College freshman Dana Rehnquist was on her way to dinner with her brother and grandfather one night a few years back when the grandfather, a big movie buff, announced that he had just seen a "really raunchy" film.
He loved it so much, he said, that even when his disgusted friends wanted to get up in the middle and leave, he ordered them to stay put.
The chief justice of the United States Supreme Court, it turns out, was professing his admiration for the frat-house film Old School.
Needless to say, Dana Rehnquist has a unique perspective on the life of her late grandfather, William Rehnquist, a man often said to be more than a bit "old-school" himself.
Dana had been on campus for just three days when she got the phone call she had been expecting and dreading. She said she knew at the time that her grandfather had only "a matter of days" to live.
"When I found out that he passed away, it was really hard because I knew everybody knew he was my grandfather," she said.
Though she had already heard the news, Dana was surprised at a New Student Orientation fraternity party when she heard a member of the party's band announce into his microphone that Chief Justice Rehnquist had died.
Another band member then wondered into his microphone, "Who cares?" She promptly demanded and received an apology from the offending musicians.
"I just wanted to get out of [Penn]. It's hard enough to deal with a death in your family, but when everybody knows about it and will probably come up and say something to you or at least silently know, I just wanted to be with my family at the time."
So while her new friends at school were busy with NSO events and going out at night, Dana found herself alone on a train to Washington for the funeral.
In life, though, Dana said that her grandfather was, among other things, a good-humored Civil War buff with a penchant for trivia.
"He would always have trivia games for the kids, so when we would go to his house in Vermont, he would have all the kids sit around his chair and he would have questions categorized for how old you are," she said.
"If you got the question right, you got a quarter. The questions he would ask my youngest brother is the stuff I would know, and the questions he would ask me my dad wouldn't even know."
"Whenever we were with him, we would never talk about his job," she added. "He never talked about his cases. He would always want to hear about you, or he'd tell you stories about the Civil War or recite some epic poem."
Dana said that she did not follow her grandfather's career that closely but that she did once get into a "heated debate" with him as to whether or not his court's decisions were weakening the result of Brown v. Board of Education.
Though she ruffled her grandfather's feathers, Dana said she was quickly persuaded by his constitutional reasoning.
In Washington last week, though, she found herself in the middle of the media's eye. She said that the media's presence could be both overwhelming and disillusioning.
Dana opened The New York Times the day after the funeral to see herself in the middle of a photograph.
"There I was trying to bite my lip and stop myself from crying out loud, and people are just like not caring."
Equally distressing, she said, was the speculation preceding Rehnquist's death as to both when he would die and who would replace him.
"It was really hard when we first found out that he had cancer, seeing it in the newspapers," she said.
"They talk about the cancer and be like, 'Well, when he dies, this is what's going to happen.' Obviously for the rest of the country, it's like, 'Yeah, what's going to happen,' but for my family, it's 'My grandfather's going to die.'"
Just as bad, she said, was the speculation as to whether the chief justice would step down after being diagnosed.
"He loved his job and he loved what he was doing," Dana said.
As his cancer prevented him from traveling or playing tennis -- as he liked to do -- Dana said that though "it was hard for him to talk," her grandfather's job was one of the few things he was still able to do.
"The only thing that failed him was his body," she said. "He still had his humor, his intelligence, everything was still there with him."
Though sad, Dana said it was nice at the funeral to hear so many glowing words about her grandfather.
She said Sandra Day O'Connor -- who was Rehnquist's law-school classmate and close friend -- was "motherly" in hugging her and inviting her to tea.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg's condolence, she noted, was amusingly clumsy.
"Ruth Bader Ginsburg comes over, and she was trying to do something similar to what Sandra was doing, but it was just so awkward," Dana said, noting that their meeting was marked by awkward silences.
Overall, though, she was touched by seeing the tears in all of the other justices' eyes.
Despite the pomp and circumstance of the past week in Washington, Dana said that she will remember Rehnquist as her grandfather and really just a normal person.
"I don't think of him on the bench with his robe on," she said. "He was really a mellow, chill kind of guy."
