>>Mother Joan interrupted at one point to note that she was descended from one of the victims of the Salem witch hysteria of 1692, Mary Eastey, who she said was hanged.
From Boston magazine:
It was the blood that caught the attention of a passerby, a streak running down one side of the woman's face in a long red tear as she tried to hoist herself off the Beacon Street sidewalk. She looked like a disoriented street person who had wandered into the Back Bay from the nearby Boston Common. "She said she was okay, but she did not look okay," says Constance Bacon, who shielded the helpless woman from the rain as they waited for an ambulance. "She was conscious. She had just hit her head pretty hard. She knew that she had fallen and she tried to get up and she couldn't. So I just waited until the ambulance came. I had no idea who it was, that it was anything special."
It took little more than a day for Bacon—and the rest of the world—to find out that the woman she had helped had a last name recognized across the globe, that this bloody and disheveled person was the former model once nicknamed "the Dish" by her brother-in-law, the late President John F. Kennedy. As with other members of the Kennedy clan, notoriety was nothing new to her. Her fall, which resulted in a concussion and a broken shoulder, was the latest incident in a long and very public struggle Joan Bennett Kennedy has waged against alcoholism.
