Monday, March 10, 2014

Last week I spent the day at the Watkins Museum in Lawrence, Kansas. Why? because Lawrence has had a lot of strange people go through there, and so I figure that one of the persons I am looking for who worked on NEQUA just might have spent some time in Lawrence.
The Watkins is in a grand old building downtown on Massachusetts Ave.  Being my bull in a china shop, self I just ambled in a minute after it opened. They run their place on an appointment basis. How the public is supposed to know that I do not know. Of course I was able to slide by the rules with my best sad face showing.
They put me in touch with a woman named  Mary Wallace, a volunteer archivist. She had actually been responsible for preparing the files in the section where she works, which was great because I just told her the story of what I knew about the NEQUA crew and she wrote down a couple of key words and pulled the files for me. It only took about two hours to go through  the potential files.
Mary also gave me a card for the “Collection Manager” who she said could do a search of the notations on photographs and see if there were any  photographs of the dozen or so names I gave her. 
Two days later I got an email saying, No Luck, but it included a couple of suggestions of other places to check.
It is this type of service that I have come to expect from research people.  They know there section of information better than anyone else or they should, and they usually have an idea how to play their intuitive card which sometimes pays off with very unsuspected information.

Seems there is always one more place to check.

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