Sackets Harbor community patriot, historian turns 100 on July 4
Jul. 1—SACKETS HARBOR — When it comes to community spirit, patriotism and history, Jeannie I. Brennan is a Yankee doodle dandy, born on the Fourth of July and ready to celebrate her century on Earth.
On Tuesday night, at about 9:30, the annual Independence Day fireworks will launch in the village. The fireworks for Brennan on the holiday will include those aglow in her still very active mind as her reliable synapses fire up and she quickly solves several crossword puzzles and word jumbles with the spark of someone half her age.
Maybe she'll also listen to an audio book on intriguing topics such as ancient Egypt, or roll out some pie dough with the help of one of her seven caregivers — just an average day for the centenarian.
Sackets Harbor Mayor Alex M. Morgia has proclaimed Tuesday "Jeannie Brennan Day" in the village, due to her "lifelong commitment to the community, serving as educator, historian and volunteer."
Brennan came to Sackets Harbor with her family from Watertown, at age 5, recalling the village was a wonderful place to grow up in all seasons. She swam at the oil docks area off Ontario Street in summers and skated in the harbor in winters.
Brennan taught at the local school for 30 years and after her teaching career volunteered for a slew of community causes, including for 37 years at the Pickering-Beach Museum and for more than 30 years at the Jefferson County Historical Society.
Brennan and her late husband, Robert E., who died in 2013 at the age of 92, were co-village historians.
Now Brennan is co-historian with her daughter, Constance B. Barone, site manager of the Sackets Harbor Battlefield State Historic Site.
"When I was a child, we explored area cemeteries looking for interesting stone inscriptions, or further away, we visited historic sites like Fort Ontario and Fort Ticonderoga, always discovering a bit of the past," Barone said. "Our family history stories gave me a grounding in what history is really about: people, people's stories, connections, imagining the past and how it shapes our lives today. This early influence in my life certainly guided my career path toward museum work."
HER PLACE IN HISTORY
Aided by caregivers, Brennan lives at her village home which she and her husband built themselves and moved into shortly after they married in 1943. Her living room walls offer a history lesson. They are dotted with famous faces associated with Sackets Harbor. Over the couch there are several portraits of Ulysses S. Grant, whose Army career brought him to the village, but front and center is Augustus Sacket, lawyer, soldier, businessman and founder of the village. On other walls, early scenes of the village are preserved, including a painting, created by son-in-law Larry Barone, of the incomplete, 80-gun ship-of-the-line New Orleans, which was laid down in 1814 in the village, intended for use by the United States Navy in the War of 1812. Brennan, always eager to educate, explained that the ship was never finished and became a tourist attraction. In 1880, the ship house protecting the New Orleans blew down. The unfinished ship was sold in September 1883 to Alfred Wilkinson of Syracuse and dismantled.
The Brennan home on East Washington Street will be the site of two birthday celebrations for Jeannie hosted by the family. A family gathering will be held tonight. An invitation-only community gathering is set for 1 to 3 p.m. Sunday.
John W. Deans, who served as Sackets Harbor mayor from 2003 to 2006, is one of the local residents looking forward to the community gathering.
"You can't turn too far to the right or to the left in the village without finding something that Jeannie Brennan's hands haven't touched," he said. "Mrs. Brennan, or The General, as her husband Bob would refer to her, has long been one of this community's most respected citizens."
Mr. Deans, who also served as president of Jefferson Community College from 1992 to 2003, and as interim president in 2006, said that as a team, Jeannie and her late husband were a reliable resource when he sought information.
"When I was mayor, it was really great to be able to turn to either one of them with questions as maybe I was giving a talk on, say, Memorial Day. If you wanted to know about the history of Memorial Day and the village of Sackets Harbor, either one of them were more than willing to help you fill in the details."
Like so many others in the community, Deans first became aware of Brennan's prestige through school and the stories students brought home. "We, as a family, got to know her first when our youngest daughter entered first grade at Sackets Harbor school," he said. "The two were a great match: a serious teacher and a serious young student."
The youngest daughter of John and Mary Jo Deans, Jennifer Deans Brumback, died in 2014 from brain cancer.
"As the years went on, we became even more aware of Jeannie's interests, working right along with her husband Bob on a wide range of historical interests," Deans said.
'AHEAD OF THE GAME'
Jeannie is daughter of Steven and Agnes Kafka. Her father was appointed chief petty officer with the 13th Separate Fleet Division, U.S. Naval Reserves. He died in 1937 at the age of 43 following an explosion aboard U.S. Subchaser 431 that was at dock at the naval militia station at Sackets Harbor. Jeannie had an older brother, William C. Kafka, who died in 2013.
"In Watertown, I was in kindergarten and when I came to Sackets, they didn't have a kindergarten, so they said, 'We'll put her in first grade. If she can do the work, we'll leave her,'" Brennan said. "That's how I got ahead of the game."
She recalls long walks to school, at times battling difficult weather that blasted off Lake Ontario.
"The school was way over here," Brennan said of the current school building which opened at its Broad Street address in 1928. "I had to walk from Dodge Avenue to the school, even in the wintertime when there was a lot of snow. One day, my mother looked out and she saw these red boots sticking out of the snow bank. That was me! She came out and assisted me and told Bill that he was to make sure that I got to school all right. That was a hike from Dodge Avenue for a 5-year-old."
Brennan is a 1939 graduate of Sackets Harbor School and her husband was a 1940 graduate of the school. Robert served in the Army Air Forces during World War II. They were married Dec. 21, 1943, at Our Lady of the Angels Church, Albany.
Brennan recalled the days of building their Sackets Harbor home.
"Bob would go to work in the mornings and draw a line across a certain area, and that's where I had to keep the shingles in the right place," she said.
Getting materials to build the house wasn't easy in the years immediately after World War II.
"There was a couple of old fellas who had taken a house down someplace," Brennan recalled. "We bought the lumber from them."
Finding nails was also a problem.
"Somebody told Bob that somewhere, I forget where he had to go, but they said there was a barrel of nails there and he could have them," Brennan said.
But the nails had been used. Somehow, in a show of pointed community support, the person with the task of straightening out the nails ended up being the father of the Rev. John Kennedy, the local Catholic priest at St. Andrew's Church who served from 1946 to 1964.
Brennan graduated from Albany State Teachers College and later from Oswego State University College. She described how she lost a summer job one year at the Union Hotel when she was off on college break:
"Raema Gowing had a tea room and she hired me to wait on tables," Brennan said. "It worked out all right until the day a bunch of old ladies with their white shoes were sitting there."
She was bringing the ladies a tray full of tea (or it might have been tomato juice, she can't surely recall) when her toe caught something and she stumbled.
"And all the ladies' shoes got a bath," Brennan said. "That was the end of my work as a waitress."
TEACHER, VOLUNTEER
Brennan began her teaching career at Belleville Academy, where she taught for a short while. At Sackets Harbor, she would end up teaching many children and grandchildren of her early students. Many of her students, seeing her about town, would ask: "Do you remember me?"
"Some I did remember, some I didn't. And some I didn't want to remember," Brennan said.
She retired from teaching in the 1980s and began to focus on volunteering in the community. At Pickering-Beach Museum, 501 W. Main St., she did everything from coordinating volunteers to cleaning the museum, once the private home of a prominent local family during the mid-19th century. Augustus Pickering, a ship builder, took his life in 1844 following the stress that resulted from discovering that his ship Columbia was too wide to pass through the Welland Canal connecting lakes Erie and Ontario.
The museum offers visitors a glimpse of what village life was like in early Sackets Harbor. About 15 years ago, Brennan transcribed letters dating from 1867 to 1869 written by Marietta Pickering Hay while she was traveling the world with her husband, Dewitt Clinton Hay. Marietta wrote several letters to her siblings back in New York, including several to Olivia "Livie" and Allen C. Beach of Watertown. Mr. Beach became lieutenant governor of New York in 1868. Brennan gathered the letters into the 69-page book, "My Dear Livie — Travel Chronicles of Marietta Pickering Hay, 1867 to 1869." It also features several watercolor paintings by Marietta's husband.
Brennan was also a volunteer for more than 30 years in the genealogical department at Flower Memorial Library and the Jefferson County Historical Society, both in Watertown. She and her husband co-authored the books, "Images of America: Sackets Harbor" and "Images of America: Fort Drum," both published by Arcadia Publishing.
Brennan and her husband also liked to travel the world when they retired, with China being her favorite country to visit. They also took hiking, skiing and canoe trips. She enjoyed playing tennis and was an excellent water skier.
"When I was 70, they said I couldn't water ski anymore," Brennan said. "And when I was 90, they took my diving board away from the pool and said I couldn't dive in anymore. So, I have a pair of stairs where I could get in the pool and a pair of stairs where I could get out of the pool."
These days, Brennan is more likely to dive into the wonder of words. "It's a challenge to make sure your head is working," she said.
Her favorite word games are "Jumble" and crossword puzzles, both featured in the Watertown Daily Times. She does about a half-dozen of the puzzles each day and she relies on word puzzle publications to keep up with her enthusiasm.
Mary Whalen Corboy, one of Brennan's caregivers, said that to play "Jumble," family and caregivers copy the letters in the "jumbled" words onto card stock. Brennan's eyesight failed in 2013 and she only sees shapes. But she can make out the 3-inch high black letters written for her on card stock to do Jumbles when she views the letters close up.
"She can hold it up, read the individual letters and unscramble the word," Corboy said. "She snaps them right off."
To solve crossword puzzles, family and caregivers verbalize the clues. "She answers — rapidly," said daughter Barone.
Corboy said that Brennan, with assistance, also remains skilled in other areas.
"She can still bake and do lots of things," Corboy said. "Jeannie is famous for her pies. She's really good at rolling out the pie dough, feeding it into the pan and fluting it and everything. Her husband Bob was a pie fan."
Corboy said that she's learned a lot about village history while caring for Brennan.
"It's really nice to work with her," she said. "She's very philanthropical and very interested in other peoples' welfare. That's really nice to see as people age."
Jeannie and her husband have been honored with a slew of community awards over the years. In 1994, the Brennans received the Sackets Harbor Distinguished Alumni Award. Decades later, the village would name them Senior Citizens of the Year.
Deans, first hired at JCC to teach history and political science before becoming involved in campus administration, said that historians are a key element of a community and the resources that Jeannie and her husband brought to Sackets Harbor can't be overstated.
"It's just been so critical that we've had people with that degree of interest and competence who could ensure that we discover what we didn't know about the community, but also build our future on that history," he said. "It certainly is not an overstatement to say that much of what our community knows about who it is, our background and history, which gives a community that sense of well-being in knowing who it is and which helps in decision-making and so on — they played a major part and will continue to play a major part through their writings."
