[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 17 (Friday, January 27, 1995)]
[House]
[Pages H834-H836]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
TRIBUTE TO THE DEPARTING PAGE CLASS
The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Goss). Under a previous order of the
House, the gentleman from Missouri [Mr. Emerson] is recognized for 5
minutes.
Mr. EMERSON. Mr. Speaker, I rise today in my capacity as chairman of
the Page Board to remind our colleagues that today is the last day of
service for many of the pages currently serving the House of
Representatives. The semester is at an end, and those who have been
appointed to serve for a semester will be returning to their homes and
what I call a new crop of pages will be arriving over the weekend to
begin their service on Monday.
I think it is fitting to note at these junctures the fine and
outstanding service that is rendered, very often unsung, to the Members
of the House by the pages who serve us here. Their experience is a
wonderful experience. They have the opportunity to learn by being here
and observing and seeing and absorbing what goes on.
I would maintain, having been a page myself many, many years ago in
the 83d Congress, that this is one of the best types of educational
experiences that one could possibly have.
So on behalf of the Page Board and, indeed, I think for the entire
membership of the House of Representatives, I want to express to the
pages the thanks of the House for the great service that they have
rendered and to wish them well in their future endeavors.
I am delighted to yield to the gentleman from Michigan [Mr. Kildee],
the former chairman of the Page Board and currently the minority member
of the Page Board.
Mr. KILDEE. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding.
I want to thank the pages for their outstanding service this year.
You have been just tremendous. Each and every one of you can be proud
of yourselves, and I am very proud of each and every one of you.
I see a former page, the former Clerk of the House, Donn Anderson,
standing back there with them, one who has really taken them under his
wing and given them his wisdom and his guidance.
You have seen history at work here. You have seen the House of
Representatives at work here. You have seen us at our best and at our
worst. You have seen us working together trying to make this a better
country.
You have witnessed some real history. You have seen Nelson Mandela
walk down this aisle and speak from the podium where every President
since Woodrow Wilson has stood, a man who had been in prison almost
half his life who spoke of love and reconciliation. You heard the State
of the Union Message here, a very long State of the Union Message here,
just the other night, and you witnessed the orderly transfer of power
in this House from one party to another after 40 years. That is
democracy at work.
And in that orderly transfer of power, you saw me being transformed
from chairman of the Page Board to the ranking minority member of the
Page Board to be followed by the one for whom I have great admiration,
the gentleman from Missouri [Mr. Emerson], who is now the chairman.
I look forward to working with you in the future. Anytime any one of
you need a letter of recommendation, I will give you each one a great
one. You are good people.
Eight or nine years from now you can be a Member of this House, and
as I look around, Mr. Speaker, some of the new Members, they look
almost that age, some of
the newer Members this year. That was a great transfer of power, too.
Thank you for what you have done. You are great people. God bless
you. Godspeed.
Mr. EMERSON. I thank the gentleman.
I yield to the gentleman from Arizona, a newly appointed member of
the Page Board and a former page himself.
Mr. KOLBE. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the gentleman from Missouri
yielding to me.
I did have the opportunity this morning to attend my first meeting as
a member of the Page Board, and it is a great honor for me as one who
began his service back here as a page too many years ago. We will not
mention the particular year. But Donn Anderson, Ron Lasch, and I all
graduated from the page school.
I just wanted to join with my colleagues in saying to the young men
and
[[Page H835]] women that are with us here today, many of whom will be
leaving, some of whom will be staying with us for their second semester
and the rest of this session of Congress, or this first part of this
session of Congress, that you had an extraordinary experience, and I
think you probably all recognize that.
As I look back on the experience myself, I think back to things that
have had a formulative part, been a formulative part, of my life, and I
think non has been more important that the experience that I had here
as a page. In terms of giving me an appreciation for how the American
Government works and an appreciation for the political process and a
better understanding of those who serve us in Government, that they are
humans, they are good, and some are bad, and some are indifferent, but
they are humans in every single way, and I think that perhaps more than
anything else that I took away from that experience it was that.
I hope as you go back to your States and to your communities you will
try to convey that to the young men and women that you will be in
school with this year and next year and on into college, that there is
so much that we are fortunate to have in our country, so much in our
Government that is good, and that it is so important for all of us to
participate in that.
You have been given a rare opportunity that very few young men and
women have in their lifetimes, to be a part of this, not just to
observe, but to actually be a part of this process, and I know that you
will take away from it a great deal.
The test is really how you will use this in the future and to what
good you will put it. It does not have to be in government. You can put
it to good use whether you are in medicine, whether you go into law
enforcement or business or whatever career you might be in. But I
suspect that this is an experience you will find later in life will be
one of those defining moments for you. So take that message back and
think about what you have learned here and how you can put it to use.
I will make this prediction, Mr. Speaker, and my chairman of the Page
Board, my colleague, at least one or two of these people will be back
among us one day, probably after we are gone, but back among us one day
as Members of this body.
I wish you all very well, God bless you. Thank you.
Mr. EMERSON. I thank my colleague for this contribution.
Let me yield now to the gentleman from Pennsylvania [Mr. Kanjorski],
my friend of 42 years with whom I had the great privilege of serving as
a page in the 83d Congress.
Mr. KANJORSKI. Thank you very much, I say to the gentleman from
Missouri [Mr. Emerson].
I guess the pages should know that there is a long traditional
history in this House that pages do come back to serve, and they come
back as the guardians of the memory of what this House is about.
The gentleman from Missouri [Mr. Emerson], the new chairman of the
Page Board, and I had the pleasure of meeting on this House floor on
the great day of January 20, 1953, as the American people were
witnessing the inauguration of Dwight Eisenhower as President of the
United States.
He and I have had the pleasure through our lifetime to have served
and known personally every President of the United States since Dwight
Eisenhower, every Speaker of the House of Representatives since Joseph
Martin of Massachusetts, every majority and minority leader of the
House of Representatives since Charlie Halleck of Indiana, and I
believe at that time John McCormack of Massachusetts, or Mr. Rayburn,
at that time, was minority leader when we served as pages.
The opportunity you have been given by this Congress and your
individual sponsoring Members is something special, and as I think of
it, it is one of the few assignments or appointments we can make as
Congressmen that will, indeed, affect our future.
As my friend from Arizona has pointed out, there is not any question
in my mind that one of you will rise at least to the service of this
House, if not to the Senate or to the Presidency of the United States.
{time} 1450
What you have learned here and what you have observed here is most
important because you will carry it as probably the most important and
significant experience of your lifetime.
As you go on from this place, you will return to your schools, and it
is important that you exercise the greatest capacities you have to gain
all the knowledge and information you can gain there, then go on to
college and graduate school, as you may, so that you too may have the
opportunity to come back and serve the American people.
As my friend from Arizona indicated, you have had the opportunity to
be the fly on the wall to see democracy in action in its very form. You
have also had the opportunity, as the gentleman from Missouri, Bill
Emerson, and I did as 15-year-olds, to see the orderly transition of
democratic power. That experience may not happen for another generation
to come. So, for all time in the future, you will be able to say you
were there in the 104th, this Congress, when 40 years of domination by
the Democratic Party turned the gavel over to a new Speaker and a new
majority and that it operated without the threat or the sound of one
gunshot.
It is a tradition that has continued for more than 200 years, the
longest uninterrupted parliamentary democracy, the House of the people,
in the history of the world.
I join with my friend from Missouri [Mr. Emerson] and all my fellow
pages, some of them came after us--they are the young guys--in wishing
you well and congratulating you on your great public service, recommend
that you carry on in that tradition and you have the opportunity to see
that democracy and representative government continue in this democracy
forever in the future.
Mr. EMERSON. I thank the gentleman for his contribution.
Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Mississippi.
Mr. WICKER. I thank the gentleman from Missouri for yielding to me.
Mr. Speaker, it is my pleasure to add my comments of commendation to
the pages who are leaving this Chamber. I have only been here some 3
weeks with this crop of pages, but you are part of a proud tradition
that dates back--it is hard to believe, Mr. Speaker, that it was some
27\1/2\ years ago that I was here as a page. Lyndon Johnson was
President of the United States, there were giants who walked the floor
of this Chamber, such as Gerald Ford, John McCormack. There were people
who fought partisan fights very vigorously, but they were patriots and
loved this country above all. I know that you will look back on your
experience with the same memories that I have. Some of you will come
back to this body as Representatives of the people. Most of you will go
on to other careers, perhaps medicine, the military, some of you in
public service in other areas, in education perhaps. But whatever you
do, this time that you have had will be an invaluable moment in your
lives and you will always look back on it with treasured memories.
If I could, I would like to echo the remarks of the gentleman from
Arizona [Mr. Kolbe] and my colleague from Michigan [Mr. Kildee] that it
is a very historic moment that you have witnessed in these past few
months. You saw only yesterday a balanced budget amendment enacted in a
bipartisan vote that has been before this body for some 15 years. You
saw the fruition of that just yesterday.
This is about the orderly transfer of power, and it only happened 40
years ago prior to this. It is truly historic and truly profound when
you have an opportunity to see the gentleman from Missouri [Mr.
Gephardt] pass the gavel to the gentleman from Georgia [Mr. Gingrich]
and the troops were not called in, air raids were not required. But the
solemn act of the voters across this country made that decision. It was
accepted by the most powerful leaders of the land.
So you have been here, I would say to each and every one of you, at a
very historic time and you have performed a very valuable service to
your Nation and to this Congress, and I commend you and thank the
gentleman for yielding.
Mr. EMERSON. I thank the gentleman for his contribution.
Mr. Speaker, I yield to the distinguished gentleman from Virginia
[Mr. Davis].
[[Page H836]] Mr. DAVIS. Mr. Speaker, I thank my friend from
Missouri, Mr. Emerson, for bringing this to the House's attention.
Mr. Speaker, this is an important day. It was not that many years ago
that I left this Capitol Hill as a page in the other body. Actually, it
was many years ago, 1967, about the same time the gentleman from
Mississippi was leaving.
Mr. Speaker, though I learned a lot in my 4 years, I remember a lot
of things: I still get lost in the Rayburn Building, moving around in
my first weeks here. But I keep running into pages who keep me on the
straight and narrow as I make my way about.
Mr. Speaker, pages still work many hours. I do not think people
appreciate the long days that they put in. School starts at 6:30, they
have to get up before that. They have long days, and longer days since
the session began, sometimes into the evening. So, after getting their
studies at night, a 12-hour day is not unique in the life of a page. It
is very exciting, but it takes total commitment.
Mr. Speaker, I want to commend their knowledge and their industry and
the commitment they have shown just in the 3 weeks since I have joined
this body. I think the test is going to be for them to build on the
basis of knowledge that they have obtained here. They have been given
an opportunity to observe and serve in a way very few ever have. It
will be a defining moment in their lives.
I hope many of them will seek public service and find the same kind
of commitment many of us have, but at the same time find the kinds of
joys you can get from serving other people which brought many of us
into public service.
I know some of these individuals will return in the future to this
House. It is a sad time to see some of them go. But I know that when I
left here, I had hoped to return one day. So the fact that I can make
it will inspire others. It is an achievable goal.
I thank the gentleman from Missouri for bringing this to the House's
attention.
Mr. EMERSON. I thank the gentleman from Virginia for his
contribution.
Mr. Speaker, in conclusion, let me wish all the pages all good
things. I hope you will achieve your life's goals and ambitions and
that your lives will be filled with good health and happiness and
success.
Work hard, and do the very best you can. I hope that this experience
has been for you everything that we hope it has been. I think as you
get older and reflect back on it, you will probably find it is one of
the best experiences you could ever hope for.
Mr. Speaker, I say to all the pages: ``God bless you all, God speed
to you in your future endeavors.''
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