Eunice Kennedy Shriver remembered for founding the Special Olympics
Sunday August 16, 2009 by Kevin Dayhoff
Some folks have asked where they may find my tribute to Eunice Kennedy Shriver, “
Shriver remembered for Special Olympics and also for a connection to Carroll that appeared my Carroll Eagle Archives column on Sunday August 16, 2009
So I thought what I would do is post the long version which is unedited to meet word limit…
Last Tuesday, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, died at a hospital on Cape Cod surrounded by several generations of her large family. She was 88 years old.
Inspired by her sister, Rosemary Kennedy, who was born mentally retarded, Shriver founded the Special Olympics in 1968 for persons with intellectual disabilities.
As a child, Rosemary and Eunice Kennedy are reported to have spent a great deal of time together swimming and sailing. Rosemary died in 2005.
Shriver earned a sociology degree from Stanford University in 1943 and subsequently worked as a social worker at a prison for women in Alderson, W. Va, and the juvenile courts system in Chicago, before she took over the philanthropic foundation named after her brother, Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr., who had been killed fighting in WW II.
Throughout her lifetime received numerous awards for her work with children. In 1962, when no one spoke in public about the mentally handicapped, Shriver broke the ice and turned on the light on the plight of the handicapped.
It was then that she “revealed her sister's condition to the nation during her brother's presidency in a 1962 article for the Saturday Evening Post,” according to a number of historical accounts of Shriver’s incredible life of service to our nation.
A year earlier, in 1961, President Kennedy “signed a bill she championed to form the first President's Committee on Mental Retardation,” according to news accounts.
Shriver was the fifth of nine children in the family of Joseph P. Kennedy and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy. President John F. Kennedy and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy were two of her more famous brothers.
Many folks will also remember her as the mother of former NBC newswoman Maria Shriver; and the mother-in-law of California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.
She married R. Sargent Shriver, from Willis Street in Westminster, in 1953. Sargent is a member of the historic Shriver family in Carroll County, known as community, political and business leaders; whose heritage has been, in part, preserved by the Union Mills Homestead.
He later became President Kennedy’s first director of the Peace Corps. He was also Sen. George McGovern's running mate in 1972, and ran for president himself in 1976. It is reported that the couple were very close and that she was an integral part of her husband’s political career.
However, it is through the Special Olympics that she will live on through the ages.
She was the daughter of a millionaire, the sister of a president and a U.S. Senator, and the mother-in-law of a governor; however she is best known for her tireless lifelong commitment to the mentally handicapped – and the Special Olympics.
Tovia Smith said it best on National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered:” Shriver “was born to one of America’s most powerful families but spent her life laboring for some of the least powerful.”
Kevin Dayhoff may reached at kevindayhoff at gmail.com or visit him at
http://www.westminstermarylandonline.net/ 
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