Everything about John Anthony Volpe totally explained
John Anthony Volpe (
December 8,
1908 -
November 11,
1994) was a
Governor of Massachusetts and a
U.S. Secretary of Transportation.
Volpe was born in 1908 in
Wakefield, Massachusetts. He was the son of
Italian immigrants Vito and Filomena (Benedetto), who had come from
Abruzzo to
Boston's
North End in 1905; his father was in the construction business. On June 18, 1934, Volpe married Jennie Benedetto, with whom he'd two children, John, Jr. and Jean (m. Rotondi).
Volpe attended
Wentworth Institute in Boston and entered the construction business, building his own firm in
1930. During
World War II, he volunteered to serve stateside as a
United States Navy Seabees training officer. In
1953, he was appointed as the Massachusetts Commissioner of
Public Works, and in
1956 he was appointed by President
Dwight D. Eisenhower as the first Federal
Highway Administrator.
He was elected
Governor of Massachusetts in
1960, and served from
1961 to
1963, before narrowly losing reelection in
1962 to
Endicott Peabody. In 1964, he ran for Governor again and won, and was re-elected in 1966 for the first four-year term in Massachusetts history.
During his administration, Governor Volpe signed legislation to ban racial imbalances in
education, reorganized the state's
Board of Education, liberalized
birth control laws, and increased public housing for low-income families. Governor Volpe also raised revenues by increasing the state sales tax to three percent. He served as President of the National Governor's Association from
1967 to
1968.
In 1968, Governor Volpe ran as a "
favorite son" candidate for the
Republican presidential nomination. Following the election of
Richard M. Nixon, Volpe was named
Secretary of Transportation. He resigned as Governor to assume the cabinet post, and served in that position from
1969 to
1973. During his administration as Secretary of Transportation,
Amtrak was created. In 1973, Volpe was nominated by President Nixon and confirmed by the Senate as U.S. Ambassador to
Italy, a position he held until
1977.
Governor Volpe died in 1994, and is buried in Forest Glade Cemetery in Wakefield. The
John A. Volpe National Transportation Systems Center in
Cambridge was named in his memory, as well as the Governor John A. Volpe Library at Wakefield High School in Wakefield.
The
papers of John A. Volpe
are in the Archives and Special Collections of the Northeastern University Libraries, in Boston MA.
Further Information
Get more info on 'John Anthony Volpe'.
|
External Link Exchanges
Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:
<a href="http://john_a__volpe.totallyexplained.com">John A. Volpe Totally Explained</a>
Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned. |
