James J. Kenney
American firefighter
James J. Kenney (1869 – March 23, 1916) was the first fire chief in the city of Berkeley, California. He oversaw the mechanization of the department in 1914, the first in the United States west of Mississippi.
Early life
Kenney was born in 1869 in San Francisco, California, one of 3 children. In 1871, his father, James J. Kenney, Sr., an Irish Australian immigrant, served for a year on the Board of Supervisors of the City and County of San Francisco, and was also a fire commissioner there from 1871 to 1875. Kenney's mother, Nellie, was born in Massachusetts of native-born parents. By 1880, Kenney's father moved to the East Bay, where he ran a saloon while his son attended school. After the death of his father, Kenney was taken in by an aunt, Sarah Landers, who operated a concession at the Berkeley Station of the Central Pacific's Berkeley Branch line on Shattuck Avenue in what became the downtown section of Berkeley. Upon her death in 1882, James and another aunt, Elizabeth Kenney, took over the concession. When the railroad (by then, the Southern Pacific) forced them out in 1891, his aunt acquired another location nearby on Center Street. The Kenney store sold books, stationery and candy, and even operated a small lending library.
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This entry incorporates text from “James J. Kenney” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.