In the early 1960s, a Chicago alderman proposed naming what is now the Eisenhower Expressway after former Mayor Martin H. Kennelly, whose name nowadays may not be as recognizable as Daley or Emanuel, but who led the city from 1947 to 1955.
The effort failed, and historians are hard-pressed to cite any public memorials in Chicago to Kennelly.
But more than 50 years after Kennelly’s death, a suburban high school is honoring him.
The soon-to-be renovated athletic facility at Riverside Brookfield High School will be known as the Kennelly Athletic Complex, thanks to a donation from his great-nephew, and will bear a plaque that includes a short biography of the former mayor.
Jerry Kennelly, who lived in Riverside as a child, contacted the west suburban high school in February after reading in the Tribune that the school was seeking donations for the athletic facility in exchange for naming rights.
Kennelly’s donation of $140,000, which will ensure the complex will include his great-uncle’s name for a minimum of 20 years, was accepted by the school board last week.
“He wanted to find a way to honor his uncle,” said Superintendent Kevin Skinkis. “For the students, they will now have the opportunity to learn about (Mayor) Kennelly, an individual they are probably not familiar with.”
The stadium is undergoing $8 million in renovations. The money will help pay for new bleachers, a field, drainage repairs and possibly other repairs at the school.
Jerry Kennelly, 64, moved to California with his family when he was in fifth grade. But he remembers his uncle would often visit the family at his childhood home in Riverside for dinner on Sundays.
“Our family has always been proud of him,” said Kennelly, who is CEO of Riverbed Technology in San Francisco. “He never really got a lot of recognition and was somewhat forgotten after he left office.”
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Martin Kennelly died in 1961.
“I always thought of him as my grandfather,” said Kennelly, whose uncle never married or had children of his own. “He was actually my godfather. It’s kind of funny … for my baptism I was taken to the church in a city limousine and a motorcycle escort.”
Kennelly said he still has many memories of Riverside, which was designed by famed architect Frederick Law Olmsted and is a National Historic Landmark. He now lives in Piedmont, Calif., a suburb of San Francisco that reminds him of the western suburb, he said.
“It’s just a unique community, and the high school there is a perfect place to honor him,” Kennelly said.
Martin H. Kennelly was born in the Chicago neighborhood of Bridgeport in 1887, according to an obituary in the Tribune in 1961. His mother, Margaret, was widowed when Kennelly was 2. Kennelly had to quit school to work in the stockroom at Marshall Field & Company. He later went back to school.
After World War I, he started his own warehouse business and landed his first contract moving exhibits at the old Field Museum site in Jackson Park.
Kennelly became active in civic affairs, served on various boards and was later elected mayor. Under his leadership, the groundwork for Chicago’s expressways had begun, and his administration planned and started the Chicago Skyway. He also helped assemble land for O’Hare International Airport.
While mayor, Kennelly hired an attorney who replaced 12,000 political appointees — many of them Democratic precinct captains — with permanent civil service workers. That was, according to the obituary, one of the key reasons the regular Democratic organization supported Richard J. Daley, who defeated Kennelly in the Democratic primary in 1955.
“Richard J. Daley dominated the city for so long that Kennelly was forgotten,” said Chicago Ald. Ed Burke, a longtime student of the city’s history whose father was an alderman when Kennelly was mayor.
“He wasn’t a very forceful politician to begin with — kind of shy and soft-spoken,” Burke said. “He did a lot of things for the city but wasn’t cut from the same cloth that other Chicago mayors (before him) came from like Ed Kelly, Anton Cermak and Big Bill Thompson. Those were larger-than-life characters.”
A residential complex on the Near North Side that was the site of Kennelly’s warehouse still bears his name.
But Anne Durkin Keating, a history professor at North Central College who spearheaded the book “Encyclopedia of Chicago,” can’t recall much named after Kennelly in Chicago.
“There was no way (Richard J.) Daley would have allowed that,” Keating said. “It was the same with Jane Byrne (who in the past year had a downtown interchange named for her). Her daughter had to fight very hard and did it after Richard M. Daley was out of office.”