Love under the El: Caring in Kensington for 50 years

Kensington Avenue gets a lot of press for the opiate heartbreak that deeply impacts the surrounding community. But for Bea and David Kelley — who will celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary on April 19 — love blossomed for them on the road under the El, and they’ve been sharing it with others ever since.

Bea and David grew up just a few blocks from each other — David on the 2800 block of C Street, Bea on the 2800 block of Kensington Avenue.

“I always tell people that I don’t have friends,” says David, 71. “I only have one friend — and that’s her. Everyone else is an acquaintance.”

“I knew from the minute I saw him,” says Bea, 69. “He was the one.”

The couple first noticed each other at a dance in October 1965 at Mastbaum High School on Frankford Avenue. Bea was 16, and David was 17.

“That was it that night,” says David. But he was too shy to ask her out. So Bea, who often spotted David and his friends hanging out near Martin’s Deli at Kensington and Somerset, began making it a point to be there.

“I never saw her,” David said. “Then, all of a sudden, she started going back and forth to Martin’s.”

Still, it took David a few weeks to make a move, and when he did, he asked her through a friend — Joey DeMuzio.

“He couldn’t even ask me himself,” says Bea.

They got engaged soon after, while Bea was still a senior in high school. Instead of Bea getting a class ring, David gave her an engagement ring — so she could show her friends, he says.

The Vietnam War intruded on the couple in 1968 when David was drafted. He and Bea wrote each other while David was deployed, and Bea remembers the local mailman avoiding her when he didn’t have a letter from overseas.

“He knew David was in Vietnam,” Bea says. “So he knew every week I would look for him and say, ‘You have anything for me today?’”

On April 19, 1969, just thirteen days after David’s tour ended, the couple married at Twelfth United Presbyterian Church at Ruth and Somerset Streets.

Tragically, some things had changed during the year David was away. His friend Joe Lodise, who was going to be best man at David and Bea’s wedding, was killed in Vietnam on May 1, 1968. Lodise was a graduate of Kensington’s Thomas Alva Edison High School, which lost a staggering 64 alums in the war — more than any other high school in the nation.

“You know how there are people that shouldn’t be in certain situations?” David says. “He was a kid that shouldn’t have been in Vietnam.”

David had changed, too. Like many combat vets, he returned from the war with post-traumatic stress disorder.

“The week before we got married, we were walking down Kensington Avenue, and a car backfired — I almost jumped behind the car,” David says. With the help of a therapist, he worked through the symptoms (though he says he still experiences occasional flare-ups).

Around the same time, David says, the neighborhood was transitioning into a place he didn’t recognize. He noticed an influx of drugs on the streets — a stark contrast to the neighborhood in which they grew up.

Today, he says, “If I met you and you lived in Mayfair, and you said, ‘Well, where you from?’ and I said, ‘Kensington,’ you’d say, ‘Oh, my god, how do you not get shot?’”

But that’s not the Kensington of his childhood memories.

“It wasn’t like that,” he says. “You left your doors open back then.”

The Kelleys settled into married life with David working for Local #14 of the Insulators Union and Bea working at Dobbins, a local ladies’ and children’s clothing store. They stayed in the neighborhood for 20 more years before moving to the Northeast, but not before something happened that would forever change their family’s path.

When their daughter Lisa was younger, she had been close friends with a girl who lived across the street, but the friendship faltered as the girl struggled with addiction to crack. They reconnected in the late ’90s when Lisa and her husband took temporary custody of the friend’s children — ages 9, 10, and 12.

Immediately, Bea and David took on grandparent roles, hosting a “shower” to provide the many items needed for this instant addition to the family. The 9- and 12-year old lived with Lisa and her husband for two-and-a-half years. The 10-year-old, Artie, stayed for five, before moving in with his biological family. Lisa later discovered he was using drugs — the beginning of a long battle with addiction.

“Loving Artie,” says Lisa, made the entire Kelley family “open our eyes to things that we probably wouldn’t have otherwise.”

In 2017, Lisa and artist Kathryn Pannepacker launched a weekly program called Tea & Textiles, which focuses on weaving and other craft-making. It takes place at the Kensington Storefront, a community art-making space inside the onetime Dobbins clothing store, Bea’s former employer. Across the street is Bea’s childhood home, and right next door is Martin’s Deli — the very place where a very shy David first approached Bea for a date so many years before.

And fate has brought the couple back to the place where their love story began.

Bea and David bring supplies and snacks to Tea & Textiles every Tuesday, helping with setup and breakdown and making conversation with participants — many of whom struggle with addiction or issues related to behavioral health. Some of the volunteers call Bea and David “mom and dad,” says Lisa, and program participants are touched when they learn that Lisa is Bea and David’s daughter.

“When they find out, people say, ‘Oh my gosh, you’re so lucky to have your parents here with you,’” Lisa says. “These are people coming off the street, overcome that my parents are here, too.”

Bea says that volunteering at the storefront is her and David’s way of giving back to the community where so much of their lives have played out, but Lisa believes their motivations are more nuanced than that. She thinks they’re involved because of knowing and loving Artie, which has had a therapeutic effect on her family, especially her normally reserved father.

“This is the first time I’ve seen my dad hug people,” Lisa says. While volunteering, David spends a lot of time outside the Storefront making conversation. He especially connects with the men there, some of whom are vets.

For Bea, the work has provided a new outlet for her natural empathy. She just wants people outside of Kensington to know that people who struggle with homelessness and addiction are still human beings.

“People need help — they need somebody that cares about them,” Bea said.

The way she and David — themselves born and raised in Kensington — have cared about each other and the community so beautifully for 50 years.

This story first appeared in Kensington Voice.