Jack Coan played football with Robert Kennedy at Harvard, and some forty years later rode on the train transporting RFK’s casket from St. Patrick’s Cathedral to the Arlington Cemetery. Later that same year, his wife, Jane, gave birth to their eighth child. To Jane and Jack, family is everything.
Jane, Jack & Eight Children, Family is Everything is the heartwarming and inspiring story of the Coan family of Beverly, Massachusetts. The entire family – including Jack and Jane’s children, daughters-in-law, sons-in-law, and grandchildren – share their experiences and convey their life lessons on a wide range of virtues that are becoming harder and harder to find today: overcoming obstacles, ingenuity and resourcefulness, integrity, trust in God, sacrifice, budgeting, the value of hard work and education, and above all, the blessings of a large family.
The life lessons come from both the good times – Thanksgiving Day football games in the back yard, vacations at Cape Cod, graduations, weddings, and births, and the hard times – growing up through the Great Depression and World War II, and battles with addiction, cancer, and dementia.
Through always engaging and often humorous slice-of-family-life stories, Jane, Jack, and the children answer the question most people ask when they hear about a family with eight children: How did they do it? You’ll read their secrets to getting eight children off to school (and getting them back home!), feeding ten people at a time, keeping kids entertained over the weekend, surviving Christmas morning, putting eight kids through college, and keeping the family so tightly-knit together after all of them have grown and scattered from coast to coast that the grandchildren would rather go to the annual family reunion at Cape Cod than on a trip to Europe.
Perhaps the most amazing testimony is the sentiment echoed by all the Coan children: “Even though Mom and Dad had all these kids, they found time to make each one of us feel special in our own way.”
Jane, Jack & Eight Children, Family is Everything is a guidebook for how to be a loving parent, grandparent, child, brother, sister, friend, and neighbor; on how to make memories and capture them; on how to build a family legacy that will continue for generations.