Biography
The son of Rear Admiral Edward D. Taussig and his wife Ellen Kneffler, Joseph Taussig was born in Dresden, Germany where his father, a lieutenant (navy) was on special service at the European Station (February 1877 – January 1880). One of five sons, he entered the United States Naval Academy in 1895. His older brother, Paul Taussig, had been enrolled at the United States Naval Academy but died the previous July of a sudden onset of acute appendicitis. Joseph Taussig, like his late brother, excelled in athletics at USNA. A football star, he was quarterback for the 1899 Navy team. He also excelled at track and field events and was president of the USNA Athletic Association. He was the second of a three-generational family of United States Naval Academy graduates that served from 1863 to 1954 starting with his father, Rear Admiral Edward D. Taussig (1847-1921), and ending with his son Captain Joseph K. Taussig, Jr. (1920-1999).
Read more about this topic: Joseph Taussig
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 great biography should, like the close of a great drama, leave behind it a feeling of serenity. We collect into a small bunch the flowers, the few flowers, which brought sweetness into a life, and present it as an offering to an accomplished destiny. It is the dying refrain of a completed song, the final verse of a finished poem.”
—André Maurois (1885–1967)
“The death of Irving, which at any other time would have attracted universal attention, having occurred while these things were transpiring, went almost unobserved. I shall have to read of it in the biography of authors.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)