James Oberstar: “Think of all the energy wasted on the learning curve by the parents. But the children certainly learned a great deal. At…”

“Think of all the energy wasted on the learning curve by the parents. But the children certainly learned a great deal. At a time when our full committee is at a point of bringing to the House floor a bill in a week or so that will restrict the ability of young people to fly an airplane to avoid another tragedy as occurred in the case of the young girl whose airplane crashed, and she was not at the controls, the instructor was the pilot in control and in command of the aircraft, but we are going to be dealing with legislation to prevent that kind of tragedy, I note that this legislation makes it possible for young people of that age group to pilot something that they could appropriately handle and that they should handle and to open wider the doors of opportunity for youngsters 9 through 14 to race their homemade soap box cars. I may be the only one in this room that can still remember what a soap box really is. Where I grew up in northern Minnesota, boxes of wood were shipped around the country that contained soap and we did in fact make cars out of these old soap boxes. They were quite sturdy pieces of wood to put a set of wheels on them and set one of the younger kids on it and push them along the street. Nothing quite so fancy, I am sure, as is going to be entered in the races here but it does bring back for me some nostalgia.”