Counter Culture, Dunfey

Ordering Information

$27.95, 7 x 10, hardcover, 320 pages, full color endpapers,
ISBN: 978-1-942155-15-7
To order copies visit Casemate IPM.

2021 Reader’s Choice Award from the NH Writers Project in the Nonfiction Category! 

Counter Culture: Clams, Convents, and a Circle of Global Citizens

by Eleanor Dunfey-Freiburger

Readers’ Comments

“This spirited and spiritual journey of the Dunfey family is shared in loving, often humorous
stories that reach from a mill town in America to townships in South Africa. Thank God for
parents who inspired their twelve children to make a difference in our world.”

—Archbishop Emeritus Desmond and Mrs. Leah Tutu

“The Dunfey family have been faithful, long-term voices for children. I am so grateful Eleanor
Dunfey has chosen to share these stories and her family’s inspiring legacy.”

—Marian Wright Edelman, president, Children’s Defense Fund

““I loved the book! It’s an uplifting story of the Dunfey family’s values, their respect for their
individual differences and their determination to work together constructively in life and
in business.”

—Jim Stamas, former chief administrative o cer, Omni Hotels, and founding dean, Boston
University’s School of Hospitality

“If you want to learn how to achieve in business, faith, socal justice, and politics … then this is
the book for you.”

—Monica McWilliams, founder of Women’s Coalition Party, Northern Ireland, and global
advocate for human rights

When LeRoy ‘Roy”Dunfey called out “Hey…Dunfey” in his fried clam restaurant in the 1940s, at least seven of his twelve children would turn around. Then he’d point to the one he needed without having to remember names. Roy and Catherine ‘Kate’ Manning had met and married thirty years earlier as teenage workers in Lowell, Massachusetts textile mills. With little formal education or resources, but with a store of humor, entrepreneurial zest, and spiritual roots, they collared the American dream starting out in 1915 with Dunfey’s Orchestra, a luncheonette, and a baby every two years through the Great Depression to the doorstep of World War II. Written by their twelfth child, this saga reveals the lasting influence her parents had on each of their dozen kids: around the kitchen table digesting political fare; over restaurant counters meeting a diverse world of people; into and out of convents serving as educators; on to Boston’s Parker House, Omni International Hotel boardrooms, and, for forty-five years, still around the table of the family’s not-for-profit Global Citizens Circle’s civil dialogues.

Profits from the sale of this book will go to the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur who have served immigrant communities at St. Patrick’s School, Lowell, MA, for 167 years.

About the Author

Eleanor Dunfey is the youngest in a family of twelve children. She is a graduate of Emmanuel College in Boston and the University of San Francisco and was a Sister of Notre Dame deNamur for thirteen years. She is professor emerita of ethics and civic engagement at Southern New Hampshire University and is the recipient of honorary degrees from Southern New Hampshire University and Franklin Pierce University. Eleanor is married to Dr. James Freiburger, professor emeritus at SNHU. They have two grown children and five grandchildren.