Cathy Kinard

I stood on the front sidewalk in front of Jean’s Bakery watching the crowd form across the street. Less than a week later I would turn 5 years old.

The men in dark suits came in to the bakery and left with paper bags filled with the donuts that my dad was famous for baking in the town of Indiana, PA. .  Indiana was my mother’s hometown.   It is known as the Christmas Tree Capital of the World, and otherwise for its famous native son, actor Jimmy Stewart. 

On October 15, 1960, I watched John Fitzgerald Kennedy make a campaign speech across the street from my father’s bakery at the Indiana County Courthouse.  I don’t remember much about that day except watching those Secret Service men visit the bakery.

My father would die five years  later at age 38 of a heart attack, leaving behind a wife and four little children.  I turned 10 two weeks before. My brother Kevin was 7 on the day we watched my father lowered into the ground, Carole was 4, and Cindy was 16 months old.

The butcher block recipe box sits on the baker’s rack in my kitchen.  I can’t use the recipes because they are in bulk quantities.  Most of the recipes were typed by my mother.  The most prized are the ones in my father’s beautiful cursive writing.  I’ve never tried to wash the outside of the box, for fear of removing the remaining fingerprints of my father—congealed in flour and lard from so many years ago.

According to my maternal aunt, he made the best chocolate meringue pie.  Ever.

About four years ago, I visited Indiana.  The abandoned bakery remains.  I was able to look in the window and was struck by the beautiful window in the rear of the bakery. 

The world changed on November 22, 1963, for the Kennedy children.

The world changed on November 4, 1965, for the Kinard children.