When volunteers arrive at the new Cincinnati Public Radio studios in Evanston, they’ll turn off Dana Avenue onto Beverly Kinney Way.
Realistic Avenue, at the stoplight next to the station at 2117 Dana Ave., was given the ceremonial designation of Beverly Kinney Way Thursday, April 24, to honor WGUC-FM’s longest-tenured volunteer posthumously.
“We had the option of where to put it, and for all her years of volunteering at WGUC-FM we thought it was appropriate to do it there (on Realistic Avenue),” says Ed Cloughessy, who was married to Kinney for 17 years. He researched Cincinnati’s ceremonial street-naming program and submitted the application to the city.
Kinney, a retired Princeton Schools gifted education teacher, was struck and killed by a Cincinnati Metro bus while crossing Duck Creek Road in a crosswalk on Jan. 11, 2024. She was walking back to her Hyde Park residence after checking out the construction progress of the new Scripps Family Center for Public Media, about a quarter-mile east of Duck Creek Road.
“She had said she couldn't wait for it to open because then she would be able to walk to her volunteering job,” says her son, John Kinney, a Monfort Heights Elementary School music teacher who performed several times on WVXU-FM when it broadcast from the Xavier University campus.
The Cincinnati arts patron was WGUC-FM’s “longest-serving volunteer — more than four decades," says Conrad Thiede, the stations’ director of major and planned gifts. "She answered phones during fund drives, represented the station at public events, and wrote thousands of personal notes to listeners and supporters. Yes — thousands.”
“I’m told she was there longer than many of the employees,” Cloughessy says.
Cincinnati Public Radio, which invites the public to an open house this weekend, also has honored Kinney by naming the volunteer hub for her. The Beverly Kinney Volunteer Center is on the first floor on the north side of the building, right inside the huge glass windows at the corner of Dana Avenue and Beverly Kinney Way.
Son Jeff Kinney says his mother had a lifelong love of classical music.
“We always had classical music on the radio, even when WEBN had classical music on Sunday mornings. We would go to Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra concerts when I was growing up and we loved the concerts in the parks in the summertime,” says Jeff, who drove in from Connecticut to speak at the unveiling 10 a.m. Thursday.
Cincinnati Vice Mayor Jan-Michele Lemon Kearney, and Rich Eiswerth, Cincinnati Public Radio president, CEO and general manager, also spoke at the ceremony along with John Kinney and Cloughessy.
Jeff Kinney says the family is setting up a charitable foundation in his mother’s honor to support the arts and nonprofit social services she was involved with in Greater Cincinnati. She was a longtime patron of the CSO, Playhouse in the Park, Cincinnati Shakespeare Company and Ensemble Theatre of Cincinnati. While teaching fifth and sixth graders at Princeton’s Robert E. Lucas Intermediate School in Sharonville, she produced two student-created operas. And twice she attended summer opera workshops at New York’s Metropolitan Opera House.
After the Kinney family moved from Sharonville to Lebanon in 1974, she continued teaching at Princeton Schools until retiring in 1988. Kinney and Cloughessy moved from Lebanon to Hyde Park about seven years ago. In January she was posthumously honored by the Martin Luther King Jr. Community Coalition of Lebanon with a Drum Major award for adult leadership.
“She was highly regarded by so many organizations," Cloughessy says. "She was always very generous to them.”
John Kiesewetter’s reporting is independent. WVXU only edits his stories for style and grammar.
