Melvin Watt: “my colleagues, I wanted to first express my thanks to Congressman Jessie Jackson, Jr., for coming up with the idea and…”

“my colleagues, I wanted to first express my thanks to Congressman Jessie Jackson, Jr., for coming up with the idea and pulling the people together to pay tribute to my good friend Cleo Fields. I want to thank my colleague, Major Owens from New York, for reserving the time and yielding part of the time to us for this purpose. Mr. Speaker, I have been wondering how to approach this tribute, because I could approach it in a number of different ways. First of all, I could approach it as a roast of my good friend the gentleman from Louisiana, Cleo Fields, because he is first and foremost my friend and we have, in the last 4 years, during the time that we have served in this Congress together, and 4 years ago was really the first time I had met him, although I had known of his reputation, but during that 4 years we have become what I would call in the community ``ace buddies.'' We do a lot of joking around, and so I was tempted to use this evening to roast him, but I decided that that probably would not be the proper thing to do when somebody 100 years from now or 50 years from now reads the Congressional Record and finds all of these things of a humorous nature on such a serious occasion.”