Given the number of words devoted to the story of the Kennedy family, it’s easy to think primarily about JFK in the White House, the assassinations of JFK and RFK, and the numerous other tragedies that have followed other members of America’s extended “royal family.”
Yet, largely overlooked beneath the tales of wealth, power, style and the premature deaths of the twentieth-century Kennedys are the lesser-known stories of the poor immigrant Kennedys who came to America in the mid-1800s, fleeing the collapse of their famine-ravaged homeland.
In particular, history has given short shrift to the dramatic and inspirational story of JFK’s widowed great-grandmother, Bridget Murphy Kennedy, the tenacious matriarch of the clan, a widow and single mother raising four kids alone, facing long odds in a hostile, anti-Irish climate.
Partly to blame is a strong, male-dominant bias in a family whose men clearly had complicated and imperfect relationships with women. When JFK visited his great-grandparents’ home turf in 1963, for example, he gave a shoutout to Patrick the barrel maker but not Bridget the grocer.
Her remarkable ascent — from maid to hairdresser to business owner — began less than ten years after her husband, Patrick, died at 35 of consumption (as tuberculosis was then known). It began at the tail end of the Civil War, as she donned her white shopkeeper’s frock and walked the aisles of her unnamed street-level East Boston shop, tallying her stock, making notes in a ledger book on what was running low, what needed restocking, what was collecting dust.
Over here were the teas, coffees, sugar, and flour, beside the scale used to weigh beans, rice, and spices scooped from barrels and bins. Over there, butter, cheese, eggs, and rashers, perhaps some mackerel, pickled salmon, cod. Standing at attention on shelves: bottles of relish, vinegar, honey, and molasses, beside the sperm and whale oil, the soaps and candles. At the counter, tins of hard candies, baskets of biscuits and bread. Arrayed out front, crates of fruits and vegetables and on a good day maybe the exotic bananas and “pine apples” Bostonians loved. Squeezed in or scattered elsewhere were the assorted dry goods, toiletries, ribbons, buttons, stationery, hosiery, and handkerchiefs that filled so many similar all-purpose neighborhood establishments, giving them their generic names — variety shop, notions shop. These immigrant-run mini marts, these mom-and-pop sundry shops, these convenience stores and bodegas: the striving toe-in-the-door outlets and emporiums of every working-class community, before and since.