🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <313gsq$gf1@terminus.apexgrp.com>,
Joe Herman <dzoey@apexgrp.com> wrote:
>bigfun@gwis.circ.gwu.edu (william hanff) writes:
>>I've been out of the Smithsonian loop for a while, so I'd like to hear
>>other people's favo(u)rite exhibitions from whatever museums (for ideas of
>>what I should check out)
>I like the Hands on History room at American History and Information Age is
>fun to walk through as well.
>I've seen the Science in American Life exhibit in American History and found
>it informative, but a little dull and unsurprising (although the film of a
>50's commercial for the new miracle fabrics is pretty funny).

Here is a funny story that I haven't told in years.

In the 1950's, my mother, Ellen Louise Young, was the assistant curator 
of the division of Mechanical and Civil Engineering, under the able and 
distinguished scholarship of both Robert S. Woodbury and Eugene Ferguson.

Because she was crippled, she did not leave her office for lunch, as most 
of the staff did. Consequently, during the middle of the day she often 
was the only curator available to receive both telephone calls and 
visitors to the divisional offices.

In those days, of course, all long distance telephone calls were placed 
and received by operators, and the quality of the voice transmission 
often was very poor.

One day, she took a long distance call from Iowa. At the other end of the 
line was a man whose voice was barely auidble. He kept repeating that his 
firm was donating some object to the Smithsonian and that it would arrive 
within a few days. My mother certainly was not surprised. The Smithsonian 
is more than the "national attic," it is the "national junk shop," as 
well. People by the hundreds, every year, donate the most unusual things 
to the Institution -- some are delightful acquisitions, some are dreadful 
monstrosities whose owner are trying to dispose of them in the handiest 
way possible.

My mother made several attempts to discover just what it was that these 
people in Iowa were sending to her, but without much success. On the 
fourth or fifth sally of: "Will you please repeat that," the man on the 
other end seemed to scream into the mouthpiece "AARDVARK."

My mother was never nonplussed in her life. With perfect equanimity, she 
put down the receiver and filled out a preliminary acquisition form for 
the object, which she called a "mechanical aardvark." Who knows, she 
thought, perhaps there IS such a thing as a mechanical aardvark.

She was slightly surprised, some days later, to receive a call from the 
guard at the entrance to the storage court of the old Arts and Industries 
Building -- where she worked in those days. The guard told her that a 
large flat-bed truck was downstairs conveying a new donation. My mother 
stepped her window, at the back of the northwest pavillion on the second 
floor, and looked down on the truck below. Thereon was an odd-looking, 
self-propelled steam device rather unlike most of the things with which 
she dealt at the Smithsonian. It was a Hart-Parr steam tractor -- one of 
the first such devices in America.  Ah, she thought -- Hart-Parr = Aardvark.

She amended the acquisition record and dispatched the truck to the 
storage courts in Suitland for unloading.

Today, that tractor -- which was known for years as The Mechanical 
Aardvark by members of the staff -- is the leftward of the two which 
grace the window on the Constitution Avenue side of MHT.

My mother died many years ago, but that tractor is one of many, many 
reminders of her work at the Smithsonian today.

-- 
                                Regards, Frank Young 
 tipcat@wam.umd.edu                                    703-532-6284 
 6166 Leesburg Pike, Suite B-12,  Falls Church, Virginia 22044-2343 
 "Videmus nunc per speculum in aenigmate... Nunc cognosco ex parte"