Ep 2-The Long Goodbye: The Kenny Family, before.

Before I tell you what happened to them, I want to spend some time letting them be alive again.

A son who built a stone wall by the lake and never finished it. A CEO who talked the board into buying a company plane. A mother who kept the snack drawer full and the door unlocked. A girl behind a camera. A boy with a postcard and a joke about an M16. A girl who danced. A thirteen-year-old who'd just had her birthday cake.

This is Episode 2. The Long Goodbye.

If this story is part of your story too — I'd love to hear from you. hazyyellowfeeling@gmail.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

I don't know exactly why I'm doing this. If my cousins and my aunts and uncles are listening, and I hope some of you are, that's my honest answer. I just feel like someone should tell this story. And maybe you feel the same way. Maybe that's why nobody has. Because we're all standing at the same edge, wondering who goes first. Well, I guess it's me. This is a true story about a family from a small town in Wisconsin, about a bomb on a plane in 1972, about six people who never came home, and about everyone who was left behind to figure out how to keep living like normal people. A small town grieved and moved on. We did too. Or maybe we just went quiet. I'm Andy Kane, one of the cousins. As I said, I'm not exactly sure why I'm telling this story, but I hope I find out along the way. They're the poor Kenny family. Such a shame, awful. It's unforgettable. People shake their heads when their name comes up, and then they change the subject because what else are you supposed to do? But that's not who they were. Before that day, they were real people walking around with the rest of us. They had haircuts and bad jokes and favorite chairs, they borrowed each other's sweaters, they had plans for the weekend. One day they were here, and the next day they were gone. We're all subject to that same fate, whether we can admit it or not. So before I tell you what happened to them, which I will eventually in the episodes ahead, I want to spend some time letting them be alive again, just for a little while, the way they were before the world decided who they were going to be. Let me tell you about them. Tommy Kenny. His name was Thomas James Kenney Jr. Tommy, Uncle Tom and Aunt Robbie's oldest. By all accounts, he was something. Tall, confident, easy in his own skin. He was supposed to be the patriarch of a whole generation of this family. Thirty some cousins and counting. He was going to be the guy. He was twenty when he died, three years before the family trip. I was four years old when that happened, so I met him only as a ghost, in the stories that circulated among the cousins in the summer. Halfway up the gravel road, maybe, or shin deep in the water by the pier. Some cousin, some summer, some forgotten cigarette. Did you know we had another cousin? Older one. Died before the crash. A car accident. He was building that wall when it happened, and nobody ever finished it. That's how family legend travels. Not in announcements, but in pieces on the way home. That retaining wall was made of big mismatched field stones, different colors and sizes. The kind you see on chimneys all over this part of the country. Somebody placed them there one rock at a time, along the shoreline, to keep the land from spilling over. That somebody was Tommy. For years, long after he was gone, the wall was just sort of there, leaning, losing the battle a little more every spring. Every now and then, one of us kids would fish a stone out of the shallows and try to fit it back somewhere that made sense. That wall is gone now, and so is he. Uncle Tom. By the time Tom Kenney was 50 years old, he'd already graduated from Annapolis, gotten his law degree, served in World War II and Korea, come home to West Bend, joined the Ziegler Company, been mentored by his father for years, and then surpassed him. DJ, or Pop as he was called by the family, had built something extraordinary, but he'd come of age in the depression and there were territories he'd never touch. Tom had no such hesitation. Take the company plane. He was building a nationally recognized company and needed to move, so he convinced the board to buy one. Hardly normal back then if it was done at all, but Tom wanted it, and Tom got it. The opinion circulating the office was that Tom had out-popped Pop. He was respected, maybe even intimidating, but it was earned. He'd done the work. He was learned, focused, he had vision and credentials behind it. The kind of guy who walked into a boardroom and the room knew. That was Tom Kenny, president of the Ziggler Company. But there was also Tom the husband, father of five children at home, a house in town, as they used to say, in a place on the lake. He wasn't all business. He enjoyed himself the same way most of us do. Family cookouts on the weekends, baseball games, golf, teaching his kids life lessons the way dads do. My mother told me a story about a night at the lake. There was a party going on, and Uncle Tom was a few drinks in and feeling good. At some point he ended up with a wheelbarrow. He was pushing somebody around in it, or he was the passenger, something like that. Tom Kenny, president of the Ziggler Company, laughing his ass off, drink in hand. So I guess he was the one being pushed. His sister watched and remembered it for the rest of her life. She told that story warmly, almost proud, her older brother being as funny as can be. She loved seeing the people she loved happy. And who doesn't? And of course, there was his Naval Academy ring, the same one he used to give us noogies on top of our heads. It was a painful reminder that we were part of his family too. That was the love language of an Irish Catholic uncle. He wore it every day. He had his wedding band soldered to it, and when he asked Robbie to marry him, he gave her an exact replica of that same Annapolis ring. He gave her a tiny version of the proudest thing he'd ever earned and asked her to wear it for the rest of her life. Two different rings, but the same. Two different people, but the same. Aunt Robbie. She'd already buried her oldest boy three years before, and she kept the house going anyway. What people remember about that house is that it was the house, the one where the kids ended up. The good snacks, bottles of soda you could grab whenever. Devil's food cake cookies in the cabinet because kids liked them. A basement that went on and on. She was the mom who made breakfast in the morning after the sleepovers, and there were a lot of sleepovers. One of my sisters put it like this. That was the Kenny House. Kids just ended up there not for a reason, but just because. That doesn't happen by accident. Somebody makes a house feel like that. Somebody leaves the door unlocked, somebody keeps the fridge full, somebody decides, out loud or not, that the kids are welcome, all of them, all the time, whether they called first or not. Aunt Robbie mutually all of that happened. Pretty came up a lot. Dark hair, easy on the eyes, a New Orleans debutante who fell for a young, handsome Naval Academy guy and came north with him, which had to have been a hell of a culture shock for her. So far, the best description I have of Aunt Robbie is this. Super sweet, very quiet, really loved her kids. That was who she was, and it suited her. My own memory of her is just a picture in my head. Big buffant hairdo, pretty, with tired eyes. John. One day I was sitting on the hill at the lake house, the one that used to be Uncle Tom and Aunt Robbie's. John was living there by then with his wife and his kids. I had my puppy with me, a sickly little thing I got from my first communion, a gift my parents regretted. And John came walking up, petted the puppy, flicked his cigarette, talked to me for a minute, and then moved on. There were these boots John used to wear, brown, square toed, a leather strap that ran up from the sides and met across the front with a brass ring on each side that held it all together. I thought they were the coolest goddamn boots I had ever seen. They were basically biker boots. They were Fonzie boots, and I wanted a pair. I begged my mother and she caved. Then I was cool, just like John. Cousin John was the only one who didn't go on that trip. He had a baby daughter at home, Sarah. She'd just been born. When the family was planning the Orient trip, this big once-in-a-lifetime family thing, John and his wife Kathy were told to stay home. You've got a newborn, be a father. This one's for you. And so he stayed behind. There's more to John's story than that, a lot more. But today he's just the cool older cousin who was home that week. The one who got to walk away. Let me tell you about his brother and sisters who were on that trip. Khaki. There's a picture on a shelf in my house. You've already heard about it without knowing it. It's a picture of me as a kid on a swing at the lake. I always thought my cousin from out east took it. I had told myself that for years, I don't know why. A few weeks ago, fifty some years after that picture was taken, I picked it up and I turned it over. There was writing on the back, my grandmother's handwriting. 1971, five years old, taken by Khaki. The math was off, I would have been six that summer, not five, but Mom Kenny had all the grandchildren and a lot on her mind, and I'm not gonna hold a year against her after all this time. The name was right. Khaki took that picture, the summer before everything. Her name was Kathleen Jo Kenny. Nobody called her Kathleen, she was Kaki to everyone. She was everyone's favorite, spunk in spirit, a kick in the pants, sweet, real sweet, like an older sister. Everybody said something like that, and nobody could take me much past it. She was 18 when Tommy died. Middle of the night, the phone rang in the Kenny house. There was a sleepover going on across the hall, two 10-year-old girls. One of them was her little sister Colleen. At some point that night, Khaki walked into the bedroom and told Colleen their brother was dead. Then she walked out. A few summers later, Kaki went to Spain by herself for weeks. She was that kind of girl. When she came back, Aunt Robbie was beside herself as she drove to the airport. She'd missed her girl and she was about to get her back. So far, I only have one picture with her in it, taken in 1968 when she was 17. A big toothy grin, caught in that awkward stretch between girl and woman. But her haircut and her face, there was something about her that made me think of Astrid Kircher. She's the Hamburg art student who photographed the Beatles before anyone knew who they were. Astrid was behind the camera in Hamburg, capturing four kids before the world knew them. Kaki was behind a camera too, capturing a little redheaded cousin on a swing. A year later, she was on that plane. I'm still trying to find out who she was, but I keep that picture on the shelf where it's been all these years, and now when I walk past it, I see two people in it instead of one. The kid on the swing and the young woman behind the camera who saw him there and thought he was worth keeping. Danny. There's a postcard floating around somewhere from the spring of 1972. Danny wrote it from Asia three weeks into the family trip. He sent it to a friend from high school back home in Wisconsin. He'd invited her and her roommate to a party at the New Lake House a few weeks before the family left. They couldn't come, finals were happening. So she got a postcard instead. The postcard said Vietnam was the next stop, and he joked that he'd forgotten his M16. He was 19 years old. There's a picture of him from a few years before he died. He was 15, maybe 16, white short sleeve buttoned down with some kind of pattern on it, sleeves a touch tight, like he grew faster than Aunt Robbie planned on when she bought it. Cleft in his chin like Pop Kenny, arms on him already, and a slice smile that started on one side. Remember us walking back up the gravel road from Peter's, trying to inhale, pretending we were older than 10? Danny would have fit right in on our walks up the gravel road. He'd be the strapping one, the one who's already a man at 15 and doesn't know it yet. Mechanical, low-key, always had a summer job, always lending a hand, wrenching his fist half the time. He taught a little girl to ride a bike on the hill behind the house, patient, jogging next to her with the training wheels off for the first time. He had a skateboard. His little sister and her cousin used to take it down the street hanging off the back. Big brothers don't always let little sisters ride their stuff. Danny did. One summer he got his older brother Tommy a bottle of high karate aftershave for his birthday. The commercials were goofy as hell. Danny thought it was the funniest thing in the world. He was beside himself. Couldn't wait to hand it over. He was sure he'd nailed it. That's the Danny I want you to hold in your head. His best friend was a kid named Andy Pick. Andy went on the trip with him. And the Pick family lost a son that day too. Danny had also been in a car crash a few years earlier. He walked away from it. Two of his friends didn't. He carried that with him without making a thing out of it. Not that anyone knew. I'd bet anything he got on the plane with that smile on his face anyway. There's a postcard to prove it. Mary Jane. To us, she was Mary Jane. Everyone called her that. The cousins, her parents, Mom Kenny. By the time she got to high school, some people had started calling her Mary. Classmates, teachers, maybe a friend or two. I don't know if she made the switch herself or if it just happened the way names sometimes do when you're new in a hallway and somebody shortens you and it sticks. But to the family, she stayed Mary Jane. She was a quiet, sweet, nice girl. Dark hair, freckles, millions of them. She looked like a Kenny, could have passed for any one of the cousin's sisters. I have little doubt she hated those freckles. Every kid I've ever known with a face full of freckles hates them. You wash your face and they're still there. You grow up and learn to love them, maybe, or you don't, but they're the thing you'd give anything to wake up without. She danced. The Jerry Sawyer Dance Studio put on a recital every year. Local kids on a school stage, tights, leotards, parents in folding chairs, a record player, whatever those things were back then. Mary Jane was up there one of those nights, and some boy in the audience walked out of that auditorium with a crush. Too shy to ever say a word to her. He held on to it for fifty some years. Long enough that when he was asked for memories about her family, he typed it into an email, laugh emojing at the end of it like it was nothing. She was a cheerleader her one year of high school. That spring she was making plans. Junior golf at the country club. Lots of fun times this summer. See ya out there. That's what I have, and it isn't much. A girl who was quiet, a girl with freckles, a girl who danced one night and got a crush she never knew about. With a wide open summer she couldn't wait to start when she got back from her family trip. Colleen. Her name was Colleen Francis Kenny. She was the youngest of the six and the smallest one too. Her name suited her somehow. Sweetest, prettiest girl there ever was. She had friends the way little girls have friends. One of her best friends lived just around the corner, which meant waking up, getting through household chores so they could ride bikes, put on plays, skip rope, play with Barbies. Yes, it was that era. Colleen had the most Barbies of anyone they knew. The big plastic case, all the accessories, the works. The Barbies didn't have all their fingers. Three older brothers will do that. Haircuts they didn't ask for, marker on their faces, a Barbie in that house had to be tough. The night Tommy Jr. died, her best friend was sleeping over. After Khaki came in and told them, Colleen turned to her in the dark and said four words. Did you hear that? That was all she said. Maybe she didn't mean anything more than the way a kid asks if a car went by or the dog barked or her mom hollered something from downstairs. Maybe. Thirteen is a big year for a kid. Finally a teenager. Out of the little kid pile and into something else. There would have been a cake. Aunts and uncles teasing her about it, cousins congratulating her, grown-ups making the kind of fuss grown-ups make. Look who's a teenager now. No doubt she loved it. Her room was on the second floor of the house on Evergreen. Yearbrook from Badger Middle School on the dresser. Clothes she'd worn that week in the closet, the bed she'd slept in the night before they left, made or unmade depending on how the morning went. That's how the room looked the day she left it. It was springtime at home, a 13-year-old girl walking out the door of her room, heading downstairs to wherever she and her family were going. One more thing before I go. My family is known for our long goodbyes. It's a thing. We get teased about it. You stand in the driveway for 45 minutes after you've said you're leaving. You walk somebody to their car, and then you keep talking through the open window. You hug, then hug again, then remember one more thing, then hug again. I do it, my kids do it, our whole family does it. I can't prove this, I'm just a guy with a hunch, but I think we learned it in 1972. I think when that many of you walk out a door and never come back, the people who are left behind start saying goodbye like it might be the last time. Because it might. And once you know that, really know it in your bones before you have words for it, you don't ever fully unknow it. My mother was not a hater. She didn't carry that around. She had a low tolerance for fakers, for bullshit, but she wasn't somebody who went through life with a list of people she hated. She told me she hated the man who did it. She said it once, and she meant it. I think I might hate him too. That's a story I'll tell next time.