Robert Byrd Was World's First 'Super Model'; Was Also A Hoarder

Because the Senate is full of sick old people, there is actually an established policy about how long you get to clear out all of a senator's stuff, after he dies. You get 60 days! This is fine for your ordinary senator who burned everything incriminating, but what about Robert Byrd, a man who was in office longer than any other Senator, and who literally never threw out a single letter that he received or sent over the decades? It takes a long time, and it is very emotional, because you keep stumbling across precious keepsakes, like uncaptioned photos where you look at them and are all like "Seriously, who the hell is this," and also mash notes. Did Robert Byrd have a scorching-hot sex affair with a prominent advice columnist! Find out after the jump!

Robert Byrd did not have a sex affair with anyone, as far as we know, but the following letter, found at the bottom of a box full of expired coupons and loose change, implies that he could have:  

"If you ever decide you've had enough of the Senate (which would be the country's loss) you can always model men's wear for Brooks Brothers," one female admirer wrote Byrd in April 1978.

Byrd's correspondent was none other than Abigail "Dear Abby" Van Buren, who wrote to Byrd, then 61, to compliment his "perfectly stunning" photograph in Time magazine.

And that is more than you ever wanted to know about Dear Abby's sex fantasies. Anyway, he also had 2,800 cubic feet of other papers, just piled up everywhere, that will be shipped to his vault deep below the Appalachian Mountains, where they will remain in a climate-controlled chamber as a monument to his legislative career, until it is destroyed in a year or two when someone blows that mountain up looking for coal. [ WP ]