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Forty-one years before John F. Kennedy inspired a generation with his “ask not” call to service, he was a 3-year-old boy living in a cramped second-floor bedroom in Brookline, Mass. JFK’s boyhood home provided a modest start on the road to greatness.

It’s doubtful that JFK remembered much about the nine-room Colonial Revival-style house at 83 Beals St. It was here that his parents began to shape his early life.

You can visit JFK’s boyhood home, which is now managed by the National Park Service. Rangers field questions in a basement gift shop. And you can take a tour of most of the house that includes recorded memories from Rose Kennedy.

Rose and Joseph Kennedy moved into the home in 1914, shortly after Joe married Rose Fitzgerald. Joe insisted on owning a home rather than living with either of the couple’s prominent parents partly. This was a signal of his ambition for what was to come. He “had a strong need for privacy, for independence, for being able to choose the people he wanted to be with in close association,” Rose said later.

The home was the birthplace of the first four of nine Kennedy children. JFK arrived on May 29, 1917 as the second child after Joseph, Jr. and before Rosemary and Kathleen. Eunice, Patricia, Robert, Jean, and Ted would come later.

Kennedy Loyalty Learned in Brookline

The tightly knit Kennedy family forged its early bonds in Brookline. Joe and Rose taught their children about filial loyalty, love of knowledge, Irish Catholic pride, and social rank.

Family loyalty became a hallmark of the Kennedys, especially with Robert Kennedy, who idolized his older brother. Especially after an assassin’s bullet ended the JFK presidency on Nov. 22, 1963 in Dallas.

In his chronicle of Lyndon B. Johnson’s 1964 campaign, Theodore White writes this family bond.

“Robert F. Kennedy, who loved his brother more than he loved himself, saw John F. Kennedy, even while alive, as more than a person—as the flag of a cause. His brother was for him not only the occasion of brotherly love but a new departure in American purpose.”

JFK remembered his childhood fondly, later writing about “a very special affection” for the place of his birth.

The Kennedys left the home in 1920 with a growing family. They moved into a larger home at 51 Abbotsford Road, also in Brookline due to Joe’s business success.

They would leave that home in 1927 for the Bronx, New York, and a Riverdale mansion with views of the Hudson River.

In 1969, Rose Kennedy remembered the years on Beals Street.

“We were happy here and although we did not know about the days ahead, we were enthusiastic and optimistic about the future,” Rose remembers in a recording that you hear at the last stop on the tour in the kitchen.