I hope you have time to walk around the library if you havent had a chance to see what we done. By the end of this year we have brought 15 authors to toledo and thats made possible through generous support to the robert legacy foundation. It allows to not only bring world renowned authors but helps us be a catalyst for positive change in toledo county. And that includes homework helpers, the ready to reprogram in the summary. And speaking of summer read we will be announcing a winter read. Keep an eye out will try to get the Community Reading just like the summer the month of january. In addition to the foundation we always have gratitude to the media sponsors, buckeye broadband and the supporting sponsor in our Community Sponsor friends of the library. As i mentioned weve had a great year and we are not done yet. I hope youll join us later this month as we wrap up the 2019 series we have authors with kevin wilson on november 14 at 7 00 p. M. Downstairs and tickets are free but registration is appreciated and books will be available for sale after that. Thats november 14, we will also have authors presenting the joy of cooking on 2019 and tickets are 50 and they also include a copy of the newest edition of the book and a small sampling of cocktails. Hope to see you there. And now for the reason you all here today, the moderator is a puts a prizewinning colonist and profession at School Journalism the author to nonfiction books including and his lovely wife, and the husband and present an offer for the u. S. Senate. The novel the daughter of yuri town for 2020 and hopefully will be able to bring her back for that. Please join me in welcoming to the stage connie schultz. [applause] dont start until i get on the stool and miss. Ill topple over. The senior u. S. Senator from ohio elected to see into thousand six. The member of the Democratic Party he began his put a cooker in 1977 prior to serving he served as a u. S. Representative for the 13 district ohio secretary of state in the General Assembly and has taught in the schools and the Ohio State University has written three books, the latest of which is senators who changed america. Until the proud history on the senate floor by sharing the stories of eight men who were there before him. An eagle scout, where he spent summers working on his family farm he is as many of you know married to the moderator this afternoon and they live in cleveland their three daughters, a son, three sons and laws, seven grandchildren and two Family Friends franklin and waterford please join me in welcoming to the stage their honorable Sherard Brown hot. [applause] okay were ready we never got that reception and are other talks. Its truly honored to interview him but the more i thought about it nobody knows his book i come close second to you in terms of how hard you worked and how many years you been working on it than i do. What id like to answer first because i been watching people and listening to them as the same question over and over and first of all we know you wrote this book all by herself. [laughter] its not that funny. Like you had nothing else to do but also youre a good writer and if you not been so funny and literate in his email to me there never wouldve been a good day so i know hes a good writer. How the book came about in the writing process itself. What you learned over the course of writing the book. Can i Say Something nice about the library. Please do. It was wonderful to do this in the library into get to do it at this library and a number of you saw connie interview Stacey Abrams earlier this year. Its two really strong smart women stood up front high school and talk about their lives and what they were doing and special thanks to kathy and jason in the number of volunteers in so many of you that make this happen in ohio still we have not had the best State Government for much of her adult life but we do libraries in the state than any state in the country. [applause] i would make one other point. Freshman with everything in the senate is done by minority where your offices were used to on the senate floor, the committee you are requesting typically are more or less done in place with committees by seniority so there was ten freshman and ten left for which we said on the senate floor and i walked around and i realize i was not there were no bad seats you dont sit behind a post at the stadium so someone had told me that senators carved their names in the bottom of the dusters so i pulled out dexters and the one i looked at said for the lawyers black government of south dakota, and of tennessee, kennedy. So i said khmer this is 2007 and he walked over and he was for five desks away and i said which desk is this and he said it has to be bobbys i have jacks. So he did get first choice. But then i started thinking about the senators and many i knew and some i did not and im guessing theres at least one senator may be to who almost never heard of or knew very little about and one is glenn taylor, well talk more about him and around the same time, because i love history and i always believe that you do your job better whether you Practice Medicine or law around the library or working government or business, if you know the history of institution in your other business you do better. So connie went online and found a dozen 15 books about senators or the senate all inexpensive because nobody was reading those things and they started to read books and over the course of time i read about 160 books and i interviewed 100 people so the book was laid out to talk about eight senators and commentary on each directly or indirectly. I read it for the same reason some of you have maybe heard me talk about the workers memorial day where they took a canary down and if the canary died the mine worker was on his own he did not have a union Strong Enough or government they cared enough to save his life to make him safe. So this book is about the role of government, the power of government to improve peoples lives whether in the Labor Movement and union in nonunion its about lake erie and workers in civil rights and women rights and all of that. Talk about the writing process itself and when you thought it was ready. [laughter] i made a presentation to my Senate Colleagues because they wanted to know about this so i gave them each a copy last week and one person i came into office said connie write this for you. [laughter] that was their first reaction and that hurt my feelings but i got over. Its hard to be me. So then i wrote what i thought was a good first draft starting in 2008 and 2011 i had a pretty good first draft and she said not even close. [laughter] she said the writing. I said this would love. She said the writing was not good enough and i had not done enough rewriting and more portly i had not done she said any historian can write a book about eight senators and you have to bring yourself and your perspective into it. And i did not start over but i did a much deeper dive and i had no deadline i dont do this for a living i have a day job. But i wanted to make it what it should be and im very grateful for that because if she had not done that it wouldve been a shadow of this. In the payoff in some sense was the first big review of the book in the post which was posted friday night and done by historian from toledo and by the name of brinkley who grew up in perrysburg and i so appreciate that historian did the review not a Political Writer because we do like Political Writers. [laughter] i was not assaultin insultini went deep enough into this with a historic accuracy and im not a professional historian but i think i might and i put a lot of seriousness into it. The reason i offered to critique i did at the time is precisely because youre a senator writing it and brings up a perspective and bring yourself into it i encouraged you i need to write about all of this. [laughter] i also encouraged you to tell more about yourself because one question i have heard asked by reporters is how does a guy who grew up as a doctor or a father and middleclass ends up being such a champion of workers rights and civil right. It has so much of your early story involves your mother. Talk about your mom. My mom grew up in a town in georgia a town of 500, she went to washington during the war and worked for the oss which later became the cia and she met my father for mansfield ohio, they married and they met in 1945 and 44 and my dad had just come back from overseas serving the country and they moved to mansfield a little southern girl from a small town and she had she would talk about segregation to us sometimes and she found it as a little girl in georgia in the 30s she found segregation first puzzling and repulsive as she thought of compounding and repulsive and much of the way she saw the world was the race and she would tell me i remember, i was born in 52 so i remember all the 60s and 70s busing issues where people were bus for integration and toledo and cleveland and most of our country and she said i remember busing in georgia its when they forced bust black kids passed the good white school to send them to inferior black schools. Thats the way my mom always looked at things, she dug deep and did all kinds of things when i was in high school and got to pick up Shirley Chisholm and was head of the owi ca which she would sit next to the urban league for the best advocates for race and womens rights of anybody in any Ongoing Group in our country and she got to pick up Shirley Chisholm for a speech went. Talk about what she did for voter. In 2004 my mom is 84 living in mansfield and my dad had passed away four years earlier and she thought John Kerry Campaign was on the run well enough in towns like mansfield are not tension enough president ial anyway toledo or cleveland or columbus wood. So she said she was going to do something, she talked a friend in doing this it took a card table put in her trunk and of her american car i would add, she drove to a Grocery Store in the part of town where lots of people were not registered to vote and over a week she did every friday for six weeks or Something Like that and she register 900 voters because shes an organizer and brown she kept the names and phone numbers and called all of them to get them out to vote. [applause] that is the stuff she knew what to do. She was a woman who knew her mind. She did not start dating the first time i met her i saw an evening gown and i had not bought a gown since prompt since prom and we are going to a formal event and i know her 20 minutes and she standing next to me and we look in the mirror and she never lost her southern accent and she says connie would you like a necklace to go that dress and i said them a little concern and might draw attention to my cleavage and she said isnt that what youre trying to do. [laughter] that was at 83. And one more thing about your mom, she was the first in the family to vote for barack obama. She came out for obama and 0 seven early and i was not endorsing anybody she was the first one in the family and when my mom was dying in january of 2009 when Obama Took Office we were with her in hospice both my parents died in hospice and i would do commercials anytime for hospice how important it is you maybe never understand how important hospices connies mom was a hospice worker in a home and a hundred people showed up and her mom died. Anyway, my mom and my brothers and i and connie were staying there and on january 19 she said i want you to go to the on a ration and leave. It turned out that was my mom the last day she got out of bed and she sat up and watched inauguration in her last good lucid day on earth, she died two weeks later and we can back that night or the morning and we were all with her when she died but she just thought it was the greatest thing, the southern little white girl daughter and father that it was greatest thing that we had a black president in her country. Arent you glad you included that in your book. I think its a good context. Now forget the nice stuff were going to the next part. [laughter] its all good. One thing you know my response to reading the biography about these different men in the senate, they were very flawed human beings, some of them not successful at all. And i never talk to why you wanted to write the way you did and why included him when you working on a book like the. I just dont think if your writing history that you cant taper over parts of their lives and celebrate other parts of their lives and nobody believes any of it, i would not go so far to say fake news but nobody would believe any of it but i thank you all that to the reader in your own integrity and your own soul. Second i want to show one thing connie taught me is when you ask people to change, her dad had real issues about race and we always wanted him to change and when he changed he began to change in his lashes and you embrace that, you cant say you are like this. I looked for that and elected officials and public officials, there were three people in particular of the eight senators that i think journey the furthest from the early career an early lives. One was the hugo black, i will come back to him because he journeyed the furthest but also Robert Kennedy and albert gore senior. Kennedy worked for mccarthy and his father was a difficult man and he is probably has that through his father. He also wiretapped doctor king when he was in the general. Two big things happened in his life, his brothers assassination in warmer tragedy for the Kennedy Family and many more to come. That changed him to be sure, he became more of his own man and learn more about the greek for those things. As lincoln used to say, lincoln staff learn to understand the white house and free the slaves and preserve the union and he said i have to go out and get my Public Opinion. My study of bobby and i never knew bobby of course, i know some of the family but bobby really did go out and listen and hear people and get his Public Opinion best. In the story it came out of a dinner where marianne and peter were there. Senators eastman and stennis refused to do it. And and you may remember this from studying this, john kennedy, all of his federal judges went Treatments Committee and eastland wouldnt allow kennedy to appoint anybody but segregationists, eisenhower appointed much better judges. The civil rights decisions that were done right, the decisions were right, eisenhower judges, not kennedy judges, she had no use for the Kennedy Family. Bobby showed up with Peter Adelman, she had no use for Peter Adelman either but she married him some years later. Bobby showed up and she told us that night, everybody, all the media and tv cameras out of the sack when he went in and he picked up this dirty little child and she said i would not have wanted to hold him and she saw empathy she had never seen in a human being. I dont know when kennedy became that empathetic, usually it is gradual but those two things, he became the body kennedy we all know and most of us like in the mid1960s before his assassination. Hugo black came the furthest. Gore went from an uneven career to doing the right things, probably lost reelection because of what he did with vietnam war, one of the only southerners and he opposed two bad nixon racist judges. Nixon went after him and defeated him in 70 and hugo black, full circle by the 1950s after brown the board, the most important integration decision in American History at that time. After that hugo black was burned in effigy in tuscaloosa because he was for immigration. You mention the war and one of the things i found so interesting in the chapter about the value of public hearing. And most americans do not have Washington Post coverage. It was when watergate was brought back in the hearings and in the climate we are in, what are the words of encouragement about the impact of public hearings or are we not there anymore . They dont carry the same weight. The impeachment hearings, whether they want a republic or not, do the American People want it. The American People want everything to the public. They want a light shone on government, on what we do. That is part of the idea of representative government. In january 1966 the pool bright hearings shone a light on the amount of the point johnson tried to stop cbs from covering the hearings. They were covering them live. He actually convinced cbs to take the hearings off and run, im not making this up, run reruns of i love lucy and fred friendly at cbs resigned over that but the hearings continued and got a lot of attention and ted kennedy said to me in his hideaway in 2007 or 8, it was those hearings the changed the american public, saying what he said. The hearings had a great impact. I think the hearings, and these hearings, and Richard Nixon didnt do some things like helping his election. That i think the house will impeach. I have an idea what the senate will do. It is a jury, 400 jurors and we should weigh the evidence not at that point, listen to Public Opinions, the hearings are really important, American History, and the same hearings and mccarthy hearings, and the Affordable Care act, the hearings have a gravatar surround them in that committee, and ask the question live. We are talking about impeachment, what will it take for any republican, and not the republicans, and in the senate, they change their mind about support for the president , number of people are asking what would it take, i hear republicans talk privately to me and others. They think this president is not informed.