As a 7 year old, I met two of them at IFIP68 in Edinburgh. I don't have much recall of Minsky, but McCarthy was nice. We went out to turnhouse airport and he flew a light plane around. At dinner he commented we did the washing up by hand and when he offered to send us a dishwasher my mother (of course) said "no no John don't be silly" but she said to me in the kitchen later on: "if he ever offers again accept"

We also ate at a chinese restaurant across town and he was surprised when me and my brothers and sisters said birds-nest soup was disgusting.

Susy McCarthy stayed with us for a while. She was a typical Californian teenager, ate her cereal with the wrong hand holding the spoon and her feet up on the chairs and we younger kids were told in no uncertain terms not to emulate her. She refused to go to school and there were exasperating phone calls about what to do. In the end she went somewhere else. Johns wife died climbing Mt Everest. it was really sad. I think it was the first all-women's climbing team to try the route (or even Everest's pinnacle)

Minsky and McCarthy were quite happy to respond to emails in the 80s and 90s. I asked Minsky about writing with Harry Harrison and he said he was frustrated at the ending of the book they did ("the Turing Option") and McCarthy talked about his ideas of long term information ontologies in a notation or language he called "Elephant"

McCarthy was a notable USENET curmudgeon and would be oppositional to any anti-nuclear, anti-oil, anti-plastic agenda he saw. He also said he cried when he learned the bombs had been dropped, and that the invasion of Japan was off, because he knew he wouldn't die on a beach in an opposed landing. (It is possible I have this mixed up with memories of what Paul Fussel wrote, but I am pretty sure John said this)

John played "Alice's Restaurant" with a guitar, he had a very nasally whiny voice.