This is the eighth in a series of posts spotlighting recently released email from Governor Tim Kaine’s administration. These posts are not meant to be comprehensive but to encourage further exploration in the Kaine administration records (electronic and paper). Editor’s note: This is not an April Fool’s joke.
Who is Rusty Shackleford? This was a question that I asked myself when I conducted an inventory of the email files the Kaine administration transferred to the Library in January 2010. Rusty’s email box was unusual. It contained 553 messages from the summer of 2008. None of the messages had been opened and none were addressed to him personally. I made a note of this in my spreadsheet and moved on to the next email box. I had forgotten about Rusty until I processed the email of Paul Brockwell, conflict of interest director in the secretary of the commonwealth’s office, two years later. I discovered that Kaine administration staffers were also curious about the identity of the mysterious Rusty Shackleford.
The following August 2008 email exchange between Brockwell; David Allen, Northrup Grumman; Amber Amato, director of constituent services; Kate Paris, executive assistant to the chief of staff and counselor to the governor; and Bernard Henderson, deputy secretary of the commonwealth, documents the administration’s search for Rusty.
The Kaine administration never did discover the identity of Rusty Shackleford but the crack staff at the Library of Virginia did. I am pleased to announce that due to the sleuthing of one of them, we now know that Rusty Shackleford is an alias used by Dale Gribble, a fictional character of the animated series King of the Hill! Who or why someone created an email account for Rusty is a mystery beyond even the LVA staff’s ability to solve.
The Library of Virginia’s Kaine Email Project makes the email records from the administration of Governor Timothy M. Kaine, Virginia’s 70th governor (2006–2010) accessible online. Users can search and view email records from the Governor’s Office and his cabinet secretaries; learn about other public records from the Kaine administration; go behind the scenes to see how the Library of Virginia made the email records available; and read what others are saying about the collection. Previous posts spotlighted personal stories, transportation, the state budget and the Kaine records officers.
-Roger Christman, LVA Senior State Records Archivist
Follow the money.
This is great!