White House Gets First Female ‘Chief Usher’

Who run the world?! Girls! The White House has announced that next month, Angella Reid will become the White House’s next chief usher or “director of the president’s executive residence”. Reid will be only the ninth person to hold the job and the first woman in the position. Continue reading after the jump.

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Fresh out of high school in Kingston, Reid found her life’s calling in the hotel business and quickly learned the sacrifices that come when your job is to put other people’s comfort first.
Now, after more than three decades working in hospitality, Reid is ready to take charge at one of the world’s most exclusive residential establishments, the White House.

Chief usher is a quaint title for a demanding position. Reid will oversee day-to-day operations at the president’s home, a 132-room mansion with a staff of more than 90 people ranging from plumbers and electricians to butlers and cooks. She’ll cater to everyone from A-list guests at state dinners to throngs of kids at the annual Easter egg roll.
In recognition of the many facets to the job, the usher’s title was recently expanded to include “director of the president’s executive residence.”
“To say that she was hopeful and excited couldn’t possibly describe how badly she hoped she was chosen for this position,” says Jean Cohen, who mentored Reid in Marriott’s management program when both were in New York in the 1990s. “This was her absolute dream position.”
Yet even Reid’s closest friends didn’t have a clue a White House job was in the offing until her selection was announced.
“It was kept very hush-hush,” says Brenda Belding-Topping, a longtime friend and colleague from the Ritz-Carlton organization.
Discretion may be one of the most important qualities needed for the chief usher.
In addition to seeing that things run smoothly throughout the White House, Reid will work to ensure the White House remains a home where two busy parents, their two daughters and the family dog feel comfortable and have their privacy.
In years past, the usher’s job description has included everything from hunting down Caroline Kennedy’s lost hamsters to getting the marriage license for President Woodrow Wilson, according to Claire Faulkner, writing in “White House History,” the journal of the White House Historical Association.
President Lyndon Johnson wanted a multi-head, high-pressure shower that required serious plumbing work, according to a memoir by former usher J.B. West. Nancy Reagan was so appreciative of the longtime service of Rex Scouten, chief usher to four presidents, that she named her King Charles spaniel “Rex.”
To say the usher must cater to a lot of guests is an understatement. More than a million people pass through the White House every year.
Gary Walters, chief usher for two decades before he retired in 2007, describes it as an all-encompassing job that requires understanding the likes and dislikes of the first family, learning the ways of a tradition-steeped White House, and interacting with a multitude of outside organizations such as the historical association and the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts.
Reid will come in just before the holidays, when the calendar is packed with parties and receptions, and that will make for a steep learning curve, he says.
“It’s pretty much go, go, go from early in the morning, 5:30 or 6 a.m., until 1 a.m. the next day,” Walters says.
For all the modern challenges of life in the White House, in other ways not much has changed since the days of Elizabeth Jaffray, a White House housekeeper from 1913 to 1925, who once described the mansion as “no remote castle, but a plain white house — a home full of the hundred and one petty details, triumphs, worries, heartaches, and pleasures that every home faces.”
Luckily, Reid has always been a problem-solver, says Dwyer.
“If ever I had a problem and nobody would step in, she would be the one,” Dwyer says. “There was nothing that you could throw at her that she didn’t respond to.”
Reid, currently the general manager of the Ritz-Carlton Pentagon City in Virginia, just across the Potomac River from the White House, has the managerial, financial and people skills to make a seamless transition, and the work ethic to endure, says Cohen. She recruited Reid into the Ritz-Carlton organization in 2002 from its parent company, Marriott International.
“She sees it as a lifestyle, not a job, which I think will serve her well in the White House,” says Cohen.
Still, Reid’s selection is a bit of a culture shift. Where Reid is described by friends as effervescent, past chief ushers have been rather sober men, many of whom moved up from other positions on the White House staff.
A Ritz-Carlton promotional video shows Reid dancing to U2 on her iPod, and includes an eclectic personal playlist stretching from Bob Marley to the Pet Shop Boys, with UB40 and Tina Turner in between.
Reid, 52, who is single, manages to pack in plenty of adventure. She loves to travel, and vacationed in Istanbul, Turkey, this year. She’s a concert-goer, not passing up any opportunity to catch U2. She keeps herself healthy, recently signing up for a fitness “boot camp.”
“She’ll try anything at least once,” says Belding-Topping.
An art lover, Reid is savoring the idea that her job description includes overseeing the mammoth White House art collection.
Dwyer says Reid, whose close friends call her “Angie,” was a “doer and a goer” from the beginning. Dwyer encouraged Reid to get a hospitality management degree from the Carl Duisberg Gesellschaft School in Munich, Germany, a rigorous training program where “you don’t know it until you’ve peeled potatoes and made beds.”
Couple that training with a willingness to work hard and the result is “a kind of walk that captivated everybody,” says Dwyer, sales and marketing director of Glamour Destination Management Co. “It’s a walk of confidence. Not pride, but confidence that given an opportunity, she can succeed.”
Dwyer says Reid-managed hotels were always a must to visit because “she is there, she is present.”
“She is not going to walk away,” Dwyer says. “She doesn’t just want to hear about it.”
Reid’s career path has taken her from a middle-class upbringing in Jamaica to Washington, New York, Connecticut and Miami, and now back to Washington. Along the way, she’s learned to work with all kinds of egos at the conference table, a skill that will be crucial in dealing with all the big names — and heads — that can pass through the White House.
While the usher’s job is nonpolitical, Reid is a big Obama supporter, Cohen says, so the chance to ease the burdens of the president’s family has her “on the ceiling with excitement.”

FN