Employees at the Government Printing Office gathered in Harding Hall on Friday to mark GPO's 144th birthday, but Public Printer Bruce R. James soon turned the spotlight on an employee, Virginia Saunders, to celebrate her 60 years of federal service.
GPO presented Saunders, 78, with a crystal ball, engraved with her name, as a symbol of thanks from her fellow employees, a $1,000 U.S. savings bond and a framed tribute published in the March 3 Congressional Record.
 
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Saunders said she was surprised to be singled out for attention. When James asked her to come forward, "I said, 'Oh, my goodness.' "
"She got a standing ovation that went on and on," James said, noting that "Virginia is considered an icon here."
Since 1969, Saunders has been responsible for the Congressional Serial Set, a compilation of House and Senate reports and documents issued for each session of Congress. GPO produces 100 to 125 volumes per set for each session of Congress, and they are widely considered one of the government's most important publications.
"The Congressional Serial Set joins the Congressional Record in offering students and historians a rich insight into the American system of government. Virginia Saunders makes all that possible," Rep. Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) said in the Congressional Record tribute.
Saunders, born in 1926 in Maryland, joined the FBI after high school. But she worked only a year before being asked to return home to care for her ailing mother. With her mother on the mend, she began job hunting in Washington, working through the Christmas shopping season as a department store clerk earning $23 a week.
Friends in her church choir told her that the Navy and GPO were hiring, and on Feb. 4, 1946, Saunders joined GPO as a junior clerk-typist in the stock section of the division of public documents.
Two years later, she received a promotion -- the first in a series that led her to take an interest in congressional documents. Today, she works as program operations and evaluation specialist for congressional documents in GPO's Office of Congressional Publishing Services.
Along the way, Saunders has worked to improve GPO's efficiency and save taxpayer dollars. In 1989, she noticed that the House and Senate had created an identical appendix to the Iran-contra reports. She suggested that those documents be bound only once for the serial set, saving more than $600,000.
One of the biggest changes she has witnessed at GPO has been the advent of the Internet and digital document. She ships off much of her work in electronic formats to the printers but said she favors old-fashioned ink and paper as the best method for ensuring the historic preservation of the government's most important documents.
James praised Saunders as a reservoir of institutional memory at GPO and said: "I don't know what we would do without her."
For her part, Saunders said retirement is not on the horizon. "I plan to keep working as long as my health is good," she said.
Presidential Honors
Steven R. Cohen, a senior adviser to the director of the Office of Personnel Management, has been honored with the President's Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service, the highest award given in the civil service.
The award was presented by Andrew H. CardJr., the White House chief of staff, at an OPM ceremony Friday that also marked Cohen's 42 years of federal service.
Cohen is a chief architect of the new Department of Homeland Security pay and personnel system, one of the most dramatic changes in the government's workplace rules in decades. He had retired from OPM in January 2002 but came back in October that year to serve as OPM's representative on homeland security matters to the White House and Congress.
Leadership Forum
Executive Women in Government will hold its leadership conference March 17 at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's Hall of Flags.
Speakers include Janet Hale, undersecretary for management at the Department of Homeland Security; Constance Berry Newman, an assistant secretary at the State Department; Sallyanne Harper, chief administrative officer at the Government Accountability Office and Kimberly Nelson, chief information officer at the Environmental Protection Agency.
For more information, go to www.execwomeningov.orgor call 301-725-3500.
E-mail: barrs@washpost.com
