Eleanor Dunfey-Freiburger recently took home the 2021 New Hampshire Writers Project People’s Choice Award in the Non-fiction category for her candid account of the 100-year saga of her very large family–the Dunfeys. “Counter Culture: Clams, Convents, and a Circle of Global Citizens” portrays the story of a hard-working Irish-American pair, LeRoy “Roy” Dunfey and Catherine “Kate” Manning Dunfey and their 12 offspring–yes, a full dozen children.
Kate and Roy wed in Lowell, MA, along with 24 other couples at the rectory of St. Patrick parish. No one could afford a church wedding. With little formal education or resources, they turned to their store of humor, entrepreneurial zest and spiritual roots and with those, collared the American dream. That dream began in 1915 with Dunfey’s orchestra, a luncheonette, and a baby every two years through the Great Depression to the doorstep of World War II. Written by the youngest, Dunfey-Freiburger reveals the lasting influence her parents had on each of their children.
“I am #12,” the author said, “the last of what I call the originals’ in my family. I felt I needed to tell the stories of my 11 siblings and parents because I had a unique lens into each of their lives. We ‘grew’ around the kitchen table and over that luncheonette counter in the immigrant enclave of Lowell’s ‘Acre’ where, as Kate said, ‘Each of the 12 kids learned about the world from their Dad.’”
Roy taught all of the children to run the family business and after three sons returned from WWII, the family opened a clam stand at the beach in Hampton, NH. The Dunfeys who had digested much political fare around the kitchen table in their early years, went on to make their mark in New Hampshire and national Democratic politics, while the four sisters entered religious life and became educators until each moved beyond that formal service.
The Dunfey Family Corporation eventually became Omni International Hotels and, in 1968, purchased the then bankrupt historic Parker House. It became the base from which they responded to the many national and global crises of that era, and they did so by doing what they did best: hospitality. Welcoming and including people diverse in age, economic status, gender, and race to gather around tables of conversation building trust and common ground are the roots of any sustainable community change. From hotel boardrooms and across continents to Northern Ireland, South Africa and Cuba, the extended family of Global Citizens Circle is still around the table of civic and civil conversation, a free, not-for-profit, which celebrates its 50th anniversary in 2022. It is their parents’ legacy.
“Although the saga of 100 years is the story of one very large family, it portrays, as well, the belief that the values of hard work, humor, hospitality and song can be woven together as we all make our meaning in life’s imperfect places: our families, churches, businesses, political and social ‘homes,’” said Dunfey-Freiburger. “It is my hope that anyone who reads about our family takes away a sense that we all need to move from success to significance in the time that we have here.”
Profits from sales of “Counter Culture: Clams, Convents, and a Circle of Global Citizens” go to the Sisters of Notre Dame at St. Patrick’s School where the sisters have served poor and immigrant families for 170+ years. “The SNDs ‘survived’ teaching all 12 Dunfeys and four cousins!”
“The NH Writers’ Project Peoples’ Choice Award is such an honor especially because, at the heart of this local to global saga, is hospitality, the spirit of welcoming and including all people, and as my parents said, ‘treating each as a guest in our own home,” said Dunfey-Freiburger.
Dunfey-Freiburger has been a teacher of writing, an informal writer, and editor for over 40 years. Learn more about the author at https://dunfey.wixsite.com/dunfeycounterculture and visit the family’s non-profit organization at https://globalcitizenscircle.org/. Dunfey-Freiburger’s book has been featured on New Hampshire Chronicle and can be purchased at independent bookstores, through Amazon, and Barnes & Noble.
