Later Years
García became an American citizen on June 25, 1947 and earned a high school diploma in 1951. On May 18, 1952, he married married Alicia Reyes with whom he had three children. For twenty-five years he worked as a counselor in the Veterans' Administration.
On the evening of November 21, 1963, Marcario Garcia greeted President John F. Kennedy at the door of the Rice Ballroom in Houston Texas. The ballroom was filled with a diverse crowd of attendees that included Hispanic World War II veterans, Civil Rights advocates and future political activists. The president spoke of U.S. and Latin American Foreign Policy and the importance of recognition and acknowledgement of Hispanic organizations like the United Latin American Citizens (ULAC). Speaking in fluent Spanish, Mrs. Kennedy offered words of inspiration, encouragement and hope. The unprecedented meeting by an American President and First Lady addressing Hispanic minorities is considered by many to be the emergence of the Latino vote in the United States. The day after this historic meeting Kennedy was dead.
Garcia died on December 24, 1972, from the injuries which he received as a result of a car accident. He was buried with full military honors in the Houston National Cemetery in Houston, Texas. The local government of Houston honored his memory by naming a middle school after him as well as renaming part of 69th Street in Houston "S/SGT Marcario Garcia Street". In 1983 Vice President George Bush dedicated Houston's new Macario García Army Reserve Center, and in 1994 a Sugar Land middle school was named in García's honor.
Read more about this topic: Marcario Garcia
Famous quotes containing the word years:
“What had really caused the women’s movement was the additional years of human life. At the turn of the century women’s life expectancy was forty-six; now it was nearly eighty. Our groping sense that we couldn’t live all those years in terms of motherhood alone was “the problem that had no name.” Realizing that it was not some freakish personal fault but our common problem as women had enabled us to take the first steps to change our lives.”
—Betty Friedan (20th century)
“War and culture, those are the two poles of Europe, her heaven and hell, her glory and shame, and they cannot be separated from one another. When one comes to an end, the other will end also and one cannot end without the other. The fact that no war has broken out in Europe for fifty years is connected in some mysterious way with the fact that for fifty years no new Picasso has appeared either.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)