Roy Blunt: “first of all, I wanted to talk about everything you could be doing in Missouri in the next month or so with your family…”

“first of all, I wanted to talk about everything you could be doing in Missouri in the next month or so with your family, and then I was told I have 5 minutes. That seems to be an impossible restriction for me. So let me see how many things I can talk about here as we end the summer travel season. But there are other people traveling after the summer. Some families still have their summer vacation. Some schools start after Labor Day, some before. I am sure I will be leaving things out that I will be glad to talk about at a later time. Let me first just mention a couple of our national parks. If you leave my hometown of Springfield, MO, and you head west, pretty quickly you get to the Wilson's Creek National Battlefield park. There was a battle in August of 1861. Several thousand people fought who really weren't prepared to fight. They weren't trained. They weren't ready. It was a big battle that made a big difference in what happened in Missouri in the war. Not too far from there, you get to Diamond, MO, where there is the George Washington Carver National Monument. It is a 240-acre park on the farm where George Washington Carver grew up. He was born as a slave but was quickly freed and raised by the older White couple who lived there. He managed to get to school there a little bit and in those years after the Civil War became a leading scientist and spokesman for agriculture in the country.…”