John F. Kennedy in Palo Alto
It was a short but memorable stay
In mid-September 1940, a young John F. Kennedy rolled into Palo Alto in a brand-new Buick convertible and checked himself into the President Hotel on University Ave. After finding a small cottage on campus for $60 per month, he enrolled in business, economics, and political science courses at Stanford. Jack enjoyed spirited exchanges with professors and classmates over politics and the war, but perhaps unsurprisingly, the young JFK was engaged in more than just his studies. “Have become very fond of Stanford,” he wrote a friend in November. “Everyone is very friendly - the gals are quite attractive - and it’s a very good life.”
Jack was well-known down on El Camino’s restaurant row, entertaining the ladies at hangouts like L’Omelette, a local bar, and Dinah’s Shack, a steakhouse with a fireplace lounge. The closest he came to having a steady girlfriend was “a stunningly beautiful sorority girl” named Harriet “Flip” Price, whom he took to dances and Stanford football games. But Jack was not seeking a commitment from Price or from any of his other dates. “I’m not interested in carrying on, for the most part,” he admitted to one friend. “I like the conquest. That’s the challenge … It’s the chase I like — not the kill!”
“I’ve known many of the great Hollywood stars, and only a very few of them seemed to hold the attraction for women that JFK did,” [Robert] Stack would later observe. “He’d just look at them, and they’d tumble.”
He made many excursions to the city (SF), racing up and down Bayshore, as well as making regular trips down the coast to Hollywood in his convertible, where he met the likes of Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, and Lana Turner, and started hitting the town with a young actor named Robert Stack. “I’ve known many of the great Hollywood stars, and only a very few of them seemed to hold the attraction for women that JFK did,” Stack would later observe. “He’d just look at them, and they’d tumble.”
Young Kennedy’s short stint at Stanford and living the California dream would soon come to an end. After his raunchy first semester, he headed back east to help his father write his memoirs and begin to address his own health problems, intending to return to Palo Alto in the spring. Instead, he wound up traveling around South America, working on his Yale Law application and eventually joining the U.S. Navy the following fall, just a few months before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and every American’s life, Kennedy’s “very good” one included, took an irrevocable turn.
Years later, as those in Palo Alto mourned the passing of the president, along with the rest of the country and many around the world, there were those at Stanford and in Palo Alto for whom the tragedy hit especially hard. For they knew Jack Kennedy.
[Sources include: PaloAltoHistory.org, John F. Kennedy: A Biography by Michael O’Brien, A Chronology of Stanford University and Its Founders, published by the Stanford Historical Society.]
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