Helen KennedyEdit

Helen Kennedy shares her life story with Mary Ann Apple. She talks about how her family was affected by World War II and the strong women in her family who worked during the war. Helen also discusses her own education and career path, including her decision to work for the Department of Defense and her experiences teaching in different countries like Turkey, Japan, and Germany. She mentions the challenges and unique experiences she had in each location, including bomb threats and witnessing historical events like the fall of the Berlin Wall. Helen concludes by talking about her favorite teaching experience at Sewell School and why she eventually settled in Farrington. This is Mary Ann Apple, Farrington StoryCorps volunteer, here for a chat with Helen Kennedy. Today is April 19, 2024, and we are in Helen's home in Farrington Village, North Carolina. Helen was born and raised in North Carolina. Due to limited financial resources and living in World War II, Helen was taken in by various relatives and experienced the insecurities and dislocation associated with attending nine different schools during her childhood. Helen, can you tell me about how your path in life was shaped by the example of women family members on the home front in World War II, and also your participation in church youth groups? Because of the war, we were located in many different places, but finally found a home with my grandparents. And at that time, my grandmother had never worked out of the home. But during the war, she had three part-time jobs. One was in the local department store, one was selling Maytag washing machines door-to-door, and one was selling Luxier's products, which came out of Missouri, door-to-door. And at that time, my mother, being the oldest in a family of six, had three children. So she couldn't be out at work. She was taking care of us. But her sisters, the next one in the family and the next one, had gone to business school. So they were both working outside of the home. And then the last daughter was in Atlantic Christian College. So I saw very strong women, and it was decided that I would live with my mother's youngest sister in Zebulon and attend Wakeland School, where my brothers attended Windale School. I didn't think I would be able to go to college. Because I had been a very strong member of my home church, which was First Christian in Windale, that's the Disciples of Christ. The people from the college who knew me from my attendance at conferences during the summer came to my home to find out why I hadn't applied to go to school there. And of course, my parents explained that we just didn't have the money. So they proceeded to ask members of the church if they would help me. And after two years of going to college there, I had met Jan's father. And he convinced me that he needed me to be closer to him because he was already in dental school. So we married. And I became a dental wife here for three years in Chapel Hill. And after that, he decided to join the Public Health Service, which was an unarmed military corps. And so we were first sent to New Orleans to the hospital there. And he was trained to work with patients in a hospital setting. And at the end of that year, we were reassigned to Staten Island, New York. That's where Jan was born. Unfortunately, our marriage didn't last beyond 13 years. I had been here three years after that in Chapel Hill, working as a teacher here. And I decided that it was time for me to make a move. And I had met colleagues that I taught with who had been with the Department of Defense. And they had interesting things to say about their time doing that. And so I thought, well, this is what I want to do. I had already been certified as a gifted teacher by then, by Wake Forest University. And so the next year, they called me and they said, we have a job for you. And it's in Izmir, Turkey. What year is this that you arrived? It was 85. I got there, and we were to stay in the military hotel, which was right on the water. The Aegean Sea and the culture there with the Turkish people was very different. Well, my students were gifted children, and they were all really special. But the part I wanted to tell you about being there was regarding those students. This was a period of time when Gaddafi had been bombed, and his son had been killed by this bombing. Gaddafi threatened the American children. Well, the American children were sitting in my classroom every day. So for six weeks, the Turkish National Police were leading us, leading the school buses to pick up all the children. So the children had one step on the sidewalk, one step into the bus. When they got to the school, it was the same thing. One step on the sidewalk, one step into the school. And for six weeks, they had no place to play, except in their own homes. There were always men on the street with their machine guns. And so, you know, there was always that possibility of terrorism. That was my life in Turkey. I had other postings. And from there, I went to Japan. And my location was Misawa, which is on the northern tip of Honshu. My home was going to be the lodging for the officers who came there, visiting officers. And we were allowed to live there for five years before we had to move off of the base. And in Misawa, there was a Japanese man. His name was Masashi Narazaki. And he came to the school a few days after school started. And he was looking for someone who could teach a class to Japanese people at a community center at a village that was across a lake that bordered our base. He chose me to come and work with the people at the community center. And I took that money, and I bought things from our commissary that they didn't have there, and I would take it to them the next time. Well, Masashi became a very good friend, and he taught me a lot about the Japanese culture. And that particular location, my students there were pretty much teachers. One was a finance minister at a school. One was a housewife. It was just for them to learn how to pronounce English words and put them together in sentences. So I told them stories about American holidays. And for Thanksgiving, I invited them to come to my apartment and have a Thanksgiving dinner. And so I wrote the words that I was going to be using in my presentation. It was a real difference of culture that I wouldn't choose to be my own, but I appreciated very much an opportunity to be there. You mentioned to me earlier that one of the reasons for taking this career shift to work for the Department of Defense was to be able to share the foreign postings with your family. Yes. I'm a Sagittarian, and Sagittarians are adventurous people. And I had not had enough adventures by that time. And it was my chance to put, for me, a lot of eggs in one basket. And I wanted my children to be able to share the understanding of another culture. And I didn't think that you could do that without actually walking in their shoes, so to speak. And so Japan was the only place my children did not visit me. At that time, Jan was not married yet, and Ken had just graduated from college. So they came to my other postings. The next posting for me was Germany. My first location in Germany was Butzbach, and the soldiers there were an armored division. And at that time, they were called to Bosnia, and sometimes it was both mother and father going to Bosnia. And you had to teach their children. And then the other military families took care of their children. Well, while I was there, there were eight bomb threats to our school. And that was a school of more than 1,000 children. And each time that happened, we had to evacuate the school. And we had to go out of the building, up a hill, onto a road that was behind the school. And it was winter. There was snow on the ground. And so can you imagine standing up there with a classroom full of first and second graders with snow on the ground until every nook and cranny in that school had been searched? That was an anxious time. I don't think you got to talk much about the wall coming down when you were in Germany. The wall did come down, and Jen helped take it down. How did she do that? I drove her to Berlin so she could. They gave you like a hammer to crash it and take home some pieces. I didn't tell you about assignments in England. My assignments in England was during the time of the IRA threats. We always had to be fearful, you know, that there were IRA spies where we were. And I was never convinced that one of our bus drivers was not one of them because he was from Northern Ireland. But during that time is when the peace agreement between John Major and the IRA was signed. And the base where I was processed was Alkenberry. And Alkenberry was one mile from John Major's real home. And so whenever he was flying out to anywhere, he was flying out of our base. So that was an interesting time as well. And in Puerto Rico, I was there when Vieques, the island off the coast of Puerto Rico, was given back to the Puerto Rican people because Clinton had promised them that they could have the base back. So the base closed and the military left before we were able to close school because we had children who had to graduate from school. And that was the end of my working for the Department of Defense. What year was that? 2004. They offered me a position in San Juan, but it was not working with gifted children. And I didn't think San Juan was a good place for a single woman to be living at that time. So I came home and looked for a place to live. And Farrington seemed like a good place and close to Jan and my grandson at that time. So I've been here ever since. My favorite place to teach was Sewell School because it was a new idea. It was team teaching and I was teaching second graders at that time. My teammate was a black lady from New York and she and I were perfect teammates. And so we worked out, you know, all of these plans about who would be needing to have this extra help with reading or this extra help with math or whatever. And one little boy, who was actually a first grader, but he was so smart, they had moved him up to be in our group. And that little boy didn't want to go home every day. He would hide when his parents came to pick him up. He would really rather stay there and sit in the reading center and read all the books that he wanted to read for that day. We had children, you know, who had a lot of different kinds of problems there. Barbara Lawler was our principal, a wonderful, wonderful woman. Barbara was the principal at Sewell School and Barbara wanted us to introduce these students at some point in time to famous black leaders, black inventors, black people who had done amazing things. And the children knew none of them. When I went to Barbara with some difficulty I was having with what I was trying to teach there at Sewell School, she looked at me and she said, but Helen, look at all of these things you have done that were right. Don't worry about this. You'll figure it out. And she was always ready to help. And when we first went there, knew at our teaching positions and she was there, she said to us, I'm going to see that these students respect you as their teacher and I'm going to see that their parents respect you as their teacher and I want to see you respect them. That was her advice to us and that's what she did. How fortunate to start a career under such a leader. Yeah, yeah. I loved her very much. Oh, this has been wonderful, Helen. I've enjoyed this so much and never expected to hear you being there at so many critical points in world history. Yes, I felt very lucky to have experienced those times. It certainly gives you a different look at the world.