Byron Dorgan: “I would like to just briefly, today, talk about two Americans I wanted to bring to the attention of my colleagues, two…”

“I would like to just briefly, today, talk about two Americans I wanted to bring to the attention of my colleagues, two heroes of mine. I never met them. I talked to one fellow on the phone the other day. A fellow named Robert Naegele and his wife Ellis. He started a company called Rollerblade, which some may know about, the largest in-line skate company in America. It was a story I read in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, when I traveled through Minneapolis the other day by plane. Robert Naegele sold his company 2 months ago. He apparently made an enormous amount of money, ran the company, started it from scratch, brought it to a $250 million company and then sold it a couple months ago. Then, about a week before Christmas, 280 employees of this company began to get letters in the mail from Mr. Naegele and his wife. It turns out he decided to give the people who worked for that company, the people in the factories, the people who made the skates that made him a very wealthy man, a Christmas bonus equal to $160 a month for every month these folks had worked for the company. For some of them in the factory who had been there all the time he was there it meant up to $20,000, a $20,000 check. Do you know what he had done? He and his wife had prepaid the income taxes, so when these folks opened up this check, totally unexpected, from someone who no longer owned the company, they got a check that was tax free.”