By Nicole Falco
Born in Missouri in 1915, McKenna knew tragedy at a very young age. Her mother died when she was just a year old, and her two older brothers died when she was a teenager. She briefly attended St. Louis University, but could not finish her degree because of the Depression. She then worked in the office of a St. Louis clothing manufacturer, but another duty called.
In 1942, McKenna enlisted in the Army. "One of the reasons she volunteered to go into the Army was she didn't have any brothers to join," said her son, Patrick Michael McKenna, a Malverne resident and the Valley Stream village attorney. "She thought she would step in and represent the family."
McKenna, a lieutenant in the Women's Army Corps, met her husband, John, an Army staff sergeant, at the Pentagon during the war. The two were wed in a military ceremony at Fort Meyers, Va. She was stationed at Arlington Hall in Virginia, and assigned to the Army Intelligence and Security Command's cryptography unit.
In 1950, the couple and their three sons settled in Valley Stream. McKenna was active in the community as a Cub Scout den mother and a member of the PTA. She also loved to attend parties as well as host them.
McKenna and her husband were big supporters of the Democratic Party. John, the party leader in Valley Stream, ran for mayor against Henry Waldinger in 1957. When the local paper, the Valley Stream Mailleader, refused to run Democrats' paid advertisements, McKenna founder her own weekly paper, the Valley Stream Ledger, according to her son. The paper was bought by the South Shore Record in 1962. Herald Community Newspapers purchased the South Shore Record in 2001.
That same year, McKenna was appointed deputy director of Civil Defense by newly elected County Executive Eugene Nickerson. She retired from that position in 1975. Always busy, she and her husband also ran an insurance business, McKenna & McKenna, on Merrick Road.
After her husband retired in 1980, the couple moved to Boca Raton. They traveled extensively, visiting every continent except Antarctica. Her husband died in 1993, but the "fiercely independent" McKenna continued to live on her own, agreeing to be helped by a nurse's aide only about a month before she died.
Besides her son and his wife, Susan, McKenna is survived by four grandchildren, Anne, of Manhattan; Brian, of Malverne; Peter, of Valley Stream; and Caitlin, of Charlottesville, Va., and a daughter-in-law, Carol McKenna, of Valley Stream. She was preceded in death by her sons, Jay and Brian, in 1996 and 2000, respectively.
