[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 38 (Tuesday, April 12, 1994)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: April 12, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
                      TRIBUTE TO FELIPE N. TORRES

                                 ______


                          HON. JOSE E. SERRANO

                              of new york

                    in the house of representatives

                        Tuesday, April 12, 1994

  Mr. SERRANO. Mr. Speaker, it is with great sorrow that I rise to 
report the passing on April 3, 1994, of Felipe Neri Torres, a great 
Puerto Rican and a great American.
  Felipe Torres was born in the town of Salinas on the Spanish 
territorial island of Puerto Rico in 1897. With the passage of the 
Jones Act in 1917, he became one of the first Puerto Rican citizens of 
the United States. He enlisted in the Army and served with pride as a 
Second Lieutenant in a Black company in Puerto Rico in the closing days 
of World War I.
  After the great war Felipe Torres was among the pioneering Puerto 
Ricans to settle in New York City, where he washed dishes at the 
Biltmore and Commodore Hotels to put himself through law school.
  Admitted to the bar on July 7, 1927, Felipe Torres established an 
office in Midtown Manhattan, started a family, and studied nights for 
his BBS, a degree he earned in 1940. He later moved his office to 
Harlem, and was elected president of what was then known as the Harlem 
Lawyers Association, subsequently reconstituted as the Metropolitan 
Black Bar Association.
  Mr. Speaker, Felipe Torres later moved to the South Bronx, the very 
community in which I have lived since my own family migrated from 
Puerto Rico in 1950. And when I was just a youngster, Felipe Torres 
paved the political way for me by serving in the years 1952-61 as the 
first New York State Assemblyman of Puerto Rican descent from the 
Bronx.
  As an Assemblyman Felipe Torres campaigned for legislation to 
eliminate English-only literacy tests, which, in the years before the 
Voting Rights Act of 1965, deprived large numbers of poor and minority 
citizens of the right to vote. He also advocated for maintenance of New 
York City's Rent Control law and for raising the minimum wage. Among 
the other accomplishments of his assembly years are participation in 
the founding both of the Ponce de Leon Federal Savings Bank, which was 
established to address the lack of mortgage funding available to the 
area's growing Hispanic community, and of the Puerto Rican Bar 
Association.
  Felipe Torres retired from the assembly in 1961, and was soon 
appointed a judge of the New York State Family Court. He sat on that 
bench until 1967, when he reached the mandatory retirement age of 70.
  Though retired, Felipe Torres continued to serve: as a hearing 
officer for the Board of Education; as a member of the Committee on 
Character and Fitness of the Appellate Division, First Department; as a 
judicial hearing officer of the State supreme court; as a director of 
the Ponce de Leon Federal Savings Bank; and for over 20 years as the 
head of a busy private practice in the Bronx with his son, Austin.
  Mr. Speaker, for many years the Puerto Rican Bar Association has 
granted an annual Felipe. Torres Leadership Award; in 1982 the City 
University of New York awarded Felipe Torres an honorary doctor of laws 
degree; in 1983 he was honored at the 25th annual Puerto Rican Day 
parade as the patriarch of the ``Family of the Year''; and just last 
year he was honored with the dean's medal of recognition at a ceremony 
at Fordham Law School.
  The legacy of Felipe Torres is evident not only in the record and 
memory of all of his accomplishments, but in the outstanding service of 
his many public-spirited children and grandchildren. I ask my 
colleagues to join me and them in paying tribute to this great man.

                          ____________________