"As the 51st governor of New York from 1975 through 1982, [Hugh] Carey led a small group of public servants who vanquished the fiscal crisis..."

"... that threatened New York City and the state — the direst emergency a governor had faced since the Depression — by taking on powers over the city’s finances that no governor had wielded before and none has wielded since. A liberal Democrat, Mr. Carey reversed the upward spiral of borrowing, spending and entitlement under his predecessor, Nelson A. Rockefeller, a Republican who had presided in an era of limitless government promise."

He was 92. It's good to remember what happened in the 1970s, what he "vanquished," and how some people back then imagined "limitless government promise."

Hugh Carey was born in 1919. ("He fought with the 104th Division in France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany, helping to capture Cologne and liberate prisoners at a concentration camp at Nordhausen.") He had 13 children. Nelson Rockefeller, by the way, was born a mere 11 years earlier, and he's been dead since 1979.