By Alice Waugh
Three people with prominent Lincoln roles—Police Chief Kevin Mooney, deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum director Dennis Kois, and longtime assistant librarian Ellen Sisco—are moving on.
Mooney “looks back fondly” on Lincoln years
Mooney, 63, is retiring after 36 years with the Lincoln Police Department, 11 of them as chief. He joined the town force after working in Newton and Watertown as a dispatcher and rose through the ranks starting with his first position as patrolman in 1978. He was the juvenile officer and DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) officer until 1995, when he was promoted in inspector and later to lieutenant in 1997.
Kevin Mooney
Technology in police work has made great strides during Mooney’s tenure. “When I first came here, we didn’t have computers and the log was hand-written,” he recalled. “But this is still a profession where the people make it work and the technology just assists them.”
The Lincoln department has grown from a part-time staff when he arrived to a 24/7 operation with 13 officers plus five part-time civilian 911 dispatchers, Mooney said. It also works more closely with regional law enforcement. Mooney himself, a Watertown native, was one of the Lincoln officers who helped Watertown police during the house-to-house search for the Boston Marathon bombing suspects a year ago. That incident is certainly one of the most memorable for Mooney, along with other tragedies including the murder of a student at Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School in 2007 and a car crash that killed three Lincoln boys in 1980.
“I remember all the fatal car accidents I’ve been to, and it just breaks your heart,” he said. “In sad things, you see the strength of the community.”
Mooney has happier memories of his time as a juvenile officer. “I see young adults today who have own families and careers, and they remember you as their DARE officer and that’s kind of special,” he said, adding that a couple of those students are now police officers themselves in other towns.”
“Kevin cares deeply about the people of Lincoln and understands and respects our unique culture,” said Town Administrator Tim Higgins. “He was considered a go-to person in the department well before he became chief. He was trusted with difficult assignments because he has great police instincts and a natural way with people.
Mooney is “principally responsible for the transformation of our department into the model public safety organization that it has become,” Higgins continued. “He takes great pride in the professionalism of his officers but he has also instilled a service-oriented approach to policing. Our town and our officers are the better for it. On a personal note, it’s important to have colleagues that you respect and who inspire you to do your best work. I’m fortunate to have had Kevin as a trusted and supportive colleague for 20 years. I’ve learned a great deal from Kevin about Lincoln, about leadership and about dedication to your people.”
“You make some tough decisions and hope they’re the right decisions, and you help people. That’s what you really aim for,” Mooney said. “The town’s been very good to me. I look back fondly, and I have mixed emotions [about retiring], that’s for sure. This has been my life for a long, long time.”
Kois a “consensus builder” at deCordova
Kois has accepted a position as president and CEO of the Milwaukee Public Museum after six years at the deCordova and will leave his post in Lincoln at the end of April.
“Obviously it was a difficult decision. The deCordova is an amazing institution—there’s nothing like it in the world. Very few things that could have pulled me away,” said Kois, who grew up in Milwaukee. “It’s an opportunity to go back to where our families are and make sure my children get to know their grandparents better.”
Dennis Kois
Kois joined deCordova in 2008 after serving as director of the Grace Museum in Abilene, Texas, chief designer and head of publications and digital media at the Freer and Sackler Galleries at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and assistant chief designer of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. His accomplishments at deCordova include more than quadrupling fundraising over just five years, according to a press release from the museum.
The Milwaukee Public Museum is a natural history museum with about 750,000 visitors a year (more than Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, Kois noted), and owns more than 4.5 million objects. The deCordova gets 95,000 to 125,000 visitors a year, he said.
Looking back on his time at the deCordova, “one of things I’m most proud of is the progress we’ve made to be a better community member and a better neighbor, and part of the fabric of Lincoln life,” Kois said. Two years ago, the Lincoln Nursery School (LNS) relocated to the sculpture park campus, linking the museum and the community more closely, and the museum has also hosted programs with other public and private schools as well as fund-raising events for community groups.
“Bringing in the nursery school has been wonderful, not only for the kids but their parents,” said Gerry Frank, president of the deCordova’s board of trustees. “It’s become a national model of how kids are affected by art and it’s raised a lot of interest around the country.”
Also during Kois’s tenure, the deCordova officially added the “Sculpture Park” piece to its identity. The three elements—the museum, nursery school and sculpture park—now function in an integrated fashion, Frank said
When Kois arrived six years ago, “there was a bit more tension” between museum and town, “and I think Dennis has dispelled that very nicely. It’s a much happier place in that respect,” Frank said.
The deCordova board has formed a search committee to identify Kois’s successor, Frank said. “We’d love to have someone as soon as we can, but it needs to be the right person. Dennis is really a consensus builder, and we don’t want to lose those qualities.”
Sisco leaves a “vast and varied” role” after 35 years
Ellen Sisco, who retired from her post as assistant librarian at the Lincoln Public Library at the end of February, worked in Lincoln almost as long as Mooney. In its most recent issue, the library’s newsletter published a profile of Sisco, which is preprinted here with permission.
A Fond and Sad Goodbye to Ellen
On February 28, 2014, the town of Lincoln said a sad goodbye to Ellen Sisco, our remarkable assistant librarian. How we will manage without her is a mystery. Ellen came to Lincoln in 1979 planning to stay perhaps a year, and now 35 years later she has reluctantly decided to retire. Ellen was a loyal and stalwart member of the Library staff, bringing to the job an amazing array of skills and talents. Her broad-ranging interests made this a perfect job fit.
Ellen Sisco
The role of assistant librarian is vast and varied. Ellen was in charge of book selection and culling of books, book circulation, adult programing, publicity, scheduling of staff hours and vacations, community relations, and keeping the art gallery up and running. One of her most important and much-loved jobs was her Friday morning book group. Ellen began facilitating the group the first year she started her job in Lincoln and 35 years later it is still going strong.
Ellen reports that leading the book group was one of her favorite roles. She notes that it was “a ton of work” and that she “could have earned two Ph.D.s” from all she learned.” Her role was to select a year-long theme and find books that nicely meshed with it. In all these years the group has never repeated a theme. Selecting books, reading reviews, researching authors’ lives and finding supplemental material requires much time but is very rewarding.
Claire Mount, one of the original Friday Book Group participants, reports that Ellen “takes you into the book.” She provides so much research and is so knowledgeable, it is clear that she has put in hours of preparation. Claire goes on to say, “During other book groups folks read the book and then offer their opinions. Most book groups are great, but Ellen’s are exceptional.”
In addition to running the Friday group, Ellen ran two other book groups for shorter lengths of time. For three years a Shakespeare group met in the evenings and read plays. Another evening group focused on contemporary books and ran for two years.
Ellen reports that one of her other favorite things about the library was working closely with the Classic Jazz group which she helped run with the late Bill Poisson and Ed Williams. Bill and Ed selected music and speakers. Every spring the Friends of the Library continue to funds a live jazz performance.
She also enjoyed the wonderful Wednesday Salon which was led by the late Ethel MacKenzie, Martha DeNormandie, and Ellen Cannon. A small group met every week to hear Lincoln speakers talk about wide-ranging topics. Running the gallery on the first floor of the library has been, in Ellen’s own words, “terrifying, awful and great.” Currently there is an eight-year waiting list for this very successful program. The gallery is a “showcase for the very talented people who live in our community”. Ellen also participated three times on library literary trips to Europe and enjoyed every minute of them. These trips were started by former president of the Friends, the late Jane Telling.
Ellen enjoyed working with four great Library Directors. As she enters her retirement years, she is looking forward to spending more time with her family and becoming a first-time grandmother to her daughter’s soon-to-be-born baby in April. When asked if she plans to sleep in, Ellen replied that she will continue to go to bed at eight and get up at four. What do you do at four?” I asked. “I read, do puzzle, watch curling (during the Olympics), and work on researching ancestry,” she answered.
One of her aspirations is to take a “roots” trip to Norfolk, England where she can trace back ten generations, and to visit her husband Hugh Gerechter’s ancestry in Poznan, Poland. She also plans to travel around the U.S., with a stop at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio. Rock on Ellen! We wish you a long and happy retirement!