Mercer Island Skater Fondly Remembers '52 Olympics

The last time the Winter Olympics were in Norway, in 1952, Eastern-bloc security police kept an eye on Seattle pairs skaters Peter and Karol Kennedy, a brother-sister team who would win a silver medal.

Recalled Peter, "They thought we'd helped a Hungarian pair defect two years earlier in London," where the Kennedys had become the first U.S. pair to win a world title.

Now 66 and a ski-equipment representative living on Mercer Island, Peter Kennedy said this week that along with the Cold War, the sport has moved on: to triple jumps, spectacular lifts and throws, and theatricality and athleticism undreamed of in 1952.

In Peter Kennedy's era, male skaters could lift the woman only while transferring from one foot to another.

"What we used to call `carry lifts,' so spectacular today, were adagio skating, done only in professional shows," he said.

Kennedy is 5 feet 9, only a little taller than his sister. Nevertheless, "I could do all the lifts we were permitted on one foot and sneak in a few the others weren't yet doing," he recalled.

The Kennedys started skating when their hometown, Olympia, acquired a rink. Peter was 12 and Karol 8. Within two years they won the Pacific Coast pairs championship and starting in 1948 were national champions for five straight years; in 1949 and 1951, they won the North American title.

Their success stemmed from innate athletic talent, hard work and help from their dentist father, Michael Kennedy, who photographed their practices to spot and correct defects in their techniques.

When the Olympia rink was threatened with closure, their dad bought it.. When Peter was 16, the family moved to Seattle to be closer to the children's skating coach.

Their mother, Clarice Kennedy, made Karol's costumes. In 1947, Clarice also made a costume for Peter.

"We were told we didn't win (the national title) that year because I was in costume instead of a tux," he recalled. "I went back to the tux and won with it in 1950, when the other men had gone to costumes."

Michael Kennedy sold a house, mortgaged a yacht and moved his practice into smaller quarters to keep his kids on track to the world title. Before he died in the mid-1970s, he told a sportswriter his kids' skating cost him more than $50,000.

The 1952 Olympics were the Kennedys' final skating contest. The Eastern bloc had it in for them; Kennedy said if the East German Olympic judge had put them one place higher (11th rather than 12th), he and Karol would have topped the German pair that won the gold medal.

They weren't bitter, he said, but thought it was time to move on.

A skater's superb physical conditioning enabled Peter within three years to come within a hair of making the U.S. Olympic ski team.

He turned to improving ski equipment, invented and manufactured the first aluminum ski poles and the first all-aluminum skis, and helped outfit the 1964 U.S. Olympic ski team. He pioneered the foam-filled ski boot. Also a windsurfer and water-skier, he was a developer of the banana water ski.

Karol married Robert Kucher, now a Seattle remodeling contractor, had six children and owns a children's shop in Madison Park. Peter married Sally Moffitt in 1957; with a son and two daughters, they have lived on Mercer Island for almost 30 years.

In 1992, Peter and Karol were inducted into the U.S. Figure Skating Association's Hall of Fame in Colorado Springs, Colo., along with Dorothy Hamill and pairs skaters Tai Babilonia and Randy Gardner.

Peter has never been back to the Olympics. Watching the games on television, he commended the camera-work but sympathized with "all the parents and friends who'd love to see their kid come in 35th, instead of all the time given over to interminable hype that makes heroes out of a few key people."