Bill Nelson: “as long as we have a lull, on a much lighter note I note for my colleagues some of the conversations I had prior to the…”

“as long as we have a lull, on a much lighter note I note for my colleagues some of the conversations I had prior to the Christmas recess and prior to all the bowl games. It so happened Florida had three college teams in bowl games, and so in trying to be a good Senator representing my State of Florida, I went to the respective Senators from the States with the other three teams. Given the fact that the Gator Bowl in Jacksonville was being waged between Florida State University and Virginia Tech, I naturally went to Senator Warner and Senator Allen and suggested we have a friendly wager on the game. What Senator Allen and I agreed to was we would wager a crate of Florida oranges and a bushel of Virginia peanuts. I am one who absolutely loves peanuts, and I am going to thoroughly enjoy those Virginia peanuts that are going to be presented to me by Senator Allen next week. We will have an appropriate ceremony and may even have the president of Florida State University present for this solemn occasion. Then I went to the other Nelson in the Senate, our fellow freshman, Ben Nelson of Nebraska, and suggested that something as monumental as the national championship being played in the Rose Bowl in Pasadena was certainly worth us determining we would put something of specialty of our State on the line, backing up our boast that our team was going to be the national champion: The University of Miami versus Nebraska, the Hurricanes versus the Cornhuskers.”