(1917–2002). After playing professional football to finance his schooling, Byron Raymond White became a successful lawyer and a Supreme Court associate justice. White was born on June 8, 1917, in Fort Collins, Colo. He received a bachelor's degree from the University of Colorado in 1938, where he was an outstanding football player and acquired the nickname Whizzer White. He played professional football with the Pittsburgh Pirates (now Steelers) for one season, and with the Detroit Lions for two seasons while attending Yale Law School. He graduated from Yale with a law degree in 1946. He studied at Oxford University as a Rhodes scholar in 1939–40 and served in the United States Navy in World War II. From 1946 to 1961 White had a law practice in Denver, Colo. An old friend of John F. Kennedy's, White became assistant attorney general of the United States under the president's brother Robert Kennedy in 1961. In 1962 he was appointed an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court, becoming the first Kennedy appointee as well as the first Coloradan to serve on the Court. Although appointed by a Democrat, White was generally a conservative or moderate member of the Court. He retired from the Court in 1993. White died on April 15, 2002, in Denver. |