Eunice Mary Kennedy Shriver (July 10, 1921- August 11, 2009) was a member of the Kennedy family and helped to found Special Olympics in the 1960s as a national organization. Born in Brookline, Massachusetts, she was the fifth of nine children of Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr. and Rose Kennedy (née Fitzgerald). Kennedy was educated at the Convent of the Sacred Heart, Roehampton, London, England, and graduated in 1944 from Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, with a Bachelor of Science in Social Science/Social Thought, after which she went to work for the U.S. Department of State, in the Special War Problems division. In 1950, she became a social worker at the then-named Federal Industrial Institution for Women in Alderson, West Virginia, and the following year she moved to Chicago, Illinois, to work with the House of the Good Shepherd and the Chicago Juvenile Court. On May 23, 1953, she married Robert Sargent Shriver, Jr. at Roman Catholic St. Patrick`s Cathedral in New York City, New York. Her husband served as the U.S. Ambassador to France from 1968 to 1970 and was the Democratic U.S. Vice Presidential candidate in 1972 (with George McGovern as the candidate for U.S. President). They had five children: Robert Sargent Shriver III (born April 28, 1954), Maria Owings Shriver (November 6, 1955), Timothy Perry Shriver (August 29, 1959), Mark Kennedy Shriver (February 17, 1964), and Anthony Paul Kennedy Shriver (July 20, 1965).

In the early morning of August 11, 2009 Shriver died at Cape Cod Hospital in Hyannis, Massachusetts. The immediate cause of her death has not yet been disclosed.

Post a Comment | View All Comments (1)