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Bill Clinton's stepfather dies
01/02/2007 12:19 - (SA)
Hot Springs, Arkansas - Richard Kelley, stepfather of former US president Bill Clinton, died at his home on Wednesday. He was 91.
Kelley, a retired salesman, had been in declining health in recent weeks, and the former president visited him on Monday.
Kitty Koonce, a caregiver who answered the phone at Kelley's home on Wednesday evening, said Kelley died at about 17:45.
Kelley ran a food brokerage business for many years in Little Rock before retiring in 1992. He met Clinton's mother at a horse racing track, and they married in 1982. It was his second marriage and her fourth.
At the time, Clinton was preparing for a campaign to regain the Arkansas governor's office.
"I would come to love Dick Kelley and grow ever more grateful for the happiness he brought Mother, and me," Clinton wrote in his memoir, My Life.
Kelley became one of Clinton's favourite golf companions. "Well into his eighties, when he played his handicap and I played mine, he beat me more than half the time," Clinton wrote.
Kelley also cherished the former president, referring to him as "my best friend".
"When you meet the president, he'll just make you feel like you're the most important person in the room," Kelley once told The Associated Press.
"He's just a regular guy and if you're playing cards or playing golf with him, you'd see that," he said.
The Kelleys were married 12 years before she died on January 6, 1994, after a battle with breast cancer.
The couple were tireless campaigners for Clinton and spent the night of his first inauguration in 1993 in the Queen's Bedroom, the White House room where Winston Churchill always slept.
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