My dear friend, Larry Kennedy “left this world” on November 25, 2025, nine weeks shy of his one-hundredth birthday, refuting the adage “the good die young”. I am well aware that common sense and logic tell us that we should celebrate the glory of a magnificent life, fully lived, and ignore the sorrow inherent in witnessing its end. That is a concept I am still working on.
The Kennedy family moved into our neighborhood fifty years ago, occupying the last house on the end of our dead-end street. The combination of the location of the Kennedy house and Larry’s obvious leadership personality made it easy for us to proclaim him “Lord of the Manor”. I still have a map I made for a treasure hunt in the woods when our children were small. Based on Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings, it was full of whimsical references including “Kennedy Manor” and “The Lord of the Manor’s Throne”.
For a few years we were neighbors and casual friends. I had always frequented the woods, exercising our current dog; occasionally I would encounter Larry and exchange pleasantries. By the early 1990s Larry had retired and I was working out of my house, operating a one-man engineering consulting practice. At 4:00 each afternoon I would head down the street with Sundance and find Larry waiting for us, eager to initiate a highly intellectual conversation. Seldom did I come home without pondering some thought-provoking topic he had brought up.
Early in 2000 he advised me that he wanted to start a book review club. His wife, Marie, was having a good experience with a group of her friends in one, and he had decided to try his luck with a group of his own. Thus was born the Youngwood Road Book Review Club. Two hundred and fifty books later we are still going strong, although we have missed his participation for the past several years. Larry always wanted to read the classics; as the makeup of the club got younger, our repertoire has shifted toward contemporary works, both fiction and non-fiction.
A few years ago Marie began to have health problems, and the Kennedys left Youngwood Road for an apartment in mid-town Mt. Lebanon. In no time Larry was acknowledged as the “Mayor of Washington Road”. Several times a day he patrolled up one side of the street to the Dormont border, then back down the other, stopping to greet folks he knew and to introduce himself to strangers. Tall, immaculately dressed in an ironed dress shirt, vest, wool jacket, and hat. and ramrod stiff, he and his elegant walking stick were fixtures in the Washington Road landscape.
After Marie died, Larry had difficulty coping with life without her. Eventually he consented to having lunch with me every Friday so we could read James Joyce’s masterpiece Ulysses and discuss it, one chapter at a time. Pretty heady stuff for a literary-challenged lightweight like me! If only I had the journalistic skill of Mitch Albom and could replicate his Tuesdays with Morrie and document this experience properly. Sadly, it ended with deterioration of his health and our contact reduced to occasional visits and frequent phone calls.
John Lawrence Kennedy was born on February 4, 1926, on the South Slopes of Pittsburgh in the general vicinity of Mount Oliver, into a family of modest means. He often talked about his experience as a street urchin hawking newspapers at trolley stops, an experience right out of a Charles Dickens novel. Small wonder he was such a fan of Dickens. I think the Book Club has read four Dickens novels, including Bleak House, his (and my) favorite.
When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, fifteen-year-old Larry persuaded his father to lie about his age and help him join the U. S. Navy. By summer he was aboard the USS Wasp in the Coral Sea during the invasion of Guadalcanal. I believe his assignment was as a radio operator. On September 15, 1942, the Wasp was struck by three torpedoes from Japanese submarine I-19. In addition to severe structural damage, the torpedoes ignited massive fires which ultimately resulted in the Captain issuing “Abandon Ship” orders after five hours of unsuccessful firefighting. The casualties included 175 fatalities and 366 injured; fortunately, Larry was among the survivors. He never talked about the incident, but eye-witness accounts of the hundreds of men treading water in an ocean covered with burning oil are harrowing.
Apparently the Navy realized how young Larry was after his rescue; he was reassigned to Pearl Harbor where he coupled a night shift in the Combat Intelligence Unit (famed with breaking the Japanese Navy code) with high school in Honolulu during the day. Following the end of the war he returned home and attended Pitt on the GI Bill, eventually earning a degree from Pitt’s Law School. During this time he met a lovely Co-ed at Mount Mercy College (now Carlow University), culminating in a “made-in-heaven” marriage that lasted over seven decades.
Larry and Marie shared a rewarding life together while rearing six children. Regardless of the venue, they were always the center of attraction, whether it be at the Pittsburgh Symphony or Opera, in the French Quarter in New Orleans or on the Champs Elysees in Paris, on the deck of their home overlooking Bird Park or holding court in the Commons area at the Galleria. Everyone knew them and everyone who knew them loved them.
In Edwin Markham’s classic poem, Lincoln, Man of the People, the poet likens the passing of the Great Emancipator to the felling of “a lordly cedar, green with boughs (that) goes down with a great shout upon the hills and leaves a lonesome place against the sky.” There is a lonesome place in my sky today.