Judy Kennedy, mother, friend and beloved Mayor of Newburgh, died at the Kaplan Family Hospice Residence in Newburgh today (April 15, 2018). She had been ill for two years before bowing out of her dance with cancer.
Judy was born in Pocatello, Idaho, on Oct. 25, 1944 to a couple whose last name was Hogge (I never asked her her parents’ first names – one of about 44,000 things I now wish I had asked her). She had three younger brothers; Lynn, Barry and Mark. As the oldest child – and only daughter – Judy probably would have been given great responsibilities even if both parents hadn’t been alcoholics. But as it was, she learned early how to keep the family intact.
“I became the mother before I was 10,” she recalled recently. By the time the family moved to Baker City. Ore., when she was 13, she said, “I was cooking; cleaning the house, dishes and everyone’s clothes; and taking care of the other kids.” To make sure they had enough money, Judy also became an adolescent entrepreneur: She sold greeting cards door-to-door.
“I bought big boxes of cards at a discount and walked all over the city selling them,” she said. Near the end of her life, she still remembered that once, she had $110 saved up, which her parents “borrowed” from her and then never returned. She worked stocking shelves in a grocery store as a sophomore in high school. It was the same year she met and fell in love with James (“Roger”) Kennedy.
Judy once said of her first husband, “I married him to please everybody but myself.” Together they bought a grocery store. Her husband spent almost all his time at the store; Judy also worked there but was involved in the new baking business she’d started while caring for their four sons, as well. She soon saw the need for a larger house for their growing family.
“Around 1976, I started talking about getting a new home, but Roger said we couldn’t afford it,” Judy recalled. “So I built one myself.” She worked on the plans for six months, and her now-sober father and her brother Lynn helped her build it. She made sure it was exactly what she wanted – for example, it had a fireplace that could blow hot air into the room for heat. It also had a specially-designed door in its rear wall.
“That way, you could load logs into it from the garage, without getting dirt and insects all over the house,” she said. Notably, she designed the house with two kitchens – one for her family and one for her baking business. But Judy had bigger dreams than baking and homemaking: She wanted to become the first person in her family to go to college.
By 1982, her marriage was breaking up and she had become severely depressed. To pull herself out of it, she decided to make a radical move. She saw an ad for a bookkeeping course at Eastern Oregon University’s satellite location in Baker City, to be held at the public library. She went there to enroll, only to find the class filled. The college was offering another class there, however – one in “computer science.” Judy had never heard of computer science and had never worked on a computer, but she signed up for the class. As it turned out, she excelled at programming, and thought that it might even provide her with a career to support her sons. Rick would be graduating from high school in a year; James (“Ryan”) was already in 9th grade; Kyle was 12, and Kevin was 8. Judy did so well that, by the end of that four-month course, she knew she could succeed as a full-time college student.
Her husband said no, you can’t; Judy said yes, I can. She baked cookies, cakes and other pastries all that summer, and set a table on the sidewalk every weekend to sell them. She made the $434 she needed for tuition. It was 86 miles roundtrip to the main campus in La Grande, Ore., five days a week, but each semester she made just enough money for the next semester, and she used Pell grants and loans to help her get through, as well. Despite how hectic it sounds, it was a great time in her life. Rick was attending college and Ryan had gone to Belgium as an exchange student, but Judy’s two younger kids, Kyle and Kevin, moved into “married student housing” with her in La Grande (she and her husband weren’t quite divorced yet).
“Kyle, Kevin and I were the Three Musketeers,” Judy recalled. “We happy there, making a new life.”
After school each day the boys would come and hang out with her while she worked as an assistant in the college’s computer lab. The boys also helped with chores and housework.
In 1984, after nearly 20 years of marriage, her divorce became final, and Judy soon had another beau: Wilson (“Wil”) Brumley. He was a professor who had come to Oregon from Colorado State University on sabbatical to teach a computer course Judy was taking. They moved to Fort Collins, Colo., where she enrolled at CSU and he continued teaching. Two years later, she had a B.S. in Business Administration (with a minor in Computer Science) and another bad marriage.
“I knew two days after I married Wil that I’d made a mistake,” she recalled recently. “He didn’t get along with my kids at all. But we stayed together, going to terrible counseling for five years, because I didn’t want to admit I’d made a mistake.” From this, she said later, she learned a great lesson: “When you hit a wall, stop pushing.”
The move to Colorado, if not the marriage, brought one major blessing: Right after graduating, she was hired by Colorado Tape Systems (CTS). This was her first technology-related job.
So successful was Judy at CTS that when the company was bought by Hewlett Packard, HP hired her to be a consultant to other major corporations. One of her projects was to help Albertson’s Supermarkets, then the second-largest grocery chain in the U.S. In 2002, Albertson’s hired her as its full-time Director of Information Technology Process Engineering. She taught “best practices” in Information Technology areas such as HelpDesk, Configuration Management, and more. When Albertson’s was bought by SuperValu in 2006, Judy decided to leave the corporate world.
Meanwhile, she had become engaged to be married for a third time, and was living with her fiancé in Boise, Idaho. But she felt something was missing in her life. On July 1, 2006, she took off alone on a life-changing spiritual retreat in the Catskill Mountains. She fasted, prayed, journaled, hiked and, she later recalled, “I felt love filling me up. I knew I had to be here, in this part of the country, and I knew that I should not marry the person I was engaged to.”
She spent the cross-country flight home rehearsing how she would break the news to her fiancé. And then, when she arrived back in Boise, life took a stranger-than-fiction turn of events: Her fiancé met her at the airport and told her the engagement was off, and that he’d moved out while she was gone.
Shortly after that, Judy’s third-eldest son, Kyle, and his partner bought a house in Newburgh that “needed some work” -- work that turned out to be so expensive that he couldn’t afford to keep the building. He called his mom for help. After visiting Newburgh to look at the house a few times, Judy saw this as an opportunity both to help her son and to move to a city that she found intriguing and enchanting. She bought the building from Kyle and with incredible energy and determination, began using all the construction skills, negotiations skills, and people-management skills she’d perfected over her lifetime. In a few years, she made 162 Grand Street into not just a showplace but also a gathering place. She gardened, brightening the city for passersby. She offered “Sunday Soup and Cinema” events in her living room, inviting friends and neighbors into her home to watch” films with a message,” and then to discuss them over a simple meal. She loved doing that, she said, because it brought people together who might otherwise never would have met. She also began serving people as a life coach, using her own experiences and psychological insights to help others.
She always said she was proudest of her ability to “stop and help people along the way.”
And in 2011, when she couldn’t stand the incompetence of Newburgh’s elected officials any longer, she ran for mayor and won. Her popularity was seen in the fact that she was handily re-elected in 2015, despite being forced off the Democratic line in a city where Democrats are virtually the only party. During her tenure the city became more financially stable, cleaner, safer and saner.
Judy sold her Grand Street home and bought a smaller place on Townsend Avenue in April 2016, where she resided until her death.
Looking back, Judy noted that she was “born to a life of service to humanity.” Looking back, she said that there was one more lesson she had learned from her disastrous second marriage: “how to let go.”
Now she has let go of us all, spreading her love over her family, her friends, and humanity, until we meet again.
Judy Kennedy was predeceased by every human who ever lived, except those few of us who were lucky enough to share the planet with her. May we show our gratitude for this blessing by loving one another and being kind to everyone, forever.
