This article appeared in the September 1st edition of the Peoria Journal-Star:

Kenny 'took us to the stars'
by Barbara Mantz Drake

Little than a month before he was diagnosed with the cancer that killed him last week, John Kenny wrote of visiting the grave of Bavarian chemist Joseph Fraunhofer, who built lenses and prisms that analyzed starlight. The tombstone read, "He took us to the stars."

Kenny, the long-time Bradley University physicist and astronomer, said he thought that "the noblest epitaph ever written for a mortal man."

There were stars in John Kenny's eyes almost from the moment he first saw them in small-town Ireland and later in the United States, his adopted land. He once said he'd be "bartending and making a little book in south St. Louis" if not for the space program. Centuries from now, he said, "the past 50 years of our Western civilization will be remembered mainly for this glorious effort."

Kenny's comment about what Western civilization will be remembered for reflects his passion for space exploration, which he said "gives us some insight into who we are and how we got here." But his assessment of an alternative career as a bartender and bookmaker was pure Irish whimsy. He was funny and fun to engage. He loved people and ideas in equal measure. He was - and there is no other way to say it - brilliant.

If there were smarter men or women, few of us ever met them. Before a classroom, John Kenny's mind raced and his questions poured forth like a meteor shower: Was God a mathematician? There is some indication of a numerical order to the world. Or was He a biologist, creating a natural world of small cells and letting the force of evolution carry it forward? Was He a gambler? Did He roll the dice and ask humans to live with what random chance produced? Oh, by the way, did you know about the physicist's mistress and how she may have affected his work? Maybe a little poetry will help make the point. Whereupon he would reach into his invisible album of memories - his was photographic - and pull out a dozen or so semi-obscure lines. Maybe, he'd jest, God was a poet.

All of this occurred in the course of a class not in religion, but in theoretical physics. In some ways there wasn't much difference for John Kenny. On a frigid Dec. 25 in the year 2000, he took three of his grandchildren outside to watch the only Christmas solar eclipse they'd see in their lifetime. They just wanted to go back inside and play with their toys.

Ah, but the universe was John Kenny's toy. For a few years he played with it at NASA, where he worked on the Gemini space program. He landed at Bradley in 1967, where he taught, parented the soccer program and launched an organization of little notoriety he called the "Deep Thinkers Club."

It was a fitting name for what he created every time he stood before a class. Whatever God may have been, John Kenny was a born teacher who encouraged his students to think big, as he believed his beloved space program did. It was a priceless gift to them and their university.

And so this epitaph, the one John Kenny said was noblest, is fittingly his own:

"He took us to the stars."

A memorial service will be held at St. Mark's Catholic Church in Peoria at 9:30 am Saturday, September 4. From 11 am to 1 pm, a reception will be held at the Bradley Student Center. After that, Michael Kenny has planned a memorial service at Jimmy's Bar in Peoria.