A few dates into our acquaintance back in 1997, my fiancee and I discovered that her father and my parents had grown up at roughly the same time in Poughkeepsie, New York (local Native Amer dialect for little mud huts on the river, apparently). Her family, Quaker and Presby; mine, Jewish. Her father grew up more on the farm side of things; mine in the township outside the urban area.
We found another good intersection on Wednesday. Jim Shea, Jr., went to high school in West Hartford, Conn., with Lynn, and she knew him somewhat, and even skied with him once. Jim's father and grandfather competed in the Olympics as well; his grandfather was killed by a drunk driver just a few weeks before the game.
While watching coverage of the gold-medal-winning runs of Jim Jr., they mentioned his grandfather had been a gold-medal-winning speedskater in 1932. As mentioned earlier in this blog, my grandfather's cousin Irv Jaffe, was also a multiple medal skater. Turns out, they were teammates. In fact, they're both mentioned in the book, Frozen in Time.