Meet Your Neighbor
Anne Kronenberg
BY MARY LANCASTER INDEPENDENT WRITER

ROBBENCHLEY/The Independent

Date of birth "Guess," she said.

Likes most about Nantucket The peacefulness.

Likes least about Nantucket The cost of living.

Favorite TVshow Any news program. Anne Kronenberg views life as an adventure, and she has taken advantage of her years to learn as much as possible about ways to reach out to people in need, visit a number of places around the globe and extend her abilities here and elsewhere to improve lives and relationships. And, by the way, she initiated the island's Christmas Stroll.

Born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio, after high school Kronenberg earned her bachelor's degree in nursing from the Cornell, New York Hospital School of Nursing. She married a doctor she met while in college and worked as a home visit nurse while the couple began their family of three sons and two daughters. In 1960 she moved to Westport, Conn. At that point she had left nursing, and besides concentrating on raising her children, she immersed herself in a lot of volunteer opportunities. One was with a pre-school program in Bridgeport, Conn. which became a model for the Head Start program for disadvantaged children and was featured in a Lookmagazine article.

"I loved that job," she said. "I brought a lot of the kids home so my kids could see how fortunate they were."

Kronenberg and her children started spending half-summers on Nantucket in the early 1960s and in 1971 decided to make the island their home - "which had always been a dream of mine," she said, sitting in her cheerful cottage in the company of Lilac the cat.

When she first lived here she had the job of second floor hostess at Cap'n Tobey's but also found time to travel with the children. In 1974, a friend who owned a local business was lamenting about the lack of sales during the offseason. Kronenberg had been involved with a group in Westport who initiated a Christmas Walk to stimulate holiday shopping, and she took that idea to David Worth, who was then Executive Director of the island's Chamber of Commerce. Worth thought it was an interesting concept to try and the first Christmas Stroll was launched.

Five years later, Kronenberg moved to Boston to work as a psychiatric nurse while earning her master's degree in education at Harvard. In 1983 she was recruited to become the first psychiatric liaison at D.C. General Hospital in Washington, working with staff and patients. Kronenberg remained in Washington until 1987 when she was employed as a nurse practitioner in Florida before returning to Nantucket in 1990 and becoming a nurse at Our Island Home.

Still yearning for new experiences and knowledge, Kronenberg began missionary training in Hawaii and subsequently was asked by her group to go to Romania. While there for four years she established Eastern Europe's first psychiatric rehabilitation program and worked with the Peace Corps and World Vision. World Vision sent her to Bosnia where she led a psycho-social program for young children who had lost one or both parents in the Bosnian War to assist them in recovering from their traumatic experiences.

After six months she came home to Nantucket again and moved into her permanent home.

"I decided that that was enough overseas work," said Kronenberg.

Nevertheless, not one to sit still too long, Kronenberg commuted weekly between the island and Brockton for 10 years while she was a psychiatric nurse practitioner with the Bethel Family Medical Group. She retired from there last November and opened her own business on Nantucket as a therapist.

In her free time, Kronenberg enjoys reading, especially history and biography, and being with her grandchildren, three of whom live on Nantucket and two in Illinois. She is pretty certain her wandering days are over.

"I'm settled down - as long as

there's a plane," she laughed. I