Geaney, Victoria Papers

Hostess-Manager at Blair House, 1942-1961

The Victoria Geaney papers contain letters written to her by Bess Truman, Margaret Truman, and others during her years as the official Hostess-Manager at Blair House. Also included is an assortment of menus from dinners she planned, as well as newspaper clippings.

Size: 2.5 linear inches (about 100 pages)
Access: Open.
Copyright: The donor gave to the U.S. government her copyrights in this material. Documents created by U.S. government officials in the course of their duties are in the public domain. Copyright interest in other documents presumably belongs to the creators of those documents, or their heirs.
Processed by:
Updated by: Grace Billimack (2014) as part of the Truman Library Internship Program.
Supervising Archivists: Randy Sowell and David Clark.

The Victoria Geaney papers contain correspondence from her years as the Hostess-Manager at both Blair House and Prospect House in Washington, D.C. Also included are handwritten menus and newspaper clippings. The papers are arranged in a single series.

The series, the Subject File, consists predominantly of letters and thank-you cards written to Mrs. Geaney from Bess Truman, her mother Madge Wallace, her daughter Margaret Truman, and others. These items often thank her for flowers she sent the Trumans or presents she gave them for holidays. The menus are believed to be for the meals that the Truman family participated in during their time at Blair House, where they lived in the spring of 1945 (before Eleanor Roosevelt moved out of the White House), and again from late 1948 to early 1952, during the renovation of the White House. Lastly included in her papers are newspaper clippings. One mentions Mrs. Geaney herself and her activities on vacation, while the other includes a picture of President Harry S. Truman.

Important in understanding the relationship between Mrs. Geaney and the Trumans, the Victoria Geaney papers provide examples of both Bess's and Margaret's handwriting as well as the manner in which they corresponded with their acquaintances. More closely relating to social events and niceties, these papers provide evidence of what meals the Truman family would have eaten, along with examples of what the women in the family liked to receive as presents and the types of flowers they preferred to have displayed in the White House or in their rooms at Blair House.

The Truman Library also has the papers of Bess Truman and Madge Wallace, and the papers of Margaret Truman and her husband Clifton Daniel.