Washington – The conversation started innocently, but it quickly got too personal for Daniel Ciucci.
Last year, Ciucci was a Democratic congressional page from Boulder’s Fairview High School who’d wandered into unfamiliar territory, the Republican side of the House chamber. But he was familiar with the reputation of the congressman talking to him, Mark Foley.
“Everybody knew he was a weird dude,” said Ciucci, now a freshman at the University of Colorado.
“He kept delving into, ‘What’s your favorite subject in school? How’s your family life?’ He seemed overly interested in everything I was talking about. I finally said, ‘I have to go tally votes’.”
So Ciucci slipped away to the House Cloak Room where he worked.
“I walked in and told the pages, ‘Foley talked to me’,” Ciucci said. “Everybody laughed because everybody knew.”
Ciucci and other former pages from Colorado say it was a common view among them that the Florida Republican was too friendly with the high school students who serve as pages – particularly the males.
They say they were disappointed, but not terribly surprised, to hear of the sexually explicit electronic conversations Foley had with male pages, creating a scandal that has rocked Washington.
Yet both Ciucci and another former Colorado page, Jen Ridder, said they would join the program again because it was one of the most positive experiences of their lives. And they’re angry about proposals by some in Congress to abolish the page program.
“I had the time of my life in the House page program,” Ciucci said. “I got a bird’s-eye perspective of the legislative process.”
Rep. Mark Udall, D-Eldorado Springs, who nominated Ciucci for the program, termed Foley’s behavior abhorrent and called for an independent investigation.
“Leaders who fail to protect the young people who come to Washington, D.C., to serve them do not deserve to lead the House of Representatives,” Udall said.
There are 72 House and 30 Senate pages, generally nominated by members. They must be high school juniors and at least 16 years old. They often serve as messengers in the Capitol and go to school while taking part.
Ciucci and Ridder say they felt the program was extremely safe. Pages were under constant supervision, their whereabouts were monitored through use of keycards, and they could not go out alone.
“If I wanted to go to dinner with my member (of Congress), that was impossible,” said Ridder, who attended East High School in Denver and now goes to Middlebury College in Vermont. “I couldn’t go to the Starbucks across the street.”
She said she had heard that Foley corresponded with former male pages after they left the program.
“I don’t think any of us were surprised,” she said. “He was a member who hung around the page desk.”
Ridder’s father, Rick Ridder, a Democratic pollster who himself was a congressional page in the 1960s, said he’s angered at how the Foley matter was handled by House leaders, but wants the page program to continue.
“I absolutely would send another child to this program,” Ritter said. “You don’t close down a good program because the administrators are on the lam.”
