I should have been but wasn't". Although she loved him, Matilda was a private woman and after Hugo's death she burned the extensive letters that he had written her. In January 1942, Matilda sold their estate, "Eastover", to Captain and Mrs. Marion Eppley. Koehler is buried with his wife and son in the Berkeley Memorial Cemetery by St. Columba's Chapel in Middletown, Rhode Island. In November 1942, 25-year old Lt.(j.g) John F. Kennedy, then attached to the Motor Torpedo Boat Squadrons Training Center at Melville, Rhode Island, was mourning the death of his close, childhood friend, Marine Second Lieutenant George Houk Mead, Jr., who had been killed in action at Guadalcanal that August and posthumously awarded the Navy Cross. Accompanied by a female acquaintance from a wealthy Newport family, the couple had stopped in Middletown at the cemetery where Hugo Koehler had been buried the year before. Ambling around the plots near the tiny St. Columba's chapel, Kennedy paused at Koehler's granite cross grave marker and pondered his own mortality, hoping out loud that when his time came, he would not have to die without religion. "But these things can't be faked," he added. "There's no bluffing." Two decades later, President Kennedy and Koehler's stepson, U.S. Senator Claiborne Pell had become good friends and political allies, although they had been acquaintances since the mid-1930s during their "salad days" on the same Newport debutante party "circuit" and when Pell had dated JFK's sister, Kathleen ("Kick") Kennedy. Personality Hugo Koehler, by all accounts, had a highly engaging and charismatic personality. Claiborne Pell wrote of his stepfather, "From the time I was nine years old, I lived most of the time, for ten months of each year, in the same house as my stepfather, Commander Koehler. I loved the man. He was a very gifted, very unusual person. On many occasions, I have met people who knew something about his exploits and from them, as well as from my mother and from what I could note myself, I have been convinced that a fine book could be- and should be – written about him. Whoever wrote it, however, would have to dig into areas that are not easy to come by." Although the theory that Koehler was the illegitimate son of a Habsburg prince, separated at birth, is dubious speculation; he was undeniably a dashing, swashbuckling figure enveloped in mystery. In October 1925,