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:
“I did not enter the Labour Party forty-seven years ago to have our manifesto written by Dr. Mori, Dr. Gallup and Mr. Harris.”
—Tony Benn (b. 1925)
“Unlike Boswell, whose Journals record a long and unrewarded search for a self, Johnson possessed a formidable one. His life in London—he arrived twenty-five years earlier than Boswell—turned out to be a long defense of the values of Augustan humanism against the pressures of other possibilities. In contrast to Boswell, Johnson possesses an identity not because he has gone in search of one, but because of his allegiance to a set of assumptions that he regards as objectively true.”
—Jeffrey Hart (b. 1930)