It’s Time for DeLay Supporters to Pony Up Some Cash
The news that Tom DeLay planned to resign from Congress and not seek re-election hit Horace Schweringen hard, really hard.
“I was stunned, flabbergasted,” Schweringen said. “I was driving my car down the Katy Expressway and had to pull over to listen to the whole story. Tommy dropping out? You could have knocked me over with a feather.”
DeLay’s exit from the political stage could upset Schweringen’s plans to build a DeLay monument in the Houston suburb of Sugar Land where the former majority leader ran an extermination business before he entered politics.
“We have some solid pledges and a couple for big bucks, but now they could all evaporate in an instant, I suspect,” Schweringen said. “But we’re going to press on. Tom is a monument and he deserves to memorialized.”
Schweringen and some fellow Houston Republicans seek to purchase the ranch style house in the Sugar Woods subdivision that DeLay lived in during his exterminator days and turn it into a museum. The centerpiece would be a detailed recreation of the office for Albo Pest Control, the company DeLay owned and operation from 1973 to 1984 when he was elected to Congress from Texas’ 22nd District.
“They may know Tom in Washington as ‘The Hammer’, but here in Sugar Land, we knew him as ‘The Exterminator.’ That’s what we want to memorialize,” Schweringen last December when he announced the DeLay monument project.
Schweringen’s group also wants to use the living room of the former DeLay house to show a mannequin that looks like DeLay — uniform and all — spraying the baseboards with pesticide. They also hope to outfit a truck like the Albo trucks of the era and put it in the house’s garage with another DeLay mannequin at the wheel.
“I ain’t giving up,” Schweringen vowed. “Lots of people say they still believe in Tom and that he got a rotten deal. Now is the time for them to put their money where their mouths are and get behind this monument project.”