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Dale received this letter from President Ford.
President Reagan reaches over Dale's desk for a handshake
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Billy Ray Dale was in charge of the White House Travel Office during |
SPOTSYLVANIA COUNTY resi-
"Public servants," those kinds of people are often called.
They frequently work exceedingly hard to support the people and public interest of the United States. This is sometimes a noble profession, and real pride and personal satisfaction can be attained when you do your job well. Anyway, that's how these stories should play out. Keep that in mind as you read on.
Now, "Billy Ray Dale" might that name be ringing a faint bell in your memory?
Here's some help: Dale was in charge of the White House Travel Office during the Clinton administration. Yes, it's that Billy Ray Dale.
The national press back then called that ill-fated Clinton-presidency incident "Travelgate," but it might more properly have been tagged "Dalegate," for it most certainly was a personal assault on Dale and his family.
However, when all the partisan dust finally settled, it was Blanche and Billy who welcomed victory, while that other Bill, and his wife, Hillary, were on a different side of the political aisle.
Billy Ray Dale grew up in the southwestern corner of Virginia in a little town called Grundy near both the West Virginia and Kentucky borders.
There is no Lake Anna recreational area down there, nothing as big as a Central Park for shopping, and government employers like Dahlgren are nonexistent. "When I graduated high school," said Dale, "the choices were pretty much working in the coal mines, going into the sawmills or getting a job at some local gas station."
Billy's dad was a coal miner, and made it clear to his son that Billy needed to leave the area for any real chance at a better opportunity.
Billy worked during breaks in high school for an uncle who was a foreman at one of the mines. After one of his shifts underground, he remembers his dad saying to him, "This is only what's going to be in store for you, for the rest of your life, if you don't leave this place."
That lesson took hold and a resolute seed began to grow in Billy's soul. One afternoon, shortly after the boy graduated high school, he learned an Air Force recruiter was scheduled to visit Grundy the next day from Roanoke. "I won't be back to work tomorrow," Billy told his uncle after their shift ended.
"Tomorrow is payday. What will I do with your paycheck?" His uncle asked him.
"Give it to my dad," Billy answered.
The next day, Billy Ray Dale left with that recruiter, who put him up in a Roanoke hotel for the night. The day after that, Dale was headed south on a train bound for San Antonio, Texas.
"I got homesick on that train ride," Billy laughed as he remembered the incident. "I'd never been out of the mountains before."
In the meantime, another recent graduate of Grundy High School, a pretty young girl named Blanche Johnson, had left Grundy, too. She went on to Washington for a job at the Navy Department.
In the Air Force, Billy was trained as a communications specialist and teletype operator. After leaving a post in Okinawa, he chose Andrews Air Force Base in Clinton, Md., for his last duty station, for Blanche was living and working nearby.
Billy eventually married his high school sweetheart; Blanche was still working for the Navy Department, and he was finishing up his tour in the Air Force.
Blanche's boss knew of a job opening in the communications office at the nearby Veterans Administration, and Billy applied for and got that job when he was discharged from the Air Force.
After working there for over a year, Dale was asked by a supervisor if he'd like to try a post in a different department of the government. "I was making $3,800 a year," said Dale, "and I knew the chance for any advancement within the Veterans Administration was limited."
Billy was told this other position was at the Department of the Interior.
He agreed to an initial interview, and there it was explained to him that this "Department of the Interior" job was actually a position at the White House.
"Being just a country boy, that man could see all my apprehension at that prospect," remembered Dale. "Go home and talk it over with your wife," he was told, and Dale did just that.
"We discussed it. And 'Why not?' was our answer."
The next Monday, Dale was inside the White House Personnel Office. He was interviewed, took the required typing test, and was told there were several other applicants for the position and he'd be hearing something soon.
Weeks passed and no word came. Then, one Friday afternoon, that same supervisor came by Dale's desk again, and told him to clean it out and report to the White House Monday at 9 a.m.
Dale had landed the job working in the White House Telegraph and Transportation Office.
That weekend, Billy and Blanche spent much of their time shopping at JCPenney and Sears buying sports coats, slacks, white shirts and ties, for one just doesn't walk into the Old Executive Office Building without proper attire. No indeed, and certainly not if you're working on the White House staff.
Dale performed well on his new job, and moved up the ranks on the Telegraph side of the office first, then through the Travel Office division.
In July 1982, Dale became the head of the Travel Office.
The White House Travel Office provides all the arrangements when the president and his staff, or other high-ranking officials, leave Washington, whether it be for a campaign trip, fact-finding mission, political speech in Kansas City or vacation in California. The president always flies on Air Force One, but the Travel Office has to make arrangements to obtain commercial airline flights for many of the accompanying press corps. Occasionally they do the same for the wives, husbands and children of prominent newsmen or newswomen who also might want to go along. They book all the hotels and buses, provide for meals, make out schedules and have many more details to work out and coordinate so the presidential trip is a success.
"A pampered and happy press corps is less likely to write a negative story," Dale says, "but there are no manuals on that. We just learned it to be true."
Members of the press pay for their own travel expenses, but the Travel Office has to send them those pro-rated bills, as well as pay its own suppliers for all the services delivered during a trip.
It's a hard and demanding job, to be sure. The White House doesn't pay overtime, and Dale laughed when he said, "Heck, in my lifetime I could never get to use all my annual leave, let alone the comp time I accumulated over the years."
The staff is often called upon for other White House jobs, too.
Once, when Dale had just started working there, he got a call from the White House operator. The next moment, Dale, posing as Santa Claus, was speaking to a very excited Caroline Kennedy. After she had presented Santa with her Christmas wish list, she asked if he'd like to speak to her daddy, President John Kennedy, who just happened to be at her side. The White House operator interrupted then, and politely told Caroline that Santa was very busy and he had to go now.
Another time, a senior White House aide from Utah had called up to get some help for one of his constituents. It seems a man had been bitten by an exotic venomous snake, and the only antivenin was somewhere in Iran, and had to be delivered to Utah within 36 hours.
Dale was at his desk that morning at 2 a.m. making the arrangements through various embassies and airlines to get the antivenin delivered on time. "A lot of people helped me out on that one," he says.
The mission was successful, and the man in Utah survived.
The Travel Office staff also has to make sure a certain reporter always has an empty seat next to her on the plane. Another national correspondent expects his coffee served with utmost civility and never in something as common as a paper or Styrofoam cup.
It's better to break out the good china than read an unflattering story.
Many others in the press need special coddling, too, and this can certainly be a challenging job, but rewarding in helping the government run smoothly. Dale was a very successful head of the very important Travel Office.
Then the Clintons came to town.
On Bill Clinton's Inauguration Day, the Travel Office received a call for a woman who didn't work there. "But I was told she did," said the caller from Arkansas.
That was an omen of things yet to come.
Weeks later, Dale was instructed to find a job in the Travel Office for a friend of one of Clinton's friends. He did, and a week or two later the office copy machine was found jammed when people came in to work. While it was being fixed, the technician discovered stuck inside the machine a canceled check that had been filed away many years before.
Someone was obviously coming in late at night, going through the Travel Office records and making copies of selected items.
Then "Nannygate" surfaced, in which a political appointee of Clinton's was found to have illegally employed someone in her own home.
The political wind shifted direction, and the White House Travel Office quickly came under fire.
One day, Dale and his staff were summoned to a meeting and told they had but two hours to clear out their personal belongings. When they returned to the office, other people were already working at their desks.
"I was asked if I had a lawyer," remembers Dale. "'What for?' I answered."
"You'd better get one," he was told.
The political "spin" almost immediately began to unravel, for many in the press corps knew these Travel Office people well. The news reporters just weren't buying into the official story that was being handed out from inside the White House.
The whole episode was quickly dubbed "Travelgate."
Criminal charges were eventually brought against Dale; they included a charge of embezzling $54,000.
At his trial, one lawyer quipped, "If that was the best you could do, working with a budget of over $35 million, you're a darn poor embezzler."
Dale's was a jury trial, and once the jury got his case it took a grand total of 20 minutes to come to a verdict.
Dale was found innocent of all charges.
He later countersued for character assassination, but those charges were dropped for lack of direct proof.
During his years in the Travel Office, Dale would often find himself working far more than half the weekends in a typical year. To relax, he'd often just go driving around the area on his normal Wednesday off.
Going past Fredericksburg one afternoon, he noticed a sign for Lake Anna and followed the
"This is as far as my wife will go away from our grandchildren," said Dale last week when talking about his choice in homes.
They both stay busy in retirement. Besides that beautiful lake right outside their front door, there's golfing and occasional card games; Blanche likes to sew and Billy enjoys woodworking. Plus, those grandchildren are always close by for an occasional visit.
Lake Anna and Grundy aren't really all that far from each other maybe just a couple of hundred miles.
However, Billy Ray Dale's achievements in his lifetime make those two places seem worlds apart.
JIM KUNDRESKAS of Louisa County near Lake Anna has been an outdoors writer for more than 20 years. Contact him at
Email: Zbasser@aol.com.
