McCain no stranger to Philadelphia

McCain was coming up from Meridian, Miss., where he was stationed as a flight instructor. He would take a student pilot on a four-hour training flight to Philly on Friday evenings, in time to meet Carol Shepp for dinner at Bookbinders Seafood House at 15th and Sansom. His relationship with Shepp, McCain wrote, "added to my creeping sense that I might have been put on earth for some other purpose than my own constant amusement."

(History will note that Shepp was not the first Philly girl McCain dated. In his book Faith of Our Fathers, he writes of coming in by train to see a young woman on the Main Line. He gets waylaid at the 30th Street Station bar, with well-meaning travelers buying the Naval Academy guy drinks. When he finally shows up at her front door, he stumbles through the screen to make a dubious entrance. After about 15 minutes, her parents hail him a cab back.)

Carol Shepp and John McCain were married on a stifling hot July 3, 1965, in the Bookbinders' marble-fireplaced living room at 2117 Pine St. "The city of Philadelphia decides to repair the street," Bookbinder recalls. "They're out there [with jackhammers] uh-uh-uh-uh. And one of the guests went outside and said, excuse me, we're having a wedding here, can you lay off for a while?"

The city workers were happy to oblige. Like the bachelor party, the reception was held, naturally, at Bookbinders.

After the wedding, the couple moved to Florida with Carol's two sons. That fall, McCain flew in for the Army-Navy game in a trainer to meet his parents, who gave him presents for his family. On his way back, somewhere over the Eastern Shore of Maryland, his engine flamed out and he had to eject at a thousand feet. The Christmas gifts were lost, but the incident, McCain wrote, "added even greater urgency to my recent existential inquiries and made me all the more anxious to get to Vietnam . . ."

Their first child, Sidney Ann, was born in 1966; McCain's combat duty in Vietnam began in the summer of 1967, two years after their wedding.

Bookbinder says she feels sad that people assume McCain left her friend because she was somehow disfigured. She remains, Bookbinder said, the same woman, with no bitterness.

"She's never been in love with anybody else," Bookbinder says. "It would be a hard act to follow."

She regrets that her friend missed a chance to be a first lady from Philadelphia. "I told her, 'I'm sorry it isn't you.' She had the smarts and the looks and the savoir faire."