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Coretta Scott was born on April 27, 1927, in Marion, Ala. Her parents owned a farm in nearby Heiberger. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, Coretta and her brother and sister picked cotton to help support her family. She attended high school in Marion, where she sang at school recitals. She continued to study music while attending Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Scott received a B.A. in music and education from Antioch and, in 1951, enrolled as a scholarship student at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, having decided to pursue a career as a professional singer.

While in Boston, she met Martin Luther King, Jr., who was then a graduate student in theology at Boston University. They married in 1953. When coretta scott king got married she was intitled to keep his legacy going

Ellen Ochoa was the first Hispanic woman astronaut. She was also a scientist and an inventor. She helped create several systems that use lasers to gather and process information from images.

Ellen Ochoa was born on May 10, 1958, in Los Angeles, California.  

She grew up in La Mesa, a town near San Diego, and graduated from San Diego State University in 1980. She studied physics in college, but she was also interested in music and played the flute. She continued both her music and her science studies after college. Ochoa earned a master’s degree and a doctorate from Stanford University in electrical engineering. She also played with the Stanford Symphony Orchestra.

In graduate school Ochoa concentrated on optics. Optics is the study of how light behaves. She continued that work at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico. She helped create optical systems for recognizing objects. Later she worked at the Ames Research Center designing computer systems. Ames is associated with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). All of her skills helped her gain admission to NASA’s astronaut program in 1990.

Ochoa became an astronaut in 1991. She flew on her first mission, on the space shuttle Discovery, two years later. By 2002 she had flown on four shuttle flights. On the shuttle she oversaw experiments and operated a robotic arm to move other astronauts and equipment around.

She later served as the Deputy Director of the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. She often spoke to groups of students of all ages about her experiences as an astronaut.

 

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 (1895–1948). The crowd that jammed Chicago’s Wrigley Field booed when the big man with the barrel-shaped body and pipestem legs came up to bat. It was the third game of the 1932 World Series between the Chicago Cubs and the New York Yankees. The score was 4–4 in the fifth inning. Cub pitcher Charlie Root threw one strike, then another. Grinning, the batter stepped back and seemed to point to the distant center-field bleachers. Root pitched, the big man swung, and the ball soared into the bleachers for a home run. The hitter was Babe Ruth, probably the most revered of baseball players. Ruth’s legendary pointing gesture—whether it ever happened or whether he even intended it—captured the imagination of baseball fans, as did everything about this great player.

The Babe’s achievements loom large in the record books. The left-hander held or shared about 60 records, with 28 made in World Series games. Among them were his record of pitching 29 consecutive scoreless innings in World Series play and his total of 714 major league homers—not including 15 World Series homers. (The pitching and home-run records were later broken by Whitey Ford and Hank Aaron.)

George Herman Ruth was born in Baltimore, Md., on Feb. 6, 1895. His father, a saloonkeeper, placed him in St. Mary’s Industrial School when George was 7. There he learned to play baseball. In 1914, through the help of one of the priests who taught at the school, Ruth began to play with the Baltimore Orioles of the International League. The Orioles’ manager, Jack Dunn, paid him 600 dollars for his first season. Although Ruth later earned such nicknames as the Sultan of Swat and the Busting Bambino, he got his most famous nickname—Babe—on his first day of practice. A veteran coach sneered at the 6-foot-2 youngster, “Here’s another one of Dunn’s babes.”

Later in the season he was sold to the Boston Red Sox. As his batting prowess grew, he was shifted from the pitcher’s mound to the outfield, where he could play every day. Before he quit pitching, Ruth had won 94 games and lost 46.

In 1920 Ruth was sold for 125,000 dollars to the New York Yankees, whose stadium was later called the House That Ruth Built. Then began the greatest years of his career. He reached his peak in 1927, when he hit 60 home runs, a season record (for 154 games) that still stands. In 1925 he was suspended for “misconduct” off the field. As Ruth grew older, his huge body became too heavy for his slender legs. In 1935, after 15 years with the Yankees, he joined the Boston Braves as a playing vice-president. Before the season ended, the unhappy Ruth laid down his bat for the last time. He ended his career in baseball as a coach for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1938.

In 1947 Ruth, who had always loved children, took a position with the Ford Motor Company to help with its Legion junior baseball program. He died of throat cancer in New York City on Aug. 16, 1948, with one dream unfulfilled: his reputation for irresponsibility blocked his wish to manage a big-league team.