Having the vice president of the United States hand out the diplomas, and a future commander in chief as the commencement speaker wasn’t out of the ordinary for high-schooler Billy Walters in 1958.

After all, he’d been hobnobbing with the powerful politicos since January 1955, when he arrived as a U.S. Senate page for John L. McClellan of Arkansas, and later J. William Fulbright.

Walters, now 71, goes by the more mature “Bill” and lives in Cranfills Gap with his wife, Sandra. But his memories of his boyhood adventures in D.C. came rushing back with the recent news that after 169 years, the U.S. House’s page program is being swept into the dustpan of history.

When 15-year-old Billy Walters’ pet garter snake got loose in the stacks at the Library of Congress (where the Capital Page School was conducted each morning in the attic), the story was reported in newspapers around the country. This widely reproduced picture features Billy, one of his larger specimens, and the scowling Lt. Charles Taylor of the LOC security detail.
Image provided by Bill Walters, Cranfills Gap

The Senate’s older program, established in 1829 by Sen. Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, is unaffected by the change. And that’s a relief to Walters, who brought two bulging scrapbooks to the Tribune-Herald to share stories about the program with Brazos Past.

Walters, an adopted Texan who grew up in Osceola, Ark., had a very determined mother, Mary, who worked in the local bank. It was her dream for her boy to be a Senate page, running errands for the high and mighty, and she wrote several letters to McClellan to plead her case.

McClellan said he couldn’t promise much, without a Democratic majority in the mid-term elections of 1954. A Southern sweep that November meant that by January 1955, Billy, 14, was on his way to Washington, D.C.

Unlike most pages, who split apartments with other students, Billy moved into an apartment across the street from the U.S. Capital rented by his grandmother, Grace Crouch, who moved there to be his chaperone.

“I was the only Senate page who had (access to) a car — a 1947 Coupe,” he recalled. It made him a popular guy. His earnings of just more than $300 “was pretty good money for a 14-year-old kid.”

The 30 Senate pages and their House comrades (in those days, of course, no girls were allowed) would attend school each morning from about 6:30 a.m. until 9:30 a.m., in the private school operated for them in the attic of the Library of Congress. Then, the real work day began.

Daily duties

Page duties consisted primarily of delivery of correspondence and legislative material within the Capitol complex, and also included preparing the Senate chamber for sessions, taking messages for senators or calling them to the phone, and carrying working documents such as bills and amendments from the presiding officer’s desk around the offices. The pages also retrieved lecterns, easels, writing supplies and such for the senators and clerks.

When the Senate was in session on pressing matters, pages were required to stay handy and work long hours into the night. But most nights, the youths had off to get their homework done or take a field trip around the cultural center of the city, Walters said.

“We were responsible for keeping the phones wiped off and the Senate lounge clean,” he recalled. They would line up in the cloakroom, where they would be dispatched to pick up or drop off items for whichever senator needed them. Just as some senators had their favorite pages, some pages had their favorite senators; Walters was fond of Sen. Lyndon Baines Johnson (majority leader and eventual 36th president) as well as Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, “and (Vice President) Nixon was quite jovial with us.”

The pages often were tapped to escort VIP visitors around the legislative halls.

The perks were plentiful, to boot: free medical care, free haircuts, tickets to see the Washington Senators baseball team or acting greats at the National Theatre. There were cotillions and society soirees at which he and the fellows would squire around the daughters of senators and representatives. He dated briefly a daughter of Sen. Estes Kefauver of Tennessee.

He got to meet and question some of the great names of the arts, sciences, sports, military and statesmanship, through a public affairs current events TV program called “Youth Wants to Know.” He recalled that Jackie Kennedy created a stir whenever she came into the Senate gallery.

Slithering problem

Walters created a brouhaha himself one day in late 1955. Because his grandmother disapproved of him keeping his pet snakes in her home, he got permission from biology teacher to keep the collection in the science classroom in the attic of the Library of Congress. But one of the serpents sprung from its case and slithered its way through the stacks — setting off a panic among Capitol police who threatened to evacuate the venerable institution should it not be found quickly.

Billy was summoned from the Capitol to attend to the situation. The snake was found and sent packing with the rest of the reptilian retinue to The Washington Zoo. The New York Times and other national newspapers carried the story.

One less-publicized Senate shenanigan happened when debate was droning one long night, Walters recalled. Two senators, each of whom had just purchased a new car, got to comparing the pros and cons of their opponents’ set of wheels. So Billy and another page were summoned to test their braggadocio with a drag race at the foot of the Washington Monument. Billy, driving the Buick, was bested by the Ford.

Many of his exploits are meticulously documented in his scrapbooks. That he has them intact after more than 50 years is a small miracle, his spouse said. The couple suffered a house fire in 2009 that destroyed virtually all their belongings: By a stroke of fate, falling debris protected the scrapbooks from the worst of the smoke and flames.

After he graduated from the Senate page program in June 1958, Walters was happy to exchange his business suit for the garb of a hunter, fisherman and entrepreneurial “frog-gigger” who sold his catch to local eateries in his native state.

A student at Arkansas State College, he met Sandra, a Baylor University student, while both had summer jobs at a lodge in California. They wed in 1960. After designing bridges for the Texas Highway Department for several years, and designing rural water systems for several more, Walters ended up as an industrial engineer for Owens-Corning in Waco, while his wife taught school and raised their three children.

tjryan@wacotrib.com

757-5746