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One day in 1986, Marion Bruner was driving home with her daughter in Palm Beach County, Fla., when she realized she had a flat. “I pulled over to the side of the road and a few minutes later, Burt Reynolds stopped his car and changed my tire,” wrote Marion, of Indian Land, S.C. The mustachioed actor was, Marion reports, charming, funny and capable. “He did a great job,” she said of his facility with a lug wrench.

Today’s column is about these sorts of <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/07/02/celebrity-encounters/" target=_blank>encounters</a>, which I recently asked readers to share. Some were the result of chance, a mere moment, while others were a little more lasting. All made their mark. It’s not all Hollywood celebrities.

For example: In the early 1950s, a young Peter Bucky went with his father to the Princeton, N.J., home of a family friend for lunch. The friend was Albert Einstein, with whom Peter’s grandfather shared a patent for something called a light intensity self-adjusting camera.

Wrote Peter, of Ashburn: “All I can remember of the encounter was that his sister,” that would be Maja, “had wild, white hair like her brother. Einstein’s study was as you might expect it to be … a mess. There was a piano in the hallway and last but certainly not least, Einstein held my hand as we walked together in his backyard.”

And as Einstein might say, it’s all relative. On Nov. 14, 1943, Tom Gutnick’s father, Arthur, was working in his uncle’s drugstore in Manhattan. Through the doors came a flustered 25-year-old Lenny Bernstein, who had just learned that he would have to lead the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall that evening because conductor Bruno Walter was ill.

“My father gave him some pills to settle his nerves,” wrote Tom, of Arlington. For years, Tom’s mother, Arline, was skeptical of this story. Wrote Tom: “But then one evening, Lenny was being interviewed on one of the late-night TV programs and told basically the same story, except that he provided the postscript: He realized that he needed to do this on his own, so he discarded the pills without using them. My mother’s jaw dropped!”

Janet Millenson’s late mother-in-law, Helen Edelstein, was a rather naive young bookkeeper for a New York bail bond company. Its customers included notorious Prohibition-era gangsters Dutch Schultz, Legs Diamond and Owney Madden.

“She said they were always very gentlemanly, taking her to lunch and chatting about their families,” wrote Janet, who lives in Potomac. “She wasn’t worried, she’d say, because they ‘didn’t kill anybody except each other,’ but when Diamond gave her a ride home one time in his very recognizable car, she was scared somebody might shoot at them.”

When Yesmeen Sarkes and her sister were growing up, they could never understand why their father, Nabeh Sarkes, was such a big John Wayne fan. Their father, Yesmeen wrote, “was an educated, cerebral, well-read man who never bought into macho attitudes, but he always loved John Wayne, the epitome of machismo.”

So one day they asked him. Their father explained that in the 1950s, he was in the Air Force and stationed at Wheelus Air Force Base in Tripoli, Libya. Because he spoke not only English, but his native Arabic, along with German, French and Italian, Nabeh was asked to assist on the set of a movie being filmed nearby: “Legend of the Lost.” He was assigned to assist one of the stars, John Wayne.

Wrote Yesmeen, who lives in Littlestown, Pa.: “My father was the type who never met a stranger, he was charming and funny. So, naturally, Mr. Wayne took to him. They developed such a close friendship, and Mr. Wayne began referring to my dad as ‘My Little Buddy’ — my dad was only 5 foot 6 inches — on set and my dad loved the nickname! We finally understood his affection for John Wayne!”

Nieman Fellow, 1998

Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism Fellow, 2007

Two-time winner, "Journopalooza" Battle of the Bands

University of Maryland, BA in English

John Kelly writes John Kelly's Washington, a daily look at Washington's less-famous side. Born in Washington, John started at The Post in 1989 as deputy editor in the Weekend section.

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