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Special Section: 50 Faces for America's Future
(10 of 15)
30. Vilma Martinez, 35, the daughter of a San Antonio carpenter, worked her way through the University of Texas and Columbia Law School. After concentrating on civil rights for the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense Fund and the New York State division of human rights, she moved to San Francisco in 1973 to become the president and general counsel of the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Educational Fund. There she has fought skillfully for the rights of 8 million Mexican Americans. Martinez, who herself grew up in a Spanish-speaking household, won a 1974 case before the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that guaranteed the controversial right of bilingual education to all non-English-speaking children in public schools.
31. Carole McClellan, 39, is something of a lone star among big-city mayors. A former civics teacher and school district trustee, she oversees not only the 353,400 people and 120 sq. mi. of her home town of Austin but also a household of four sons, aged eleven to 16. McClellan starts the morning with a dawn breakfast followed by car-pool duty to get the children to school, works all day with Austin's city manager and six-member council, and hurries home to cook dinner for her children (she is a divorcee). She then returns to city hall for more paper work. Since taking office in 1977, McClellan has got voter approval of bond issues totaling $141 million for remodeling the city and continuing Austin's participation in a nuclear-power venture. She is persuasive: she won the nuclear-power bond issue by 53% just ten days after the Three Mile Island incident.
32. Anthony Toby Moffett, 34. "What happens when a Nader Raider comes to Congress?" mused the Connecticut Democrat in 1975, shortly after his election. Four years later, Moffett admits: "I'm trying to find the fine line between screaming all the time and being a member of the club." Last January he outmaneuvered three senior Representatives to win the chairmanship of the powerful Subcommittee on Environment, Energy and Natural Resources. A second-generation American with Lebanese grandparents, Moffett, who studied government at Syracuse University and Boston College, is a longtime defender of consumer rights. He has spoken out against high energy costs and opposes President Carter's decontrol of domestic oil prices, despite arguments from those who feel that Americans will waste gasoline until prices go up. "Government programs are still wanted," he says. "My job is to cut out the waste and the junk, and to be a leader of the programs that work well."
33. Sister Elizabeth Morancy, 38, wore the traditional black habit of the Sisters of Mercy and taught government in a parochial school until a few years ago. Last fall she was elected by a landslide to the Rhode Island state legislature from her home town of Providence. A graduate of Salve Regina College in Newport, R.I., she represents the Spanish-speaking, black, Laotian and blue-collar white residents of the city's 18th
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