He described a conversation with the President a week after Pendel was assigned to the White House:

...In the course of the conversation I mentioned Senator Harlan, and said, "Mr. President, Senator Harlan seems to be a very good man." He replied, "Yes, Senator Harlan is a good man." It always seemed to me a singular coincidence that very soon after this conversation Mr. Lincoln appointed Senator Harlan as one of his Cabinet officers. Afterwards Robert Lincoln married his daughter Mary, whom I knew very well, as I did also her mother and father.

Pendel wrote that he met Clara Rathbone, apparently for the first time, when she called at the White House during the Hayes administration (1877-81):

I met her as she was leaving, and found that she was the Miss Harris who was in the box with Mr. Lincoln the night he was assassinated... I never saw Mrs. Rathbone after this. (PENDEL 50)

Pendel gave the alleged Harris fragment to Miss Josephine Brodie Chester "very soon" after Lincoln's death, who in turn donated the fragment to the Chicago Historical Society.

Thomas Pendel, a White House doorkeeper, claimed that he collected the remnant of Clara's sleeve lining along with several other Lincoln relics, including "a piece of shirt bosom," and the president's alleged assassination coat.

Pendel was originally assigned to the White House as a Metropolitan Police guard in November 1864. He was promoted to doorkeeper the following month with encouragement from Mary Lincoln. Her son Tad was quite fond of the guard; Pendel comforted him on the night of the assassination, laying beside him in bed until the boy fell asleep. (PENDEL 44)

White House doorkeeper Thomas F. Pendel from his autobiography Thirty-Six Years in the White House, 1902. Courtesy of Northwestern University Library.