A Senate Page

When I was sixteen my father asked me a strange question. “Would you like to be a Senate Page?”
“Sure.” I said. I had no idea what he was talking about. But over the next few months it became more and more clear to me. Being a Senate Page meant that I was going to go and live in Washington D.C. I was going to work in the Capital Building, and go to school in a specially constructed classroom environment in the top floor of the Library of Congress.

My first days as a page were all about getting to know your environment, where you were going to live and who you were going to share your space with. I image it is much the same experience as someone going off to boarding school or summer camp. The only difference was that I was in the nations capital and was a federal employee working on the Senate floor.

The days were very long, though they varied a lot depending on whether or not the Senate was in session. Usually I got up around four thirty in the morning and went to school for a few hours. I was a junior in High School. All pages are. After school we went immediately to the Capital and began preparing for a days work. Dress was very formal, a blue suit and tie. Our duties might include running errands for the Senate staffers that manned the Democratic and Republican cloak rooms, set up of the Senate floor, that included laying out all the bills and amendments that were to be discussed, or doing secretarial work including answering calls and making copies.

As you might imagine the Capital is a building full of history, and everywhere you looked there were objects baring the marks of history, Davy Crockett’s desk or the Senate Gavel that was cracked by Richard Nixon. The people there were historic too. Among the Senators that I worked with were Strom Thurmond, Ted Kennedy, Bob Dole, Robert Bird, George Bush (who as V.P. sometimes made appearances as the President of the Senate) and John Glenn.

I was a Senate page for approximately six month during the ninety-ninth and one-hundredth congress in nineteen eighty-six and seven. I was there for the Senate Iran-Contra hearings, Cory Aquino’s address to a joint session of Congress, the appointment of Rehnquist as chief Justice and the appointment of his replacement Scalia to the Supreme Court.

Some of my best memories included taking the subway all around the city. My particular favorite place to go was Georgetown. We lived in dorms that were two floors of the house office buildings adjacent to the capital. The Smithsonian and all the monuments on the capital mall including the Lincoln memorial and the Washington monument were in my back yard. I was paid an annual salary and saved almost a thousand dollars during my time there, though this money was stolen shortly after my return home during a party I had thrown at my parents house.

It is hard for me to talk about the experience as anything more than matter of fact. The most remarkable thing about being a senate page is the way people look at you when you tell them that you were a senate page. For me the experience is more than twenty years old and is just another in a list of stories that I like to tell. But when I see the wide eyes of the people I tell it to, I begin to realize how special that time was, and it makes me appreciate it all the more.