Nellie

The central character was conjured out of a deeply personal source—namely, the travails of Stephen King’s mother, Nellie Ruth Pillsbury King.

Nellie’s husband abandoned the family when Stephen was a child, leaving her to bring up him and his brothers on paltry wages from menial jobs.

On Nov. 22, 1963, Kennedy was riding in an an open-topped convertible with First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, Texas Gov. John B. Connally Jr. and Connally’s wife, Nellie, as their motorcade drove through Dealey Plaza in Dallas.

“We think about her creative legacy as a living legacy, sharing the ethos that she left us,” says Nellie Scott, the center’s executive director, “not only with the collection, but this that we keep repeating as our mantra, that doing and making are acts of hope.”

That afternoon, Michael and Kimberly Guccione, a septuagenarian couple from Altadena, left the shelter carrying their 16-year-old cats, Nellie and Lili, in two soft crates.