I was watching a tv movie today called "A Different Kind of Christmas" and it was taken from the life sort of of Robert George. When our kids were little we took them to the George's "Santa's house" that is talked about in this article that was published in the New York Times on July 5, 1998. When I Googled Robert George & Santa it brought me to your message here so I thought I would share the info. I don't know anymore about them. Their home was a very special place to the families with little ones around here. It was too bad they lived in a neighborhood of Grinches.
Happy Holidays to you. I Hope you are able to find Stella using this article.
Robert George, who was Santa Claus to six Presidents and whose year-round Christmas display charmed thousands of disadvantaged and disabled children in Southern California but bedeviled some of his neighbors, died on Wednesday in Providence St. Joseph Medical Center in suburban Burbank. He was 74 and lived in Los Angeles.
The cause was complications of heart disease and diabetes, said his wife, Stella, who was at his side as Mrs. Santa Claus for 33 years.
Mr. George, a retired barber, became the nation's Santa Claus in 1956 when President Dwight D. Eisenhower heard about his display and invited him to the White House. He subsequently accepted similar invitations from Presidents John F. Kennedy, Richard M. Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and George Bush. Mr. George was scheduled to attend a photo session last October with President Clinton but was forced to cancel the trip because of illness.
The year-round Christmas display at Mr. George's home made him a fixture in the Los Angeles area and gave him a national reputation; last year he was the subject of a made-for-television movie. Most of the decorations in the display were donated by area residents, businesses and organizations, including fire department crews, but some were bought by Mr. George out of his Social Security checks.
Mr. George's ties to firefighters led him to make regular visits to orphanages, hospitals and community centers. At the time of his death, Mrs. George said, her husband had 38 custom Santa suits for those occasions. (She said he also had three regular business suits, but two of those were red and the other one, which was black, was rarely used.)
In addition to his wife, Mr. George is survived by their daughter, Roxanne Clark of Celeste, Tex.; four brothers, Fred and Phil, both of Cozad, Neb., Kenny of Columbus, Neb., and Ted of Grand Island, Neb.; two sisters, Madelyn Kress of Seattle and Frieda Scharfenberg of Sacramento, Calif.; and two grandchildren.
The annual bumper-to-bumper procession of holiday sightseers attracted by Mr. George's Christmas display got him in trouble with some of his neighbors through the years.
In suburban Glendale, where Mr. George, a native of Nebraska, used to live, complaints led the city to declare his three-bedroom house a public nuisance and he was pressured to end his all-seasons display in November 1987.
''It looks like the last season for me,'' Mr. George said at the time as he prepared to pack up his Christmas display. But a short while later he resurfaced a few miles away, in the eastern San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles, with a freshly decorated home and yard.
''Ho! Ho! Ho! Only 237 days left to Christmas,'' he said.