President Donald Trump on Monday issued an amended executive order that added more than 200 people to be honored with statues in the National Garden of American Heroes.
And there just might be enough for a Western Pennsylvania section:
• 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey coach Herb Brooks, who later served as the Pittsburgh Penguins’ director of player personnel
• Industrialist Andrew Carnegie, who has a town named after him, plus all the libraries he supported
• Pirates star Roberto Clemente, the first Latin American player to be enshrined in the National Baseball Hall of Fame
• Jonas Salk, the inventor of the polio vaccine while working at the University of Pittsburgh
• Everyman actor Jimmy Stewart, from Indiana
“In short, each individual has been chosen for embodying the American spirit of daring and defiance, excellence and adventure, courage and confidence, loyalty and love,” Trump wrote in the executive order. “Astounding the world by the sheer power of their example, each one of them has contributed indispensably to America’s noble history, the best chapters of which are still to come.”
Seventeen of the country’s 45 presidents will be honored:
• John Adams
• Grover Cleveland
• Calvin Coolidge
• Dwight D. Eisenhower
• Ulysses S. Grant
• Andrew Jackson
• Thomas Jefferson
• John F. Kennedy
• Abraham Lincoln
• James Madison
• William McKinley
• Ronald Reagan
• Franklin Roosevelt
• Teddy Roosevelt
• William Howard Taft
• Harry S. Truman
• George Washington
The garden includes dozens of entertainers such as Johnny Cash, Julia Child, Walt Disney, Whitney Houston, Elvis Presley, Alex Trebek and John Wayne.
The world of sports will be represented by:
• Boxer Muhammad Ali
• U.S. Olympic hockey coach Herb Brooks
• NBA star Kobe Bryant
• MLB star Lou Gehrig
• Football coach Vince Lombardi
• Olympic track and field star Jesse Owens
• MLB groundbreaker Jackie Robinson
• MLB slugger Babe Ruth
• Multi-sport star Jim Thorpe
• MLB pitcher Cy Young
The location for the proposed statuary park, first announced in July, hasn’t been determined.
