Things are a lot easier if someone is telling you what to do.

Robins in his Red Cross uniform heading to Russia

Hello everyone,

Things are coming along a little better this week. I have been practicing my docent presentation for the history center. My spiel is mostly complete, and it is becoming more natural as I rehearse, at least my cats think so. Going to see how much trouble I can get into in front of humans this weekend with one of the tours. I have been helping out up to this point and adding bits and pieces where I can but not leading the tour. So if things go well enough this Saturday, I will have accomplished one of the main things that I wanted to do and begin presenting the tours. My main concern is filling the hour. Going over is fine, but I don’t want to shorten the tour.  

In other news, research is actually going somewhere this week. I have overloaded myself with first source documents that I have pulled off of the Department of State site: https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments. I have also found a few second source books from the 1920’s about Raymond Robins and family that I had not seen before. The State Department documents are from Raymond’s time with the Bolsheviks in 1917-1918. I am familiar with the Russian Revolution in general and know a fair amount about the Great War, but this project is going in directions that I have not explored before. Until I had gone to Chinsegut I did not know that the US and the other allies were as directly involved with all sides of the revolutionary Russia as we were. The allies were desperate to keep Russia in the war and on the side of the allies. Raymond was a labor attorney and social progressive who worked with his wife Margret in the settlement houses in Chicago. He was also friends with Teddy Roosevelt and worked on his Bull Moose campaign. It is that latter connection that got him nominated by Woodrow Wilson to the Red Cross contingent to Russia during the revolution.  

Ross, that is the gentleman I work under at the site, has been very helpful with providing encouragement and information. This weekend we are going to go over where I am and where I am going in the project. I have been given a lot of freedom in my project, but with that comes a lot of uncertainty. I have four different focuses for subjects and three different ideas bouncing around in my head and need to decide what the final “project” is going to be. Up to this point, I have been gathering information. I know that I want to work on the Robins family, and I had pretty much decided that I was going to focus on Raymond at least for this turn.   

I am running out of space. So, stay tuned till next week and see just what it is that Paul is doing when he grows up.