- Date Of Birth: June 17, 1933
- Date Of Death: September 29, 2014
- State: Maine
Jane MacLean Walker Kennedy died September 29th in Portland, Maine after a short illness. She was 81. Jane was born in Providence, Rhode Island to Donald M. Walker and Sara Buckley Walker. She attended the Wheeler School, summered on MacMahan Island in Maine, and attended Swarthmore College, where she met her husband, Christopher Kennedy. In her senior year she chose the married Army life over a professional career as private secretary to Margaret Mead. She never gave up her anthropological perspective; as a young mother of three, when asked what she did, she would reply “I teach American civilization.” The family settled in Michigan where Jane ran with apparent effortlessness an open and welcoming home filled with love, extended family, friends, an ever-changing menagerie, good cooking; a shared a passion for education, learning, and a fierce commitment to thinking clearly and “doing the right thing”. Most years were punctuated by Jane’s epic, non-stop 17-hour drives to Maine and back in huge, kid-and-pet-filled, Detroit station wagons. As the children grew older Jane turned a life-long devotion to social justice and especially women’s issues, a passion for art and design, and a strong head for business into a series of ventures that supported textile artists in the Hmong refugee and Amish communities; the quilts and tapestries they produced together are in several museums including those in Williamsburg. In the late 1980s, Jane and Chris moved to Maine where they built a beautiful home along the Damariscotta River. They loved the life they made there, with a large and ever-growing circle of close and fascinating friends. Jane served on the boards of the Genesis Community Loan Fund and Miles Memorial Hospital, and helped raise funds and community support for the new Skidompha Library in Damariscotta, as well as the Round Top Center for the Arts. Jane Kennedy loved her husband, children and grandchildren, their friends, and the web of life and living they shared with her and for whom she had a bottomless reservoir of attention and support. She had a gift for design and crafted a series of magically warm and welcoming homes in which many found refuge, love, support, and the occasional life lesson. A born naturalist, she loved the views from her porches, moontrails on the Sheepscot river, knew every bird in the air or diving in the water, every constellation in the night sky, and her gardens were labors of love and works of art. She had a wicked and explosive sense of humor, consistent with her Scottish heritage and flaming red hair. She cared passionately about right and wrong, her country and her world, and paid very close attention to what was transpiring in both.
