Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

popular name: Patrick J. Kennedy

date_of_death: May 18, 1929

age: 71

cause_of_death: Liver disease

claim_to_fame: Historical Figure

best_know_for: Patrick Joseph Kennedy (P.J. to his friends and grandfather to President John F. Kennedy) was the son of Irish immigrants. His father, Patrick Kennedy, died of cholera ten months after he was born while his mother, Bridget Kennedy, who also had three daughters, found work as a clerk in a shop. Working in the shipyards after high school, Kennedy borrowed money from his mother and sisters to purchase a run-down saloon in a poor area of Boston. Although he was himself a teetotaler, the business venture was a success and he was soon able to obtain a second saloon. Kennedy purchased a third bar in an upscale East Boston hotel, the Maverick House. Before he was thirty, his growing prosperity allowed him to buy a whiskey and fine liquors importing business, P.J. Kennedy and Company. In 1887 Kennedy married Mary Augusta Hickey, the daughter of a prosperous businessman in the city. A member of the Democratic Party Kennedy was elected to the Massachusetts Senate in 1892 where he worked behind the scenes as a party boss. After leaving state politics, Kennedy held various appointed positions in the city including elections commissioner, fire commissioner, and wire (electricity) commissioner. He continued his business career by helping to incorporate two Boston financial institutions, the Columbia Trust Company and the Sumner Savings Bank.

popular name: Brigadier General Albert Myer

date_of_death: August 24, 1880

age: 51

cause_of_death: Kidney disease

claim_to_fame: Historical Figure

best_know_for: Albert Myers was a surgeon, a general, father of the U.S. Army Signal Corps, inventor of wig-wag signaling (or aerial telegraphy), and also was the founder of the U.S. Weather Bureau

popular name: David A. Kennedy

date_of_death: April 25, 1984

age: 28

cause_of_death: Drug overdose - cocaine

claim_to_fame: Historical Figure

best_know_for: David Kennedy was the was the fourth of eleven children to Senator Robert F. Kennedy and Ethel Skakel Kennedy who had led a deeply troubled life since witnessing the assassination of his father on live TV as he was waiting for his father upstairs at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. In the spring of 1984, Kennedy completed a month-long stay at St. Mary's Hospital and Rehabilitation Center in Minneapolis. He flew down to Palm Beach, Florida, on April 19 for Easter, where several members of the Kennedy family had gathered. Kennedy checked into room 107 of the Brazilian Court Hotel and spent the next few days partying. On April 25th, at the insistence of concerned family members, staff went to check on his welfare and found him dead on the floor of his suite. An autopsy determined he had died on April 25, 1984, of an overdose of cocaine, the tranquilizer Mellaril, and the painkiller Demerol.