Pete Domenici: “last night I took a couple of minutes to tell the Senate that a good friend of mine, but also a great New Mexican, was…”

“last night I took a couple of minutes to tell the Senate that a good friend of mine, but also a great New Mexican, was dead, Colin McMillan. My friend and colleague, Senator Bingaman, just spoke of him. It is remarkable that Senator Bingaman would speak of him with such glaring words when, as a matter of fact, they ran against each other in a statewide campaign. The truth is, he was a truly outstanding man. His death is rather unexplainable. We still do not know enough about it, but we do know that he was too young to die and had succeeded at just about everything he tried in his life, starting out at the University of North Carolina where he was a Phi Beta Kappa in the college of engineering and became an enormously successful geological engineer. He was one of those who was first to grab on to the modern techniques of discerning what lies below the surface and, thus, became an expert and developed a successful company helping others locate oil and gas. He formed his own exploration company and became an oil and gas entrepreneur. Along with that achievement, he had a western craving to own a ranch, and he had a beautiful ranch. I have been there many times. It is a great place to hunt quail. His ranch is renowned for quail. My son Peter and I and others in New Mexico have been there with him many times. It is rather ironic that he was found dead at the ranch yesterday some time during the day by the ranch hands.”