Family, Friends Gather to Mourn Kennedy Matriarch : Memorial: Rose Kennedy’s children, neighbors remember her unflappable dignity and love of life. Funeral is today after private wake.

Long before computers, she kept index cards detailing the health and school records of each of her nine children. At dinner time, she posted a newspaper article to serve as the evening’s discussion topic. To imbue her brood with a sense of history, she marched them off to Revolutionary War battle sites. If any of them fell out of line, her only surviving son, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, remembered, there was Rose Kennedy’s “mean right hand” to contend with.

“Mother would have made a great featherweight,” quipped the son, who last July marked her birthday by presenting her with 104 roses, one for every year of her life.

Felled by a devastating stroke in 1984, Rose Elizabeth Fitzgerald Kennedy nonetheless managed to persevere until Sunday night, when complications of pneumonia claimed her life. As family members converged on the seaside compound here in preparation for a private wake Monday night and a funeral in Boston’s North End this morning, friends and neighbors recalled a devoted wife and mother who presided over this country’s leading political dynasty.

Three sons served in the U.S. Senate. One won the White House. Two grandchildren have been elected to Congress. Another serves as a lieutenant governor.

“She will be remembered as the mother of the most politically spectacular and useful and modern political family of our time--there’s not another one like it,” said Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith, who first met Rose Kennedy more than 60 years ago and later served as an adviser to President John F. Kennedy.

“I think ‘matriarch’ is the right word,” agreed historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, who chronicled Mrs. Kennedy’s extraordinary life in her best-selling book “The Kennedys and the Fitzgeralds.”

More even than the achievements of any of the individual members of her family, “I think she will be remembered for creating that institution, the family--the Kennedys,” Goodwin said.

Bundled up against a cold winter wind that had the half-staffed flags here fluttering fiercely, some neighbors recalled intimate memories of Mrs. Kennedy. Following the death of her husband, multimillionaire businessman and former U.S. Ambassador to Great Britain Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., in 1969, she moved into the big, shingled house here that served as John F. Kennedy’s weekend White House. Before her stroke, she took a daily swim in the Atlantic, at the Kennedys’ private beach.

“Like clockwork,” said neighbor Sancy Newman, who grew up with the five Kennedy daughters, Mrs. Kennedy played golf at 4 each summer afternoon on the local course.

Once, while her husband was still alive, another neighbor, B.J. Ludtke, remembered Rose and Joe Kennedy driving “their big Oldsmobile” right onto the course, near the 13th hole. Ludtke, readying a shot, looked up in some dismay.

“Well, go ahead, finish your shot if you’re in a hurry,” he said Mrs. Kennedy told him.

Years later Ludtke accidentally sent a ball whizzing by Rose Kennedy’s ear. Ludtke rushed to her side, profusely apologetic. “Think nothing of it,” said Mrs. Kennedy. “You didn’t hit me.”

That kind of unflappable dignity is what cultural historian Laurence Leamer, author of “The Kennedy Women,” said he took away from his five years of research on the family.

“She just always had this positive sense of life,” Leamer said.

Friends said that even in the last years, as her sight and hearing faded, she loved to sit with the family at Sunday evening songfests. An Irish tune, they said, never failed to light her face with a smile.