The past two mornings I’ve spent at the State Archives going through a small portion of the 561 cubic feet of materials from the 1950s administration of Texas Gov. Alan Shivers. I’m looking for some correspondence of importance to a book of Texana I’m putting together. Shivers played a minor but significant role in the story.
Alas, I haven’t found what I’m looking for. And no wonder. The materials are a jumble. The dates on some of the folders, in the four boxes I’ve been through so far, often don’t match the dates on all of their contents. At one point I asked the young archivist helping me if anyone, state or academic, has been through all of this stuff and indexed it in some manner other than just the (alleged) contents of the boxes. The answer was no, no one. It all came to the state in 1977 and has been largely untouched since then. What, I wonder, do Texas academic historians actually research these days?
THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER 