Scope and Content Note
The Thelma Juanita Grammer Papers span the years 1926-1943, with the bulk of the material dated 1930-1931. The collection includes correspondence, a diary, a scrapbook of photographs and postcards, a passport and government document, and clippings and printed matter documenting Grammer's experiences in the Soviet Union, 1930-1931, while accompanying her husband, Earl Grammer, an oil industry welder, as he worked on a one-year contract with the Soviet government in Baku and Grozny. Clippings from the Kansas City Star record Grammer's accounts of life in the Soviet Union as told to reporters and in public speaking engagements, along with a challenge by the Kansas City Friends of Soviet Russia to debate her negative assessment. Interviews in 1990 by Charles Timberlake, professor of Russian history at the University of Missouri, Columbia, were recorded on audiocassette tapes to augment the brief and sometimes cryptic diary entries and to identify the photographs and postcards in the scrapbook. These tapes have been transferred to the Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division, where they are identified as part of these papers.