Lawrence J. Kennedy

Lawrence J. Kennedy

February 4, 1926 – November 25, 2025

Mt. Lebanon, PA - Lawrence J. “Larry” Kennedy died just three months before his 100th birthday, leaving an unmatched legacy of curiosity and learning.

He was married 73 years to his beloved wife, Marie, until her death three years ago.  Together they built a love story marked by symphony and opera, golf, European travel and annual stays in New Orleans, and weekly restaurant dates that continued well into their 80s.  Their marriage was a quiet miracle for all who witnessed it.

Together, they had six children, 8 grandchildren, and 11 great-grandchildren.  To each, he offered lifelong examples of what it means to greet each day with wonder.  Nourished by words, Larry adored heavy literature—Joyce’s Ulysses most of all.  35 years ago, he founded a book group that still gathers, still reaching for the ideas he sparked.  Often, he selected an obscure word and mischievously slipped it into conversation, confounding all.

Larry embraced the world with grace.  He walked daily, in uptown Mt Lebanon, in Bird Park, with perfect posture, always elegantly dressed in an ironed dress shirt, vest and wool jacket, hat and walking stick, and everyone who met him remembers him.  He liked driving fine cars and cheering for the Steelers.  In recent years he found joy in movies, especially My Cousin Vinny.  Sunday card games were a family competition: “Oh Hell” for decades with Marie, and seven-card stud after her passing.

Yet beneath his charm lived quiet dignity and courage.  Enlisting after Pearl Harbor and before his 16th birthday on February 4, 1942, later that year, on September 15, 1942, he was aboard an aircraft carrier enroute to Guadalcanal that took two torpedoes and sank.  He awoke in the ocean.  That moment shaped his life. 

Next summer, Larry’s and Marie’s ashes will be joined and honored in a full military service at the National Cemetery of the Alleghenies, in Bridgeville—a resting place reserved for veterans and spouses, deserving of the nation’s highest regard.  In that peaceful place, their story will be celebrated and laid to rest, together.  May their memory be a blessing, and may his story live in every life he touched.

Survived by a brother, Paul, children, Bob, Leo, Eileen, Marian, and Larry, preceded by Marie and daughter Nancy, grandchildren, Brenna, Rebecca, Eli, Chris, Erin, Elizabeth, Veronica, and Erik and great grandchildren, Natalie, Zoe, Gabriel, Jackson, Lilah, Grady, Amelia, Austen, Elodie, Cohen, and Nicholas and loving caregivers, Julie and Irmina.

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