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If she had her foibles, if she played the piano loudly while Mother was trying to give an interview, if she teased photographers hip-deep into the Atlantic City surf in order to take her picture, Luci's capers never became a public problem. Nellie Grant's flirtations were so well noted that her mother packed her off to Europe at 16—only to have Nellie return with a dandified English worshiper in tow. Alice Roosevelt (who will attend this week's wedding) scandalized Washington 60 years ago by smoking cigarettes in public and riding horseback in breeches.
Fun Man. Pudgy and sometimes petulant as a bobbysoxer, Luci has evolved into a slim, articulate, engaging girl-woman who has been able to weather the limelight with considerable poise and—it seems to some—greater relish than her pleas for privacy would suggest. The impression she conveys obviously concerns her. Though she only turned 19 on July 2, she abhors the stereotype of the teen-age marriage, points out bravely that her own and Pat's ages average out to 21. On this score her mother, who was 21 and a college graduate before she married, says reassuringly: "I think a year of planning it and a year of being sure about it is a very reasonable approach. Luci is a very feminine, domestic sort of girl for whom this will be right."
Luci has also been around a bit. She campaigned with her parents in 26 states in 1964 and, despite the lisp she cannot always control, learned to deliver pleasant, spontaneous little talks. During the last academic year she buckled down earnestly to her nursing studies. Pat calls her "much more mature than other girls her age." To Luci, her sober, self-possessed fiancé is "a gentle man, a kind man, a fun man." And, she vows, "he will always have the upper hand of me."
In her choice of a husband, Luci breaks another White House tradition. Without exception, her seven predecessors as White House brides took husbands who were mature, professionally established, wealthy, patrician, or all four.* By contrast, Pat, 23, has a modest background and an uncharted future. His parents, Gerard and Tillie Nugent, have lived for 25 years in a small orange bungalow with fake-brick siding in a blue-collar Waukegan neighborhood. Gerard Nugent, district sales manager for a mutual-fund distributor, is of Irish descent. Mrs. Nugent's antecedents are Lithuanian. They sent their tall, athletic son to parochial grammar and prep schools and then to Jesuit Marquette University in Milwaukee, where he graduated with a B average in history. He earned pocket money by working as a parking-lot attendant and tour guide at the Miller High Life brewery. At school his friends called him "Paddy" or "Nuge." One Marquette professor remembers him as "independent, not one of the herd, a take-charge guy."