A Supreme Court Page in the Quill Pen Era

In this era of security badges, street barricades and 24-hour surveillance, it's hard to imagine a time when Washington was a carefree town where a kid from a poor family could get a job at the Capitol and gamble in the hallway outside the attorney general's office.

But that's exactly what happened to Frank Trenholm Lyman more than 80 years ago. When he was 13, he was hired as a page at the Supreme Court, when it was still housed in the Capitol and former president William Howard Taft was chief justice. Lyman went to work in knickers and knee socks, rode his bicycle around the city on errands for the justices and had enough free time to consider the Capitol his personal playground.

Lyman, who grew up in a succession of houses between Dupont Circle and Kalorama Road, was a spunky kid with the kind of resilience, self-reliance and can-do moxie that seems both old-fashioned and refreshing. By the time he was born in Washington on Sept. 21, 1910, the money from aristocratic ancestors was long gone, and life kept getting harder.

His older brother, 17-year-old David, was killed along with 97 other people on Jan. 28, 1922, as the roof of the Knickerbocker Theater collapsed under the weight of 28 inches of snow. (Frank had been at the theater the night before.) A year later, his father died of tuberculosis at age 42.

His widowed mother took in boarders and worked as a nurse to support her two children, and the young Lyman quickly learned to accept a man's responsibilities while somehow maintaining a boy's innocent-eyed exuberance.

When a family friend recommended him as page, Lyman left the eighth grade to report to work. At that time, political connections could not land a young man a job as a Supreme Court page. Letters from congressmen were ignored, as Supreme Court marshals and older pages recruited boys -- and only boys -- who needed the job. By long-standing custom, they were the sons of widows.

"There was no patronage that I knew of," Lyman said in an interview with the Journal of Supreme Court History in 2004. "They just decided to hire a boy, but it had to be someone who needed the money."

He went to work for $110 a month and attended night school, but most of his education came from his five years at the court, when he worked within arm's reach of Taft, Louis Brandeis and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Lyman, who was 95 when he died of congestive heart failure on May 18, never did graduate from high school.

The court met in what is now called the old Senate chamber of the Capitol. (The current Supreme Court building opened in 1935, and the court stopped using pages in 1976.) The justices still wrote with quill pens in the 1920s, and Holmes, then in his mid-eighties, arrived for work each day by horse and buggy.

Taft, Holmes and Brandeis were Lyman's favorite jurists, simply because of how they treated their subordinates. In the Supreme Court History article, he recalled that if a page was chewing gum in the presence of Justice James C. McReynolds, the justice would snap, "Spit out that wax, boy!"

When the Supreme Court was not in session, the pages were free to roam the Capitol. They climbed to the dome and sometimes sneaked outside, taking in the view from the best vantage point in the city. They played dice and even set up a bowling alley on the rug outside the attorney general's office, then in the Capitol.

Lyman was head page in his last two years at the court, but he had to quit at 17, when he grew too tall for the job. But there were many other adventures along the way. At 15, he sailed to France as a deckhand on a freighter, and a year later he smuggled a few bottles of whiskey back to Prohibition-era Washington from Canada.

During the Depression, he worked as a taxi driver, hotel clerk and door-to-door radio salesman -- "You have never been really rejected until a door has been slammed in your face," he said in a handwritten family memoir.

Along the way, he became a skilled artist, and, while serving in the Navy in World War II, escaped the more onerous chores by drawing portraits of his fellow sailors' sweethearts. After the war, he was a transportation officer for the Navy Department and the Atomic Energy Commission until his retirement in 1972.

Lyman and his wife, Rachel, raised their son, Frank Lyman Jr., in Bethesda, where they were surrounded by neighborhood children, animals and a steady stream of boarders at their Victorian house. Lyman earned extra money by making exquisitely painted lead soldiers and worked on the side as a commercial photographer.

He took care of his ailing wife before her death in 2004 and installed home emergency systems for Suburban Hospital until he was 90.

"He never made the big time," his son said, "but he was a great man in the small traffic of life."