Ethnic and Cultural Groups

Defense issues, including the missile gap, played a prominent role in the campaign of 1960. President-elect John F. Kennedy, very much concerned with defense matters although lacking former President Dwight D. Eisenhower's mastery of the issues, first offered the post of secretary of defense to former secretary Robert A. Lovett. When Lovett declined, Kennedy chose Robert S. McNamara on Lovett's recommendation.

On November 7, 1960, Mary Garvey Neal, who had roots in Ventry, County Kerry [Ireland], took her son to the Springfield, Massachusetts, town hall. It was very late and Richie Neal, then 10 years old, would never forget that evening. He was there to witness one of the last campaign stops of Senator Jack Kennedy during the final frenetic days of the race against Richard Nixon for the presidency. He vividly . . . 

At a party at her Arizona home in 1981, a middle-aged Sandra Day O’Connor, ever the consummate hostess, served enchiladas poolside with good cheer. But when she greeted a friend of her son who was soon to begin a clerkship for Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist, her mood shifted. As Evan Thomas describes the scene in “First,” his illuminating and eminently readable biography of the Supreme Court’s first female justice . . .

Rihei Onishi, a journalist for the Jiji Shimpo, a Tokyo daily newspaper, first came to the United States with his wealthy wine-merchant cousin, Toraichi Onishi, in 1903. They were impressed with the possibilities of growing rice in Texas and purchased approximately 300 acres of land to do so.

Sonia Shainwald Orbuch (born Sarah) grew up in Luboml, a small market town 200 miles from Warsaw, Poland, with a thriving population of about 8,000, two-thirds of whom were Jewish. Her family lived near the center of the town on #37 Chelmska Street, near her many friends and relatives. Inside their modest home, Sonia grew up under the caring watch of her tightly-knit family. “My older brother, Shneyer, used to take care of me all the time . . . ”

William (Bill) Pickett, rodeo cowboy, was the son of Thomas Jefferson and Mary Virginia Elizabeth (Gilbert) Pickett, who were former slaves. According to family records, Pickett was born at the Jenks-Branch community on the Travis county line on December 5, 1870. He was the second of thirteen children. He became a cowboy after completing the fifth grade. After observing herder dogs subduing huge steers by biting their upper lips. . .  

Chief Plenty Coups was the last traditional chief of the Crow Nation because, after his death, it was agreed that no other Crow could match his achievements. Born into the Mountain Crow tribe, near Billings, Montana, the Crow Nation and many other major Native American tribes were enduring great hardships.

“A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives.” This, more than his on-the-field statistics, can be viewed as his enduring legacy. He was born in Cairo, Georgia, to a family of sharecroppers, the youngest of five children, and his mother moved the family to Pasadena, California, the following year. He grew up in relative poverty and the prejudice the family encountered . . .

Sculptor and stonecutter Frank Teich was born in Lobenstein, Germany, the son of the poet Frederick and Catherine (Horn) Teich. At the age of eight he began painting, and after his graduation from the University of Nuremberg he was apprenticed to the German sculptor Johannes Schilling; he probably worked on the German national monument, The Watch on the Rhine. He then studied a year under the Franciscan Brothers at Deddelbach am Main.