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[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.
____________________