In dad's memory they help diabetic girls cope

      By Tom Shea
              
      Thursday, June 29, 2006 
       
      Life was already starting to get into the fast lane. New careers. Relocations. Marriages. Babies. 

      Chris and Tim Kenny thought it would be a fun thing to throw a golf tournament. Invite the old gang from Greenfield. 

      Tongues in cheeks, Chris and Tim dubbed the event, "The Kenny Classic."  Twenty or so friends showed up that first year, 1994, on a Connecticut 
      course so rain-soaked there were puddles. Not that the weather or conditions mattered. Fun was had. Plans were made for a second annual. 
      With two twists: Invite more friends and find a cause to benefit. 

      Most of Chris and Tim's childhood friends had learned the game at Mohawk Meadows, a little municipal course on Deerfield Street. Chris and Tim's 
      father had taken them there when they were on the cusp of teenhood.  Born 11 months apart, the boys already were soccer, hockey and baseball 
      players. Golf turned out to be one of those gifts that kept on giving. 

      Bob Kenny was not a golfer per se. He was just into having his children, daughters Kerry and Patricia, too, learn and experience. 

      Bob loved his sports, but every trip to Fenway Park included visiting a nearby museum. Life was more than hits, runs and errors. 

      He learned that growing up as a child of the Depression in the belly of inner city Hartford born to Irish immigrants. His father was a truck 
      driver; his mother was a housekeeper. In 1938, when Bob was 4, his father died. The death certificate listed heat exhaustion. 

      A voracious reader, Bob worked his way through Hillyer College, now part of the University of Hartford, as a hospital orderly. After graduating 
      college in 1956, there was a year of law school in Boston. Then he started his career with Phoenix Mutual Life Insurance Co. He was a salesman who 
      worked his way up to management. In 1960, he married his wife, Judy, in Chicago. The first of their children were born in 1962. The Kenny family 
      moved to Greenfield in 1971. 

      Bob opened a Phoenix Mutual Customer Service Center in town. He coached Little League. He chaired the town finance committee and for a time 
      directed the town arts council. Judy worked as a teacher's aide at Greenfield High. Their children consider Greenfield their hometown. 

      "After growing up in the concrete jungle of Hartford, and living in Chicago and Los Angeles, my father found Greenfield pretty bucolic," Chris 
      says. "In his 40s, he took up canoeing." 

      Also in his 40s, Bob was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes. 

      "It was an earth-shattering moment for him," Chris recalls. "He battled it for 20 years." 

      Despite the ravages of diabetes, Bob Kenny, who died at 62 in 1997, wasn't one to complain much, even after losing his sight. But his eldest son 
      recalls him saying he couldn't imagine a child having to inject insulin. When it came time to find a charity for the Kenny Classic, it was Bob who 
      suggested one that helped children. That idea led Chris Kenny, the associate athletic director at St. Michael's College in Winooski, Vt., to search 
      the Internet for the right cause. 

      Chris, who is on the board of directors of a Vermont camp for children with cancer, discovered the Clara Barton Center for Diabetes Education in 
      the Worcester County town of North Oxford. Named for the humanitarian, nurse and founder of the American Red Cross, the center is located on 
      Barton's homestead and offers camping and education programs for girls with diabetes. "This is the one place I feel normal and I love it," one child 
      is quoted as saying on the Barton Web site. 

      In Bob's memory, Chris and Tim created the Robert J. Kenny Memorial Scholarship Fund.

      Two years after his death, the fund reached endowment status, meaning as long as there is a Barton Camp, there will be scholarships in Bob Kenny's 
      name allowing girls who otherwise couldn't afford to the chance to "feel normal." 

      Tim Kenny, the managing director at Babson Capital Management in downtown Springfield, is now on the Barton Board of Directors. 

      The annual Kenny Classic - set this year for July 14 at The Tradition Golf Club in Windsor, Conn. - has grown from the original 20 family and friends 
      to usually a full field of 144, raising more than $100,000 in its history, funding not only Barton camp scholarships but the construction of new 
      cabins and other capital improvements. 

      For the Barton Camp, and for a family that 13 years ago was just looking to have some fun, golf has turned out to be one of those 
      gifts that keeps on giving. 

      In a father's memory. 


      Tom Shea can be reached at tshea@repub.com 

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