Rose Fitzgerald was born on July 22, 1890, in the kitchen of her parents’ red brick flat on Garden Street in Boston’s North End. When Rose was born, there were only 42 states. Czars still ruled Russia. Wilbur and Orville Wright were still tinkering with bicycles. The “Nutcracker Suite” was yet to be composed by Tchaikovsky. The Philadelphia Orchestra was not in existence, and the average woman lived to be about 51 years of age. Rose would live to be more than twice that. During her lifetime, the battleship Maine was blown up, Japan attacked Pe

In 1944, the Kennedy “curse” was set into motion when Joe and Rose’s eldest son, Joseph P., Jr., was shot down over Europe in combat during World War II. Four short years later their daughter, Kathleen, was killed in a plane crash. Their second eldest son, John F., was assassinated in 1963 after serving as President of the United States for nearly three years. The Kennedy’s third son, Robert F., had served as U.S. Attorney General and as a New York Senator when he was assassinated during his presidential campaign in 1968. Their youngest son, Edward, became a Senator in Massachusetts but was caught in a scandal in 1969 after admitting to leaving the scene of a car accident in which a female passenger drowned when he drove off the bridge at Chappaquiddick. Another daughter, Rosemary, was institutionalized for retardation from early adulthood after undergoing a disastrous lobotomy that Joe, Jr. had ordered secretly. And Rose’s husband, who had suffered from a debilitating stroke in 1961, died in 1969 (Encyclopedia Britannica).

Somehow, none of these terrible shocks cracked that armor of calm she wore constantly in public. “I just made up my mind,” she said, “that I wouldn’t allow it to conquer me.” And then, chin up, she concluded “Birds sing after a storm. Why shouldn’t we?” (Darrach 52).

Rose’s parents were John Francis Fitzgerald, nicknamed “Honey Fitz” for his sweet singing voice, and Mary Josephine Hannon. While her mother taught her values of dedication to family and religion in the Catholic Church, Honey injected her into a life of politics (Ciccarelli).

Being the youngest student to ever graduate from the school at the age of fifteen, Rose graduated from Dorchester High School with honors in May of 1906. That same year her father was elected mayor. At the age of sixteen, she had passed the entrance exams for Wellesley College where she had planned to attend. However, her father thought she was too young and instead enrolled her at Sacred Heart Convent in Boston and the New England Conservatory of Music, where she honed her skills as a pianist. From 1908 to 1909 Rose was a student at Blumenthal Academy, a German convent finishing school in Valls, the Netherlands, where she learned to speak and read German and French fluently. She received her higher education at Manhattanville College of the Sacred Heart in Purchase, New York, and graduated in 1910 (Ciccarelli; Cameron 47).

After the deat

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