Compound Trouble

Like a homeowner with a rainy Sunday on his hands, Dr. Leonard Carmichael, new head of Washington's Smithsonian Institution, decided it was high time he tidied up the "Nation's Attic." After a long, appalled look, he reported to the House Appropriations Committee that the dingy stone museum needs a million-dollar spring cleaning. All the exhibits of man's skill, from the stone age to the jet plane, said he, are crammed into crowded displays that belong to the "horse & buggy and gaslight era."

One of the world's principal research centers for anthropologists, zoologists, biologists, botanists, geologists and specialists in solar radiation, the Smithsonian surfers troubles that are continually compounded. Already it has 33,200,000 assorted curios and relics in its catalogue and more pour in every year.

Today visitors can hunt down such varied exhibits as the stuffed carcass of "Winchester" (once called Rienzi), General Phil Sheridan's horse; the bones of "Swanky Dan," a prize bull; Lindbergh's Spirit of St. Louis, a collection of dresses worn by former First Ladies; a collection of fleas from G.I.s in Korea. Last year, if there had been room, the Smithsonian staff could have displayed 607,354 new acquisitions, including a couple of Japanese eels, an adjustable, double-ended wrench (circa 1856), 18 boxes of bricks from the White House renovation, one astral lamp (complete with glass shade fitted for electric light), a phanerogam, the original model of Emmons' "Pelvi-phore," a keyed Hungarian taragoto, the uniform worn by a student nurse at Passaic, N.J. General Hospital circa 1897, a star-nosed mole, a palatometer, a telegraph crossarm complete with two insulators, an untitled color print of a steak platter and half the braincase of a fossil herring.

If the Smithsonian gets the money it needs, one of the first exhibits to be spruced up will be the fading dresses once worn in the White House. Carefully fitted to wax dummies, the old clothes will be displayed in eight separate rooms, complete with White House mantelpieces, furniture and odd bric-a-brac. "Women," says Dr. A. Remington Kellogg, director of research, "deserve a fine setting."

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