Cleaning the Nation's Attic

By Maureen Dowd

Vince Wilcox meanders through the large, dusty room, past mummies of Eskimo babies, past Amazonian poison darts and Japanese dollhouses, past lost cultures and found treasures. President James Buchanan's saddle is over in the corner, next to a statue of a samurai warrior. Meditating Buddhas sit on top of cabinets filled with spears and mandolins. Wilcox opens a drawer full of shrunken heads, some human, some sloth, some monkey. He holds up an apple-size human specimen and strokes the long black hair. "See how soft the hair is?" he marvels. "They removed the skull and then they shrank the head slowly, using smoke and heat, all the while pouring in hot sand to keep the shape."

A grin crosses Wilcox's face as he surveys the top floor of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History. "There are a lot of wild, weird and wonderful things up here. We might even have the Raiders' Lost Ark stashed away some place, catalogued as miscellaneous archaeology."

If the Raiders' Lost Ark is there, it should turn up soon. Wilcox and the Smithsonian's 266 other curators are giving "the nation's attic" its first good cleaning, a task that ranks as one of the most ambitious museum inventories ever undertaken. They expect to catalogue and computerize 78 million different items by the time the "Great Counting," as they call it, has been completed, in 1983.

It all started, as many important things do in Washington, as cocktail-party chatter. At a museum reception in 1978, Representative Sidney Yates good-naturedly challenged Paul Perrot, an assistant secretary at the Smithsonian, to prove that he could produce every object listed in the records. Yates, an Illinois Democrat whose subcommittee oversees Smithsonian funding, was curious about how many items had been lost or stolen over the years.

Although Perrot initially protested that his records were in order, a spot check showed that several valuable pieces of silver were indeed missing. "I realized then that our inventory procedures were quite lax," he said. "By Jove, the collection was growing out of bounds. It was our moral obligation to begin this counting to see exactly what we've acquired in the last century and a half."

Congress agreed, and appropriated $2.4 million for an undertaking that the curators had always regarded as impossible, if not downright laughable. The nation's attic was as badly organized as the average homeowner's; junk and jewels had been piling up helter-skelter since 1846, when Congress founded the Smithsonian with a $500,000 bequest from James Smithson, an Englishman who left his estate to establish a national museum in the U.S.

The 20 million tourists who flock to the Smithsonian's ten museums every year are familiar with the big draws: the Wright brothers' Kitty Hawk, the moon rocks, Archie Bunker's chair, the Hope diamond, the First Ladies' dresses, Fonzie's leather jacket, the ruby slippers that took Judy Garland back to Aunt Em in The Wizard of Oz.

But these and other objects on display represent only 3% of the Smithsonian's holdings. Out of sight, filling every nook and cranny of space, is a decidedly odder assortment of things--100,000 bats (including 6,629 vampires), 2,300 spark plugs, 24,797 woodpeckers, 718,605 pieces of pottery, 16,694 baskets, 82,615 fleas, 12,000 arctic fishing tools, 14,300 sea sponges, 6,012 animal pelts, 2,587 musical instruments, ten specimens of dinosaur excrement and a male gorilla preserved in formaldehyde.

Then there are such historical detritus as F.D.R.'s lap robe; Nazi pilots' socks; a banner from a John L. Sullivan fight; Everett Dirksen's horn-rimmed glasses; a stuffed lion that was the flying partner--when it was alive--of Aviator Roscoe Turner; several white rats, now stuffed, used in a Soviet space shot; leftover Tang from the astronauts; a piece of Plymouth Rock; bricks from China's Great Wall; shards from champagne bottles used to christen battleships; a miniature compass embedded in an acorn from an oak tree that George Washington planted at Mount Vernon; President Eisenhower's red pajamas with five stars on the lapels; Jimmy Durante's fedora and Henry Clay's boater; Teddy Roosevelt's Teddy bear; Mrs. Grover Cleveland's wedding-cake box; Abe Lincoln's frock coat; the chairs from the Kennedy-Nixon debate; Hubert Humphrey campaign cookies; Tom Seaver's college baseball uniform; waxed flowers from President Garfield's funeral; L.B.J FOR PRESIDENT lollipops in the shape of Texas; a swatch of material from the Red Baron's plane wing; a "Mr. Bones" skeleton puppet used in a vaudeville show; Jimmy Carter's hymn book from Plains, Ga.; and a tie box full of old gallstones.

Another intriguing item: the pickled brains of some former Smithsonian officials. It is said that one of the officials, a pioneering geologist named Major John W. Powell, donated his gray matter in order to settle a wager with a colleague about whose brain was larger. Curators are not sure what happened to the colleague's brain or the bet.

"Anything you can think of, we usually have two of 'em," says Al Bachmeier, a collections manager for the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum. "After you count 40 bio-belt pouches (for collecting and transmitting information about heart and respiratory functions) from the astronauts, you begin to wonder why you need 60."

The census taking can be hazardous. The employees counting poison darts and hedgehogs required thick cloth gloves; those cataloguing protozoa developed eyestrain after weeks of staring intently into microscopes; those working with uranium samples had to wear special devices to monitor levels of radiation; and those tallying mammals preserved in alcohol experienced queasy stomachs. "It doesn't smell like Chivas Regal in those collections," sniffed one researcher.

"With everything being eyeballed by responsible people," Perrot said, "we're rediscovering things in collections that had previously been overlooked." At the National Natural History Museum, researchers found nine whale skeletons that somehow were misplaced in the 1950s and a never-opened crate containing the bones of big game shot in Africa by Teddy Roosevelt. Although many items seem ridiculous or redundant, Perrot says that the Smithsonian wants them both for scientific research and as "testimony of the past being kept for the future."

Once the inventory is complete, most of the objects not on display will be moved to a $28 million warehouse and conservation laboratory being built in Suitland, Md., six miles from the Smithsonian's main museums on the Mall near the Capitol. A new computer system will be capable of locating anything from hummingbird eggs to George Washington's egg poacher within an hour; now it takes days to find items, if they can be found at all.

The new warehouse will have filtered air and temperature and humidity controls. In the past, collections have been damaged because of heat and overcrowding. Silverfish have eaten labels off objects, leaving them with no identification. Leather has desiccated, wood has cracked and animal skins have split because of erratic temperatures. And periodically, in hot weather, beetle eggs unexpectedly hatch and the insects eat their way through plant specimens in the botany department. Security will be tight, to avoid embarrassing losses like last summer's theft of one set of George Washington's false teeth.

Sooner or later, of course, even the new warehouse will be overflowing with odds and ends. Smithsonian officials say that they are trying to cut back on the number of items added each year (now anywhere between 1 million and 3 million), but the institution's grand acquisitors are hard to restrain.

Consider Glen Sweeting, a curator in the Air and Space Museum who discovered during the inventory that he has 117 air-sickness bags. "I call them motion-discomfort containers--that sounds better than barf bags," he says. "I haven't found any tasteful--no pun intended--way of exhibiting them, but I still have them. They don't take up much room, and they're a little page in aviation history." Now, to a layman, 117 bags might seem enough. But Sweeting confides that he has just struck a deal to procure 300 more bags from a private collector in California.

"I'm looking forward to their arrival," he says. "Then we'll have the world's largest collection." But after a moment, a disquieting thought occurs to Sweeting. "Then again, we might have to keep on the case. Who can say how many they have in Russia?"

--By Maureen Dowd

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