Serving dinner to the startled students was none other than Jacqueline Bouvier Auchincloss Kennedy Onassis. Her children were Caroline and John Fitzgerald Kennedy Jr., Auchincloss' niece and nephew respectively.

Auchincloss, 52, preferred to dwell on those good times Wednesday after learning that his nephew's body had been found in airplane wreckage off the coast of Martha's Vineyard.

The plane piloted by Kennedy, 38, was located in the water about 7 miles southwest of Martha's Vineyard. The bodies of his passengers, his wife, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, 33, and her sister Lauren Bessette, 34, were also recovered.

"In the last 20 years, the only times I've seen Caroline and John is when my sister Janet died, when my mother died and when my father died," he said, later adding that the arrival of the Kennedys almost became synonymous with a funeral.

Auchincloss last talked to JFK Jr. 10 years ago Tuesday, during the funeral for Auchincloss's mother, the young Kennedy's grandmother.

He saw but did not talk to him and Caroline during Jacqueline's funeral in the spring of 1994.

Auchincloss was only 16 when he marched immediately behind his sister, Robert F. Kennedy and Ted Kennedy during the Nov. 25, 1963 funeral of JFK. It was also JFK Jr.'s third birthday, the day the young boy solemnly saluted his father's casket.

It has long been a family tradition to remain strong and silent through troubling times, he noted.

"Like these last two days of hopeless search for John, you had to keep a stiff upper lip, smile on your face ... it probably would have been better to give ourselves a good reality check," he said.

His father was Hugh Auchincloss, Jacqueline's stepfather. Their mother was Janet Lee Bouvier Auchincloss.

Auchincloss' telephone has been ringing constantly in the past four days, from family and friends and members of the press.

A historian, Auchincloss moved to Ashland from Washington, D.C. in 1995. However, he had been visiting the Oregon Shakespeare Festival each year for 30 years.

Jacqueline was 18 years older than Auchincloss, who was 14 years older than JFK Jr.

"I was very much an older brother (rather) than an uncle to John," he said, adding that Jacqueline often served as his babysitter. She was not quite 13 when their mother married Hugh Auchincloss.

Although the press dubbed him "John John," the children in the extended family knew JFK Jr. fondly as "Helicopter Head," Auchincloss said.

"He was absolutely fascinated and would do a Whirling Dervish thing when he saw his daddy's helicopters," he said. "He was always joyous. He really loved his parents ... he was genuinely a happy child."

That trait could be seen in his magazine, "George," said Auchincloss, a charter subscriber to the publication.

"He was searching for the relatively intelligent young person," he said of the readership. "He interviewed Castro, George Wallace and the Dalai Lama.

Auchincloss, an expert on the presidential lives of Theodore and Franklin D. Roosevelt, doesn't want to try to predict what might have awaited JFK Jr. had he lived.

Instead, he prefers to remember the good times, such as the incident in the pool at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port, Mass.

The junior Kennedy was climbing out of the pool when the senior Kennedy reached up to playfully pull down his son's swimming trunks.

"John said, `You're a poo-poo head,"' Auchincloss recalled. "And Jack said, `John, nobody can call the President of the United States a poo-poo head.'