Memorial Service for Albert Gore, Senior

My father was the greatest man I ever knew in my life.

Most of you know him for his public service, and it could be said of him, in the words of Paul, that this man walked worthy of the vocation wherewith he was called.

There were those many, many who loved him, and there were a few who hated him --hated him for the right reason. It is better to be hated for what you are, than to be loved for what you are not. My father believed, in the words of the scripture: "woe unto you when all men shall speak well of you."

He made decisions in politics that were such that he could come home and explain to his children what he had decided, and why.

He went into the world with peace. He held fast to that which was good. He rendered to no one evil for evil. He was of good courage. He strengthened the faint-hearted. He supported the weak. He helped the afflicted. He loved and served all people who came his way.

None of this was a secret to the world. As most of you know, there was a time when some people thought my father should seek the highest office in the land. Here's what he said about that idea: "The lure of the Presidency never really overwhelmed me, though there were times when the Vice Presidency seemed extremely attractive."

Now, that's humility.

And he did love mercy and do justly.

The last advice he gave me, two weeks ago, when he was almost too weak to speak -- was this: "Always do right."

He was born on an isolated, poor dirt farm on the banks of the Roaring River in Jackson County, Tennessee.

His father was a friend of Cordell Hull, who of course later made all the families in this part of the country proud by becoming a Congressman and a Senator, and then Secretary of State. My grandfather and Cordell Hull floated logs down the Cumberland River to the point where it meets the Caney Fork at Carthage. My father's boyhood dreams were taken by the currents of both men's lives. He was always a farmer, and he became a statesman.

Soon after he was born, his whole family moved to Smith County, to a place just west of Carthage called Possum Hollow.

He grew up in what he described as "a self-giving, self respecting household," and he said, "although the chores were heavy and the discipline absolute, there was love in our family and reverence for each other."

He went to work as a teacher, in a one-room schoolhouse in a mountain community in Overton County named Booze. He was eighteen years old, and had three months of college. His students called him "Professor Gore."

He read voraciously, and taught himself to use language with precision. The Leather Stocking Tales were his favorites. I always marveled at his vocabulary and -- as I grew older --at his unusual pronunciation of certain words. For example, instead of "wound," he always said "wownd." I used to challenge him on the words I was certain he mispronounced, but invariably, the dictionary also contained his preferred version, with the italic note "archaic." As many have said since his passing, he was an original.

As he continued his education at Murfreesboro State Teachers College, and continued working in all his free hours, he learned the lessons of hard times, trucking livestock to market only to find that they sold for less than the hauling fee.

The Great Depression awakened his political conscience. He often told me of the deep emotions he felt watching grown men with wives and children they could neither feed nor clothe, on farms they could no longer pay for -- grown men who were so desperate, the tears streamed down their cheeks when they received their meager checks for a whole season's work on their crops.

The kindling for his political philosophy piled up on Sunday afternoons among the whittlers, with whom he sat under the shade trees of the Carthage Square, and listened as Congressman Hull talked of important business in the nation's capital.

When my father first heard Franklin Delano Roosevelt on the radio, the kindling caught fire.

He became the youth chairman in Tennessee for FDR in 1932. The following year, he became a candidate himself for the first time -- for Smith County Superintendent of Schools.

He lost the election -- and then his teaching job -- but he gained respect from those who heard him. Indeed, when the man who won the race unexpectedly turned gravely ill soon after the election, he surprised the County Court by recommending my father as his replacement before he died. This gift from his dying former rival made a deep and lifelong impression on my father. It was one of the reasons why he never said a harsh word about any of his opponents for the rest of his career.

He soon began YMCA night law school, even as he continued as Superintendent of Schools and awoke well before dawn to tend his crops.

I don't think I ever saw him tired. But he must have been sleepy after such long days andnights, facing an hour's drive yet to return from Nashville to Carthage on old Highway 70.

So he went looking for coffee, and found it at the old Andrew Jackson coffee shop, which stood not a hundred yards from here. He loved to tell the story of how the coffee didn't taste good unless it was poured by a beautiful young waitress named Pauline LaFon. She was going to law school by day, and working nights.

They say opposites attract.

They didn't marry right away. She left for Texarkana, put up her shingle, and practiced oil and gas law. But his coffee turned bitter, and eventually, he persuaded her to come back as his wife.

Of all the lessons he taught me as a father, perhaps the most powerful was the way he loved my mother. He respected her as an equal, if not more. He was proud of her, but it went way beyond that. When I was growing up, it never once occurred to me that the foundation upon which my security depended would ever shake. As I grew older, I learned from them the value of a true, loving partnership that lasts for life.

After managing the successful campaign of Governor Gordon Browning, he became Tennessee's first Commissioner of Labor, and started Unemployment Compensation in the face of powerful opposition. He enforced mine inspection laws for the first time in history. He administered our first minimum wage law: it was twenty-five cents an hour. He defended the right to organize. He was always, always for working men and women.

He loved practical jokes. His humor often had an edge. One Saturday night in the early 1930's, at a party he organized in a barn by the Cumberland River for a group of friends in Carthage, he planted the suggestion that quite a few rattlesnakes had been seen in the area the preceding day. Surreptitiously, in the shadows thrown by the fire, he attached a fish-hook to the pant-leg of his friend Walter Merryman. At the other end of the hook was tied a large blacksnake he had killed in the barn before the party guests arrived. Rejoining the circle, he bided his time for a moment and then suddenly pointed toward Merryman's leg and shouted: "snake!" The more Merryman jumped and ran, the more determined the pursuing snake appeared. The prank worked a little too well, when the fish-hook dug into Merryman's calf. Certain that it was a rattlesnake's fang, he collapsed in fear. It took several months for the friendship to be repaired, but the story became such a local legend, that someone told me about it again last night at the wake.

It's difficult to follow the rhythm of his life without hearing the music that held him in its sway ever since the spring day a fiddler named Uncle Berry Agee played at the closing ceremonies of Ms. Mary Litchford's First Grade class. It was a magical experience that ignited a passion for playing the fiddle so powerful that later in his life he sometimes worried that if he gave in to it, it would somehow carry him away from the political purposes to which he was also powerfully drawn. Before long, by the grace of his mother, and with the help of his brother, he marshaled the impressive sum of five dollars to buy his own fiddle. And soon thereafter, his classmates nicknamed him 'Music Gore.'"