Mario Matthew Cuomo was an American lawyer and politician who served as the 52nd governor of New York for three terms, from 1983 to 1994.
66 Facts About Mario Cuomo
2.
Mario Cuomo was the father of former New York governor Andrew Cuomo and former CNN news anchor Christopher Cuomo.
3.
Mario Cuomo was defeated for a fourth term as governor by George Pataki in the Republican Revolution of 1994.
4.
Mario Cuomo was born in the Briarwood section of the New York City borough of Queens to a family of Italian origin.
5.
Mario Cuomo was a baseball player and while attending St John's University in 1952, he signed as an outfielder with the Pittsburgh Pirates for a $2,000 bonus, which he used to help purchase his wife Matilda's engagement ring.
6.
Batting helmets were not yet required equipment, and Mario Cuomo's injury was severe enough that he was hospitalized for six days.
7.
Mario Cuomo eventually became a partner at the firm, but stepped down in 1974 to become New York Secretary of State.
8.
Mario Cuomo first became widely known in New York City in the late 1960s when he represented "The Corona Fighting 69", a group of 69 home-owners from the Queens neighborhood of Corona, who were threatened with displacement by the city's plan to build a new high school.
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In 1972, Mario Cuomo became known beyond New York City when Mayor John Lindsay appointed him to conduct an inquiry and mediate a dispute over low-income public housing slated for the upper-middle-class neighborhood of Forest Hills.
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Mario Cuomo described his experience in that dispute in the book Forest Hills Diary, and the story was retold by sociologist Richard Sennett in The Fall of Public Man.
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Mario Cuomo was followed as Secretary of State by Basil Paterson.
12.
Mario Cuomo had received the nomination of the Liberal Party several months previously and was urged to drop out of the race but he contested the general election against Koch and token Republican opposition.
13.
Mario Cuomo denied responsibility for this but Koch never forgave him "as he made clear with a pointedly disparaging reference to Mr Mario Cuomo in a recorded interview with The New York Times that was not to be made public until Mr Koch's death".
14.
Mario Cuomo ran on his opposition to the death penalty, which backfired among New Yorkers as crime was very high.
15.
Mario Cuomo withdrew from the ticket and unsuccessfully challenged Carey in the gubernatorial primary, accusing him of incompetence.
16.
Mario Cuomo won the primary for lieutenant governor and was elected alongside Carey in the general election.
17.
In 1982, Carey declined to run for re-election and Mario Cuomo declared his candidacy.
18.
Mario Cuomo faced Ed Koch in the Democratic primary.
19.
Mario Cuomo won the primary by ten points and faced Republican nominee businessman Lewis Lehrman in the general election.
20.
Mario Cuomo actively campaigned for Walter Mondale in the 1984 presidential election, and was named on Mondale's list of vice presidential candidates.
21.
Geraldine Ferraro was ultimately nominated as his running mate, but Mario Cuomo was chosen to give the keynote speech at the 1984 Democratic National Convention in San Francisco.
22.
Mario Cuomo ruled out the possibility of running in the 1988 presidential election, announcing on February 19,1987, that he would not run, and then going on to publicly decline draft movements in the wake of Gary Hart's withdrawal following the Donna Rice affair.
23.
When Mario Cuomo was asked if he was planning to run for president in 1992, he said, "I have no plans and no plans to make plans," but he refused to rule it out.
24.
Mario Cuomo was not able to negotiate a budget agreement with Republicans in the Legislature and on deadline day, time ran out.
25.
Mario Cuomo's supporters launched a draft movement and encouraged people to write in his name in the Democratic primary, which was held on February 18,1992.
26.
Mario Cuomo did not discourage it, which many saw as implicit endorsement of the campaign.
27.
Mario Cuomo was spoken of as a candidate for nomination to the United States Supreme Court, but when President Clinton was considering nominees during his first term to replace the retiring Byron White, Cuomo stated he was not interested in the office.
28.
Mario Cuomo lost mainly because his support outside of New York City all but vanished; he only carried one county outside the Five Boroughs, Albany County.
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Mario Cuomo extended New York State's economic reach in business globally, contributing to both strengthening and developing it.
30.
Mario Cuomo is known for beginning the "Decade of the Child" initiative, an effort that included multiple health care and educational strategies to better the lives of children in New York State.
31.
Further, in 1988, the "Rebuild NY" Transportation Bond Act was an initiative under Mario Cuomo that was a continuance of efforts to rebuild bridges and roads throughout the State.
32.
Mario Cuomo increased assistance to local law enforcement agencies in order to help reduce or eliminate crime; and prison expansion in the State was continued which he is said to have regretted.
33.
Mario Cuomo established the Office of the MTA Inspector General in 1983, as an independent watchdog for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.
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Mario Cuomo was the first governor to support an ecological approach to families which was represented by community integration and community development as the goal of deinstitutionalization.
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Mario Cuomo's progressivism was evident in his appointments of judges to the New York Court of Appeals.
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Mario Cuomo appointed all of the judges to the State Appeals Court, including the first two female judges, as well as both the first African-American and Hispanic judges.
37.
Mario Cuomo eliminated the New York State Regents Scholarship given to all students who ranked high on a statewide special examination.
38.
Avola's godfather, Aldo Ercolano, considered that Mario Cuomo would be an "excellent target".
39.
Mario Cuomo was notable for his liberal political views, particularly his steadfast opposition to the death penalty, an opinion that was unpopular in New York during the high-crime era of the 1980s and early 1990s.
40.
Mario Cuomo was outspoken on what he perceived to be the unfair stereotyping of Italian Americans as mobsters by the media, including denying the existence of the Mafia, and urging the media to stop using the word "mafia".
41.
Mario Cuomo opposed the move of the National Football League's New York Giants and New York Jets to the Meadowlands in East Rutherford, New Jersey, choosing instead to attend the home games of the Buffalo Bills while serving as governor, referring to the Bills as "New York State's only team".
42.
In 1996, Mario Cuomo joined the board of Medallion Financial Corp.
43.
Mario Cuomo sat on the advisory council of the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission.
44.
Mario Cuomo wrote a narrative essay titled "Achieving the American Dream" about his parents' struggles in coming to America and how they prospered.
45.
Mario Cuomo was the author of Why Lincoln Matters, published in 2004, and he co-edited Lincoln on Democracy, an anthology of Abraham Lincoln's speeches.
46.
Mario Cuomo was married for 60 years to Matilda, from 1954 until his death in 2015.
47.
Mario Cuomo is a graduate of St John's University's Teachers College.
48.
Mario Cuomo's younger son Chris was a journalist on the ABC Network news magazine Primetime.
49.
Mario Cuomo anchored news segments and served as co-host on Good Morning America, before moving to CNN in 2013, where he co-hosted the morning news magazine New Day.
50.
Mario Cuomo was picked as one of People magazine's 50 Most Beautiful People in 1997.
51.
Mario Cuomo is Chair of the Board of HELP USA, a charitable foundation that is associated with the organization her mother founded, Mentoring USA.
52.
Mario Cuomo's daughter Margaret is "a board certified radiologist, teaching professional, and national advocate for the prevention of cancer, heart disease, and diabetes".
53.
Mario Cuomo is the author of A World Without Cancer: The Making of a New World and the Real Promise of Prevention, and she serves on the board of directors of the nonprofit organization, LessCancer.
54.
Mario Cuomo has been featured on such TV shows as Good Morning America, Good Day New York, Morning Joe, and Inside Edition.
55.
Mario Cuomo remained a baseball fan after his athletic career ended, reportedly limiting his television watching to baseball games and C-SPAN.
56.
Mario Cuomo was an avid player of fantasy baseball, always with an Italian-American player on his team, regardless of how many Italian-American players were available or how well they were doing.
57.
Mario Cuomo was the first guest on the long-running CNN talk show Larry King Live that began in 1985 and ended in 2010.
58.
On November 30,2014, it was announced that Mario Cuomo had been hospitalized for a heart condition; he was described as being "in good spirits".
59.
On January 1,2015, Andrew Mario Cuomo was sworn in for his second term as governor.
60.
Mario Cuomo is here and his inspiration and his legacy and his experience is what has brought the state to this point.
61.
Mario Cuomo's wake was held on January 5,2015, and his funeral was held at Saint Ignatius Loyola Church in Manhattan on January 6.
62.
Mario Cuomo is interred at St John Cemetery, in Middle Village, Queens.
63.
Mario Cuomo rose to be chief executive of the state he loved, a determined champion of progressive values, and an unflinching voice for tolerance, inclusiveness, fairness, dignity, and opportunity.
64.
Mario Cuomo had the courage to stand by his convictions, even when it was unpopular.
65.
Mario Cuomo's legacy ran in his family, with the election of his son Andrew Cuomo in 2010.
66.
Andrew Mario Cuomo would serve as Governor for ten years, from 2011 until his resignation in 2021.