As she recalls anecdotes about her grandmother Rose Kennedy, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend laughs over the thriftiness Rose once showed when Kathleen spilled Cream of Wheat cereal on the kitchen floor.
"You have to eat it all up," Rose Kennedy told the 5-year-old child. "You have to eat a peck of dirt before you get to heaven!' ""Grandma was always strict about what you could and couldn't do," says Townsend, 39, director of Maryland Student Service Alliance in Baltimore, an organization which promotes public service by teenagers. She is also a former Democratic congressional candidate.
This Sunday marks the 100th birthday of America's most famous matriarch, who has been wheelchair bound since suffering a stroke six years ago.
The milestone has not arrived unnoticed.
Congress has passed a resolution making July 22 Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Family Appreciation Day. It will be known as Rose Kennedy Day in Massachusetts. Life and Woman's Day magazines have celebrated her this month. NBC News correspondent Maria Shriver, one of her 28 grandchildren, has already presented a special television report. A birthday party for several hundred guests was held last weekend at the white clapboard house in Hyannis Port where Rose has summered for the past 59 years.
As queen of America's most famous political dynasty, Rose Kennedy is known as much for withstanding family tragedy as for producing a generation of national leaders. She has outlived four of her nine children. Her oldest son, Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., was killed during a World War II bombing mission. Her daughter Kathleen was killed four years later in a plane crash in Southern France. In 1963, her second son, former President Kennedy, was assassinated. Less than five years later, her third son, Robert, was killed while he was campaigning for the 1968 Democratic presidential nomination.
She has been called stoic and determined. Kathleen Townsend, the oldest child of Robert and Ethel Kennedy and Rose's oldest grandchild, remembers that her grandmother went to Mass at least once a day in the years before suffering her stroke. Rose also insisted upon taking a daily two-mile walk.
"She would attach quotes to her sweater that she would memorize as she was walking. She'd say, "You can't tell when you'll have to give a speech and you have to be prepared with appropriate quotations,' " Townsend recalls.
Rose Kennedy grew up as the oldest daughter of Boston Mayor John "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald and married Joseph Kennedy, the youngest bank president in the United States who later became a multimillionaire as well as ambassador to England. Despite her privileges, Rose never quite outgrew her memories of the prejudice shown toward Irish and Catholics, Townsend says. The Kennedy family decided to summer in Hyannis Port, for instance, because they were denied entry into Cohasset, an exclusive shore community south of Boston.
"When her father was mayor, there were still signs up everywhere that said `Irish need not apply,' " Townsend says.
She adds that, until her stroke, Rose remained so committed to self-improvement that she would study Berlitz records of German and French every evening after dinner.
"In her day, you had to know two foreign languages to get into Wellesley College. Grandma wanted to go to Wellesley, but it wasn't a Catholic school and her father wouldn't let her go. At 91, she was still keeping up her two languages to show that she could have gotten in."
Rose was equally concerned about the education and accomplishments of her grandchildren. When Kathleen was 18, she toured Europe with a friend - "a blue jeans, backpack sort of trip." In Paris, she ran into her grandmother, who was staying in the Plaza Athenee Hotel on the Champs Elysees; Kathleen was on the Left Bank in lodgings considerably less glamorous.
Rose insisted upon seeing her granddaughter's hotel to make sure it lived up to her meticulous standards. It did.
"All the way over in the cab, she quizzed us on art and architecture," Townsend recalls. "She wanted to know if I knew the difference between Doric and Ionic and Corinthian columns. She was always very interested in improving her mind and making sure we were improving ours."
Confined now to her bed and her wheelchair, Rose Kennedy still enjoys having her hair done once a week, watching the national news, keeping up on family news and listening to a pianist who comes to her house regularly to play old Irish songs, according to various reports. She is entertained by visits from her 22 great-grandchildren as well. The Townsend girls - Meaghan, 12, Maeve, 10, and Kate, 6 - have often visited Hyannis Port at the time of Rose's birthday. Last summer they wrote and performed a play about a Russian who tries to warn his countrymen about the evils of pesticide use in the Soviet Union - and is sent to Siberia for his effort.
"It was set in 1983," Townsend explains.
More usually, however, the family will entertain Rose by singing some of her favorite Irish melodies: "Sweet Rosie O'Grady," "Danny Boy," "Sweet Adeline" and "My Wild Irish Rose."
"She used to love to play the piano and everybody would sing," Townsend remembers. "After dinner in the summer, we'd all go over to Grandma's house."
She says that neither age nor illness has tarnished her grandmother's sense of humor.
"Just last week one of us asked, `Well, Grandma, how does it feel to be 100?'
"She said, `I'd rather be 16.' "
Distributed by Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service