SCOPE AND CONTENT

Jean Kiger was born in November of 1909 or 1910.  Her family moved to Nashville from Philadelphia around 1920 and she spent the next twenty-five years as a resident of the city.  This small collection consists of two scrapbooks and assorted documents that primarily pertain to Kiger’s time as Assistant Provost General at the Smyrna Air Base during World War II.  In the late 1940s, Kiger moved with her mother to Wilmington, Ohio to be near family.  She retired in the mid-1970s from the DuPont Company after nearly thirty years of service.  The items were donated to the Gore Center for research purposes in July 2000 by Kiger’s nephew Richard Kiger.  He states in a letter included as part of the collection that Kiger’s papers do two things. One is “to shed some light on daily life at the air base and to identify some of the men and women who worked there or who passed through on their way to other assignments” and the other reason that these papers could be valuable to a researcher is that the “items that relate to daily life in Nashville are the kind of ephemera that are usually trashed after a while, and so while they are commonplace, they may give an idea as to what life was like in the late 1920s and early 1930s that would be hard to find elsewhere.”