Missing Kennedy (Pentacoff)

The Missing Kennedy:  Rosemary Kennedy and the Secret Bonds of Four Women
Elizabeth Koehler-Pentacoff, 2015
Bancroft Press
270 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781610881746


Summary
Rosemary (Rosie) Kennedy was born in 1918, the first daughter of a wealthy Bostonian couple who later would become known as the patriarch and matriarch of America’s most famous and celebrated family.

Elizabeth Koehler was born in 1957, the first and only child of a struggling Wisconsin farm family.

What, besides their religion, did these two very different Catholic women have in common?

One person really: Stella Koehler, a charismatic woman of the cloth who became Sister Paulus Koehler after taking her vows with the Sisters of the Third Order of St. Francis of Assisi. Sister Paulus was Elizabeth's Wisconsin aunt. For thirty-five years―indeed much of her adult life―Sister Paulus was Rosie Kennedy’s caregiver.

And a caregiver, tragically, had become necessary after Rosie, a slow learner prone to emotional outbursts, underwent one of America’s first lobotomies―an operation Joseph Kennedy was assured would normalize Rosie’s life. It did not. Rosie’s condition became decidedly worse.

After the procedure, Joe Kennedy sent Rosie to rural Wisconsin and Saint Coletta, a Catholic-run home for the mentally disabled. For the next two decades, she never saw her siblings, her parents, or any other relative, the doctors having issued stern instructions that even the occasional family visit would be emotionally disruptive to Rosie.

Following Joseph Kennedy’s stroke in 1961, the Kennedy family, led by mother Rose and sister Eunice Kennedy Shriver, resumed face to face contact with Rosie. It was also about then that a young Elizabeth Koehler began paying visits to Rosie.

In this insightful and poignant memoir, based in part on Sister Paulus’ private notes and augmented by nearly one-hundred never-before-seen photos, Elizabeth Koehler-Pentacoff recalls the many happy and memorable times spent with the "missing Kennedy."

Based on independent research and interviews with the Shriver family, she tries to come to grips with Joseph Kennedy’s well-intended decision to submit her eldest daughter to a still experimental medical procedure, and his later decision to keep Rosie almost entirely out of public view.

She looks at the many parallels between Rosie’s post-operative life, her own, and those of the two families.
And, most important, she traces how, entirely because of Rosie, the Kennedy and Shriver families embarked on an exceedingly consequential campaign advancing the cause of the developmentally disabled―a campaign that continues to this day.

Ten years after Rosie’s death comes a highly personal yet fitting testimonial to a sad but truly meaningful and important life. (From the publisher.)

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Author Bio
• Birth—1957
• Where—Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA
• Education—B.A., California State University-Fresno
• Currently—lives in northern California


Elizabeth Koehler-Pentacoff is an American author of both fiction and nonfiction for children and adults. She wrote the instructional book, The ABCs of Writing for Children, which was a Writer's Digest Book Club selection. Her biography The Missing Kennedy: Rosemary Kennedy and the Secret Bonds of Four Women was published in 2015.

Personal life
Koehler-Pentacoff was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and grew up in nearby Oconomowoc. She moved to California as a teenager to attend college, graduating from California State University Fresno with a double major in children's theater and liberal studies.

In 1981 she married Robert Pentacoff. Before turning to freelance writing, she taught elementary and middle school and directed children's theater. When her son, Christopher, was young, she wrote stories for him, which led her to writing books for children.

Career
When Koehler-Pentacoff began writing children's books, she also instructed adult teachers through California State University, East Bay. She taught weekend classes of creative drama and improvisation and later taught writing for children and writing comedy through UC Santa Cruz Extension located in Cupertino.

She has worked with the California Writers Club |Mt. Diablo Branch's Young Writers Contest since 1995. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 10/20/2015.)

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Book Reviews
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Publishers Weekly


[C]enters on the treatment [Rosemary Kennedy] received at a Catholic nursing facility from Sister Paulus Koehler, the author's aunt, who cared for Rosemary during much of her adult life.... [A] poignant look at the life of a lesser-known yet remarkable Kennedy, with its dozens of never-before-published photos .—Mary Jennings, Camano Island Lib., WA
Library Journal


With average prose, Koehler-Pentacoff flip-flops from one family to another, making the narrative a bit difficult to follow, but she does reveal an untold chapter in the Kennedy saga.... A middling memoir that provides a few interesting glimpses into one member of the Kennedy clan who was almost lost to her family.
Kirkus Reviews

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Discussion Questions
1. What should have been the correct diagnosis of Rosemary’s pre-lobotomy condition?

2. What quality of life did Rosemary lead after her lobotomy?

3. Why did no one visit Rosemary for more than two decades?

4. In what ways did immense good come from Rosemary’s tragic life?
(Questions from the publisher's press kit.)

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Also consider these LitLovers talking points for further discussion.

5. Talk about young Rosemary—before her symptoms became so severe? What was she like as a child and as a young woman?

6. How much did you know about Rosemary Kennedy before reading this book? What surprised you the most about her history...and about the Kennedy family?

7.  What do you think of Joseph Kennedy, his ambitions and obsessions? Why did he never reveal the truth of Rosemary's lobotomy to the family? What moral issues, if any, are at stake in both making the decision for the lobotomy and in keeping it secret?

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