[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 59 (Thursday, May 8, 1997)]
[Senate]
[Pages S4210-S4212]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
WE CAN SAY WE WERE PART OF SOMETHING
Mr. DASCHLE. Mr. President, the tragic days of the Dirty Thirties are
still remembered by many in my State. As an unbreakable drought settled
over our region, the fields dried and the crops withered. Hot, dry
winds whipped the dust into dark clouds that blew over the land and
settled in great drifts on the ground. It was a desperate time for our
State. Destitute and facing foreclosure, many South Dakotans had no
choice but to abandon the farms in which they had invested countless
years of labor. These losses rippled through our economy with a
devastating effect, stripping businesses of their livelihood and
farmworkers of their jobs. As the lines of the unemployed grew, so did
a feeling of hopelessness among our people.
It was in the midst of this terrible Depression that one of our
Nation's greatest Presidents, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, offered hope
to the people of South Dakota. Through the Civilian Conservation Corps
and the Works Progress Administration [WPA], he provided jobs for South
Dakotans, and gave us back the dignity that comes with earning your
keep. Roosevelt's mark can still be seen across the State, where the
thousands of people he put to work left stadiums, sewer systems, and
miles of highways and sidewalks as their legacy.
In Milbank, a quiet, friendly town in the northeast corner of my
State, the WPA-built municipal water system still ingeniously delivers
water from springs outside of town without the work of a single pump.
And only recently was the stretch of Highway 12 that runs through
Milbank, built by WPA workers and nearly six decades old, finally
repaved.
After all Franklin Roosevelt gave to South Dakota and the people of
Milbank, I am pleased to say that we have had the rare and wonderful
opportunity to give something back to him. Mr. President, last week the
long-awaited memorial to Franklin Roosevelt was unveiled. Over 800 feet
long, its rough-hewn granite walls form outdoor rooms that honor each
of Roosevelt's four terms as President.
I am proud to say that the stone for this memorial was quarried by
workers in Milbank. Nearly 60 years after Roosevelt put the citizens of
Milbank to work in the WPA, they have again been hard at work for him,
cutting and hammering the granite for our memorial to the man who led
our Nation through its worst depression and most terrible war.
Quarrying this granite has been a source of deep inspiration and
pride for the workers of the Cold Springs Granite Co., which owns the
quarry. Often working in the bitter cold, their fierce dedication
ensured that the 4,500 hundred tons of stone they cut reached
Washington safely and on schedule.
This was no mean feat--to meet the needs of the memorial, the 3-
billion-year-old layer of granite that runs beneath Milbank was cut in
pieces weighing up to 100 tons. These monstrous stones then had to be
carefully raised, without cracking or falling, from the base of a pit
140 feet beneath the ground. Once they reached the surface, the stones
were sent by flatbed truck to Cold Springs, MN, where workers shaped
them according to the models of Lawrence Halprin, the designer of the
monument. According to workers like Frank Hermans, who has worked in
the quarry his entire adult life, the job gave him and his coworkers
the chance to leave their mark in history. ``We can say we were part of
something,'' he said. ``Not many get the chance to say that.''
[[Page S4211]]
I know I speak for my colleagues as I say thank you to the workers of
Milbank for their dedication and hours of labor. Their efforts have
helped the Nation to honor a man who gave us hope when we were hopeless
and the determination to fight when our freedom was threatened.
Mr. President, the Washington Post recently printed an outstanding
article on quarrying of the memorial's granite. I ask unanimous consent
that it be printed in the Record.
There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
[From the Washington Post, May 2, 1997]
By Proud Toil, Stone Is Hewn Into History
(By Peter Finn)
Milbank, S.D.--The wind chill was 70 below one Saturday
last November when the six quarrymen working in a deep gouge
in the earth here had to move one last piece of granite. It
was a 65-ton clossus.
The rock had been quarried loose a month earlier, but the
permit to transport it on state roads to a factory in Cold
Spring, Minn., for cutting and shaping stated that it had to
go that day, bonechilling temperatures not withstanding.
``We had the warn clothes on,'' said Frank Hermans, the
quarry foreman. ``But your face hurt. It was a cold one.''
It took three excruciating hours to bring the granite up
from the 140-foot-deep quarry, making sure it did not fall or
crack. Hermans, his face chapped and burnished, felt a fierce
satisfaction as he watched it leave on a flatbed truck.
``We can say we were part of something,'' said the 46-year-
old, who has worked down in ``the hole,'' as he calls it,
since he was a teenager. ``Not many get to say that.''
Now, six months later, that piece of granite is a base
stone in one of four fountains at the Franklin Delano
Roosevelt Memorial, which will be dedicated today on a 7\1/
2\-acre site by the Tidal Basin.
The memorial's dominant feature is its granite spine, an
800-foot-long meandering wall that forms four outdoor rooms,
each representing one of FDR's presidential terms. The 12-
foot-high wall defines the memorial sculpture and fountains,
embracing and guiding the visitor through Roosevelt's time,
the years of the Great Depression and World War II.
``As the stone gets rougher and rougher, the emotion builds
up,'' said landscpe architect Lawrence Halprin, the
memorial's designer. With the progression of the wall into
the room representing World War II, the stone's face becomes
increasingly irregular. ``I'm choreographing experiences.''
From the quarry here on the dull Dakota flatlands to
Washington, where today's dignitary-studded dedication will
take place, the hands of many people gave physical life to
Halprin's artistry. Working hands. Hands that hammered and
gouged and chiseled the stone. Hands that blistered and
calloused and ached. Hands that bled passion as well as
sweat.
The schedule wore on the workers. One got shots of
cortisone in his shoulder to keep working. Another, who was
responsible for coordinating all the stonework, literally
lost his hair last year under the strain of meeting
deadlines. When it grew back this year, it had turned white.
``This was very personal for us,'' said LaVern Maile, 55, a
stonecutter at Cold Spring Granite Co., which owns the quarry
and cut the stone for the memorial--enough to build an 80-
story building.
``It was a monster of a job,'' he said. ``I don't think any
of us realized until we were halfway into it just how big it
was. And probably that was just as well.''
The Millbank quarry, once a natural outcropping of stone
valued for its reddish hue, is now a vast tear that extends
1,000 feet long and 650 feet across as it falls in terraces
to its deepest point of 140 feet. Surveys estimate that the
granite runs for 12 miles under this desolate plain. Each
year this slice of earth yields 463,000 tons of stone for
malls, banks, office buildings and grave markers.
Here, in the swirl of red and gray dust kicked up daily by
heavy machinery and the boom of explosives cracking rock,
Halprin first laid hands on his creation. He chose this
granite 22 years ago because the rock closely resembled the
stone FDR had selected for additions to the family estate at
Hyde Park, N.Y.
The granite is called carnelian, a derivative of the Latin
word for flesh. It is 2 billion years old, dating from the
pre-Cambrian era, the period before there was abundant life
on Earth. The granite formed when molten rocks deep in the
earth's crust solidified and either rose to the surface or
were exposed by erosion.
Halprin says the wall, too, will endure. He promises it
will still be standing 3,000 years from now.
The architect drew and made models of every stone he wanted
in the memorial--their lengths, shapes, protrusions,
recesses, smoothness and roughness. ``I could see every stone
in my mind,'' said Halprin, comparing the process to the way
a composer documents musical arrangements.
If Halprin was the composer and conductor, a select group
of Minnesota stonecutters was his orchestra.
Stonecutter Wally Leither, 55, carried drawings of each
block as he prowled the quarry looking for granite that
matched Halprin's specifications.
Usually, granite is blasted loose with explosives, but
because Halprin's demands were so specific and explosives
leave long rivets on the outside of the stone, Leither had to
cut most of the blocks for the memorial by hand.
Using jackhammers, he drilled holes into the stone every
four inches, shaping a piece of stone. Two pieces of steel
were placed in the shallow holes, and an iron wedge was
hammered between them.
``We'd let it sit like that overnight, and the stone would
crack with the pressure,'' said Leither, whose graying
mustache doesn't quite hide a persistent smile. ``It was slow
work.''
Stone was first cut for the memorial in 1991 after Congress
appropriated the $42.5 million in public funds needed to
build it. (An additional $5.5 million came in private
donations.) Over the last six years, 15,000 tons of stone was
chipped from the earth in South Dakota and trucked two hours
east to Minnesota to the Cold Spring Granite Co., where 4,500
tons of it was cut and shaped. The contract for quarrying and
preparing the granite was $6.35 million, according to the
National Park Service.
Halprin visited the quarry frequently, sometimes becoming
seized with excitement when he saw a particular stone and
adjusting his design to incorporate it if Leither told him
the men could get it out just as Halprin imagined it would
look.
``I've never seen anyone look at stone quite like him,''
said Don Noll, 57, the West Coast Salesman for Cold Spring
Granite, who accompanied Halprin on some of his trips to
South Dakota. ``Each stone has a personality with him. Where
I saw nothing except a chunk of rock, he saw part of a
fountain. He'd stand in front of stone and say, `Do you see
it? Do you see it?' And I'd say, `See what, Larry? What do
you see?'''
Some uses of the granite came about by happenstance.
In 1978, at the New Jersey studio of George Segal, one of
four sculptors who worked on the memorial, Halprin and the
others were discussing how to depict World War II in stone.
But their ideas seemed uninspired. As they stood over a stone
model of the wall, someone waved his hand in agitation,
knocking down a section and creating a pile of rubble.
``Suddenly we all realized we had captured the destructive
image that expressed what we needed,'' Halprin recalled.
The Cold Spring Granite Co.'s fabrication plant in
Minnesota is a sea of thundering industry: furnaces that
blast granite at 1,800 degrees to give it a thermal finish,
10-foot-high wire saws that pulsate rhythmically as they
slice the stone, and huge polishing units that smooth the
granite. High above the shop floor, cranes straddle the width
of the factory, lifting slabs of granite some weighing
several tons, with suction cups.
That machinery cut and finished the granite paving stones
that visitors to the memorial will walk on, as well as the
smooth blocks on which carver John Benson sandblasted some of
FDR's words.
But no machine could give the wall stone the roughness that
the landscape architect desired.
Leither and Maile and three other stonecutters, Mervile
Sabrowsky, 56, Dean Hemmech, 39, and Kraig Kussatz, 38, began
work on the rock faces the public would view. They started
with 16-pound hammer sets, then moved to smaller and smaller
chisels until the stone began to resemble Halprin's drawings.
``It looks easy, but if you take too much, you ruin the
granite,'' Leither said. ``Sometimes we had to compromise
with Larry. He wanted it a certain way, and we had to say we
can't take that much off.''
Over the last three years, the pace has been furious. The
team of four stonecutters tried to work on at least nine
blocks a day, always starting three and finishing three each
shift.
Some of the larger stones could not fit in the factory, so
the cutters had to work outside, standing on massive chunks
of stone and hammering away. One stone was reduced from 92
tons to 40 tons before it was sent to Washington.
Part of the wall's effect is the sense that one huge block
is stacked atop another. In fact, in much of the wall the
granite is no more than 10 inches thick, the back having been
sheared away. Behind it, in a two-inch space, stainless steel
anchors hook the granite slabs to an unseen concrete wall
that runs inside the memorial, ensuring that the granite
cannot fall.
Neither Maile nor Leither has any specific memories of FDR;
each was a young child when the President died in 1945. ``My
day was strong Democratic,'' Maile said. ``He talked about
him. He enjoyed him.''
Through the FDR Memorial, however, Maile and Leither, along
with hundreds of other Cold Spring Granite employees, felt
the excitement of leaving a little stamp on history, a mark
not easily made in the anonymity of small-town factory work.
``Someday I know that my grandchildren or my great-
grandchildren will see this memorial,'' Maile said, ``and in
the stone they'll see a little piece of me.''
When the last block left the factory late last year, Maile
said he felt like retiring.
``We'll never work on something like this again. It's part
of history,'' he said. ``And we were all giving 100 percent
and a little bit more. When the last piece went out, it was a
[[Page S4212]]
letdown in some ways. We did nothing else for years.''
Construction on the memorial site began in October 1994. It
took 210 flatbed truck trips to transport the 4,000 wall
stones and 27,239 paving stones from Cold Spring to
Washington, the last arriving late last year.
The peninsula on which the memorial sits was formed from
mud dredged from the Tidal Basin in the late 1800s and early
1900s. Tests indicated it could not support the 4,500-ton
memorial, so about 900 steel pilings were driven down 100
feet to the solid ground under the settled mud. Concrete
beams were then built over the pilings.
``It's like it is built on a bridge,'' Halprin said.
The four sections of the wall were built one by one over
the last 30 months, with cranes hoisting the granite stones
into position so they could be hooked to the concrete wall
behind. The William V. Walsh Construction Co. of Rockville
with the primary contractor on site.
Halprin and the workers at Cold Spring had built mock-ups
of the wall in Minnesota to see how corners, buttresses and
ground connections could best be assembled when the stone
reached Washington. Those mock-ups also gave Benson, the
inscription designer and carver, an opportunity for some
trial runs on the heavily pillowed granite.
He chose a form of Roman inscription that was refined in
his studio in Newport, R.I., but the actual carving was done
on the erected memorial. Benson traced the letters, some 16
inches tall, onto the granite with water-based paint. Once he
saw how the rough surface distorted the appearance of the
letters, he repainted them before carving the quotations,
using a chisel driven by a pneumatic hammer.
Benson, whose stone-carving business is the oldest in the
country, dating to 1705, said he cut at a rate of about two
letters a day.
``You don't make mistakes,'' he said. ``You can't make a
mistake. The wall was up.''
The stonecutters from Cold Spring also worked on site in
the last four months, making last-minute cuts at Halprin's
direction.
``That was awful scary,'' Leither said. ``Mess up and the
whole wall has to come down.''
On one of the last pieces the cutters worked on--a bench--
Maile gave the 16-pound hammer to Halprin so he could pitch
away a piece of stone.
``I couldn't let it pass without him taking one swing,''
Maile said.
Halprin kept the piece of stone as a souvenir.
Leither and Maile, along with 30 other people from Cold
Spring, will be at the dedication today.
``When we said those stones, all finished, it'll be almost
like a family reunion,'' Leither said. ``We gave birth to
them out in Millbank, nurtured them in Cold Spring and sent
them off like grown children to Washington, D.C.''
Mr. DASCHLE. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. ALLARD. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for
the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
____________________