Tom Udall: “I want to say thank you from the bottom of my heart to each of you for your hard work, your public service, and your…”

“I want to say thank you from the bottom of my heart to each of you for your hard work, your public service, and your commitment. I want to thank my family--my parents Stewart and Lee Udall, who instilled in me the will to do good and to be good. To my brothers, sisters--my sister Lori, who is here--and cousins who have supported me throughout my three decades in elected office, thank you. To Amanda, our daughter, who is my forever campaign manager, and to Judge Jim, our son-in-law and just recently a judge in New Mexico, I thank them for their constant love and support. Most importantly, thank you to my brilliant and beautiful partner of 42 years, Jill Cooper Udall. Jill has been my rock. She has been my chief counsel. She has been my everything, and I couldn't have asked for a better partner with whom to have this public adventure. It has truly been an adventure for this son of the West, for after 20-plus years, it is time for me to go back home. As the great western writer Wallace Stegner wrote, ``It is not an unusual life curve for Westerners to live in and be shaped by the bigness, sparseness, space, clarity, and hopefulness of the West--to go away for study and enlargement and the perspective that distance and dissatisfaction can give--and then to return to what pleases the sight and enlists the loyalty and demands the commitment.'' Stegner said that we fall into two categories. We are either boomers or stickers.…”