Dan Kennedy, Handyman
by David Ferguson
I think it was the summer of 1966. I was sixteen, and as usual I was visiting Inverness with my family.
“With my family” isn’t exactly right. Once we grew out of toddlerhood, when we went down home my parents would farm us out to different relatives. My brother John usually stayed with Danny and Olive. My brother Art usually stayed with Billie. I spent a lot of time at Roddie and Pat’s.
I’m sure we must have seen my parents from time to time — we always managed to be in the car on the way back to Detroit — but I don’t remember much of that.
What I do remember, along with other things from this visit, was being at Billie’s house on MacIsaac Street one day. I noticed an old man at the place next door. As I remember it, he was doing something on the roof of the porch, like repairing shingles.
It wasn’t a very steep roof, but he wasn’t particularly young, either. In my mind’s eye, he looks like he’s in good shape for age 70 or so.
I said something to BillIe about the old guy up on the porch next door. She laughed and told me that was Dan Kennedy.
It seems this was the house he’d grown up in. As the Kennedy children got older, they moved away, started families of their own, and I suppose their parents stayed in the house on MacIsaac Street.
Eventually Dan’s own family grew up, and I guess his wife died. However it happened, he ended up moving back into his childhood home, the place where I saw him repairing the porch roof.
Billie told me that the same thing had happened to a couple of Dan’s brothers and sisters, and that a few of them were now in the house together, just as they had when they were children. I think she called the place “the pensionage.”
And I was right, she told me. Dan Kennedy was in good shape for his age. I was just wrong about the age.
Dan had been born in 1864. The man fixing the porch was 102 years old–or, to put it another way, he was three years older than Canada.
David is the son of Greet Macdonald and Hughie Ferguson.
Billie: Billie Macdonald, Greet’s sister
Danny and Olive: Danny Ferguson (Hughie’s brother) and his wife, Olive Duffitt
Roddie and Pat: Roddie Ferguson (Hughie’s brother) and his wife, Patricia Dunn
Characters • Duffitt, Olive • Dunn, Patricia • Ferguson, Art • Ferguson, Danny (Skel) • Ferguson, David • Ferguson, John • Ferguson, Roddie • Kennedy, Dan • Macdonald, Billie • Stories • Storytellers • told by David Ferguson | Dave Ferguson May 2, 2006
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By Rose Abril, May 3, 2006 @ 7:44 am
102 years old and fixing a roof!!!! You don’t see much of that nowadays.
By Frank, May 21, 2006 @ 11:25 am
Dan Kennedy was well past 100 and living in the same house you describe with his two sisters (their names escape me), one was 98 and one was 93.
On Sunday mornings they would take a shortcut to church by coming through Jack D.’s yard, entering by the back fence and leaving through the front fence.
One Sunday morning following a blizzard, Billie was leaving the house to go to church and met Dan Kennedy coming through the snowbanks still in the yard on his way to church.
“Your sisters stayed home, did they?” Billie asked Dan.
“No,” he replied, “but the girls are slowing down. They took the ploughed streets to church this morning.”
By Dave Ferguson, May 21, 2006 @ 11:27 am
I remember my mother telling me about another Sunday — it must not have been in the winter — seeing Dan Kennedy heading up the street, followed by another little old man who was having trouble keeping up.
Finally the second man called out to Dan:
“Wait for me, Pa!”