Robert Kennedy

While growing up in Los Angeles I had many accidental encounters with famous personalities; most were pleasant encounters, though some not so much. One day, when I was 19, I was playing a game of volleyball with some friends. At one point I lost my footing and came down hard on my right hand. I heard a loud sound but, since I wasn't feeling any pain, I did not think anything about it. Later that night I was in tremendous pain from my right wrist. At about 11:00 o'clock, I was taken to the nearest hospital, Good Samaritan, where I was waiting to get an x-ray. As I sat there, in a wheelchair, there was a sudden loud commotion in the hallway. Several very excited, agitated, people rushed by pushing a gurney, with an injured man on it. There were doctors, nurses and men in suits. The amount of people accompanying the injured man seemed excessive. When an orderly finally showed up to wheel me to x-ray I asked him what all the excitement was about. He said the injured man was Robert Kennedy, he had just been shot.

On a side note, a few weeks later, I went with a friend to visit his grandmother in Pasadena. She lived in one of three or four small, cottages located along a driveway off of a main street. At the end of the driveway were a four-unit apartment building; two apartments down stairs and two upstairs. There were policemen outside the door of the upstairs apartment on the right. A police car slowly drove down the driveway and stopped. Four policemen got out of the car and went upstairs. A few minutes later, four different policemen came out, got into the car and drove away. My friend asked his grandmother what was going on. It seems that the older brother of Sirhan Sirhan, the assassin of Robert Kennedy, lived in that upstairs apartment. Someone had taken a shot at him so he was under twenty-four hour police protection.