After 4½ years of registering Harvard’s voters, organizing poll workers, posting board meetings, keeping the town’s vital records of births and deaths, and the many other duties of town clerk, Marlene Kenney plans to retire in February.
Town Administrator Tim Bragan, in an email to the Press, said that Kenney’s retirement would be a loss for Town Hall: “The loss of Marlene is very sad. We wish her well but also wish she would not retire,” he wrote.
Town Clerk Marlene Kenney and Moderator Bill Barton at a town meeting in 2020. (Photo by Lisa Aciukewicz)
Kenney became Harvard’s town clerk in July 2017. A resident of Harvard since 1995, she had served as assistant town clerk in Groton for four years. And she had previously worked in Town Hall here as a receptionist, a dispatcher for the Council on Aging van, and an assistant town clerk to Janet Vellante.
As town clerk, Kenney has seen Harvard through some eventful times. Less than a year after she took office, she organized the April 2018 Town Meeting at which the construction of the new elementary school was approved—by far the largest town meeting in recent memory. That same year, the election for state representative was decided for Lori Trahan only after a districtwide recount; and as the town’s chief election officer, Kenney was in charge of Harvard’s recount. In the past two years, she has had to implement the many election changes necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I just decided it was time,” Kenney said of her retirement, in a brief interview with the Press. While one of her four children recently returned to Massachusetts, the other three have scattered across the country. Between her work and the pandemic, she said, she has not been able to visit them nearly as much as she would like to.
Besides travel, Kenney has plans aplenty for retirement. An avid reader, she says the Harvard librarians know her well. She looks forward to having enough reading time to finish a book within a few days. She also wants to continue a new activity she took up about a year ago—baking bread. With her daughter, she hopes to take some baking classes at the King Arthur Baking School in Norwich, Vermont. “And it will be nice to just go out and take a walk,” she added, a little wistfully.
