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From Dave’s Desk

We have come a long way........a very long way.

It seems like yesterday that Marion Hoblitt looked at me as I started to leave her home, "Oh, David, we have to have a reunion." It wasn’t long before she told me in another visit, "David, we can’t stop at a reunion. We have to have something like a Fulbright Foundation to represent our family’s interests." You see, for Marion to be a Fulbright was a wonderful thing. Her great grandfather had been one of the founders of Springfield, Missouri. Her family had been prominent in Springfield’s life for generations. Her late husband had run the savings and loan that her father directed. It was a Fulbright institution in her mind. She was so proud. Marion had a gift. She was proud, but she was not arrogant. She had been a classroom teacher, one of the best. She was proud of her family, proud of her heritage, proud of her teaching, but she was not arrogant. In fact, she was one of the most delightful people I have ever known. She was prophetic in realizing that we needed an association. In fact, she called it that later, deciding the name "foundation" missed the mark.

We started with a good group of people. Jim and Nancy Jeffryes, Del and Wanda Bishop, Jim and Betty McClure, Tom and Betty Herd and Bill and Shirley Voyles were a part of the very earliest group who first met at the Hickory Hills Country Club in Springfield, Missouri.

Look at what has happened in something over five years.

We have had not one but several reunions. We have met in Springfield three times, in North Carolina once, and in Arkansas one time. We are now looking forward to meeting in North Carolina at a premier United Methodist Retreat Center, internationally known Lake Junaluska.

We have a fine board. I don’t know a laggard in the group. We are extremely fortunate, even blessed, to have a hard working President. Anyone who saw what Gerald and his family members did in Batesville knows the man worked for all of us. The Arkansas Fulbrights really came through! That is another bright spot. We picked up the interest of people who will be back.

We have a newsletter that gets to you on a fairly regular basis. We have solved a number of problems with it. In the beginning, Jean Fulbright did it with the help of her husband, Marty, and some help from a number of us in preparing the newsletter for mailing. As the second newsletter editor, I could not be any more fortunate. David and Pat Herd are publishing the newsletter and mailing it. Ed Stout is doing the formatting for this and some subsequent editions, we do hope his skills and equipment will survive the task! We now can e-mail copy, and discuss it, at a pace that would have at one time been impossible. Marty Fulbright is willing to do anything he can to support this effort. We hope to soon get him online! The newsletter, like the family association, no longer belongs to a few people with the rest of us watching. It belongs to all of us, and more and more, people are sharing in the responsibility for its production.

We have a good start at an e-mail network. I believe we are up to a total sixteen people now who can communicate about family information, genealogy, reunions and the latest "finds." Two years ago, Ed was our pioneer in doing that kind of thing.

The Fulbright Family History Room in the Springfield-Greene County History Museum is a signal accomplishment. Delbert Bishop did a wonderful job of marshaling support for that project. Marion would absolutely beam at the thought of it were she alive. Her close neighbor on Walnut Street in Springfield, Dr. J.H. Fulbright, would chortle. "Uncle Harve" as I knew him felt that the Fulbright’s needed this kind of recognition in a community they helped start. To put it differently, of the founding families of that community, we have the only such named facility. You did that. All of us did it. If you didn’t help on the project, help on the next one! There is still plenty to do.

We have established a tentative relationship with the members of a line of black Fulbrights who are a part of the bloodline. Such kinship or blood ties are very, very common, but do you realize how rare it is that we can trace the relationship historically and then talk with each other? I introduced you to Clara Maddox at the Batesville reunion via a taped interview. We are fortunate. Clara and her family accepted our invitation to meet with us in Springfield in 1998.

One of the most fortunate of things is that we have had a family member who has been working for years in tracing the history and genealogy of our family. In fact, we have a number of very competent genealogists doing that. Something that excites me is that Ed Stout has deep, deep files that are the substance of a hoped for book which is Ed’s to talk about. A number of us eagerly await Ed compiling that work. It could easily be more important to our family than anything we have yet seen. It is so exciting that there is so much about our family that is available for us.

Now, we have an opportunity to contribute to the Old Independence Regional Museum in Batesville. We keep hearing things from people like Jim Gurley, our cousin in Japan, who want to push back our research to Germany. That is difficult, but after some of the other things that have happened, perhaps, one day we can do that.

Most of my friends who go to family reunions visit, eat, visit some more and go back again in a year or two. In the vernacular of the day, we have been there, done that, bought the T-shirt. We have gone far beyond that in five years. There is an incorporated family association, a named museum room, a newsletter, an e-mail group, a proposed meeting with a whole line of black Fulbright descendants, that book Ed is struggling with, and many other great things yet to come.

We have come a long way, a very long way in five years.

—David L. Fulbright