CongressionalBadBoys.com | home | Wayne Hays Wayne L. Hays Democrat, Ohio (1949-1976)   May 1976.  The Honorable Wayne Hays, 64, powerful chairman of the House Administration Committee kept a $14,000-a-year (a lot of money back then) secretary on his staff, named Elizabeth Ray.  Trouble was, Elizabeth had no secretarial skills:  "I can't type, I can't file, I can't even answer the phone," she protested.  I'm just his mistress. Elizabeth admitted to coming to the office a couple hours a week, doing no work, and doing little more than providing Hays with sexual favors. Elizabeth says she used to be a stewardess, waitress, and a car rental clerk before coming to the House of Representatives in 1972. Wayne Hays divorced his first wife in 1975, and was married for five months to his second, his Ohio office secretary, when the story broke.  Asked if their long-standing relationship could continue after the second marriage, Ray said that Hays told her yes, "if you behave yourself." In the office next to Hays, congressional staffers were crammed in like sardines because of lack of space.  Elizabeth had her own private, luxuriously-appointed room in the Longworth Building.  According to the Post article, Ray said:  "Supposedly I'm on the oversight committee.  But I call it the Out-of-Sight Committee."             Wayne Hays, who was first elected to Congress in 1948, was going to run as a favorite son for President in the June 1976 Ohio primary.  He was also considering a run for governor of Ohio in 1978.  The Elizabeth Ray revelations did him in:  he withdrew from his congressional re-election campaign before the 1976 general election. Read the breaking story in the Washington Post by Marion Clark and Rudy Maxa. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/local/longterm/tours/scandal/elizray.htm