March 17, 2014 - Anchorage, Alaska. St. Patrick's Day, remembering Guinness Beer and Gene Kennedy, my Father's Best Friend. St. Paddy's Day was always Gene's favorite holiday (or so I like to think) - a celebration that started early and went late. I had the good fortune to spend a few of those days with him (he lived on the East Coast for the most part of his later years so it wasn't always easy), but I have always remembered one in particular. It was when I first learned the profound power of the fabled Irish drink.
In 1984 my Mother was running for the U. S. House. As with most Democratic campaigns aimed at Don Young, we were in an uphill, perhaps Quixotic struggle, but we decided to fight the good fight. In the end we held Young to 55%, but it was a loss. Gene came up to Alaska to run the show - and we had our first real meeting as a campaign at Clinkerdagger, Bickerstaff and Petts, now no longer in Anchorage. I watched in amazement as the night wore on and Gene downed Guinness after Guinness without seeming to lose one bit of his acuity. Now it should be noted that I had, at first, attempted to keep pace with him so my perception might have been slightly off. Still it was a feat to remember - now a topic of campaign lore for those few of us who were there and remember.
When Gene was young, perhaps 18 or 19, he began keeping a daily journal. Really, daily. He rarely missed a date though now only six of those years remain (each journal was devoted to a year - no more, no less), but they tell a story of a man seeking purpose, changing in time as he realized the role he was bound to play in the world. See Gene had started life as a Republican, but the injustice he witnessed as the years passed, the intolerance in others, war, abortion, equal rights - all of these issues mattered to him and, in the end, he determined that there was increasingly a difference between the two parties on these issues. And, though fuzzy around the edges where the two parties overlapped, he became an ardent Democrat by 1960 when he first met my Father and Mother.
I've written about those days before - in a biography of my Father - but I have never really mentioned his story. Gene was an Educator and Administrator in those times (in both Alaska and Massachusetts) and an inveterate letter writer - keeping up a volume of correspondence that was intimidating to review (as I did when I sorted his mail for him before his death - that is sorted the letters written TO him, a number surely smaller than the missives he had sent out). But the thread through his correspondence always seemed to emphasize the same things - his passion for making the system better, his belief that others could do better, his focus on helping in the personal tragedies and celebrating the successes of friends, and his desire to keep this odd fellowship he had amassed over the years together. Nothing seemed to make him happier than when he added a new person to the fold, or found a way to connect old friends of his that had never met. This ability to build a network was not lost on me, and is likely why I maintain such a disparate group of correspondents and friends myself.
His Birthday fell on the same day of Kennedy's assassination - a day he could never forget and always honored. His Bay State namesake (though Gene was of the Protestant "Canady's", later turned to Kennedy), at the height of his promise, inspired him with possibility and purpose, and witnessing his life cut short added a fatalistic air to Gene's view of life and politics. My Father's death nearly a decade later - at the height of his popularity and personal strength - only added to Gene's sense of sadness and fatalism.
And yet it was his humor his friends remembered most when he died - his "Happy Warrior" nature and his inevitable belief that, in the end, right always triumphed. He left the road to us and our journey as he completed his in 2002. I catalogued his small library and gave books, as requested in his will, to his friends, keeping some for myself. I shared the journals that remained with his local friends (someone broke into the house in the three days after he died and before I arrived and took most of the journals - except for six that had fallen behind a bookshelf). But outside of the influence on all of us that I know he had, perhaps his lasting legacy was his bequest of his modest wealth to the Scholarship Fund he created in memory of my Father. Today that estate remains fully intact and has produced resources that have helped literally hundreds of Alaskans - providing over $300,000 in scholarships and Fellowships, creating a library and archive, and supporting worthy causes that impact education.
Every St. Patty's Day I buy an extra Guinness and I leave it on the bar for him. As often as not the bartender asks why, and I tell them some story about Gene. But most of all I talk about his core beliefs and how they inspired me and others around the country to do just a touch better, work a little harder, and find a greater purpose. So tonight Gene, lets hoist one together for all of those times and those yet to come.