Welcome to my new blog

Thanks everyone, for stopping by. I’m going to be blogging here a few times a week, mostly to post brief snippets from the dozens of staff interviews I’ve done or to discuss documents I’ve uncovered in the Senate and House historian archives. I’m also going to link to interesting stores in the media about congressional staff.

If you’d like to explore on your own, browse the House historians’ oral histories of Members and staff.

In one interview, a House historian spoke with Felda Looper, the first female Page in the House.

Miss Looper first came to Washington in the late 60’s on a trip from Heavener, Oklahoma, with her parents. Why, she asked, were all the pages on the floor of the House “boys”? Not satisfied with the answers she got, she began writing letters to her Member of Congress. And then, one day, she got a call from the Speaker of the House.

Felda Looper, first Female Page in the U.S. House of Representatives:

When we came to Washington one summer, and I’m trying to remember the year; I’m thinking it was 1966. And we were—my parents were—we were here, and we went into all of the chambers so we could see what was going on. And I could see the Pages down on the floor.

I asked my dad, “What are they doing here? Why are they here?”

And he explained to me what the Pages were and what they did

And I said, “Well, why aren’t there any girl Pages?”

And he said, “Well, I don’t know, we’ll have to ask Mr. [Carl] Albert, if we can see him, we’ll have to ask him that.”

So after we had done our tour we went into what was then his office. The Whip—he was the Whip. And we went into his office and, lo and behold, we were fortunate enough to be there when he walked in. And he was familiar with my mother, he knew her, and he stopped and spoke to us and he asked us if we would like to have lunch with him in the Member’s Dining Room. Well, we were all over that.

We went, had lunch, we talked, and so I had the opportunity to ask Mr. Albert why there weren’t any girl Pages. And he said, “Well, it’s just sort of an unspoken rule, we haven’t had any girl Pages.”

So I said, “Well, that’s not fair, that’s not right.”

And he said, “Well, we’ll look into it and we’ll see what we can do about it.”

So after we did our tour here and we were here for several days, and we got back to Oklahoma. I was in the seventh grade, and started writing him letters. And I wrote him letters for years, until finally I started to give up on it. It was during that process that I went to the Oklahoma legislature to be a page.

Oh, I always got replies to the letters. I mean, that’s what the staff is there for, you know {laughter}.

But the reasons … well it was always sort of, as I remember, well, we’re working on it, we’ll look into it, and then finally, when Mr. Albert got to be the Speaker and had some real clout, you know, he basically said we’re going to do this. And so Mr. Albert called my dad, which I didn’t know, my dad told me subsequently—and I spoke to him about this last night as a matter of a fact and asked him if he recalled, and he said, “Oh yes, I was in the clinic, and the nurse knocks on the door and says, ‘You’ve got a call from Mr. Albert, the Speaker of the House.’” And so he comes out, he takes the call, and Mr. Albert asked if it would be all right with Dad and my mom for me to come to Washington to be a Page.

So they discussed it, and the next day, Charlie Ward, who was Mr. Albert’s administrative assistant, called me and asked me, “Felda, would you like to be the first woman Page?” And I’m going, “Well, I’ll have to ask my parents.” And he said, “Well, we’ve already taken care of that, and it is all right with them.” So I said, “Of course.” This was very exciting.

But the exciting part was whenever the news got a hold of it and we started getting telephone calls and the TV people from Fort Smith [Arkansas] and Tulsa and Oklahoma City, which of course, we only got three channels in those days {laughter}

And those were the three who were in close range and they came and they took all kinds of footage of what was going on. And it was all very exciting in the town of 2,500 people.

Heavener was all a buzz. It was a real fun and exciting time—it was.