Word: skakel
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Ethel Skakel Kennedy, L.H.D., widow of Senator Robert F. Kennedy. You have shown that love is not lessened but deepened by tragic loss...
Otherwise, a raffish, indulgent and hyperactive atmosphere prevailed in the Skakel household. There were servants, a swimming pool, riding horses, a 35-ft. yawl and another smaller sailboat (significantly named, by Ethel, Sink or Swim). The house was always crammed with the children's schoolmates and other visitors, and it was not unusual for 25 people to gather at the Skakels' dinner table...
...Skakel and Kennedy families first came together around 1940, when the children met at schools. Thereafter, their lives progressively intertwined, as they dated one another, visited back and forth, and went on outings together. Seventeen-year-old Ethel and 20-year-old Bobby met in 1945, at Mont Tremblant, a Canadian ski resort near Montreal. They liked each other ("He was so handsome!" Ethel recalls) and began to date, until Bobby turned his attentions to Ethel's quiet, bookish sister Pat. This lasted a few months by most accounts, but to Ethel it seemed "two years at least." Finally...
Only one thing disconcerts Ethel, and that is flying. Airplanes have brought nothing but tragedy into her life. In 1955, her father asked her mother to fly with him on a business trip to Los Angeles in his company-owned plane. Mrs. Skakel usually preferred to take the train, but this time she made an exception. Near Tulsa, Okla., the plane exploded in midair, killing all aboard. Ethel's sister Ann phoned her the news. Ethel was silent for a few seconds, then said: "It's all right. It's all right." Softly, she added: "Goodbye." Ann was momentarily appalled...
Ethel was to display the same stoic fiber eleven years later, when her brother, George Skakel Jr., was killed in the crash of a light plane in Idaho?a crash that also claimed Bobby's close friend and onetime Kennedy aide Dean Markham...