[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 132 (Monday, September 28, 1998)]
[House]
[Pages H9175-H9176]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                      TRIBUTE TO BONNIE LOIS KELLY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 7, 1997, the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Burton) is recognized 
for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
  Mr. BURTON of Indiana. Mr. Speaker, I will not take the full 60 
minutes. I will just take a few minutes here tonight to talk about my 
mother, Bonnie Lois Kelly. She was born in February 1920, and she died 
last Wednesday. We had the funeral on Saturday.
  She was one of those unique individuals that never gets much 
attention, but she did a tremendous job in raising three children 
through a great deal of hardship. She was five feet and one-half inch 
tall, but, to me and my brother and sister, she was ten times that 
height.
  She married when she was 18 to a brutal person, my father, who was 6-
foot-8 and who terrorized her and my brother and sister and I for 12 
long years. I can remember during all that time, every time that my 
father started to mistreat me or my sister or my brother, she would 
stand between us and take the body blows and stand up for us, no matter 
what the cost, and many times the cost was almost her life. She finally 
was able to get away from him when I was 12 years old, after 13 years 
of married torture.

[[Page H9176]]

  I can remember many times she would take us to the police department 
in the middle of the night. Back in those days there was not much 
sympathy from a lot of the people in blue toward abused wives and 
children. I can remember one night the police told her that if she did 
not take the children home at that moment, which was about 1 o'clock in 
the morning, with her face all bruised, that they would arrest her, 
which I could not understand.
  Anyhow, she finally met a really nice fellow, after she was divorced 
from my father. Incidentally, my father came in through the floor of 
the house where we lived on the West side of Indianapolis with a sawed-
off shotgun and took her away after breaking down the door, and we did 
not know whether she was dead or alive for many days, and we spent 
quite a bit of time at the Marion County Guardian's Home while she was 
away. But, thankfully, she was able to get away from him and survive.
  She finally met a very nice man, Kindeth A. Kelly, who ended up 
becoming my stepfather on December 23rd, 1950. He and my mother were 
married for 48 years. He worked in a foundry as a sand hog and later as 
a foreman of that foundry for a long, long time, I think it was 30-some 
years, and my mother worked in Ayres Tea Room as a waitress for 18 
years.
  The thing I recall about her was that she never complained. She would 
get up every morning and go to work at the tea room, work all day long 
on her feet, and come home at night and fix dinner for us, and I never 
heard her complain once. Those were very difficult times.
  Looking back on those times, I realize how really wonderful she was. 
I do not recall that I told her very many times how much I appreciated 
her, but I did, and I was able to at least convey some of that to her 
in her last days.
  There are so many things that you would like to say about your mother 
at a time like this, and you just cannot recall all of them. But she 
was really something special. She instilled in her children a love of 
nature, a love of art, and a love music and poetry. In fact, she 
requested that I memorize a lot of poems when things were going very 
difficult for the family in my formative years. Those poems, that 
poetry, gave me a lot of strength and courage during some very 
difficult times that I encountered in my life.
  One of the poems that she asked me to commit to memory was one that I 
would like to just recite for my colleagues who may be paying attention 
tonight, Mr. Speaker.
     When things go wrong, as they sometimes will,
     When the road you are trudging seems all uphill;
     When care is pressing you down a bit,
     Rest, if you must, but don't you quit.
     'Cause life is queer with its twists and turns,
     As every one of us sometimes learns;
     And often the goal is nearer than it seems,
     To a faint and faltering man.
     Often the loser has given up,
     When he might have captured the victor's cup;
     And he learned too late when the night came down,
     How close he was to the golden crown.
     Success is failure turned inside out,
     The silver tint on the clouds of doubt;
     So stick to the fight,
     When you're hardest hit;
     It's when things go wrong,
     That you mustn't quit.
  My mother was not a quitter; my stepfather, who really was my father 
because he treated us so well, was not a quitter; and I will never 
forget as long as I live the wonderful things that she did for me and 
the things she taught me.

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