[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.

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