Pageland: A Political Memoir by an ex-Page about the Mark Foley Scandal and Much More

By Daniel Hughes

Pageland is a memoir about the experiences of Daniel Hughes as a House of Representatives page, particularly becoming enmeshed in the Mark Foley scandal. When Daniel arrived in Washington, D.C. as a Republican page at age sixteen, little did he anticipate being sexually propositioned by a Congressman before high school graduation – not to mention being interrogated by the FBI and tracked down for information by the House Ethics Committee a decade later. This book charts those and other odd developments, as well as interactions with a number of power players – including President Bill Clinton and Speaker Newt Gingrich – from that tumultuous congressional era.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: May 30, 2014
• ISBN: 9781483529967

Book preview

9781483529967

Chapters

1) Political Starts

2) Extracurricular Events

3) Dog Shit

4) Proctor A’s Night Visits

5) Congressman Mark Foley

6) The Death of Page T

7) Absolutely Fourth

8) Nicaragua

9) Now & Then

Dramatis Personae

Pages:

Me

Page D, Male – My Roommate

Page T, Male – My Roommate

Page B, Female

Page H, Male

Page K, Female

Politicians:

Members of Congress

The Honorable Bill Emerson (R-MO)

The Honorable Mark Foley (R-FL)

The Honorable Newt Gingrich (R-GA), Speaker of the House from 1995-1999

The Honorable Paul Kanjorski (D-PA)

The Honorable Jim Kolbe (R-AZ), a Former Senate Page and a Member of the Page Board

The Honorable Cynthia McKinney (D-GA)

The Honorable E. Clay Shaw, Jr. (R-FL), my Congressional Sponsor

Senators

Senator Bob Dole (R-KS), Majority Leader of the Senate from 1995-1996 & 1985-1987

Senator Nancy Kassebaum (R-KS)

Senator Mel Martinez (R-FL)

The Triangle – Work, Dormitory, & School:

Work

Ms. I, the Democratic Overseer

Ms. S, the Republican Overseer

Dormitory

Proctor A, a Proctor at the Page Dorm

Ms. O, Director of the Page Dorm

School

Dr. K, the Principal

Dr. M, the English Teacher

Mme. M, the French & Spanish Teacher, and later the Principal of the House Page School

Mr. N, the Science Teacher

Mr. W, the History Teacher

Skeletor, the Page School Secretary

Political Starts

I was a United States House of Representatives Page; that is to say, I am one of a dying breed. The United States government mandates that no more of us will ever be created. We were both too expensive and too troublesome. We died a quick and unexpected death due to a lethal cocktail of technological innovation and fiscal austerity.

Approximately half a lifetime ago, when I was sixteen, I spent my junior year of high school living in Washington, D.C. I attended a special high school in the attic of the fabulously ornate Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress. I delivered thousands of envelopes, hundreds of flags flown over the Capitol, and even a few hot dogs, wrapped in foil and placed in paper bags for hungry Members of Congress who did not have time for a proper dinner.

As a teenager simultaneously impressionable and jaded, I was given a rare glimpse into the corridors of congressional power. I saw firsthand that many Members of Congress and Senators were smart, ambitious, industrious, and extraordinarily personable. Others were stupid, slovenly, and predatory.

Recently, during the summer of 2011, Speaker of the House John Boehner and Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi announced that the Page Program of the House of Representatives, after nearly 200 years in existence, would be discontinued (the Senate Page Program, however, endures to this day – it would seem to have an uncertain future nonetheless). Two consulting firms hired by Boehner and Pelosi had found that the House pages were obsolete, rendered archaic by a digital stream of smartphone messages and email attachments. In addition, the Page Program was found to have a prohibitively high cost, in the range of $69,000 to $80,000 per page per academic year. Pageland constituted a secondary school experience more expensive on a yearly basis than even the toniest boarding school, yet with the entire bill footed by hard-pressed American taxpayers mired in the Great Recession.

Alas, I am one of an endangered species. And truth be told, my actual tenure as a page was not always so illustrious, in spite of the robust expenditures on my behalf approved by Congress. In fact, in Pageland, incompetence and political considerations frequently reigned supreme, while sensitivity and intelligence took a back seat, particularly in regard to many of our supervisors.

A case in point: in late November of my page year (academic year 1995-1996), things were unsettled in the page dorm. Resentments – work-related, social and sexual – broiled in the boys’ section on the third floor. As to why this was the case, a few reasons come to mind. Primarily, our school/work days had been arduous during the first government shutdown of November 1995 – and another possible shutdown (which actually occurred in December 1995 and January 1996) loomed. A small number of high school students working long days in close quarters were bound to fan petty resentments into larger fires. Behavioral boundaries were often unclear in Pageland, with adults in supervisory roles often neglecting us, only to follow up with draconian measures when problems went down.

To set the scene: earlier in the fall semester, my friends in the room across the hall had constructed a Daniel Hughes Memorial Wall, featuring homely and embarrassing photographs that had been taken of me, my father, and my paternal grandmother on a family vacation to New Orleans, Vicksburg, and other locales in the Deep South. The tableau might sound mean-spirited, but the display was created by close friends in a sense of good fun; no offense was taken. One evening, while those same friends and I were out seeing a movie, an unknown page entered my friends’ room and menacingly blackened out my face in several of the photographs with what appeared to have been a black magic marker. I duly reported the incident to the dorm staff that night, but nothing much was done and no culprit was found.

The next morning, I awoke to a nastier shock. On the door to a room belonging to a Jewish page across the hall, someone had drawn a swastika and rather redundantly scrawled I’m anti-Semitic in magic marker. On my door, One Nut Looser (likely meaning One Nut Loser; the perpetrator was not only a bigot and a jerk, but also a bad speller) was scribbled in the very same black magic marker in a crude reference to the removal of my left testicle due to a testicular torsion I had undergone earlier that year.

A bit shell-shocked and figuring that the incident demanded adult attention, I reported the graffiti to the staff of the page dorm. The staff requested that I remain at the dorm rather than report to school so that I could relate the circumstances of my