Gail J. Kenney

Gail was a hoot—funny, feisty, and frequently unpredictable. By her own account, she agreed to marry five men (and changed her mind four times) before the age of twenty-two. Her fifth engagement, to a virtual stranger named Vern, proved to be the charm. As a wife, mother, and registered nurse, she never relinquished her sass. She bought herself flowers at Schiller’s supermarket and displayed them on the living room table with a self-written card that read, “Thanks for last night.”

Gail was born July 12, 1936, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to Leslie and Marie Johnson. She attended Lake Harriet Elementary (“Booster! Booster!”) and Southwest High in South Minneapolis. As a teenager, she worked as a popcorn girl at the Uptown Theater and sold jewelry and occasionally modeled as a member of Donaldson’s department store’s Teen Board.

After graduating from Southwest in 1953, she enrolled in a four-year nursing program at St. Barnabas Hospital in Minneapolis. She finished in three years. Yearning for adventure, she then drove out east, accompanied by her mother, Marie—a trip that allegedly included a memorable one-night stay at a Niagara Falls brothel. In New York City, Gail promptly found a cheap apartment and landed a nursing job at Bellevue Hospital. Not long after that, she met a young chemical engineer from Illinois named Vernon Kenney. Three weeks later, Vern asked her to marry him. Against her better judgment, she agreed. Their love affair lasted sixty years.

In 1959, Gail and Vern moved to the Twin Cities, where he had accepted a job with 3M. Gail took a nursing job at Miller Hospital in St. Paul. Then, in 1961, she put her career on hold to raise a family. The kids arrived at two-year intervals: first David, then Kristine, and finally, Janice. She played with them on the floor, cut the crusts off their sandwiches, and meted out gentle parental justice when necessary. During the early 1970s, she held down the family’s rented villa as Vern carried out a two-year assignment with 3M’s photographic division on the Italian Riviera.

Back in Minnesota, Gail and Vern built a new home for their family on Roseville’s Lake Owasso. A few years later, Gail returned to workforce as an overnight nursing supervisor at a nearby nursing home. She remained in that position until the late 1990s, when she and Vern both retired. They spent the years that followed traveling the world and reveling in company of their eight grandchildren. After Vern’s death in 2018, Gail spent her final seven years making friends at her new Roseville home, Applewood Pointe.

Gail’s memorial service will be held at 1:30 p.m. Saturday, May 10, at Falcon Heights United Church of Christ, 1795 Holton St., Falcon Heights. All are invited to join the family at a church reception immediately following the service and at a celebration of Gail’s life held shortly thereafter in nearby Roseville. (Maps will be provided.) If you care to share a memorial, the family asks you make a donation to the cause of your choice. As Gail would often say, “That’s a good thing.”