Peggy Jablonski was doing the classic Cape Cod bent elbow geographic description in front of a barefoot John F. Kennedy (the JFK museum as backdrop) on Main Street, Hyannis, a crowd of about 20 listening to her introduce a half-mile walking tour.
“I’m pulling in people, places, and stories most of us don’t know about,” Jablonski said, “and weaving in the Kennedys.” This makes sense because the Kennedys (“however imperfect they were,” she allowed) are an important element in Hyannis history — and the museum sponsors her tour.
Jablonski, from Brewster, is an historian who started taking “pilgrimages” around Cape Cod in 2020, Covid’s onset, “when you really couldn’t go anywhere” (indoors anyway), 15 miles a day sometimes. That led to a book, “Cape Cod Camino Way: Walking with a Purpose,” Hyannis among many walks.
She has long explored what we now call DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion, well before her take would be seen as “unAmerican,” before a dumb joke that the Kennedy museum might need to defy a demand to be re-named. This in part explains why she begins her tour with a statement:
“Every step we take is on land never ceded properly to white settlers,” she announced, a segue to a very different statue overlooking Main Street a few feet away, Wampanoag Sachem Iyannough, whose name morphed to Hyannis.
A few blocks west, we learned that a yellow Greek Revival, now a Brazilian restaurant, was the Bearse family homestead, and here’s the connection: In 1630 a Bearse married Sachem Iyannough’s daughter, they had 11 children, and Jablonski says some attribute that fertile intermarriage to a period of relative peace between Natives and settlers.
By the 1850s Austin Bearse, a sea captain who traded in the Caribbean, became an ardent abolitionist and joined the Cape Cod spur of the Underground Railroad, smuggling slaves to Canada and freedom.
Jablonski focuses on women. Mercy Otis Warren, another Barnstable native whose statue is in front of the courthouse on Route 6A, was “the most famous woman of the Revolution that none of us ever learned about, I guarantee you.” An incendiary writer like Thomas Paine, Jablonski purports Warren wrote the earliest version of the Bill of Rights, incorporated by James Madison into the Constitution.
In Kennedy-era conversation, Jablonski honed in on matriarch Rose and wife Jackie as misunderstood and underappreciated. One example: Jablonski argues that Jackie, with women like Rachel Carson who wrote “Silent Spring,” strongly supported JFK’s instincts toward environmental preservation, which played a role in his championing and creating the Cape Cod National Seashore.
Standing at the edge of the group, a cane for steadiness, Billie Stewart proudly wore a Vietnam era cap as he walked familiar streets, listening.
Born in Hyannis in 1944, a Barnstable High School grad, baptized at the Federated Church on Main Street, Billie’s time in Vietnam was the mid-1960s. But here’s a small, earlier claim to fame:
“I used to caddy for the Kennedys,” he smiled, “1958, 1959.” At 14, 15 years old he’d lug their clubs while they played a round, sometimes invited back to the Hyannisport compound — soon to become “the summer White House” — where he’d pick up a ride home.
“They were just like us,” he said. “I mean just people, they always treated me really well.”
He remains convinced that had Jack Kennedy lived, he would have pulled us out of Vietnam, so Billie’s life would have been very different. Historians differ on this point, but some agree.
The tour concluded at the Village Green between Main Street and Barnstable Town Hall, Jablonski sharing a few more thoughts about the Kennedys and her “alternative history” perspective. “All over the country there are walks like this, great ways to get to know a place if you’re visiting,” she added.
“You know one thing I learned, and really appreciate?” called Billie. “The valuable role women have played in the history of Cape Cod.”
Jablonski beamed. “Then I’ve accomplished something I hoped for,” she said.
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