Background

Bruce Bustard was born on January 23, 1954, in Berea, Ohio, United States to the family of a purchasing agent within an engineering firm William Whyte and a journalist Barbara (Geist) Bustard. Bruce grew up in an area southwest of Cleveland, a little town called Olmsted Falls.

Education

When Bruce was about 15, his father was transferred to New Jersey where the boy finished high school in a town called New Providence. After that, Bruce was interested in going back to college in Ohio. He enrolled at Hiram College majoring in history.

Having received a bachelor's degree, Bustard got married and moved to Iowa. After a year of selling clothes at Montgomery Ward, Bruce applied to, and was accepted by, the History Department at the University of Iowa. In 1978 he received a Master’s degree that was followed by a Doctor of Philosophy in 1984.

Career

When in 1976 Bruce got married, he moved together with his wife to Iowa City. There, before his admittance to the university, during a year Bruce worked as a salesman at a Montgomery Ward department store.

The family moved to Washington DC since every single attempt to get a history-related job for Bruce was unfortunate. In the new city, Bruce looked for a job for about eight months. Finally, in 1985 he started his career at the Archives. The next three years he worked for the Cartographic and Architectural branch. Bruce did there project work. He started off by doing a project on the Army maps from World War II.

Besides, working at Cartographic, Bruce was doing the Archives training program, which was called the CIDS program, the Career Intern Development System.

After Cartographic, Bruce Bustard worked on the Reagan Project. Trudy Peterson, who was the head of the old Office of Record Services, called him up and said, "I need to put some people on this detail and I want you to do this. And you need to show up at the White House on Monday morning." The idea behind it was that the Archives would start processing the Reagan papers before he left office.

In the year and a half or two years after Bruce had done the detail, he started to work in what was called the Exhibits Branch within Exhibits and Educational Programs.

Achievements

• One of the greatest achievements was the way the staff has started to view exhibitions when Bruce Bustard creates them.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Picturing the Century

    (Showcases the portfolios of Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, ...)

    1999
  • A New Deal for the Arts

    (Tells the story of the New Deal arts projects between 193...)

    1997
  • Western Ways: Images of the American West 1992
  • Treasures of Congress 2000

Views

Quotations: "You know, I haven’t cured cancer or stopped terrorism, or anything like that. But for somebody who came into the Archives wanting to work with historical records, and wanting to work as a historian, it’s been fabulous. I’ve been challenged; I’ve felt like I’ve been able to be creative; and I’ve had fabulous colleagues all the way along who have helped my career and have stimulated me; and I think that the work that we do here at the National Archives is incredibly important; and that the Archives needs to get a whole lot more credit than it does. I’ve had a very happy, exciting career."

Membership

• Organization of American Historians , United States

• American Association of State and Local History , United States

• National Council on Public History

Interests

• golf, reading, travel

Connections

On August 14, 1976, Bruce Bustard married Victoria (Tory) Lounsbury.

Father:

William Whyte Bustard

Mother:

Barbara (Geist) Bustard

Spouse:

Victoria (Tory) Lounsbury

colleague:

Kenneth Kato

colleague:

Chris Rudy Smith

colleague:

Ray Ruskin