United States Senator Edmund Sixtus Muskie (1914-1996), the 1968 Democratic vice-presidential nominee and briefly a presidential candidate in 1972, was one of the key congressional leaders in formulating national policy on urban affairs and the environment during the 1960s and 1970s.

Edmund S. Muskie was born on March 28, 1914, to Stephen and Josephine Muskie in Rumford, Maine. Stephen Muskie was born Stepen Marciszewski in Poland in 1882, then a province of the Russian Empire. Because young Poles were frequently conscripted into Czarist armies, Stephen's parents arranged for him to be apprenticed to a tailor when he was 12 years old and for his emigration from Poland when he was 17 years old.

After three years in England Stephen Marciszewski arrived in the United States in 1903, settled in Dickson City, Pennsylvania, and changed his name to Muskie. He married Josephine Czarnecka of Buffalo in 1911. While on their honeymoon in Maine, the couple decided to settle...