, the Philippines, and Japan. Once he returned, his focused switched to Pediatrics, they returned to Ann Arbor where he finished his residency, and in 1963 moved to Brunswick ME where he joined his first practice. I wanted to learn more about my Dad…the stories he never told us, so pulled out my ancestry detective skills and did a bit of digging, and, I learned so much the past few weeks that I never knew…. They lived in Maine for 2 ½ years.  Dad was a general pediatrician and also the school physician for Topsham schools. He helped start and then ran one of the first comprehensive school health programs in the area…running vaccine clinics, administering TB, polio and small pox, administering health exams for grades 2, 5 and 8 as well as preschool clinics for early vision and hearing screenings. He even taught a babysitting class . The 1963 headline…27 teenagers are better qualified to handle babysitting assignments as a result of a course instruction they completed at Parkview Memorial Hospital.  Dr John Kennedy lectured on “The Terrible Twos and the Trusting Threes”. He would think this was hilarious. In 1966 he was offered a new opportunity in Stevens Point WI. He was 35 years old, packed up his young family in the station wagon and returned to the Midwest and joined the Rice Clinic. Through the 1960’s and 70’s he was very active in the community.  He was on a curling team…as one does in Wisconsin. He was a member of the Hot Shot Club…I’m not sure what they actually did. Dad told me it was just a bunch of about 50 guys who played cards, drank and cooked for one another. They even had a very silly cookbook.  Some of the “Commandments of Cooking”..do not ask your wife for recipes, the Eastside IGA is the Alices restaurant of Stevens Point, if you do not know where it is, all is lost and… butter never hurt anything. Dad’s specialty dish was Duck A La Kennedy which included 1 stick of butter for every package of dressing and an extra ½ pound for luck.. He was a church elder at the Presbyterian church and taught Sunday school. He served on numerous boards and committees related to child development, health education and mental health. He participated in Project Head Start training, and was one of the directors of the local Kiwanis club focused on youth and the community. He served on the advisory board for Parents Without Partners as well as a group called PRIDE. PRIDE stood for Programs Recognizing Individual Determination through Education.  The University of Stevens Point had the largest native American enrollment at any school of higher learning in Wisconsin. The community also had a very large Spanish speaking migrant population, as it was an agricultural area. There were many federal cutbacks during this period, and loss of funding meant little money to support local programs for these disadvantaged families. The goal of the program was to work with the Chippewa and Menominee Indians to assist native American youth with educational funding, counselling, and support as well as children of Spanish speaking migrant workers. He helped establish the Portage County Day center for children with physical and intellectual disabilities, believing that specialized attention and communication for these children, age 3-11 were key to later success so they were able to attend public school. He was involved with the Sheltered Workshop Project providing training and employment for adults with physical and intellectual disabilities. He helped establish and ran a new diagnostic department at the local hospital which aimed to diagnose and treat children with developmental disabilities. It was a new concept, a team approach, serving 105 children in 10 counties, hooking families with the tools needed for success with resources in their own communities. He served on the Portage County Board of Mental Health for a number of years as director of health and education.  He believed strongly that mental health should be a community approach. Dad also saw a need for sex ed in this rural community, where teen pregnancy was quite high. At the time, there was a wide range of opinions on “Family Living Instruction” Interesting how that all comes full circle. He believed that sex ed was a “ lifetime process of learning”. At the time the only “classes” available were oddly at the parochial school.  Dad taught the 5th and 6th grade boys.  He pushed to expand these classes into the local schools. His words…”They do ask questions and and why not give them the straight scoop right from the start?”  He and mom were involved with a group for parents called-The Realities of Life-How to talk with children about ourselves, our bodies and our relationships. He ran programs at the local high school, talking openly with teens about sex, drugs, alcohol, and interpersonal relationships and how to cope with parents and family members, This led him to a new stage in his career.  After 11 years in Wisconsin he moved to a new practice in Kalamazoo MI where he was a general pediatrician. Rambling Road Pediatrics was a  larger practice in a larger community with more opportunity to work with adolescents. He also moonlighted as a part time county coroner.  Much later his final calling, college health.  They moved to Middletown CT where he was the school physician at Weslyan University.   Many small colleges were moving away from having an onsite medical staff, and dad fought to keep this program intact. He was proud of this. It was the perfect segway into  retirement. And in full circle, they moved back to Brunswick Maine where he was involved with activities at The Unitarian Church in Yarmouth and later in Brunswick, he and mom traveled to Indonesia, Morocco and Italy, went on Elder Hostel adventures, he took senior Life Long Learning classes, participated in Death Café and enjoyed monthly lunch visits with a few close male friends. They lived a number of years at Two Echo Cohousing Community and made wonderful connections, and then on to their final home surrounded by woods, streams, nature and solitude. I will miss my phone calls with him, my visits, talking about genealogy, asking him questions about photos from his elementary school where he remembered every name of every kid and a little story to go with it, I will miss calling him when I am excited about a new spring visitor…that migrating duck or warbler, the arrival of the sandhill cranes or telling him something new my little grandson did.  I believe that Daddy was more intentionally attentive in the later years of his life. We talked more about substantial things. ..politics, hunger prevention, homelessness, relationships and his belief in the right to die and make one’s own decision about death.  We were both older…, As a grownup I found acceptance, love and achievement…Dad’s 3 essentials of childrearing.  I had arrived. The talks were always good talks. He respected the opinions of others, even if he didn’t agree with them, he believed we should honor their right to have them, otherwise how could we expect them to respect ours. He was a kind, loving and gentle man. And…He never hung up the phone without saying I love you.

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John Jack Kennedy Obituary | Keeper Memorials