Leland J. Kennedy Memoir - University of Illinois Springfield

Q: Were these family meals that she'd serve them?
A: Yes, a regular family meal, yes, a regular family meal. We'd all eat together. And it
wasn't like you see on the television where there's ten or twelve. There was - I had an
older sister and a younger brother and there was my mother and father. There was five
of us and there was never - maybe just two or three at the most that were at a meal. Now
maybe at breakfast time they took breakfast, but always the evening meal.
I mentioned that my mother came from Edwardsville - some of her sister's children became
druggists and a couple of them bought - a Schwartz and a Runge. There were six of
them. Not all of them stayed. But they bought the old Powell Drugstore in Alton, the old
Delegate Drugstore, one of the two. It may have been the same name, a different name
for the same place. And a number of those fellows either roomed or boarded at our house,
not for extensive periods. I don't mean for years, maybe for a year or eighteen months.
There might have been a fellow by the name of McGee who had a room at our house for
a number of years, just a room. Just a room. That was after my father died and I think
he could still be alive but his son is down in Texas. He may still be. I don't know. But
he stayed there maybe three or four years. He stayed there when I was in politics, I think,
when I first got precinct committeeman or alderman, but I don't remember how he voted.
It was an old duplex house. It had six rooms and we had a bath upstairs and a stool down
in the basement. And I done most of my work down in the basement.
Q: What type of work? Homework you mean, and that sort of thing?
A: Yes. We had an old coal-fired furnace. We had her put on a stoker after my dad died,
and we were making more money from our mother.
But my mother, she's a good cook. She neighbored. People neighbored more then I guess
than they do now I suppose. They were closer together. Those lots on Washington Avenue
were about seventy-five feet deep and about fifty foot wide and by the time that you get
a double house on those there, you don't have a lot of room. You don't have a lot of
yard. You had some. But they neighbored. And they hung out their clothes. She used
to race the neighbor to see who could get their clothes out first, I recall that. (chuckles)
Like I said, she had seven sisters and one brother. Some of the sisters died young, but we
always had company it looked like. And my dad's sister lived there for a while and he came
from a family of three but his other brother was a half-brother. My Grandma Kennedy
was married twice. Her first husband died and then she married my dad's dad and they
had two children, my dad and Leone. Nana stayed at our house until she married Johnny
Walsh out in Delhi and she went out there and she was a typical farm lady is what she
was, and we'd go out there every year.
But my mother belonged to clubs and neighbored with Mrs. Shane, that was our landlord,
and that Mrs. Halton, and there was a Butler family down the street. There's some of them
around here yet. And . . .
Q: What was social life like? Was it connected with the church? Your mother wasn't a
member of the Catholic church?
A: She wasn't - no she wasn't. My mother's social life was the Billikan Club.
Q: Billikan?
A: It was about eight ladies, they played parchesi. And now how that damned thing got
organized I don't know, but there's a lot of the Rillikan Club heirs around town I see on