[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 159 (2013), Part 11]
[House]
[Page 16173]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




              IN TRIBUTE TO FORMER CONGRESSMAN MAJOR OWENS

  (Ms. KAPTUR asked and was given permission to address the House for 1 
minute and to revise and extend her remarks.)
  Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, I rise in tribute to our former colleague, 
Congressman Major Owens of Brooklyn, New York.
  Major and I were elected in the class of 1998 and had the joy of 
serving together for several decades. He was a fighter for learning and 
perhaps the first librarian ever elected to the Congress of the United 
States. He came from Brooklyn, far from where I lived, but his 
predecessor, Shirley Chisholm, was the only Member of Congress that in 
our first campaign came to campaign for me. I shall never forget that.
  Major was a social critic, and he was a voice from a Brooklyn that I 
only imagined as a child with the Brooklyn Dodgers. With the old Ebbets 
Field torn down, the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles, and baseball changed 
forever from a human institution where the players came from that 
region to an enterprise where they were traded like chattel.
  Major understood the difference, and the work that he did here, 
whether it was fighting for learning, fighting for libraries, fighting 
for jobs in America, for the training of workers, he handled in a very 
measured way. He had a poetic sense about him when he came to the floor 
many times in the evening and delivered some of his handwritten lines. 
Through his work both in Brooklyn and for our country, he helped to 
build a better America, and he left us a better place for his service.
  I wish to extend to his family and to his former constituents the 
deep sympathy of the people of Ohio. He was an honest man and an 
honorable man, and it was a great privilege to serve with him those 
many years which seem just like yesterday.

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