Leland J. Kennedy Memoir - University of Illinois Springfield

I was awful fascinated by politics. I don't know, I guess it was just - it fascinates some
people more than others, but I was fascinated by it. I'd get a - and I'm no great orator. I
was a good campaigner. If I made up my mind to campaign, I could campaign. I liked
it. And I enjoyed being in the assembly. I thought twenty years was enough. But I
enjoyed that.
Q: What about the Hughes-Wilson contest back in the teens? Do you remember anything
about that or were you still a little young to . . .
A: Well I was - wasn't eight until the following December. I can't recall reading in the
paper about Hughes going to bed thinking that he was elected and woke up beaten, you
know. Of course we all knew Woodrow Wilson. You read about him. He was our wartime
president after 1916. I remember the Armistice. I remember going downtown for - that
would be 1918, so I'd only be ten the following December. I remember going downtown for
that. We lived on Washington Avenue in that duplex house. There was a Lowell family
that lived on the other side. And they had a car. We went down with them to the parade.
I liked to go downtown and watch the parades. I remember that as a schoolboy. Even at
Horace Mann, they had the Decoration Day parade in Upper Alton. I remember that, they
still have it. The school kids would march. When I went to Horace Mann I marched in
that. It seemed like the second, third and fourth graders would march in that, carry their
little flags you know. And we'd go out to the Upper Alton Cemetery and they'd have services
and then they'd have a speaker and then they'd play taps. There's some old Civil War soldiers
are buried out there. It was just a Decoration Day. The Upper Alton Cemetery,
that's still there, it's a beautiful place.
Q: What about plays or dramatics of any sort?
A: Well I was in a few plays at school.
Q: Did you have any leads in any of them?
A: Oh 1 was always a lesser - in the chorus line you might say - not necessarily the chorus
line, but school plays, never no heavy plays or - my brother belonged to the Little Theater
but I didn't. He was, I guess, the actor. I go to Little Theater plays. We go to plays down
in St. Louis but I never - just school plays is all. I couldn't recall just what they were
about. At St. Patrick's they might have had a religious tinge to them I suppose. And some
Uncle Tom plays I suppose, and plays like that. St. Patrick's had a number of black students
in it, and we all got along fine. But no plays or no heavy - oh, we'd debate, I belonged
to a debating society.
Q: Oh you did?
A: In the high school. Just - it was no professional debating society, it was just a school
discussion. I mean we never debated Alton High or Wood River High or any other parochial
schools, we never done that at that time, at least I didn't do it. Now they might have done
it. I doubt if they had done it when I was there. They do it now. But we never appeared
at any organized debating discussions or . . .
Q: Did you enjoy debate?
A: Yea, yes. I used to argue a lot when I was a kid. I guess all kids do. But I enjoyed
it. It seemed like I'd always end up taking the opposite side I guess. I don't know what
made me do that because my mother and dad weren't too argumentative, but I suppose that
was a trait that I must have acquired somewhere from either my Irish ancestors or my
German ancestry.