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Alumni Notes
John C. Kennedy '26
College Administrator
John Kennedy had served as assistant director of the Oberlin
Conservatory of Music,
and then registrar of the College, for 30-plus years when he
and his wife, Miriam Peabody Kennedy '31, broke the age barrier
and joined the Peace Corps. They spent two happy years in the
Philippines, teaching English and building compost piles throughout
the islands.
On their return to the U.S. in the 1960s,
Mr. Kennedy began a second career as vice president at the New
England Conservatory of Music before retiring in 1980 to Ithaca,
N.Y. In the 1950s, before it became fashionable, he insisted
on the importance of unrefined foods and ground his own wheat
flour in an ancient coffee grinder to make bread. He built a
compost pile in his basement and wanted his beautifully crafted
home to be an "anti-nuclear statement." Among his
passions were children, trees, raspberries, fine tools, the
Romantic poets, and his longtime friends. He and his wife, who
died in 1991, were members of the Society of Friends and were
longtime supporters of the American Friends Service Committee.
Mr. Kennedy died of a heart attack August 23, 2002, at the age
of 98, leaving his
two daughters, Rosalind Kenworthy '56 and Emily Kennedy '62;
a sister; a granddaughter; and two great-grandchildren.
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