Political Quotes

“in 1939, before many Members of this body had been born, Miss Elizabeth Bryden of Waltham, MA, came to Washington, D.C. to work for Congressman Robert Luce. She continued to work on the Hill, with little interruption, until the start of the 96th Congress in 1979. Today, when most Hill staffers remain here for only a few years, Betty Bryden, as she was always known, remains an example of rare dedication and extraordinary public service. Her early employers are now mostly names for the history books. For example, Senator Leverett Saltonstall of Massachusetts and Bourke Hickenlooper of Iowa, not to mention Gordon Allot of Colorado and Congressman McIntyre of Maine. Several of those gentlemen chaired the Senate Republican Conference, a position I now hold. As the research librarian for the Republican Conference, in the days before computers, Betty would come into the Russell Senate Office Building hours before most staffers would arrive. By the time the Senate began business for the day, she would have copied, filed, and cross-filed, in what must have been one of the world's most elaborate reference systems, scores of that day's news items from a wide variety of sources. The cumulative result was a towering warren of filing cabinets, jammed with thousands of sheets of paper, the location of each of which she somehow remembered.…”