Did you know? — The Kennedy-Chaney Legacy: From a frontier classroom to Hollywood’s “Man of a Thousand Faces”

In 1893, a 10-year-old Colorado Springs boy named Leonidas "Lon" Chaney left fourth grade at Lincoln Elementary to care for his bedridden mother and his younger siblings. Both of Lon's parents, Frank and Emma (Kennedy) Chaney, were deaf, and as Emma struggled with inflammatory rheumatism, her son spent hours at her bedside inventing wordless performances-pantomimes that mimicked neighbors, relayed the news of the day, and proved how a story could be told without sound. Those homegrown shows became his training ground. As biographer Michael F. Blake noted, Chaney's daily ritual honed the graceful movement and expressive hands that would later define one of the silent era's greatest actors.

Lon's Colorado story begins a generation earlier with his maternal grandfather, Jonathan Ralston Kennedy (1824-1883). Born in Brown County, Ohio-the grandson of Jonathan "John" Ralston Kennedy and Elizabeth "Betsy" Pitzer Kennedy-Jonathan lost his father, William Hugh Kennedy, to the cholera epidemic of 1845. A decade later, his widowed mother, Margaret Jane Ralston Kennedy, led roughly twenty-five family members west to Douglas County, Kansas, settling along the Wakarusa River in a place that came to be called Kennedy Valley. Margaret lived to eighty-seven and saw her large clan (Jonathan was one of thirteen children) push the frontier forward.

Jonathan and his wife Mary had three deaf children, a family reality that transformed him into an educational pioneer. In Kansas, he befriended Philip A. Emery, a deaf teacher from Indiana, and persuaded him to open a small private school with $250 borrowed from Kennedy relatives. In 1861, they rented a modest Baldwin City house for five dollars a month; tuition was partly paid in produce and barter. That humble start became the Kansas School for the Deaf, the state's oldest educational institution.

By 1873, the Kennedys had moved to Colorado Springs, where Jonathan again set out to create opportunity close to home. With territorial support-$5,000 in funding-and the advocacy of community leaders, he opened the Colorado Institute for the Education of Muteson April 8, 1874, in a rented house downtown with seven students, three of them his own children. Land on Knob Hill was later donated and gave the school a permanent campus; in 1877, it began serving blind students as well. The institution is known today as the Colorado School for the Deaf and the Blind (CSDB).

It was at this school-also a social hub for the deaf community-that Jonathan's daughter, Emma Alice Kennedy met Frank H. Chaney, a Colorado Springs barber who, neighbors said, never left the same shop from 1884 onward. Despite deep roots-Frank's great-grandfather was the Ohio congressman John Chaney, and Emma's father had founded CSDB-the young family struggled financially and changed addresses often across working-class neighborhoods near Walnut, Spruce, and Shooks Run. From an early age Lon pitched in: he led Pikes Peak tours at fourteen, hung wallpaper, and even helped with reconstruction after the Antlers Hotel burned, all while absorbing stagecraft from his older brother, a stage manager at the Colorado Springs Opera House. The brothers formed a troupe, wrote a play-The Little Tycoon-and took to the vaudeville circuit. By 1910, Lon had reached the new film colony in Hollywood.

Stardom arrived slowly and then all at once. After dozens of supporting roles, Chaney's breakthrough came in 1919 with The Miracle Man, followed by the towering performances that cemented his legend: Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) and the masked genius of The Phantom of the Opera (1925). Branded the "Man of a Thousand Faces," he devised and applied his own transformative makeups-sometimes painfully restrictive-to embody society's outsiders with startling compassion. Though often associated with horror, he played many straight roles and was admired for versatility and craft. In 1930, he made his only talkie, a sound remake of The Unholy Three, famously performing multiple distinct voices himself. He died later that year, at forty-seven, of throat cancer.

Chaney never moved back to Colorado Springs, but he never forgot where his voice-silent though it was-began. In 1925, he hosted a special screening of Phantom for students at CSDB, honoring the school his grandfather had founded and his parents had attended. His mother, Emma, died in 1914 and rests in Evergreen Cemetery, where the intertwined stories of the Kennedys, CSDB, and the Chaneys still speak-without words-to grit, ingenuity, and the enduring power of empathy.