Did you know that Feeney Road in the Town of Ossining is named after Ensign Mary Feeney Gordenstein, a US Navy nurse who died in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on April 14, 1943?

Mary Feeney was born in Ossining on September 11, 1916, to John and Ida Mae (Farren) Feeney.  Her father was a desk clerk for the Ossining Police.

They first rented a house at 72 South Highland Avenue and then moved to 31 Hamilton Avenue.

Both houses still stand today:

Mary went to Ossining High School, graduating in 1933. She then went on to study at the Cochran School of Nursing at St. John’s Riverside Hospital, Yonkers, graduating in 1937.  

The census for 1940 has her working in “private practice.”  In August 1941, she entered the US Navy Nurse Corps as an Ensign and spent at least four months in training before being shipped out. (For more on the US Navy Nurse Corps see here and here.)

When Ensign Feeney joined up, there were only about 800 Navy nurses on active duty.  By the end of World War II, over 11,000 nurses, both active and reserve, were serving in the Navy.  

Ensign Feeney’s initial posting is still unclear, but in May of 1942 she married Bernard Joseph Gordenstein in Hillsborough, New Hampshire.  He was also in the Navy, serving as a pharmacist. (This bit of information came as something of a surprise to the members of the Feeney family consulted for this exhibit.  This might explain why the road is named Feeney and not Gordenstein.)

At some point, after the December 7, 1941 Pearl Harbor attacks, Ensign Mary Feeney was posted to Hawaii and served at the Pearl Harbor Naval Hospital.  This was where injured warriors, primarily those from the Pacific Theatre of Operations, were stabilized before they were sent back to the US.

Here’s a 1942 photo from the U.S. Navy Bureau of Medicine and Surgery — while I can’t prove it, I have a feeling that the third nurse from the left, in the back row, might be our Mary Feeney.

And in the photo below, the nurse seated in the front row all the way on the left actually does look very much like Ensign Feeney. (What do you think?) If it is, it would have been taken just four months before her death.

Sadly, Ensign Mary Feeney’s career in the US Navy was brief – she died of pneumonia on April 14, 1943 while stationed at the Pearl Harbor Naval Hospital.   

She was posthumously awarded the Bronze Star for “Heroic or Meritorious Achievement or Service.”

She is buried in the Punchbowl National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific on Oahu.

And in 1963, the Town of Ossining would name a street in the newly completed Lakeville Estates subdivision after her.