Volume 32, Number 2 - Winter 1993
PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE
by Kathleen Van Buskirk
There are events in the watershed of the White River which remind of the gossamer character of our local memories. Such an event was the death, December 12, 1992, of Helen Fletcher, a past president and longtime member of the White River Valley Historical Society. For fifteen years, from 1921 to 1936, Mrs. Fletcher worked side by side with her husband Rockwell, editor and publisher of Branson's White River Leader, recording local and regional events. Her compassionate understanding nurtured through years of encouraging country correspondents in their work and personal interviews with townsfolk and rural residents, inevitably led to a time when she herself became a treasure-trove of information and insights about her mountain neighbors. By the time Helen Fletcher became active in the Society, in the late 1960s, her life was deeply enmeshed in the Ozarks and her concerns encompassed the need for recording personal and public histories in the rapidly changing region. She served as the Society President in 1977-78.
Mrs. Fletcher’s passing reminds us all of the fleeting nature of historical knowledge and recall. Of her vast store of information and understanding of the region and its peoples, only that which is recorded—in our Quarterly, in newspapers and other publications, or among her surviving papers—will be available for the understanding of future generations. This is also true about your personal knowledge about ancestors, family, and friends, and your personal experiences in this land. Many of you are pursuing information about your own families, or perhaps have old records by relatives. Lynn Morrow, our Quarterly editor, is always on the lookout for publishable pictures, records, stories, and family histories of the Upper White River region and its people. Such material should be brought to a Society meeting or mailed to WRVHS, Box 555, Point Lookout, MO 65726.
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