In February, the University of Oklahoma lost one of its greatest graduates and most loyal supporters, Carl Albert. During the university's centennial year, 1990, the College of Arts and Sciences selected him as the most outstanding alumnus of the first one hundred years.

A Rhodes scholar, intellectually curious until the end of his life, Carl Albert was pleased when his lifelong friend, Julian Rothbaum, endowed the Carl Albert Award, which is presented each year to the outstanding graduate in arts and sciences. Until illness prevented it, Carl spent time with the recipients of these awards, coming to know them as individuals and encouraging them in their aspirations.

Carl Albert so loved the University of Oklahoma, where he was president of the student body, that when he retired from Congress he donated his unspent campaign funds to the university. He saw education as the key to equal opportunity for every young man and woman. His statue, which was a gift of Wanda and Clark Bass of McAlester, Oklahoma, stands in front of the Oklahoma Memorial Union as a constant reminder of his values and his example. 

The Carl Albert Congressional Research and Studies Center, established in 1979, actively continues his interests and his ethical perspectives. Each year brings new Carl Albert Fellows, the graduate and undergraduate students who participate in research programs sponsored by the Center. As long as his health permitted, Carl Albert participated in special events at the Center and always found time to visit with these students, encouraging them in their study of the Congress.

The Center was chosen in 1981 by Julian Rothbaum's wife, Irene, and their son, Joel Jankowsky, for the creation of a lecture series in Julian's honor. The Julian J. Rothbaum Distinguished Lecture in Representative Government has become one of the finest lecture series in the country, and Carl Albert was proud to be associated with its development.

Carl Albert was born a year after statehood. In many ways his life is a metaphor of what it means to be an Oklahoman. What Carl Albert stood for is interwoven into our understanding of what it means to be an American and a public servant.

We all long for a return to the days when there was no yawning gap between our government and the people. For Carl Albert there was always a sense of identity with the people he represented. They were "his people" and he was "their congressman." There was no sense of separation or even of separate ambitions. 

He was in many ways a child raised by "the village," a caring and nurturing community. He grew into a man who above all wanted to keep the community alive to help raise the next boy or girl.

He grew up poor, but as he put it in his autobiography, "We had everything but money."¹ He had a loving family, a nurturing community, and great teachers like Mrs. Ross, his first grade teacher in a two-room school. 

There was a congressman who visited the small school and inspired the students to aim high. "You know, I'm an Indian boy, and it's wonderful in this country that a man who's a member of a minority can be elected to Congress. A boy in this class might someday be the congressman from this district," Congressman Charles Carter told the students. Carl Albert later wrote that he felt that Charles Carter was speaking directly to him.²

I can remember many days when, as a young state legislator, I had the privilege of driving Speaker Albert around his district. The two of us would set out together early in the morning and spend entire days visiting one small isolated school after another. Carl would make the "Charles Carter" speech to the students. He'd tell them about his own humble beginnings and then challenge them to live out their own dreams. When we got back into the car, we speculated, as we drove to the next school, about which boy or girl would be heard from again. Carl wanted to give back to those students what had been given to him.

When Carl Albert was a senior in high school, he won a national oratorical contest on the U.S. Constitution sponsored by fifty national newspapers including the Daily Oklahoman. He and the six other winners were awarded a trip to Washington, D.C. and a chance to go to the White House to meet President Coolidge. When he arrived in Washington on his first trip outside Oklahoma, he was met by the Washington reporter for the Daily Oklahoman and U.S. Senator Elmer Thomas who did not want Carl to feel frightened or alone. 

In the midst of very busy days, I've seen Congressman Carl Albert sit down again and again with students from Oklahoma on their first visits to Washington. I cannot count the Saturday and Sunday afternoons he spent talking with me in his office at the Capitol, encouraging my hopes for public service. He even asked Charlie Ward, his longtime top assistant, to promise to be my chief of staff if I ever served in Congress. Carl was the witness to the promise, and when I came to the U.S. Senate, Charlie came out of retirement to be my administrative assistant. We telephoned Carl to tell him the news.

Being there for those who needed him was Carl Albert's guiding principle. When he was asked what had given him the most satisfaction during his many years in Congress, he did not answer by reciting the major laws he had helped to enact or by recounting his stewardship during the constitutional crisis when the country was without a vice president and the president was under threat of impeachment. Instead, he told the story about a woman who had ridden miles on a horse to a little town to reach him by telephone, asking that her last remaining son he spared from the Korean War. She had lost her other three sons in World War II. Getting the "surviving son rule" reinstated for the Korean War in order to save that woman's son was the most satisfying act of his career, he said. For Carl Albert, government was never distant and impersonal.

Carl Albert was passionate in his support of equal rights and equal opportunity for all people. Early in his career, he was one of the few congressmen from south of the Mason-Dixon line to support civil rights legislation. He played a key role in passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

One of his last public speeches was at the funeral of his childhood friend, Joe Thomas. He said in his autobiography, "I talked about how we had been boys together. I told about the day we started to school, about how we walked together to Kyle Tennant's meadow and about when we had gotten there, how I had angled off to the left and Joe and the other black kids turned right. I had told Joe and his family and friends back then what I thought about segregation, that it was unfair and inhuman. I told them how happy I was that Joe Thomas and I had lived long enough to see it end. I told them that I was thankful they had given me a chance to help make that true."³

Finally, when it came time to retire from his public role, there was no doubt that he could have remained in Washington at a handsome salary. Few had as many powerful connections. He was a spellbinding orator, persuasive debater, and a Rhodes scholar of keen intellect. 

It surprised no one, however, that Carl Albert turned down all the offers and came home. In a real sense he had never left home. He never forgot that public service is about service, not about power. He saw public service as an end in itself and not as a stepping-stone for personal advancement. He said it best himself when he wrote that the special interests in essence wanted him to sell "myself and the Speakership of the United States Congress. Ernie Albert's boy was not for sale. . . I turned down the Washington jobs and went back to a little community called Bug Tussle, near the town of McAlester in Pittsburg County, Oklahoma. It was the kind of place where nobody's boy was for sale."⁴

A recent best-selling book Tuesdays with Morrie reminds us of the debt we owe to our mentors. I will always be grateful for the Sunday afternoons spent with Carl Albert and all the day trips with him to small rural schools.

Carl Albert would not want to be made an icon. He saved his heartiest laughter for his own mistakes and imperfections, and he often shared stories about them. Still, his memory and his example will always be important to us. As long as there is a girl or boy who needs an encouraging word or the courage to dream, we'll need the spirit of Carl Albert. Above all, we desperately need to pass on to the next generation his understanding of what it means to be a public servant. On our campus his legacy will live on in the spirit of the university.

1. Little Giant: The Life and Times of Speaker Carl Albert, Carl Albert with Danney Goble (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990), 9.

2. Ibid., 41.

3. Ibid., 379.

4. Ibid., 372.