James McFadden, Founder of the Human Life Foundation

James Patrick McFadden (1930–1998) was an American journalist and publisher who founded the Ad Hoc Committee in Defense of Life in 1973 as a reaction to the Roe v. Wadedecision by the United States Supreme Court. He also founded the Human Life Foundation, and in 1974 he launched its publication, the Human Life Review, a quarterly journal of scholarship opposed to abortion.^[1] He also founded the National Committee of Catholic Laymen in 1977.

He was a native of Youngstown, Ohio. He graduated from Youngstown College in 1953 and served in the Army from 1954 to 1956.^[1] He began his journalism career with the Youngstown Vindicator. In 1956 he began working for National Review magazine, after reading about the magazine's founding while stationed in Germany as a military intelligence aide. He was on the National Review's staff for more than 25 years, including 12 years as associate publisher.^[1]

McFadden died of an esophageal hemorrhage on October 17, 1998, following a five-year struggle with cancer.^[2][3]

James McEachin, American Actor

James McEachin (born May 20, 1930) is an American actor, award-winning^[1] author, and known for his many character roles such as portraying police Lieutenant Brock in several Perry Mason television movies. As the star of the television detective series Tenafly he is (along with Susan Saint James of McMillan & Wife) one of the last surviving actors to have starred as a title character from a series featured on the NBC Mystery Movie.He is alive today in 2018.

McEachin served in the United States Army before, and then during, the Korean War. Serving in King Company, 9th Infantry Regiment (United States), 2nd Infantry Division, he was wounded (nearly fatally) in an ambush and nearly left for dead. McEachin was one of only two soldiers to survive the ambush. He was awarded both the Purple Heart and Silver Star in 2005 by California Congressman David Dreier after McEachin participated in a Veterans History Project interview given by Dreier's office and in which they discovered McEachin had no copies of his own military records. Dreier's office quickly traced the records and notified McEachin of the Silver Star commendation and awarding him all seven of his medals of valor shortly thereafter, fifty years after his service.

Following his military career, McEachin dabbled in civil service, first as a fireman and then a policeman in Hackensack, New Jersey, before he moved to California and became a record producer. Known as Jimmy Mack in the industry, he worked with young artists such as Otis Redding and went on to produce The Furys. He began his acting career shortly after, and was signed by Universal as a contract actor in the 1960s.

He was regularly cast in professional, "solid citizen" occupational roles, such as a lawyer or a police commander, guesting on numerous series such as Hawaii Five-O, Rockford Files, Mannix, The Feather and Father Gang, The Eddie Capra Mysteries, Matlock, Jake and the Fatman, Diagnosis Murder, Dragnet, It Takes a Thief, and Adam-12, and in television movies including Welcome Home, Johnny Bristol (1972), The Alpha Caper (1973) and The Dead Don't Die (1975). He appeared in such feature films as Uptight (1968), If He Hollers, Let Him Go! (1968), The Undefeated (1969), The Lawyer (1970), Buck and the Preacher (1972), The Groundstar Conspiracy (1972) and Fuzz (1972).

McEachin played Mr. Turner, a tax collector for the I.R.S., and later a character called Solomon Jackson, a co-worker that Archie Bunker tries to recruit for his social club, on the television show All in the Family. He played the deejay Sweet Al Monte in Play Misty for Me (1971) with Clint Eastwood. In 1973, he starred as Harry Tenafly, the title character in Tenafly, a short-lived detective series about a police officer turned private detective who relied on his wits and hard work rather than guns and fistfights. He also appeared occasionally as Lieutenant Ron Crockett on Emergency!. In 1978, he played a police officer in Every Which Way But Loose. In 1979, he played the role of a jaded ex-marine high school baseball coach in an episode ("Out at Home") of The White Shadow.

He made his third film with Eastwood in 1983 when he starred as Detective Barnes in the fourth Dirty Harry movie, Sudden Impact. He also appeared as Dr. Victor Millson, chairman of the fictitious National Council of Astronautics in the 1984 movie, 2010. In addition to his appearing role with Roy Scheider, his character often appears in video dispatches transmitted to the American astronauts in the film. While continuing to guest star in many television series and appearing in several feature-length films, McEachin landed his most memorable role, that of police lieutenant Brock in the 1986 television movie Perry Mason: The Case of the Notorious Nun. He would reprise this role in more than a dozen Perry Mason telemovies from 1986 until 1995, starring opposite Raymond Burr, and appeared in the 1994 crime thriller Double Exposure.

In the 1990s, he semi-retired from acting to pursue a writing career. His first work was a military history of the court-martial of 63 black American soldiers during the First World War, titled Farewell to the Mockingbirds (1995), which won the 1998 Benjamin Franklin Award.^[2] His next works, mainly fiction novels, included The Heroin Factor (1999), Say Goodnight to the Boys in Blue (2000), The Great Canis Lupus (2001), and Tell me a Tale: A Novel of the Old South (2003). He published Pebbles in the Roadway in (2003), a collection of short stories and essays which he describes as "a philosophical view of America and Americans". In 2005, McEachin produced the award-winning^[3] audio book Voices: A Tribute to the American Veteran.

In early 2006, the film short Reveille, in which McEachin starred with David Huddleston, began to play to troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, and people began to request copies of the film. The film was posted on video.google.com and quickly garnered 1.5 million hits and a deluge of fan mail to the jamesmceachin.com website; this inspired McEachin's latest contribution, Old Glory,^[4] which he wrote, produced, directed, and acted in. Old Glory was McEachin's directorial debut.

In 2001, McEachin received the Distinguished Achievement Award^[5] from Morgan State University. In 2005, he became an Army Reserve Ambassador; this distinction carries the protocol of a two-star general.^[6] As part of his work on behalf of the military and veterans, McEachin has participated in ceremonies for Purple Hearts Reunited, a charitable organization that works to return lost and stolen military awards to the recipients or their families.^[7]

McEachin is married with three grown children, Alainia, Lyle, and Felecia, who was personal assistant to, among others, Ice Cube and (the late) Emmy Award-winning director, producer, and writer Sam Simon.^[8][9]

The pronunciation of "McEachin," as he used it in a public service ad for the Army Relief Agency, rhymes with "beachin."

Francis McCourt, Author of Angela's Ashes

Francis McCourt (August 19, 1930 – July 19, 2009) was an Irish-American teacher and writer. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his book Angela's Ashes, a tragicomic memoir of the misery and squalor of his childhood.^[1]

Frank McCourt was born in New York City's Brooklyn borough, on 19 August 1930 to Malachy McCourt (1901–1985), who falsely claimed to have been in the IRA during the Irish War of Independence, and Irish Catholic mother Angela Sheehan (1908–1981) from Limerick.^[2][3][4] Frank McCourt lived in New York with his parents and four younger siblings: Malachy, born in 1931; twins Oliver and Eugene, born in 1932; and a younger sister, Margaret, who died just seven weeks after birth, in 1934.^[3] In the midst of the Great Depression, the family moved back to Ireland. Unable to find steady work in Belfast or Dublin and beset by Malachy Senior's alcoholism, the McCourt family returned to their mother's native Limerick, where they sank even deeper into poverty.^[3] They lived in a rain-soaked slum, the parents and children sharing one bed together, McCourt's father drinking away what little money they had. The twins Oliver and Eugene died in early childhood due to the squalor of their circumstances, and two more boys were born: Michael, who later lived in San Francisco (where he was called the "Dean of Bartenders") until his death in September 2015; and Alphonsus, who published a memoir of his own and died in 2016. Frank McCourt himself nearly died of typhoid fever when he was 11.

McCourt related that when he was 11, his father left Limerick to find work in the factories of wartime Coventry, England, rarely sending back money to support his family. Eventually McCourt recounts that Malachy Senior abandoned Frank's mother altogether, leaving her to raise her four surviving children, on the edge of starvation, without any source of income.^[3] Frank's school education ended at age 13,^[3] when the Irish Christian Brothers rejected him. Frank then held odd jobs and stole bread and milk in an effort to provide for his mother and three surviving brothers.

In October 1949, at the age of 19, McCourt left Ireland. He had saved money from various jobs including as a telegram delivery boy^[3] and stolen from one of his employers, a moneylender, after her death.^[5] He took a boat from Cork to New York City. A priest he had met on the ship got him a room to stay in and his job at New York City's Biltmore Hotel. He earned about $26 a week and sent $10 of it to his mother in Limerick. Brothers Malachy and Michael followed him to New York and so, later, did their mother Angela.^[3] In 1951, McCourt was drafted during the Korean War and sent to Bavaria for two years initially training dogs, then as a clerk. Upon his discharge from the US Army, he returned to New York City, where he held a series of jobs on docks, in warehouses, and in banks.^[3]

Using his GI Bill education benefits, McCourt talked his way into New York University by claiming he was intelligent and read a great deal; they admitted him on one year's probation provided he maintained a B average. He graduated in 1957 from New York University with a bachelor's degree in English. He taught at six New York schools, including McKee Vocational and Technical High School, Ralph R. McKee CTE High School in Staten Island, New York City College of Technology in Brooklyn, Stuyvesant High School, Seward Park High School, Washington Irving High School, and the High School of Fashion Industries, all in Manhattan. In 1967, he earned a master's degree at Brooklyn College, and in the late 1960s he spent 18 months at Trinity College in Dublin, failing to earn his PhD before returning to New York City.

In a 1997 New York Times essay, McCourt wrote about his experiences teaching immigrant mothers at New York City College of Technology in Brooklyn.^[6]

McCourt won the annual Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography (1997)^[7] and one of the annual National Book Critics Circle Awards (1996)^[8] for his bestselling 1996 memoir, Angela's Ashes, which details his impoverished childhood from Brooklyn to Limerick. Three years later, a movie version of Angela's Ashes opened to mixed reviews.^[9] Northern Irish actor Michael Legge played McCourt as a teenager.^[10] McCourt also authored 'Tis (1999), which continues the narrative of his life, picking up from the end of Angela's Ashes and focusing on his life after he returned to New York. He subsequently wrote Teacher Man (2005) which detailed his teaching experiences and the challenges of being a teacher.

McCourt was accused of greatly exaggerating his family's impoverished upbringing by many Limerick natives, including Richard Harris.^[3][11] McCourt's own mother had denied the accuracy of his stories shortly before her death in 1981, shouting from the audience during a stage performance of his recollections that it was "all a pack of lies."^[3] However, at the very least, many of his Stuyvesant High School students remembered quite clearly the mordant childhood anecdotes that he continually told during sessions of his senior-level Creative Writing (E7W-E8W) elective ^[12].

McCourt wrote the book for a 1997 musical entitled The Irish… and How They Got That Way, which featured an eclectic mix of Irish music; everything from the traditional "Danny Boy" to U2's "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For."^[13]

McCourt was married first, in August 1961 (divorced 1979), to Alberta Small, with whom he had a daughter, Margaret.^[3] He married a second time in November 1984 (divorced 1989) to the psychotherapist Cheryl Floyd.^[3] He married his third wife, Ellen Frey McCourt, in August 1994, and they lived in New York City and Roxbury, Connecticut.^[3]

In his free time, McCourt took up the casual sport of rowing. He once sank his WinTech recreational single scull on the Mohawk River in Upstate New York, and had to be rescued by a local rowing team.

It was announced in May 2009 that McCourt had been treated for melanoma and that he was in remission, undergoing home chemotherapy.^[14] On July 19, 2009, he died from the cancer, with meningeal complications,^[1] at a hospice in Manhattan.^[4]

He was survived by Ellen, his daughter Margaret, his granddaughter Chiara, grandsons Frank, Jack, and Avery, and three of his five brothers and their families.

McCourt was a member of the National Arts Club and was a recipient of the Award of Excellence from The International Center in New York. In 1998, McCourt was honored as the Irish American of the Year by Irish America magazine. In 2002 he was awarded an honorary degree from the University of Western Ontario.

In October 2009, the New York City Department of Education, along with several partners from the community, founded the Frank McCourt High School of Writing, Journalism, and Literature, a screened-admissions public high school. The school is located on the Upper West Sideof Manhattan on West 84th Street. The Frank McCourt School is one of four small schools designated to fill the campus of the former Louis D. Brandeis High School. The Frank McCourt High School began classes September 2010. The first principal of the school is Danielle Salzberg, who previously served as acting principal at Khalil Gibran International Academy and as an assistant principal at Millennium High School in New York. Among the many community partners of the Frank McCourt school are the Columbia Journalism School and Symphony Space.

The Frank McCourt Museum was officially opened by Malachy McCourt in July 2011 at Leamy House, Hartstonge Street, Limerick.^[15] This Tudor-style building was formerly known as the Leamy School, the former school of Frank and his brother Malachy. The museum showcases the 1930s classroom of Leamy School and contains a collection of memorabilia, including items such as school books of the period and old photos, all donated by former pupils of the school. As well as having a large selection of Angela's Ashes memorabilia, the museum has recreated the McCourt home as described in the book using period pieces and props from the Angela's Ashes motion picture. The downstairs of the museum houses the Dr. Frank McCourt Creative Writing centre.^[16]