News

Knitting nurse brought comfort and joy to children

By Steve Landwehr
Staff writer
Published: July 14, 2008

Everyone's life has a story. In "Lives," we tell some of the stories about North Shore people who have died recently. "Lives" runs Mondays in The Salem News.

SALEM — Children of the Great Depression often developed lifelong habits of economy that can seem a little odd to those who never experienced its deprivations. Take gift wrapping paper.

Most people born into the age of, "There's plenty more where that came from," simply crumple it up and gather the wads into a trash bag without a second thought.

Not Alice Famico-Kenney.

She saw possibilities in those brightly colored scraps, and opportunities for reuse abounded for a woman whose first job paid 80 cents an hour — $32 for a 40-hour week.

With a little patience and a hot iron she turned that paper into wrap for a second gift, or liner for a shelf or a drawer.

"She had good values, she didn't like to see anything wasted," daughter Frances Grace said of her mother, who died Monday, July 7 in the Grosvenor Park Nursing Home in Salem. She was 93.

Her kids think she was married on her birthday, April 20. They're sure about the wedding day but a little less certain of the date on her birth certificate from 1915.

She was working as a waitress in Salem when she met her first husband, Frank J. Famico.

"He was a really big tipper, that was the attraction," Grace said with a grin.

After her first husband died in 1975, she married again, to Joseph Kenney, a Salem city employee who also preceded her in death.

Once most of her five children were raised, Famico-Kenney took a Red Cross course and enjoyed it so much she decided to enroll in the Salem Hospital School of Nursing.

She became a licensed practical nurse, working first in the hospital's emergency room, but most of her career was on the maternity ward at the North Shore Children's Hospital.

She worked the 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. shift nearly all 30 years of her second career. She seemed to have a way with crying babies, and began sitting in a rocking chair on the ward to sing sick children to sleep.

The rocker became so synonymous with Famico-Kenney that the ward staff presented it to her at her retirement party. It followed her to the nursing home, where she sat in it every day until transferring her from her wheelchair became too dangerous.

Knitting patterns

Before, during and after her night job, Famico-Kenney was dedicated to her real career, which is sometimes euphemistically referred to as, "handiwork." If it involved needle and thread, yarn or cloth, she was an accomplished master. Sometimes to the chagrin of her brood.

She knitted all of her husband's socks, and matching argyle stockings and sweaters for the kids.

"How I hated wearing those to school," daughter Betty Montoni remembered, smiling.

Tucked into a box somewhere with all the other decorations that come out every Christmas, hundreds upon hundreds of Salemites have a personal permanent memento of Famico-Kenney, and they became her trademark calling cards, personalized Christmas stockings, the big ones, the ones kids hang on the mantle with dreams of finding them stuffed on Christmas morn.

Murphy Funeral Home owner Frank Murphy used to say Famico-Kenney's stockings were the best because they stretched every time a gift was added, making room for more.

Asked to estimate how many they think she made over the years, her kids just shake their heads. She averaged two a week, every year for years.

"And she was probably working on an afghan or something else at the same time," daughter Nancy Savy said.

Nineteen years ago, on her granddaughter's wedding day, Famico-Kenney had a massive stroke on the steps of the church and would require care the rest of her life.

This was the first time she would be on the receiving end.

She played nurse to more than just hospitalized children over the years, providing in-home care for relatives for much of her life.

"We always had a bed-ridden person in the house," Savy said.

Good yarn

You get the sense Famico-Kenney didn't knit purely to save money on clothes. She enjoyed it.

Her daughters still have the dolls they played with as little girls, each with handmade outfits sewn or knitted by their mother.

She made little presents for other children, too, and stitching them together with her own hands was a way of saying something beyond the gift.

She once shared a bit of philosophy with her daughter Frances that says something about who she was.

"It's 50 cents worth of yarn, and you're going to make someone happy."