Valley has its own memories of Sen. Edward Kennedy

Valley has its own memories of Sen. Edward Kennedy

Tens of thousands of Mahoning Valley residents covering at least four generations have seen U.S. Sen. Ted Kennedy during his multiple visits here over four decades.

In this staunchly Democratic area, few names resonated like that of Kennedy. An appearance in October 1960 by his brother, John, during that year’s presidential campaign filled Youngstown’s Central Square as it had never been before and never was again. Thousands of cheering supporters turned out for JFK. Over the years, in smaller venues, perhaps as many people saw the 35th president’s younger brother, in union halls, church halls, school auditoriums, the Idora Park ballroom, the Mahoning Country Club — anywhere Democrats from Mahoning and Trumbull counties met to bolster a campaign or to muster votes.

On his visits to the Mahoning and Shenango valleys, Ted Kennedy was almost always campaigning for someone else: Charles Carney, George D. Tablack and Harry Meshel in the congressional campaigns, U.S. Sen. Howard Metzenbaum and Ohio Gov. Richard Celeste, the McGovern-Shriver and Carter-Mondale tickets, to name a few. Only once, in 1980 in his own bid for the Democratic nomination for president, was Kennedy carrying his own banner. And if it had been up to Mahoning Valley Democrats, it would have been Kennedy, not President Jimmy Carter, facing Ronald Reagan that fall. Kennedy got 59,731 votes in Mahoning, Trumbull and Columbiana counties to Carter’s 49,713 in the June primary.

Theirs and ours

A nation today is remembering Sen. Edward Moore Kennedy, D-Mass, as one of the deans of the Senate and the most influential legislator at the end of the 20th century and beginning of the 21st.

But Mahoning Valley residents will remember an unabashed liberal — one of the few politicians who did not shy from the label in the wake of the Reagan revolution. It was a liberalism that played in the Valley as it did few other places, especially in recent years, but that is a topic for another day.

And all those thousands of people who met Kennedy on his visit here will be telling stories about how he reached out and touched them, about how he focused, if only for a minute or a moment on them, and, in the case of one girl, how he took the time to autograph the cast on her arm.

Talking heads in New York and Washington will analyze Kennedy’s life of triumph and tragedy, of legislative success and personal failures, of an unquestioned loyalty to the family he led as the last living brother of an extraordinary generation and the political dynasty he represented.

But those who met him in Warren, Youngstown and New Castle will remember the day they met Ted Kennedy and feel a little loss.