Clyde Kennedy walked with a limp because of a woodcutting accident when he was ten. (He sank an axe into his right foot while chopping wood at the cement factory.) His grandfather, Ezekiel Sankey, had owned the land on which west New Castle was built and had been largely responsible for bringing the first railroad to the town after the canal was abandoned, His cousin, Ira Sankey, was a world-famous singing evangelist whose hymn books sold millions of copies and who travelled the globe raising money for Christian causes. Clyde worked in a machine shop.

Clyde’s wife, Marie, gave birth to four children before dying at the age of thirty-five. He never remarried. Three of his children moved to California; one moved to Kansas. Clyde retired in 1959 and died of a heart attack in a rented room two years later, at the age of sixty-seven.