Texas-born Carly Fiorina on the Truth-O-Meter

Carly Fiorina is famous for heading up a major computer manufacturer.

It’s less widely known that she was born in Austin in September 1954.

Here’s what USA Today said in a May news story: “Fiorina was born Cara Carleton Sneed in Austin, Texas. Her name is part of family tradition: All men of the Sneed family named Carleton died while serving in the Civil War. To honor them, one child of every generation since then has been named either Carleton (if a male) or Cara Carleton (if a female). She is married to Frank Fiorina, an executive with AT&T.”

When we wrote about Fiorina about the same time, we drew on an October 2010, Los Angeles Times news story  which said, citing her autobiography: “Her mother, a talented oil painter, was a refugee from a troubled childhood in Ohio. Her father, Joseph Tyree Sneed III, was a University of Texas law professor whose ambition in academia meant that she was perpetually ‘the new kid,’ she wrote in her autobiography, as the family moved repeatedly.”

Her Texas ties don’t appear to be deep; the Times story said her father soon joined Stanford University’s faculty. California, here she came where eventually she followed on leading the Hewlett-Packard Company to become the Republican nominee for a U.S. Senate seat.

In that campaign, Fiorina made a video mentioning her birth in Austin and that most of her schooling took place in California.

See her Truth-O-Meter report card HERE.

Footnote: Several presidential prospects have Texas ties.

We bet you know which presidents were born in Texas: Dwight Eisenhower was born in Denison, near the Oklahoma border, and Lyndon B. Johnson was born in Stonewall, west of Austin. George H.W. Bush was born in Massachusetts; former Gov. George W. Bush was born in Connecticut.