Tribute to GSOC Past President Rosemary Richartz Kenney (1926-2024)
/Another important long-time GSOC member and Past President has passed away. Rosemary Kenney (1926-2024) would have been 98 years old if she had lived 6 more days. She was also GSOC’s longest membership at the time of her death, having joined the society in 1962 (according to her presidential write-up). Rosemary was GSOC President in 1989, which unsurprisingly was also the year she retired. This tribute borrows information heavily from Rosemary’s travel journal entitled “Rosie’s Ramblings,” her Legacy obituary and her presidential write-up in the GSOC archives, as well as my own and others’ recollections.
Rosemary was a strong and independent woman who loved to travel. Rosemary Richartz was born on a dairy farm in Touchet, Washington, and was the valedictorian of her high school in Umapine, Oregon. She attended Oregon State University and received her BS in Home Economics in 1948, then a certificate in Food and Nutrition 1949. She used this education to become a dietician, a ubiquitous profession which proved to be a handy career for someone who loved to travel.
Her career started innocuously enough as a hospital dietician at St. Vincent’s Hospital in downtown Portland. Then, at the end of 1950, a friend from OSU, Marie Bosch, with whom she had previously traveled, suggested that they join an American Youth Hostel bicycle tour of the North Sea area of Europe. Rosemary took a leave of absence from St. Vincent’s and set off with Marie. This was the beginning of a trip of a lifetime.
After touring England, Scotland, the Netherlands, Denmark and Scandinavia for 6 weeks in the summer of 1951, Rosemary decided to stay in Europe and visit the countries of western Europe which she had really wanted to see. So, she set off with friends she had made on the first trip and visited Belgium, France, West Germany, and Italy.
On these journeys the intrepid cyclists would ride up to 50 miles per day with all their gear, often in the rain. If they could not find lodgings, they sometimes slept in barns or even farmers’ fields. Rosemary had few clothes and talked about cutting off her jeans and hemming them on her way to Europe, because “pedal pushers” were more acceptable to European tastes for women. She also made a canteen cover out of the part she cut off.
Many of Rosemary’s comments on this trip talk about the efforts to clean up the cities which were damaged or destroyed in World War II. She saw much of this, and met many different people associated with the armed services in Europe, as well as many Europeans and Australian travelers. She spoke of food and luxury goods rationing in Europe. She spoke quite mundanely of having to make, barter or scrounge for needed items including food while they toured on a shoestring budget.
But even then, Rosemary decided to do another trip before she returned home. She wrote on November 6, 1951 “I cancelled my ticket home with the Export Line this morning. I really don’t quite know what I am doing.” Rosemary with friends Nancy and Bob took a steamer to Tunis, then took trains across Tunisia and Algeria to Morocco, touring the cities as they went, because they heard that they could get good paying jobs in Morocco with US contractors there. Nancy and Rosemary ended up with jobs under contract for a year in Casablanca as stenographers. Rosemary was able to pay off all her debts, earn a good salary, and get a free journey home at the end of the contract, and she spent Christmas 1952 in Walla Walla.
Rosemary’s travels did not stop after this trip. She traveled and worked in Ft. Defiance, New Mexico, as a dietician with the Indian Health Service Hospital on the Navajo Reservation for 3 years, while married to her first husband Frank W. Roeder, who died in 1962. She then returned to Portland, joined GSOC, and there she met her second husband Albert R. Kenney, GSOC President in 1963. They shared interests in geology, paleontology, and travel. The two married in 1972 and moved to Australia, where Rosemary worked as a dietician at the Royal Adelaide Hospital until 1979. Then she and Albert returned to Portland, and Rosemary worked the final 10 years of her career as a dietitian in Portland hospitals. Albert died in the mid-1980’s.
I know that Rosemary spent much of her retirement years planning trips and traveling. I would ask her where she was off to next and she would reply something like, “oh, Namibia.” She liked to travel with the Elderhostel program, and she traveled to faraway places when she was quite elderly. She also did a lot of traveling with GSOC during the years that most of the field trips were done by bus.
Rosemary also maintained her contact with GSOC quite well in the years prior to the COVID pandemic. She hosted all the GSOC board meetings for many, many years. During the first 10 years or so of my stint as GSOC newsletter editor (2000-2020 and now the archive document post 2020), Rosemary was the newspaper publisher and indexer, and you can still see those indices printed on her old dot matrix printer in the January newsletters from that era. She also did some volunteer work at DOGAMI and PSU.
She moved to Newberg with her friend and companion, GSOC member Jan Kem, in the fall of 2022. She passed away peacefully on May 5, 2024, after a period of declining health.
One of the last times I saw Rosemary was at the old-timers get together on April 26, 2022. I couldn’t find many good photos of Rosemary from my personal archives. We would like more photos of her if any long-time members have taken some. Send them to fieldtrips@gsoc.org.
Carol Hasenberg
