[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 160 (2014), Part 4]
[Senate]
[Pages 5042-5043]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                       TRIBUTE TO SAMUEL B. OLDEN

 Mr. COCHRAN. 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 95th 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 to 1946 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 a predecessor of 
Exxon Mobil. 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 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

[[Page 5043]]

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 nineties, 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 to include former House 
Minority Leader and Senator John Sharp Williams, literary critic and 
editor Henry Herschel Brickell, Gov. Haley Reeves Barbour, beloved 
writers Willie Morris, Teresa Nicholas, and Ruth Williams, and educator 
Henry Mitchell Brickell. His large collection of pre-Columbian ceramics 
is now on display in the Mississippi Museum of Art in Jackson.
  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 10th decade of his life. His friends across the Nation and around 
the world celebrate with him today.

                          ____________________