Overlooked No More: Otto Lucas, ‘God in the Hat World’
His designs made it onto the covers of fashion magazines and onto the heads of celebrities like Greta Garbo. His business closed after he died in a plane crash.
By
![Otto Lucas in 1961. “I regard hat-making as an art and a science,” he once said.](https://cdn.statically.io/img/static01.nyt.com/images/2024/07/01/multimedia/00Overlooked-Lucas-01-jmqp-print1/00Overlooked-Lucas-01-jmqp-thumbLarge.jpg?auto=webp)
![Otto Lucas in 1961. “I regard hat-making as an art and a science,” he once said.](https://cdn.statically.io/img/static01.nyt.com/images/2024/07/01/multimedia/00Overlooked-Lucas-01-jmqp-print1/00Overlooked-Lucas-01-jmqp-threeByTwoMediumAt2X.jpg?auto=webp)
His designs made it onto the covers of fashion magazines and onto the heads of celebrities like Greta Garbo. His business closed after he died in a plane crash.
By
Böttner, whose specialty was self-portraiture, celebrated her armless body in paintings she created with her mouth and feet while dancing in public.
By
For Mehta, women’s rights were human rights, and in all her endeavors she took women’s participation in public and political realms to new heights.
By
He fought prejudice and incarceration during World War II to lead a successful career, becoming one of the first editors of color at a metropolitan newspaper.
By Jonathan van Harmelen and
Overlooked No More: Min Matheson, Labor Leader Who Faced Down Mobsters
As director of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, she fought for better working wages and conditions while wresting control from the mob.
By
Overlooked No More: Lizzie Magie, the Unknown Inventor Behind Monopoly
Magie’s creation, The Landlord’s Game, inspired the spinoff we know today. But credit for the idea long went to someone else.
By
Overlooked No More: Henrietta Leavitt, Who Unraveled Mysteries of the Stars
The portrait that emerged from her discovery, called Leavitt’s Law, showed that the universe was hundreds of times bigger than astronomers had imagined.
By
Overlooked No More: Yvonne Barr, Who Helped Discover a Cancer-Causing Virus
A virologist, she worked with the pathologist Anthony Epstein, who died last month, in finding for the first time that a virus that could cause cancer. It’s known as the Epstein-Barr virus.
By
Remarkable People We Overlooked in Our Obituaries
The poet Sylvia Plath and the novelist Charlotte Brontë. Ida B. Wells, the anti-lynching activist. These extraordinary people — and so many others — did not have obituaries in The New York Times. Until now.
By Amisha Padnani and
Advertisement
She led a successful career despite coping with a horrific event that she witnessed at 18: the killing of her mother and sister at the hands of her father.
By Sarah Weinman
She started out at Blancpain as an apprentice and eventually took over as an owner, a move that one industry insider noted was “totally unprecedented” for a woman.
By Rachel Felder
He became wealthy working as a hairdresser in New York, then used his funds to free enslaved people, build churches and house orphans of color.
By Elizabeth Stone
With one arm and one leg, he upended assumptions that disabled people could not lead fulfilling lives, and his artistry had audiences clamoring for more.
By Meisha Rosenberg
She created one of the world’s best-known characters for children, and fought to have the book published, but she never sought celebrity status.
By Jess Bidgood
A pioneering record-label owner and engineer, she played guitar in a raw and unapologetically abrasive way. “Whatever song it was,” she said, “I always creamed it.”
By Howard Fishman
She is best remembered for importing reindeer to the Scottish Highlands centuries after they were hunted to extinction. About 150 roam there today.
By Naï Zakharia
She learned to fend for herself during a venture to Wrangel Island. By the time a rescue ship arrived, she was the last crew member standing.
By Natalie Schachar
Beginning the 1930s in San Francisco, she transformed the image of her native Mexican cuisine in the United States with a restaurant and popular cookbooks, all while overcoming a loss of sight.
By Mayukh Sen
Long before Kindles and iPads became popular, Ruiz Robles, a teacher, created her Mechanical Encyclopedia to help lighten her students’ textbook load.
By Cindy Shmerler
A pivotal conversation led him on a quest to understand African history and create a one-of-a-kind village for practitioners of the Yoruba religion.
By Dionne Ford
For a time, whenever a bridge, tunnel or highway opened around New York, he endeavored to beat others onto, into or along it.
By Margalit Fox
Her car repair business was described as having a staff “capable of doing the jobs any male member of the automobile industry would undertake.”
By Briohny Doyle
As the first known American woman of Chinese ancestry to earn a medical degree, she treated celebrities and opened a practice in San Francisco’s Chinatown.
By Nina Chhita
Advertisement
As a dancer, actress and storyteller also known as Molly Spotted Elk, she bridged her world and that of the West, captivating audiences along the way.
By Will Dudding
Often turning her lens on women, she emerged as one of independent cinema’s fiercest proponents on the West Coast.
By Sean Malin
She persevered at a time when women were effectively banned from the sport, and was the first woman inducted into England’s National Football Hall of Fame.
By Jacob Meschke
She killed Nazis in the Netherlands and was known as “the girl with the red hair” on their most-wanted list. Then she was executed.
By Claire Moses
She was a reporter, executive director of the National Organization for Women and owner of the restaurant Mother Courage, which became a hub for women.
By Nina Siegal
In diaries, articles and letters, he pushed for the medical community’s acceptance of men who were assigned female at birth and identified as gay.
By Megan Milks
He beat some of the world’s top players despite growing up with little access to chess books and not having the same knowledge his rivals possessed.
By Dylan Loeb McClain
After documenting his experience in Japanese American internment camps, Sakoda helped bring the study of human behavior to the computer age.
By Elizabeth Landau and Ben Klemens
Reed made several discoveries in genetics and dedicated her career toward supporting women scientists. Yet she herself fell into obscurity.
By Rachel May
After she died — and just a year after her discovery — another scientist took credit for her work. It would be more than half a century until her story resurfaced.
By Delthia Ricks
Advertisement
The profession was considered unladylike in 1890s England, where she was refused admission to dental school. But she found one in Scotland, and became a notable figure in dentistry.
By Seth Mydans
She opened Murder Ink, believed to be the nation’s first mystery bookstore, and brought fans together through interactive whodunits and other events.
By Allyson McCabe
She oversaw the Tiffany girls, a group of glass cutters and artisans who created elaborate, colorful lamps that are still in demand.
By Elaine Louie
One of the best-known Black poets of the 19th century, she was also a renowned orator. “You white women speak here of rights,” she said. “I speak of wrongs.”
By Ian Zack
She relied on adamantine nerves and decades of flying experience as the first woman lead pilot for the U.S. Forest Service.
By Daniel E. Slotnik
She wrote of her life in raw detail with emotional force. But she was not recognized internationally until after her death, when her memoirs were translated into English.
By Nina Siegal
Called “the American Venus,” she was a model immortalized by sculptors, her image remaining visible in monuments across New York City.
By Sam Roberts
She set sail in 1952 not to set a record or make a point about women and their abilities. Rather, her motivation was deeply personal.
By Erica Westly
She and her husband, Joe, recorded the first commercial recording of Cajun music ever made, giving voice to French-speaking Louisiana.
By William Grimes
She worked with Alfred Hitchcock, Elia Kazan, Frank Capra and John Ford, and she was known for her deft touch, particularly with action movies.
By Gavin Edwards
Advertisement
Mother and daughter, they developed the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which has helped millions of people discover if they are introverts or extroverts or thinkers or feelers.
By Glenn Rifkin and Benedict Carey
As a food scientist, she sought to reduce the Philippines’ dependence on imported food, pioneering new ways to use local products. And that was before she became a war hero.
By Seth Mydans
She was especially known for reinventing boleros — songs of stringent, abiding love — amid Puerto Rico’s sexist and militaristic society in the mid-20th century.
By Ben Ratliff
As the only woman in a tournament, she was often greeted with skepticism. She once responded by saying that she looked forward “to drinking some men’s blood.”
By Gavin Edwards
Jonas was officially ordained as a rabbi in Germany in 1935, just as conditions were worsening for Jews. She was killed at Auschwitz when she was 42.
By Gabriel Popkin
Countless fans have been intrigued by her verses carrying erotic and sacred imagery, and by her life, from her childhood in Milan to her time spent in asylums.
By Ilaria Parogni
Known as the world’s fastest woman juggler, she assisted her brother before launching a three-decade solo career.
By Callie Holtermann
His sound and look influenced everyone from Anohni to Lady Gaga. He also sang backup vocals for David Bowie.
By Rachel Felder
He served nearly three years in the U.S. Navy and documented almost all of it, leaving an invaluable record of Black life during the war.
By Clay Risen
Colquhoun campaigned for women’s rights in Britain’s male-dominated Parliament. But her political career came to an end when she was outed as a lesbian.
By Alan Cowell
Advertisement
His experimentations with different materials and technology earned him widespread recognition as well as patents and awards.
By Elaine Louie
She appeared in hundreds of Man Ray’s photos, was friends with Picasso and is believed to be the first Black model to appear in a major American fashion magazine.
By Rachel Felder
In her books and essays, she developed a social model and a vision for how various groups could find their place in a modern Middle East.
By Eitan Nechin
“Dr. Betty” led 350 miners on a strike in Pennsylvania in 1945 demanding that the mining company that owned their town improve horridly unsanitary conditions.
By Steven Greenhouse
She fought oppression in public and private spheres, and shaped her son’s education as he evolved into a powerful thinker and speaker.
By Jolie Solomon
For two decades, she drew almost 600 cartoons for The New Yorker with female characters that commented on life with wit, intelligence and irony.
By Janaki Challa
Advertisement
Advertisement