[Congressional Record Volume 148, Number 63 (Thursday, May 16, 2002)]
[House]
[Pages H2604-H2605]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                     A TRIBUTE TO A WONDERFUL WOMAN

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Jeff Miller of Florida). Under the 
Speaker's announced policy of January 3, 2001, 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 whole 60 
minutes.
  Mr. Speaker, every once in a while one of our colleagues here has a 
wife or a child or a husband that dies, and we express our condolences 
and we tell them how sorry we are; but our colleagues really do not 
know very much about those people who have passed on. If a Member dies, 
we have the flag on the Capitol that is lowered to half mast and 
Members fly out to the district for the funeral and there is a lot of 
attention paid to it. But behind the people in the Congress are 
husbands and wives and children that are never really known about, 
except when a tragedy occurs. They are there to help us get elected, to 
feed us, to bring us joy when we go home at night; but they do not get 
much attention.
  Well, this is a picture of my wife. We were married 42 years. We laid 
her to rest yesterday morning. She was one of the most wonderful people 
that I ever met. I promised her before she died that I would make sure 
that she would at least be remembered as a footnote in history, if not 
a little bit more. I told her I would come to the floor and tell a 
little bit about her life, because it was a very interesting life.
  She was born in Flat Creek, Kentucky, up in the mountains, the hills 
of Kentucky in a two-room shack. They had no water, running water, they 
had no plumbing, and they had no electricity. She and her grandmother 
and grandfather and her mother and her uncle lived in that two-room 
shack while she was a little girl. Her mother got pregnant and was not 
married, and her father would not marry her mother, so her uncle 
literally got on a horse, took the shotgun and went over to this guy's 
house and said, you are going to marry her or you are not going to come 
out of that house alive, so the proverbial shotgun wedding took place 
and he married my wife's mother, and he never lived with her again. He 
went to World War II and died while he was over there; not in combat, 
he died from some other kind of an illness. My wife's mother literally 
had a broken heart, because she was really in love with the fellow.
  She contracted tuberculosis. When my wife was about 6 years old, her 
mother died of tuberculosis and then she was left to be raised by her 
grandmother and grandfather. Her uncle had gone to the war as well. Her 
grandmother, from taking care of my wife's mother contracted 
tuberculosis, and she likewise died.
  So now my wife was about 7. She had a grandfather, and the uncle came 
back from the war and said, we cannot let this little girl stay in this 
house with just two men. So they took her to an uncle who was a 
superintendent of schools. He had a nice home in Kentucky, but his wife 
did not like the wildness of this little 7-year-old girl because she 
had never had any formal training or education, and she said she could 
not stand having her in the house, so they kept her for about 2 months 
and then they shuffled her off to another relative.
  She went to the other relative who was called her Aunt Jackie who had 
two children of her own, and she lived there until she was about 17 
years old, and she matured and she became a very pretty lady. She was 
very popular among her fellow students because she was very quiet and 
withdrawn. I think it was probably because of the toughness of her 
childhood. She became what was called the band sponsor. She was elected 
by her classmates, and she was very proud of that. But what they did 
not know was she had contracted tuberculosis from her grandmother, 
which had been in her body all of that time.

  So in her senior year in high school, she had to go into a sanitarium 
in London, Kentucky; and she was there for about 6 months, pretty much 
by herself because they kept people pretty isolated in those days 
because they did not know how to cure tuberculosis. She did not do too 
well, so they sent her to Louisville, Kentucky, where she had half of 
one lung removed, and she was there for about another 3 or 4 months, 
and she was alone again. But she survived and she got better and then 
she moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, and lived with another aunt and went to 
secretarial school.
  I was studying for the ministry at the Cincinnati Bible Seminary when 
I met her at the Westwood Cheviot Church of Christ, and I asked her out 
and we started dating, and 6 months later we were married. Marriages 
that take place in 6 months they say do not last too long. We were 
married 42 years. She was probably, if not the best, one of the best 
things that ever happened to me.
  I ran for Congress four times before I got elected. If my colleagues 
know anything about spouses, they have to put up with the heartache, 
the pain, the financial losses and everything else when somebody runs 
for office. When you have a husband or a wife that runs and loses, you 
go through the pain with them. You go through the financial hardships 
with them. She did it once, twice, three times, and finally a fourth 
time.
  I remember the last time I thought we were going to win and 
everything started going wrong, and I told her we would have to put 
some of our own money into the campaign, and I told her we would 
probably have to mortgage the little farm that I had bought and I sold 
my car and I took our savings in order to be competitive and ended up 
borrowing and everything else on my land and everything to the tune of 
$91,000. I never will forget what she said when I told her we were 
going to have to do that, because I said, I can either do that or get 
out of the race. She put her arms around me and she said, Don't worry, 
we can make more money. It was the fourth time.
  Anyhow, we were successful; and now I have been in Congress 20 years, 
but I do not have her anymore. The thing that is interesting about it 
is, and I wish all of my colleagues were here to hear this, is one 
never really appreciates somebody like that until it is almost too 
late. Thankfully, we had the last year and a half together. We went to 
Germany and went to Florida and the State of Washington and every place 
we could to try to get her cured, but it was too late. She had 
metastatic colon cancer.

                              {time}  1745

  I would like to say to my colleagues, if you have not had a 
colonoscopy be sure to get one, because if we had done that earlier she 
probably would have survived. But nevertheless, we expect our spouse, 
our loved ones to be there when we go home at night. When we go away on 
a campaign trip we expect them to be there when we get back. We take 
them for granted, year in and year out, and we never think that one day 
we will come home and they will be gone.
  Well, I would just like to say to my colleagues from one who knows 
there is a good possibility they will be gone. So whether you are in 
politics or whether you are not in politics, pay a little attention to 
your family and your kids and spend as much time with them as you can, 
because a car accident, cancer, something can come along real quickly 
and you will not have them any more and you will rue the day.
  I remember I was talking to the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Hyde), 
who lost his wife a few years ago. We did not talk about that much on 
the floor either. I was trying to console him and he said, I would give 
2 or 3 years of my life just to walk around the block with her.
  That is how hard it was on him, and that is how hard it is on me and 
my family right now. So I wanted to come down tonight and extol the 
virtues of a woman that I loved for 42 years. I did not treat her as 
well as I should have. She deserved a lot better but she was

[[Page H2605]]

the best, the very best, and she will be missed. I hope that everybody 
takes a little inspiration from her because she was an inspiration to 
me, and I think she would be an inspiration to anybody who met her.
  On her tombstone we are putting the words, ``She was a wonderful wife 
and mother and an angel to everyone who knew her.'' And she really was.

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