Political Quotes

“I come to the floor today to talk about Larry Weinberg, who was beloved by many Oregonians, one of the original owners of our wonderful basketball team, the Portland Trail Blazers-- the owner who won eternal gratitude from the people of my State as he guided our Trail Blazers to their first title. He passed away last week at the age of 92. He was a soft-spoken man who was never one to drone on, so in that spirit, I am going to keep these remarks brief. The first thing we want everybody to know about Larry is that he was a wonderful family man. I met him for the first time in the early 1980s. I was a young Member of the other body, the House of Representatives, and Larry could have made our first conversation about politics. We were very interested, for example, in ways to promote a strong U.S.-Israel relationship. There were plenty of things we could have talked about with respect to politics, but he made the conversation about basketball, which was one of the great loves of his life, and I think people know around here that my great hope was to play in the NBA. Larry knew that. Because Larry was a family man, that first conversation we had was about family, and he had an enormous family. If you look at the family photo on the holiday cards that Larry and his wife Barbi sent each year, you would think about half of the 320 million people in our country were actually Weinbergs. The cards were wonderful, and they just seemed to go on and on and on.…”