Cecil A. Partee Memoir - University of Illinois Springfield

the volume of the business to come before that committee. And sometimes pu
would have to have night meetings in order to handle all the bills.
Q: In each individual meeting, was there a general time?
A: You would get a notification that the meeting is going to be at a certain
place at a certain time and the bills to be considered would be listed and they
would give them by number so that, when you got into the meeting, you knew
exactly what bills were to be considered.
4: How soon beforehand would that notification occur?
A: Generally a week before.
Q: So you had time to . . .
A: Sure, unless it was some call meeting or something. You would go in a
meeting say on Tuesday and they would say, "Well, we're going to meet again
Wednesday night and these are the bills that are going to be considered."
You would generally know what was going to be considered.
Q: If a number of bills were coming up, huw did you go about finding a draft
of those bills?
A: Oh, you had a book on your desk with every bill in it, every bill. As
bills were introduced and printed they were put in your bill book. You had
copies of all the bills.
9: This was done by what agency? Do you recall?
A: (pause) It was an outside printing company. Some outside group did the
printing.
Q: I see, yes. Did you have much occasion to use the Legislative Reference
Bureau for anything other than the drafting of the bills?
A: No. No, nothing much more than that.
Q: No research type thing?
A: No, we didn't have that in those days. You did your own research. We
didn't even have a telephone to call home or call your office or anything of
that sort. You would just put some money in the phone booth. We didn't even
have credit cards in that day, You just put some quarters or dimes, whatever
it took, in there, to do it. No, we didn't have any help at all. We had no
interns, we had no staff, you did it yourself.
Q: So really your office was more or less your hotel room?
A: Your head.