Archive Trip--Day 4

On my third day in the archives, I finished up my first cart and moved on to my second--a huge improvement over my last visit to the archives, when I only completed 2 carts over the whole week. Using a camera really does make a massive difference. Last time, I just took notes and even though I'm a fast typist, it's still much quicker to just snap a picture. It's also more accurate--there are no typos, no confusion over page numbers or dates.
The second cart was correspondence from the first accession in the Fulbright papers, so I moved back in time from the post-senatorial (post-1975) era to the start of the exchange program (1946). There seemed to be more "scholarship enquiries" in the earlier set and more "thank you" letters in the later set. It makes sense--in the early days, people didn't know where to get information about this new program they'd heard somebody mention. By the time Senator Fulbright was out of office in 1975, there were thousands of potential letter writers amongst the program's alumni.

My favorite find of the day was a series of letters between a concerned mother of a grantee, Senator Fulbright's office and the State Department. The woman wrote to Senator Fulbright on behalf of her son, who had just arrived in Germany and was struggling to find accommodation. The Senator's office wrote to the State Department, to make enquiries about getting him assistance from the embassy. The Senator replied to the woman, in the meantime, to let her know that they had taken the matter up. The next letter was an update from the woman--her son has found accommodation in Germany and is settling in just fine, so please don't proceed with your enquiries. The Senator's office sends her an acknowledgment and writes to the State Department to cancel its last request. Now, this is all very mundane, but the reason it was my favorite letter? This whole thing took place within a week. Even today, it takes my letters about a week to make it through the post between the UK and US. You can imagine what happened--this guy wrote to his mom when he arrived and said he was struggling to find accommodation, the letter took a week to get to Mom, he found accommodation, then wrote to tell his mom the address. In the meantime, she's taking it up with the program's founder! He might have only been staying in a hotel for a few days before finding permanent accommodation--it certainly wasn't a matter to bring up with the embassy!