On the recordJune 30, 2010
I am pleased to follow my colleague, Senator Feinstein, in tribute to Robert Byrd, whom I always called Leader and who always called me Governor. He was our leader. He was a leader for a long time and will always be that in a very real sense to many of us. I was born in Beckley, WV, just about a dozen miles or so from a community called Sophia, which is where Robert and Erma Byrd once ran a little mom-and-pop supermarket back in the late 1930s, early 1940s. I think he was the butcher. He ran that supermarket and later on, I think, in World War II, he was a welder during the war. As we know, in the late 1940s he had the opportunity to run for the West Virginia Legislature and ran. He was a great fiddler and went around his community, his district, playing the fiddle. He always called himself a hillbilly.
