Biography
On March 19, 1924, Curtis Wilbur was sworn in as Secretary of the Navy. The first appointee of President Calvin Coolidge, Curtis Wilbur came into the position with a reputation as a man of high intellect and a character of "unimpeachable integrity."
By the end of his term, Curtis Wilbur had achieved success in enlarging and modernizing the fleet and established a naval air force which would grow to become a potent component in the war with Japan.
In the last hours of his presidency, Coolidge nominated Curtis Wilbur to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco. However, when the 70th Congress ended that week, the Senate had not acted on the nomination, so it expired. President Herbert Hoover then resubmitted the nomination to the Senate in the 71st Congress, which approved it. Wilbur served as a judge in active service until 1945 when his senior status began.
In the 1930s, one of his children, Dr. Leonard Wilbur, established a mission hospital in the province of northern China now now known as Shanxi. Leonard, his wife (Jean Spaulding) and two children (Ruth and Lyman) survived invasions by Chinese communist insurgents and Japanese troops. However, on Easter Sunday 1940, Leonard died in Shanxi of typhus. His wife later gave birth to their third child, Bruce, before departing China for San Francisco.
Following retirement, Curtis Wilbur spent time with his wife, the former Olive Doolittle, and their three three surviving children (Edna, Paul and Lyman Dwight). He died in 1954.
-
Curtis Dwight Wilbur and his family.
-
Secretary Wilbur with Captain Isoroku Yamamoto of the Japanese Navy.
Read more about this topic: Curtis D. Wilbur
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A biography is like a handshake down the years, that can become an arm-wrestle.”
—Richard Holmes (b. 1945)
“Had Dr. Johnson written his own life, in conformity with the opinion which he has given, that every man’s life may be best written by himself; had he employed in the preservation of his own history, that clearness of narration and elegance of language in which he has embalmed so many eminent persons, the world would probably have had the most perfect example of biography that was ever exhibited.”
—James Boswell (1740–95)