Nancy Jane Rice, 1942

Nancy Jane Rice was born in 1926 in Highland Park, Michigan, the daughter of William Albert Rich and Edith Leyhew, natives of Canada. In 1930, she was living with her parents and older brother in Troy, Oakland County, Michigan. Her father was a tool and die maker working on his naturalization papers; her mother was already a naturalized U. S. citizen. The 1940 census located the Rice family residing in Detroit, Wayne County, Michigan; William was a machinist and Nancy was attending high school. Next to her photograph in the 1943 Northern High School (Detroit, Michigan) yearbook, it tells she was going to attend Michigan State University and that she was a member of the Physics Club and the French Club. Nancy was married in Highland Park in 1949 to Paul Cornwell Kennedy, also a native of Michigan. When the 1950 census was taken, Paul and Nancy were living in Highland Park, Wayne County, Michigan, where Nancy was an public elementary school teacher and her husband was a mechanical engineer in the automotive industry. In 1959, Paul and Nancy Kennedy were listed at 4185 Meadow Lane Drive in Bloomfield Township, Michigan.

 

I met Mrs. Kennedy in the fall of 1984, when I started the sixth grade at Avondale Middle School. She was fifty-eight years old and both my English and Social Studies teacher. Looking back at my sixth-grade schedule now, Mrs. Kennedy was originally only scheduled to teach social studies in the mornings; her name is handwritten next to the English period for section 6G (my section) – as though perhaps she had planned only to work half-days, this last year of her career. Then she got stuck with the 4^th period sixth graders, who had their lunch right in the middle of fourth hour – 37 minutes of 4^th hour, 33 minutes of lunch, then the remaining 24 minutes of 4^th hour. So with 25 twelve-year-olds who hadn’t had anything to eat for at least four hours, then dismissal (though I think we were allowed to leave our books, etc. in the room), then settling those 25 twelve-year-olds back into the previous activity, that sixty-one minutes was effectively more like thirty. Having taught classes split in half by lunch periods myself, I am quite familiar with how it affects the effective learning time.

 

Mrs. Kennedy identified as Canadian and had a little bit of a lisp; she pronounced certain words much more like a Canadian than a Michigander – “ashphalt,” for example. She was very businesslike in her teaching style and very knowledgeable about many things. Sixth grade social studies was mainly the geography of the Western Hemisphere – and Mrs. Kennedy had been to every Canadian province and most of the Central and South American countries. She had pictures from all her travels and every time we would begin studying a new province or country, she would put her photos up on the big screen in the front. I remember the picture of her in Quito, Ecuador, straddling the equator. Of course, in the 1980s nearly all learning was done by rote memorization, but I was good at rote memorization and so labeling maps with the names of countries, and listing the names of capital cities next to countries was not difficult for me. In English class (our first foray into “English” – though we also had a “Reading” class) we did a poetry unit for which everyone had to recite a poem in the front of the class – very 1840s – and I did Shel Silverstein’s “Today is Very Boring,” yet another attempt by me to try to make my peers believe I was as cool and detached as they were. In retrospect, the fact that I remembered every line perfectly despite what I know now to be acute social anxiety at finding myself in front of everyone, probably didn’t go very far to convince anyone.

 

In my sixth-grade yearbook, “Mrs. Nancy Kennedy” autographed her own photo on the staff page. On my English report card, I got all As, and on my Social Studies report card, also all As, and she wrote at the bottom: “You have excellent work habits, Wendy. I know you will be successful at anything you do. My best wishes in your future endeavors.” Mrs. Kennedy retired at the end of my sixth-grade year. In 1986 she was living in Troy, Michigan.

 

Nancy Jane Rice Kennedy’s obituary in the Detroit Free Press reads: “Kennedy – Nancy Rice age 76, July 15, 2002, wife of Paul. Mother of David (Dan) and John (Gail). Sister of Charles (Betty) Rice. Grandmother of Ariel and Erin. Memorial service, Northminster Presbyterian Church, 3633 W. Big Beaver Rd., Troy, 48084, Sunday, July 21^st at 5:00 p.m. Visitation at Church after 3:30 p.m. Sunday. In lieu of flowers, tributes in memory of Nancy to Northminster Church Memorial Fund.” Her husband Paul died in 2014.