Liz and Pearse Kerr
There are so many facets to Liz Kerr’s personality; it’s hard to know where to start.
She’s a registered nurse on the heart transplant team at Temple University Hospital.
She is a political activist, devoted to the cause of a united Ireland.
She co-founded Ladies AOH Brigid McCrory Division 25. Liz is the division’s Freedom for All Ireland officer.
She holds dual U.S.-Irish citizenship.
She is married to Pearse Kerr, who was a political prisoner in Belfast’s Crumlish Road Jail for three months in the mid-1970s. He was her “history project” when she was a senior at Cardinal Dougherty. “If we could get a speaker to come in, it would count as a project,” she recalls. “Pearse came in and spoke after he got out of prison. That was 32 years ago.”
She is a budding author and playwright. Her story, “Summer of Dark Shadows,” was published in Philly Fiction 2. She developed the story as part of a class at Arcadia University, where she was pursuing a master’s degree in English. “Some women do ceramics,” she says of her literary pursuits. “I like to do this for my hobby. It’s just this need to tell stories that the Irish have.”
Liz Kerr could be regarded as inspirational in many respects—not just for deftly pursuing so many interests but for the skill with which she holds her busy life together.
But Liz has one other very particular interest—one that might surprise you if you didn’t know her. It’s skateboarding.
It isn’t that Liz herself has any unusual skill on the board. She doesn’t perform Ollies, double kickflips, switch backside crooks or any of the typical skateboarder moves. But you probably won’t find a more ardent supporter of the sport or the kids who pour their energies into it.
Liz draws her inspiration and sense of devotion from the life and passions of her skateboard-advocate son Patrick, who died in a skateboard accident in 2002 at the age of 15. Patrick was a student at Roman Catholic High School who tirelessly lobbied for skate parks in the city—including Philadelphia’s skateboard Mecca, LOVE Park. Like any parent faced with such a horrific loss, she grieved. But she also resolved to pay tribute to his memory by continuing to support the sport he loved.
“Patrick was an activist in his own right, and very involved in the LOVE Park issue,” she says. “After we lost him we kept working on that. This past summer, we did the ribbon cutting for the Patrick Kerr Skate Park.”
Liz and her husband also instituted the Patrick Kerr Skateboard Scholarship Fund— the first college scholarship fund in the country for skateboarders. Liz is also a co-founder of Franklin’s Paine Skatepark Fund, a non-profit focused on building public skateboard parks in the city.
Nothing can bring Patrick back, but much of him continues to live on in the work performed in his memory.
“At a young age he knew that if you don’t give kids some place to skate, then they’ll be on the street … and that’s how he died. If you look at it, they have no safe place to go, that was something I really wanted to get for these kids.”
