When we moved to South Bend, Marguerite's sister, Anne and Dick Butler, were located in Brookville, PA, about 40 miles from here and we occasionally visited back and forth. We also visited my folks in Monongahela and the Kellers in their apartments in State College.

Marguerite's mother, Bobbie Stevenson Keller, had taken care of their financial affairs from the beginning of their marriage; Ellis was irresponsible about finances throughout his life. She found out that Keller’s old ancestral home in Bellefonte was for sale, and without telling her husband, arranged to buy it. Mr. Keller had grown up here during his early days, and Bellefonte was the town where his father had been a county judge around the early 1900s.

It was a stately, three-story mansion, which still had the maid’s quarters and a floor button in the dining room to call her. It had been built around 1900 and was in fairly good shape, and at night, was reminiscent of the Adam’s Family home on the old televison comedy. The shrubbery on the perimter had grown wild for years, and I spent one Saturday there cutting it back for them.

Certainly, it was too much house for the two of them, but Mr. Keller must have had a feeling of nostalgia when it was put on sale. While living here, he served two terms as mayor of Bellefonte. With all their furnishings, they had lived in cramped apartments for quite a spell and looked forward to having enough room. Earlier, while living in an apartment house in State College, they had rented two apartments, one above the other, and still were crowded.

A few years later, they sold this house and moved into an apartment at Toftrees, a fairly exclusive complex outside of State College. From their apartment they could look out over the golf course. For his whole life, Ellis had been an enthusiastic golfer, and this was an ideal spot for him to live.

Whenever we visited Toftrees, he and I would play together. His favorite golf-improvement book was a pocket-book edition by Tommy Armour, a famous golfer of the late 1930s. I’m a left-handed golfer, and Mr. Keller re-drew all the illustrations in a mirrow view so I could relate to them. I still have the book, and still marvel at all the time and effort he put into this gift for me.

He continued his life-long passion for trout fishing and still continued to tie his own wet and dry flies. He also was an avid Civil War buff (as I was), and we traded books and often discussed that era. Quite often he visited the various battlefields and made numerous sketches of the various major battles. Many of these sketches were passed on to me when he died, and I still have the folder.

He was a life-long card player with contract bridge being his favorite game. He would sit and deal out hands, face up, and play by himself for practice. He tried to make his children into bridge players, but turned most of them off by his impatience and critiques of the way they played. Most evenings, before going to sleep, he would play solitaire for about a half hour on the bed, which helped him to relax.

All the time I knew him, he was an inveterate story teller, recalling incidents and happenings from his early days. His interesting stories often included almost verbatim conversations from incidents throughout his life, some reaching back as far as 60 years or so. He probably had told some of them so many times over the years that in each telling he added some new details and embellishments.

Mrs. Keller, Bobbie, had been raised on a farm and never lost her down-to-earth approach to life. She was always up-beat and took misfortunes and good times in the same stride, at least outwardly. In 1951, when she was 46, she had a colostomy, and accepted and lived with it for almost forty years, even during her time when she and Ellis were in Iran and India for eight years. She called her pouch “Lucy,’ and never complained, but considered herself lucky that she was one of the first to have this life-saving operation.

She loved to drive fast, and when her children were young, she would assign each one of them a window to look for cops when she took car trips without her husband. She had a passion for dress hats, and our favorite was one with a pheasant feather sticking out of the top. Margeet and I always called it her “Pleasant Pheasant Hat.” Try saying that quickly five times!

In one ten-year period, 14 new grandchildren were born. She was kept busy visiting and baby-sitting from Montana to Pennsylvania, and told all her children that she had had enough, and it was time to stop having babies - she was worn out from the constant traveling back and forth.

She loved to knit, and made a Christmas stocking for each of her children, their spouses and her grandchildren. At the time she was knitting BJ’s, she had developed the beginning of narcolepsy, and would suddenly doze off in the middle of a stitch. She would lose track of where she was, and ended up making BJ’s almost twice as big as Dave and Karen’s. Every Christmas after that we heard the same lament from them when we hung the stockings up, that BJ was getting more goodies in her stocking than they were.

From Toftrees, the Kellers moved into downtown State College, renting an apartment in the Glennland Building. They lived there about three years before their final move to Tampa, Florida where they rented a ground-level apartment along a lagoon leading into Tampa Bay.

It was a beautiful location and they had frequent winter visits from their children and grandchildren. They lived there until they passed away, and both were brought back to be buried in the Stevenson family plot in the Bellefonte Cemetery, located between State College and Bellefonte.