I was reminded today of my time spent in the Louisiana state capital of Baton Rouge. When I had just turned 15 I was appointed by our local state representative, Mr. Alan Haley, to be his page for part of the summer. My term was only for about 6 weeks, but in those days that was pretty much most of the summer. Some may ask, what is a “page”? Well, in Louisiana, and I imagine most states, the state representatives and senators are allowed to appoint young people to serve in their respective houses by running errands and doing clerical work in the house. I was in the Louisiana House of Representatives. I was paid $6.00 a day and usually worked between 4 and 8 hours a day. I would say that back in 1961 that was only slightly less than minimum wage. This is an anecdotal representation of my summer in Louisiana politics.
Shortly after my 15th birthday in mid-June Mr. Haley picked me up at my house for the four-hour drive to Baton Rouge. I had visited larger cities, but never been in one on my own before. I was excited, and more than a little scared of what I would be facing. We arrived in Baton Rouge fairly late in the day on a Sunday afternoon. Mr. Haley had a Sunday night session to attend. He drove me to the capitol and escorted me in. He introduced me to the Page Captain and then went on about his business. I got a pretty short orientation and was released early to get checked into the YMCA. When the session ended, Mr. Haley took me to the Y and took me in, I got assigned a room and paid for a week in advance. I don’t recall how much it was, but not a lot.
I got instructions on how to find my way to the Capitol the next morning and had been told to report there by 8:00 AM. The representatives wouldn’t be there until about 10:00, but the pages had duties that included making sure that all of the representatives’ binders had copies of all the bills that would be on the docket for the day. We would spend time organizing all of the paperwork into stacks and then carry them out to the House floor to start posting them in the binders. Gratefully, this never happened to me, but I once saw a page drop several stacks of bills and they scattered all over the floor. He would have had a tough time reconstructing all of those, but several of us pitched in to help. Once we had all of the binders posted we went into the page room. The page room was at the front of the House chamber and off to the left. Inside there were chairs lined up along the walls. Over the door to the chamber was a call board that had a representation of all of the seats in the chamber with a light for each spot. When a representative wanted to request the services of a page, they would engage the call button on their desk and the appropriate light would turn on up on the board. The page at the head of the line of chairs would dash out to the calling member to see what he could do for that representative. I am sure the policies have changed by now, but when I was there, all the pages were teen-aged boys.
Typical errands we would be called out to perform included running to the cafeteria/snack bar to get the representative a sandwich. That was the first time I had ever seen or heard of a club sandwich and that was a popular request by the members. They would give us cash to buy whatever they ordered and usually tipped us with the change. The more experienced pages knew that rather than wait in line to be called out, once they were on the floor, they would stay out and solicit errands from the members. Some of the real hustlers would get their first call and we’d never see them again. They were racking up tips that most of us couldn’t figure out how to get. Still, that is how the process worked, and if I had been there longer, I probably would have figured it all out too. Other errands included taking notes to other representatives or even across the lobby area of the Capitol to the Senate chamber.
The two houses of legislature were very different. For one thing, the House of Representatives had a lot more members and they were not all well behaved. I recall seeing members throwing paper balls at each other, making paper airplanes out of bills and sailing them across the chamber. In the Senate, all the members seemed to be sedate and well behaved. None of the shenanigans that I saw in the House were going on there.
The first week I was in Baton Rouge, I stayed in the YMCA. It was pretty dirty and unkempt. My room had lots of ants and I saw roaches in the hallway. Rooms didn’t have private baths. We had to go to the communal showers and sinks down the hall to shower, brush our teeth and use the facilities. Before the end of the first week, I was determined to not spend another week in the Y. There was a bulletin board near our page room with 3×5 cards advertising rooms for rent in the area. I found one in a lady’s home just up the street from the Capitol. Literally, no more than a couple hundred yards from the Capitol steps. I met with the lady, and we agreed that I would move into a spare bedroom in her home the following Sunday.
Friday night Mr. Haley picked me up at the Y and drove me home for the weekend. The first week was filled with confusion and anxiety for this 15 years old kid, but I learned a lot. Sunday afternoon, Mr. Haley picked me up at my house and we headed back to Baton Rouge. I generally rode home with him every Friday night and back down to Baton Rouge every Sunday afternoon. I did spend a couple of weekends down in Baton Rouge, but not much.
How do pages spend their time off? Good question. We had so many pages that once we had done our morning chores, they would send about half of us on our way and rotate us for the errand running, and tip gathering. I spent a lot of time wandering around downtown Baton Rouge and exploring the area. I also visited as much of the Capitol building as I could. If you took the elevator up to the floor where the governor’s office was, you could see the bullet holes in the wall where Huey Long was assassinated. A gunman was on the elevator as US Senator Long was about to get on. Long had his security guys with him and there was a pretty massive exchange of gunfire in the hall there. Long was a former governor, but still held great sway with the state government. Some thought he was the power behind the governor who succeeded him. The gunman was killed on the spot and Long was rushed to a hospital with a gunshot wound to the abdomen. He died 2 days later.
The governor when I was working there was Jimmy Davis, Louisiana’s singing governor. He wrote the song “You Are My Sunshine.” Because of its success, it became the Louisiana State Song and Governor Davis used the Sunshine name for most everything he wanted to name. He had a horse named Sunshine and on the inauguration day he rode his horse up the steps of the Capitol. One of the representatives had a bale of hay delivered to the governor’s office with a note that said, “For Sunshine and the rest of the horses’ asses in the governor’s office.” During his second term from 1960 tom1964 Jimmy Davis had what was called a “deadhead payroll.” The “deadhead payroll” was for a number of people who were on the state payroll, but with no real job. There were also projects that were never completed during his tenure. One of the most notable was the building of the Sunshine Bridge. The Sunshine Bridge was completed in 1963. It was a massive, 6 lane bridge over the Mississippi River. There was a two-lane road entering on the north side, but it emptied into a swamp on the south side. It was dubbed “the bridge to nowhere.” It took years for them to complete LA 70 on the other end of the bridge. I crossed that bridge back in the late 1960s and when you got to the other side there was a dirt road that ran along the Mississippi levee for a way before connecting with another paved road.
Here are some of the things we did as pages that summer in Baton Rouge. I ate out a lot. My favorite places to eat were the Huddle House for breakfast and lunch and the Picadilly cafeteria for dinner. I saw the movie “El Cid” while I was down there. I am sure I saw other movies as well, but that’s the one I remembered. Some of the representatives stayed in a downtown hotel while we were there and several times we would take our swim suits and go to the hotel and tell the desk clerk we were guests of some representative. They would then let us go up to the pool deck floor and we could swim in the afternoon or evening.
Not all of my experiences were tame. One Sunday evening after finishing my tasks in the House chamber, I left the capitol to walk the couple of blocks to my room in the lady’s home. The home was on a street where the traffic was separated by a median with trees down the center. As I walked down the steps of the capitol, there was a car parked at the bottom. When I got closer, a man in the driver’s seat called to me out his window and asked if he could give me a ride. My creepy sensors went on high alert. I told him I would rather walk, he tried to convince me to get in the car, but I was having none of it. I started walking toward my rooming house and the car followed me very slowly. When I got to the home, I decided that I did not want to announce where I lived so I kept walking. The car passed me and went to the end of the street and made a U turn to come up the other side. When I felt that he couldn’t see me, I ran back to the house and ducked inside quickly. The guy in his car made another pass by the house, but I am pretty sure he didn’t know which house I had gone into. That was the last time that ever happened to me.
This was my first experience being alone in a city. I made just about enough money to pay for my room and board while I was there. Tips helped. What I mostly got out of the experience was an appreciation for how silly politics can be. There were several bills that were what I would call frivolous, but they were passed because deals were made. “we won’t pass your bills if you don’t support ours” kinds of things. I suspect that things have changed little over the years and I also suspect that they have been like that from the beginning. I got to watch lobbyists at work collaring representatives and senators. They were often the power behind the power. I don’t think the process is wrong, just a little flawed. Aren’t we all.
granddaddystories 