A New White House Curator: Missed the Peg

With the Obama-mania yesterday (at the National Portrait Gallery's unveiling of their portraits), I thought it best to make an tangential post that cannot be parked anywhere else except on this feral blog.

The White House has a new curator. Allegedly.

Last May, several news outlets reported the retiring of William Allman after a his many decades of service in the Office of the Curator. He had been appointed to the position of curator in 2002, and as the reporting indicated, had expressed intention to retire in 2016, but stayed on an extra year. There was no mention of his successor in any article that I could find. That struck me as curious. (Spoiler alert: it's probably not that curious.)

In the run-up to yesterday's unveiling, I started reviewing past articles about the Curator. In short, from Lorraine Waxman Pearce's appointment in 1961, through Rex Scouten's retirement in 1997, there is a solid record of who is curator, and when. When Pearce resigned, her successor (William Voss Elder III) is named in the same article. Lather-rinse-repeat through Clement Conger's departure and Scouten's ascension.

However, when it came to Scouten's retirement, articles covering his departure never mention a replacement. Only months later does Betty Monkman's name appear in an article with the title Curator. The same is true of Monkman's retirement in 2002: articles covering her retirement do not mention William Allman as her replacement.

So, here we are today: 9 months after the retirement of Allman, and the only mention of Lydia Tederick as White House Curator is a celebration announcement on Facebook, posted by the White House Historical Association on Oct. 27, 2017. 

Whether it's an issue of the White House not sending out P.R. about the last three Curator appointments, or it is newspapers not caring to publish them, I don't know. Perhaps those news articles didn't get scanned into ProQuest's archives.

Regardless, any legitimate peg for such an announcement has long passed. Still, it's nice to have a record of the appointment: somewhere: other than Facebook: or my blog, for that matter.