[Congressional Record Volume 165, Number 53 (Wednesday, March 27, 2019)]
[Senate]
[Page S2036]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                       TRIBUTE TO SAMUEL B. OLDEN

 Mr. WICKER. Mr. President, I am pleased to advise the Senate 
of the accomplishments of a fellow Mississippian, Mr. Samuel B. Olden 
of Yazoo City, on the occasion of his 100th birthday.
  Mr. Olden is from Yazoo City, the gateway to the Mississippi Delta, 
where he was born in 1919, to a family of Mississippi planters. 
Throughout his youth, he read widely in the B.S. Ricks Memorial 
Library, the oldest privately funded public library in the State, which 
greatly contributed to his personal development and admission into the 
University of Mississippi in Oxford. There, he received a B.A. and 
M.A., reportedly conversed with Nobel Prize winning author William 
Faulkner, and was ultimately recruited to Washington, DC, to serve at 
the Department of State. Prior to American involvement in World War II, 
Mr. Olden was sent abroad as the Vice Consul at our embassy in Quito, 
Ecuador, from 1941 to 1943. Upon his return, Mr. Olden enlisted in the 
U.S. Navy, serving from 1943-46 at posts ranging from Shanghai, China, 
to Paris, France.
  After the war, Mr. Olden transited the north Atlantic on a Liberty 
ship. A fellow naval officer noted Mr. Olden's fortitude during this 
stormy passage. While tending to his ailing father back in Mississippi, 
he received a letter from Washington asking him to consider defending 
our Nation's freedom, in a third, essential way. Mr. Olden returned to 
the District of Columbia, where he was invited to join the newly formed 
Central Intelligence Group. Commencing in 1947, Mr. Olden spent 2 years 
in the group's Washington office, followed by 3 years in Vienna, 
Austria, where he defended freedom and democracy against Communist 
aggression.
  Following a decade in public service, Mr. Olden entered the private 
sector, where he employed his experience abroad for Mobil Oil. From 
1952-1957, he was posted in East and West Nigeria, British and French 
Cameroon, The Congo, Chad, and Gabon. He joined Mobil's government 
relations department in 1957 and returned to New York. There, he 
attained Observer status at the United Nations and strode the halls 
with Adlai Stevenson and Eleanor Roosevelt. Later, he went abroad once 
more to serve as general manager of Mobil's affiliates in Tunisia, 
Algeria, Peru, and Spain.
  By 1974, Mr. Olden was fluent in English, French, German, and 
Spanish. He had connections around the world. And where did he go? He 
chose to retire to the finest place that he had ever lived: Yazoo City. 
There, he owned and operated a cattle ranch for 15 years, while 
continuing to pursue his passion for the study of history. He was twice 
a board member and was elected president of the Mississippi Historical 
Society, served 15 years on the State Committee for the Center for the 
Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi, and founded 
the Yazoo Historical Society's remarkable museum, housed in the same 
Triangle Center building where he had attended elementary school. Even 
in his 90s, he established and helped to fund the Yazoo Memorial 
Literary Walkway, which stretches between the Triangle Center and the 
B.S. Ricks Library. The walkway memorializes more than 100 Yazooan 
authors that include former U.S. House Minority Leader and U.S. Senator 
John Sharp Williams, literary critic and editor Henry Herschel 
Brickell, Governor Haley Reeves Barbour, beloved writers Willie Morris, 
Teresa Nicholas, Ruth Williams, John Langston, and Caroline Langston 
Jarboe, and educator Henry Mitchell Brickell. His large collection of 
pre-Columbian ceramics is now on display in the Mississippi Museum of 
Art in Jackson and is the focus of Yumi Park's book ``Mirrors of 
Clay.''
  This remarkable man has served his Nation as a diplomat, military 
officer, and emissary, during wars hot and cold. He served the world in 
the energy industry as a global businessman of distinction. He returned 
to his hometown and has continued to serve his State, his university, 
and his community as a historian, educator, and philanthropist even 
into the tenth decade of his life. His friends across the Nation and 
around the world celebrate with him today.

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