Archivists And Auburn Alums Warren And Mary Finch Serve At Bush Library And Museum

For Warren and Mary Finch, the Auburn and Texas A&M game is about the school they graduated from and love versus an adopted university and the place they have come to call home.

Warren graduated from Auburn with a master’s in history, while his wife, Mary, graduated from Auburn with a master’s in archival studies. Both have now lived in the Bryan-College Station area almost 20 years and work for the National Archives and Records Administration at the George Bush Presidential Library and Museum on the Texas A&M University campus.

“It was all fun until now, I didn’t have to choose allegiances,” Mary, who was raised in the Birmingham, Ala. area, said of Texas A&M’s entry into the Southeastern Conference.

Warren, a Mobile, Ala. native, says he now gets local news about the SEC and all the teams he grew up with. “For me, it’s fantastic. I’ve taken a lot of ribbing for the Cotton Bowl game in ’86,” he said of being an Auburn fan in Aggieland.

After graduating from Auburn and beginning his career with the National Archives, Warren was detailed to the Bush White House in 1992 to assist with the move of Bush Presidential Materials to Texas and has been in College Station ever since. He served as deputy director and is currently director of the Bush Library and Museum, overseeing about 50 full-time staff and interns and more than 200 volunteers.

Mary said her studies at Auburn led to an internship at the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum in Atlanta, Ga., which then led to a career in the National Archives. She first arrived in Texas at Fort Hood aboard an Air Force C-5 with the first load of Bush administration materials in early 1993. As the audio-visual archivist at the Bush Library and Museum, Mary and her team are in charge of cataloging and preserving more than 2 million photographs and thousands of hours of video and audio recordings.

Mary says she loves the atmosphere, people and feeling of Auburn, but that the same could be said for Texas A&M and Bryan-College Station. “I see the same type of people,” she said, noting the small town, land grant roots of both schools and communities.

Warren said he made lasting friends during his years at Auburn and described the university as very friendly and a great place to go to school.

“For A&M fans going to the game, they’ll love it. It’s a beautiful, walkable campus and a great football atmosphere,” Warren said. He recommends Aggie fans enjoy a lemonade at Toomer’s Drug or chicken fingers at Guthrie’s, which he would put up against any on chicken finger row.

Mary said she and Warren will be rooting for Auburn, but their three children, who have grown up in College Station, are Aggie fans. For this game it’s a house divided, but as both Warren and Mary said, Auburn and Texas A&M share a lot more in common than not.