As family members and celebrity supporters fan out across the nation to stump for John Kerry in the last days of the presidential race, one local figure has been noticeably absent from the campaign.
Teresa Heinz Kerry's brother, Jose Pedro Simoes Ferreira, 70, lives in Harmar with his wife, Penelope, 65, a Carnegie Mellon University professor. The couple maintain an extremely low profile and have avoided mention even in the most exhaustive profiles of Heinz Kerry and her family.
There appears to be no ready explanation as to why.
A lengthy article on Heinz Kerry published in The New Yorker in September had numerous mentions of her father, Jose Simoes Ferreira; her mother, Irene Thierstein Simoes Ferreira; and her late sister, Magarida, who died in a 1963 car accident.
Jose Ferreira surfaced in the article only as an unnamed "older brother who attended Cambridge."
Heinz Kerry's public comments regarding her older brother are scarce.
Ferreira briefly surfaced in a November 1974 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette story on her thoughts on the political unrest transpiring at the time in her native Mozambique.
She was quoted in the article as saying she did not want the nation to be controlled by Maoists "because they're going to ruin African nationalism." She noted, however, that she did not mind Maoists in the government, and she mentioned that Ferreira had been a Maoist when he was younger.
The Herald, a daily newspaper in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, recently reported that the future Penelope Ferreira met Jose Ferreira and Heinz Kerry while they were all students at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg in the 1950s. Penelope married Pedro Ferreira in 1961, and the couple moved to the United States, the newspaper reported.
Jose and Penelope Ferreira now live in a $365,000, six-room home they bought in 2000 in Harmar, less than a 10-minute drive from the $3.1 million Heinz family estate in Fox Chapel.
They reside on Beech Court, a quiet hilltop cul-de-sac of stately red-brick houses. The street's only campaign sign belongs to a neighbor supporting the candidacy of Republican state treasurer candidate Jean Craige Pepper.
According to a next-door neighbor, Rosemary Moore, "They're nice people, rather quiet."
Penelope Ferreira answered a midday knock at her door last week and politely but firmly declined an interview request. "We refer all inquiries to the (Kerry) campaign," she said.
Campaign officials did not return calls regarding the Ferreiras.
Penelope Ferreira is a distinguished services professor of environmental policy and law at Carnegie Mellon University's H. John Heinz III School of Public Policy and Management. She also is an adjunct professor in the university's history department.
According to her university Web page, Penelope Ferreira is a licensed attorney with interest and expertise in public international law, environmental law, the United Nations and sustainable development.
The Ferreiras' son, Jose Ferreira, 35, was mentioned in an August Newsweek article on Kerry's children and stepchildren. A reporter for the magazine observed Ferreira and Kerry stepson Christopher Heinz offering Kerry speechmaking advice in the Massachusetts senator's home in Washington.
The Ferreiras aren't the only Heinz Kerry family members to have distanced themselves from the presidential campaign.
Heinz Kerry's first-born son, H. John Heinz IV, 37, operates a small Buddhist high school for troubled teens near his 163-acre farm near Philadelphia. He has declined all interview requests during the Kerry campaign.
