About this time, Ruth met Nora Pyle, and the two concocted a scheme where one would drive their kids to school and the other would pick them up. Jef remembers staying at Nora's house after school and playing with her son, Richard. He would later be picked up by Ruth, who had taken Richard to school in exchange. Nora was an older lady, who also worked. She was probably a stabilizing influence on Ruth, and the 2 remained good friends with Ruth until she passed away in the 90s.

Bob recalls:

It’s a small world……

My mother’s father, Karl (Charley) Peterson, was a saloonkeeper and dealer in fine wines for 25 years before Prohibition in Ironwood, Michigan and had a 500 acre farm at Little Girl’s Point on the south shore of Lake Superior.[1] He retired from those businesses when the Volstead Act forced him out. [2] Because of his connections with the liquor people, and because of the convenient location of his frontage on the lake across from Canada, rumor tells us that he had the opportunity to participate in smuggling whiskey with the Kennedy Clan. My father’s aunt, Teresa Andersson got a job as an upstairs maid with a Chicago meat packing family, and when that family decided to retire in Pasadena California, they also took their household staff to Pasadena. There, Teresa married Magnus Sebelius and prospered. When the Ironwood iron mines became exhausted and my father was seeking employment, Aunt Teresa invited my father to come to California and to bring his small family. Meanwhile, AuntTeresa died of breast cancer and Uncle Magnus married Ingaborg Swanson, who was Gloria Swanson’s aunt. In Gloria’s autobiography[3], she blames Inga, as the one who started her cigarette smoking habit. Gloria, who starred in films, became the Mistress of Joseph Kennedy, Chairman of the Board of the RKO Theaters, and financier of F. D. R. ‘s campaign to end Prohibition in 1932, was appointed Ambassador to the Court of St. James and when Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, mother of John, Robert and Teddy, declined to go to London, Gloria accompanied Joe.[4]

In 1960, my cousin (by adoption by my first wife’s aunt), Roy Gates, and I, decided that we should go to the Democratic Party Convention and try to pick up some bumper stickers that we might get from the booth of Senator Johnson in the Los Angeles Biltmore Hotel. My family name would look good on my mailbox and on the bumper of my blue Chevrolet Impala convertible. It did not matter when Senator Kennedy won the Presidency with Johnson settling to only be Vice President.

In 1963, my divorce was finalized and I was courting Helena (Leny) Houben, a Dutch legal immigrant, who had decided to come to America while she was the dining room hostess on the Netherlands Steamship Company’s “Oldenbarnevelt” sailing twice around the world and visiting American ports-of-call. Leny, who had a job at the Beverly-Hilton Hotel, located at the westerly corner of Wilshire Blvd. and Santa Monica Blvd, had recently quit that job and was working at the Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles, asked me one Saturday morning to drive her back to the Beverly –Hilton so she could get her last paycheck. She directed me to parking at the Santa Monica Blvd. hotel loading dock and she was soon back in the car with her paycheck, and we drove East on Santa Monica. As we approached the traffic signal at Wilshire Blvd., four motorcycle escort policemen rode into the intersection and blocked us from crossing. Soon, a long convertible Lincoln Limousine coming from the West on Wilshire Blvd. with two people seated in the back with their feet on the backseat, waving at pedestrians along the sidewalks, John and Jackie! I immediately jumped up with my feet on our convertible’s driver’s seat and pulled Leny up so she was also standing. To the roar of motorcycle escorts, we caught the attention of John and Jacquelyn with our wild arm waving as they passed 20 feet across our windshield and they both happily waved back at us. One month later, John and Jackie were photographed by Zapruder in Dallas Texas.[5]

[1] Most of these statements are quotations from timely inquiries to my parents unless otherwise noted below.
[2] The 18th Amendment to the Constitution was enforced in 1920 and repealed in 1932
[3] Swanson on Swanson, Random House, 1980.
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_P._Kennedy,_Sr.
[5] John F. Kennedy had not declared his candidacy for a second term at the time of his assassination, having then recently visited nine states, obviously paving the way.