PERSON(S) OF INTEREST
From England to the U.S., to the Far East and back to the U.S., members Richard and Jill Best have lived there, done that. By Past Commodore James L. Ramsey
Richard and Jill Best bring a touch of British charm to every room they enter. She is groomed, poised and polite; he is tall and stately with an undiminished crop of graying hair and a face unwrinkled by age. It isn’t hard to imagine him attired in the uniform of a spit-and-polish British military officer and she on his arm, strolling Hyde Park. Richard was too young to remember the enemy bombers that rained havoc on his native England in World War II, but he vividly recalls the aftermath. He remembers standing on the steps of St. Paul Cathedral in London as a small boy, looking at the destruction surrounding the famed church and hearing his mother say, “Remember this day. Remember what you see here.” Richard did. So did his wife, who is a year younger than he. She recalls making a trip to London as a little girl and seeing block after block of emptiness where homes and shops and apartment buildings once stood and families once lived. “Those are bomb sites,” her mother told her. “‘Bomb site’ was a familiar word back then,” she reflects. “There were a lot of them.” Life in post-war England was fundamental for Richard and Jill. Rationing, which was instituted during the war, finally ended nine years after the conflict was over, which meant there were shortages of essentials like gasoline and tires, even food and clothing, well into the 1950s. Cheltenham in Southwest England where Richard
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Jill and Richard Best in Ecuador
