By the time Rosemary Kennedy arrived in 1949, Saint Coletta was well established as one of the better private residential programs in the country for people with intellectual disabilities. Archbishop Cushing’s recommendation of it to Joe Kennedy reflected both its Catholic character and its reputation for quality care — reputation being, in 1949, the primary criterion on which families of means made such decisions, since the formal quality standards and oversight mechanisms that exist today had not yet been developed.
The Kennedy cottage, built about a mile from the main Saint Coletta campus, gave Rosemary a residential arrangement distinct from the main residential buildings. She had her own space, her own routine, her assigned caregivers. This arrangement was unusual for a residential institution resident and reflected both the Kennedy family’s ability to pay for something different and Joe Kennedy’s apparent desire to give his daughter as comfortable a physical environment as possible while still keeping her out of the family’s public life.
The Sisters who cared for Rosemary over the decades at Saint Coletta were not mentioned by name in most of the public accounts of her life, and their individual stories are not publicly documented in sources accessible for this article. What the accounts that do exist suggest is that they were people who took their caregiving seriously and who knew Rosemary as an individual rather than as a patient or a symbol. The fact that Elizabeth Koehler-Pentacoff’s aunt was among Rosemary’s caregivers, and that Koehler-Pentacoff wrote an entire book partly based on those family memories, speaks to the depth of relationship that the Saint Coletta caregivers formed with Rosemary over decades.