The coal miner’s daughter many people think of is Loretta Lynn, the country music singer whose autobiography inspired a memorable movie in 1980.
But Western Pennsylvania has its own famous coal miner’s daughter and her name was Barbara “Bobo” Rockefeller.
On Valentine’s Day of 1948, she won the marriage lottery when she wed Winthrop Rockefeller at the Palm Beach estate of Winston Guest, a socialite and polo player. Guests included the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.
The beautiful blonde bride wore a simple dress, a square-cut diamond set in platinum and a wide smile. The groom, a grandson of John D. Rockefeller, a founder of Standard Oil, was one of the richest men in America.
Here’s how the daughter of a Lithuanian immigrant went from a gritty existence in a mine patch to living la dolce vita in a six-story New York City duplex with 15 rooms on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.
Her parents divorced when she was a child and while her father, Julius Paulekas, continued mining coal, she grew up with her mother, Eva Neveckas near the Chicago stockyards. At age 17 in 1933, she won the beauty pageant title of Miss Lithuania.
Born with the hard-to-pronounce name of Jievute Paulekiute, she changed it to Eva Paul by the time Montogmery Ward hired her to model for its catalog. That was her stage name, too.
In a touring production of the play “Tobacco Road,” she met Richard Sears Jr., a man from a prominent family in Boston’s Beacon Hill. After they married in 1941, she changed her name to Barbara Paul Sears and landed in Boston’s Social Register. For awhile the couple figured prominently in the cafe society of Paris, where Mr. Sears served as third secretary at the American embassy. By 1947, the couple divorced.
With her sister, Mrs. Sears began sharing a fourth-floor walk-up apartment in a tenement building next to New York City’s Third Avenue train tracks. In those far from genteel surroundings, Winthrop Rockefeller’s arrival in a chauffeur-driven limousine caused neighbors to stare. The couple met at a dinner party.
After the 1948 wedding, the couple had a son in 1949. They separated after less than two years of marriage. Mrs. Rockefeller pawned her large diamond ring for $30,000, living off the proceeds for five years as she waited for the divorce settlement. When it arrived, it was a record-setting $5.5 million.
Winthrop Aldrich Rockefeller served as governor of Arkansas from 1967 to 1971. His son, Winthrop Paul Rockefeller, served as Lieutenant Governor of Arkansas from 1996 until his death in 2006. Two years later, Barbara Paul Sears Rockefeller died at age 91 at her home in Little Rock, Ark.
