Hidden Truths and Tea Parties

It’s not easy to make me smile when I’m waiting for the (chronically late and overcrowded) bus early on a winter morning. But today the park looked especially beautiful with a light snow falling, and then I spied this cheerful fellow peeping at me from behind the Kennison memorial.

All of Lincoln Park used to be a cemetery. My snowman friend is guarding the alleged final resting place of one David Kennison, who duped the good citizens of Chicago into believing that he was the oldest living survivor of the original tea party—the one in Boston. (Whenever I see headlines about tea parties now, I get all excited for a minute, thinking they mean the kind featuring tiny cucumber sandwiches … and then I see that politics are the only thing on the menu. No thank you.)

Last year an artist named Pamela Bannos added a sign behind the Kennison memorial as part of her “Hidden Truths: The Chicago City Cemetery and Lincoln Park” project. She reveals that Kennison was a con artist; he would have been too young to have dumped tea into Boston Harbor or fought with Washington, and  he likely died at 85, not the 115 years he claimed. These discrepancies didn’t stop the nice ladies of the Daughters of the American Revolution from making Kennison a hero, and more recently his cause was taken up by the Tax Reform Action Coalition, who gathered at the Lincoln Park memorial a few years back.

Perhaps we can all sit down for a nice cup of tea to share Kennison stories. (But remember, no politics in polite company!)