WASHINGTON — For more than three decades, Eugene Allen worked in the White House, a black man unknown to the headlines. During some of those years, harsh segregation laws lay upon the land.
He trekked home every night, his wife, Helene, keeping him out of her kitchen.
At the White House, he worked closer to the dirty dishes than the Oval Office. Helene didn’t care; she just beamed with pride. President Truman called him Gene. President Ford liked to talk golf with him.
He saw eight presidential administrations come and go, often working six days a week.
“I never missed a day of work,” Allen says.
He was there while America’s racial history was being remade: Brown vs. Board of Education, the Little Rock school crisis, the 1963 March on Washington, cities burning, the civil rights bills, the assassinations.
When he started at the White House in 1952, he couldn’t even use the public restrooms when he ventured back to his native Virginia.
“We had never had anything,” Allen, 89, recalls of black America at the time. “I was always hoping things would get better.”
In its long history, the White House has had a complex and vexing relationship with black Americans.
“The history is not so uneven at the lower level, in the kitchen,” says Ted Sorensen, who served as counselor to President Kennedy. “In the kitchen, the folks have always been black. Even the folks at the door — black.”
Before he landed his job at the White House, Gene Allen worked as a waiter at the Homestead resort in Hot Springs, Va., and then at a country club in Washington.
In 1952, a lady told him of a job opening in the White House. “I wasn’t even looking for a job,” he says. “I was happy where I was working, but she told me to go on over there and meet with a guy by the name of Alonzo Fields.” Fields was a maitre d’, and he liked Allen.
Allen was offered a job as a “pantry man.” He washed dishes, stocked cabinets and shined silverware. He started at $2,400 a year.
There was, in time, a promotion to butler. “Shook the hand of all the presidents I ever worked for,” he says.
“I was there, honey,” Helene reminds. “In the back maybe. But I shook their hands too.”
She is referring to White House holiday parties, Easter egg hunts. They have one son, Charles, who is an investigator with the State Department.
“President Ford’s birthday and my birthday were on the same day,” he says. “He’d have a birthday party at the White House. Everybody would be there. And Mrs. Ford would say, ‘It’s Gene’s birthday too!’ ”
He was in the White House kitchen the day JFK was slain. He got a personal invitation to the funeral, but he volunteered for other duty: “Somebody had to be at the White House to serve everyone after they came from the funeral.”
The family of President Carter made her chuckle: “They were country. And I’m talking Lillian and Rosalynn both.” It comes out sounding like the highest compliment.
First lady Nancy Reagan came looking for him in the kitchen one day. She wanted to remind him about the upcoming state dinner for German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. He told her he was well ahead in the planning and had already picked out the china. But she told him he would not be working that night.
“She said, ‘You and Helene are coming to the state dinner as guests of President Reagan and myself.’ I’m telling you! I believe I’m the only butler to get invited to a state dinner.”
Gene Allen was promoted to maitre d’ in 1980. He left the White House in 1986, after 34 years. President Reagan wrote him a sweet note. Nancy Reagan hugged him, tight.
Interviewed at their home just before the election, Gene and Helene speculated about what it would mean if a black man were elected president.
“Just imagine,” she said.
“It’d be really something,” he said.
They talked about praying to help Barack Obama get to the White House. They’d go vote together.
On Monday, Helene had a doctor’s appointment. Gene woke and nudged her once, then again. He shuffled around to her side of the bed. He nudged Helene again.
“I woke up, and my wife didn’t,” he said later.
The lady whom he married 65 years ago was buried Friday.
The butler cast his vote for Obama on Tuesday. He so missed telling his Helene about the black man bound for the Oval Office.
