[Congressional Record Volume 155, Number 72 (Tuesday, May 12, 2009)]
[House]
[Pages H5451-H5452]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                         A TRIBUTE TO BILL HOLM

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Minnesota (Mr. Walz) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. WALZ. Madam Speaker, every time I get the privilege to speak on 
this floor, I am truly humbled. I am humbled by the knowledge of what 
we, as a Nation, have done. Each one of us in this body realizes that 
the strength of this Nation and our democracy lies in the extraordinary 
nature of our people.
  I come from the heartland of this great Nation, the places where the 
Great Plains begin and the Mississippi River begins to flow. Mankato, 
Minnesota, is my home town. That was the ``big town'' where the Ingalls 
family went to shop for school clothes in Laura Ingalls Wilder's 
``Little House on the Prairie.'' My congressional office is located at 
227 Main Street in Mankato. That is just a couple of blocks down from 
where America's first Nobel laureate, Sinclair Lewis, lived when he 
wrote his novel ``Main Street.'' Minnesota is also the home of F. Scott 
Fitzgerald. And I feel truly blessed to have the friendship of Garrison 
Keillor and his iconic ``Prairie Home Companion.''
  Each of these writers had a special gift to describe a place. As a 
child of the prairie and a geographer, place is something I have spent 
my entire life trying to understand. I teach high school geography, and 
invariably whenever I tell people that, they flash back to some really 
bad memories of having to memorize capitals. And I explain to them, 
that is location, and it is only a very small part of geography. Place, 
on the other hand, is knowing the people and what is in their heart.
  Minnesota recently lost another great writer. He was one of the most 
thoughtful and insightful tellers of place I have ever seen. Bill Holm 
was born in Minneota, Minnesota, in 1943. Minneota is a small town in 
southwest Minnesota where my father-in-law, Valgene Norwood Whipple, is 
still the high school boys basketball coach.
  Bill was of Icelandic descent, and he never lost his love for his 
proud ancestral home, spending his summer in Iceland. He went to 
college in St. Peter, Minnesota, at the great Swedish College of 
Gustavus Adolphus, named for the Swedish King and patron of literature 
and learning.
  Bill went on to the University of Kansas, became a Fulbright Scholar 
in Reykjavik, as well as a Bush Foundation fellow. He taught at 
Southwest Minnesota State University in Marshall, Minnesota, and he 
wrote several books and volumes of poetry. That is his biography. What 
Bill truly did was tell the soul of a northern people, a proud stoic 
people, who not only settled the harsh prairies of Minnesota, but built 
the vibrant culture and strong unique communities.
  One of Bill's works that touched me the most was a small volume 
called ``The Music of Failure.'' It is a journey of place and people 
that leaves one feeling incredibly thankful for family, friends, 
neighbors and this Nation, and puts into perspective what is truly 
important.
  I would like to spend a minute or so and let Bill's own words from 
``The Music of Failure'' tell a little of his place.

                              {time}  2000

  ``Farmers go to bed early, or at least they used to when I was a boy. 
Small towns in Minnesota close by 6, the cafes frequently by 4. People 
eat at home where you can save money. By 10, the streets are silent, 
only the liquor store is open, its lonesome Hamm's sign proclaiming a 
few that are still up. Nothing but blue flickering TVs behind drawn 
blinds, and a random pattern of yard lights stretching off into the 
prairies. By midnight, nothing. Drive on these county roads, and you 
can imagine that trolls have kidnapped the entire human race, leaving 
only electricity behind. Your headlights are a ship's beacon, lighting 
up a few breakers on the grass ocean, as the car rocks along toward 
whatever port you have business in. I like driving late at night on 
these roads without traffic. It provides me with a valuable corrective 
against human arrogance.''
  Bill understood place and he understood what made this Nation so 
strong: it was the people and their resilience.
  He also understood that not all of us saw the world the same way.
  There are two eyes in the human head--the eye of mystery, and the eye 
of harsh truth--the hidden and the open. The woods eye and the prairie 
eye. The prairie eye looks for distance, clarity and light; the woods 
eye for closeness, complexity, and darkness. The prairie eye looks for 
usefulness and plainness in art and architecture; the woods eye for the 
baroque and ornamental. Dark old brownstones on Summit Street in St. 
Paul, they were created by the woods eye; the square white farmhouses 
and the red barn are the prairies eye. Sherwood Anderson wrote his 
stories with a prairie eye, plain and awkward, told in the voice of a 
man almost embarrassed to be telling them, but bull-headedly persistent 
to get the meaning of the events. Faulkner, whose endless complications 
of motive and language take the reader miles behind the simple facts of 
an event. He had a woods eye. One eye is not superior to another, just 
different.
  When he wrote his book and the book I am reading from today, ``The 
Music of Failure,'' he was trying to get at the heart of what this 
Nation was about, what the soul was about, and he talked often about 
when he was a young man

[[Page H5452]]

trying to understand how we judged failure.
  One sentence summed it up for many of us: At 15, I could define 
failure in Minnesota by dying here and going nowhere.
  What Bill Holm understood was this Nation had a way to make itself 
great, reinvent itself and move to the future.
  Bill, rest in peace. Yours was not failure.

                          ____________________