Still Life, Melissa Milgrom [pdf e book reader .TXT] 📗

the museum's most momentous occasion: the ribbon cutting for the Akeley Hall of African Mammals.

For taxidermists and curators alike, African Hall represents taxidermy's highest merger of science, art, technology, and institutional support. Carl Akeley, the taxidermist whose dream it was to build the hall, was also a hunter-naturalist, whose adventures in Africa had made him an American legend. For young David, whose parents hadn't begun to use manikins yet, African Hall—with its startling dioramas and eight trumpeting elephants—was the taxidermic equivalent of shooting a rocket to the moon. The taxidermists who had worked on the exhibits had actually gone to Africa to collect the flora and fauna, which they painstakingly preserved over twenty-five years. David rode home from the opening dazed. "What we did wasn't like that," he says. He began dreaming about becoming a big-game taxidermist, just as other boys dreamt about becoming Babe Ruth. A while later, a local butcher gave him a calf head so that he could pretend to be Carl Akeley. But when he pulled the head out of the burlap sack, it had been bisected and was rotting. David dug a hole and buried it. He also buried the museum taxidermy idea.

During World War II, David joined the Marines, and from 1943 to 1946 he was stationed in Guam. "Should I tell her what I did?" he asks Bruce. "Big, bad Marine!" Bruce chides. While other soldiers admired pinups, David watched butterflies. He wanted to preserve a few spectacular species, so his parents sent him his collapsible butterfly net and cyanide killing jar. But when they arrived, David was too embarrassed to run around the military base waving the butterfly net.

After the war, when he got married, his wife said she hoped he didn't expect her to do what his mother did. He didn't. "Most men wouldn't do what my mother did," he says: skin a bear with a single-edge razor blade; shoot blue jays from the kitchen window; wade into ponds in a long dress and chest waders to collect geese that she was raising and selling; chip ice off the roof of her log cabin at age ninety-one; use her skinning knife to stab an apple slice after the knife had been in arsenic and minimally wiped off on her apron. The Schwendemans credit her longevity to arsenic exposure: they say she stored it in her fatty tissues and reabsorbed it as she aged. When they told me this, I shot Bruce a sidelong glance, and he said defensively, "Arsenic is an overrated poison!" by which he meant that people who are not taxidermists tend to view arsenic myopically: nothing more than a deadly carcinogen.

Taxidermists typically overcompensate when defending their maligned profession, but arsenic as elixir was exceptionally suspect—at least to me. To Pat Morris, a retired University College London zoologist and taxidermy historian, it had some merit. In 1982, he compared the life spans of thirty-two nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century taxidermists with their civilian counterparts. The taxidermists outlived the civilians by forty-two years. According to Morris, the average taxidermist in 1901 lived to 76.4, whereas the average male lived to be 34. The alleged reason: metabolized arsenic. Also, as Morris surmises, job fulfillment. The Schwendemans, who resist change, used arsenic until the mid-1980s.

One day in the late 1940s, a local taxidermist showed up at the workshop with a bag of pheasants and grouse. Arthur mounted the birds in Milltown, and the taxidermist brought them to the AMNH, which hired Arthur to preserve study skins for its ornithological collections. Soon Arthur and David were delivering batches of birds to Seventy-ninth Street and Central Park West every month. "Just like we do now," Bruce says.

On one delivery trip, the head of exhibitions offered David a summer job. Work was generally slow in the workshop during the summer, and his parents said they could manage, so he took the job. He went "up there" for two months, and he stayed for twenty-eight years.

It was 1959, "the beginning of the end" of the old-style natural history museum. Back then, displays were permanent, mostly dark galleries of dioramas, not the blockbuster traveling exhibits popularized during David's lifetime. Dioramas are perhaps the most laborious form of exhibition design, and therefore they cost millions of dollars to make. In the 1950s, museums had to compete with new sensations such as television and air travel for the public's attention. When David showed up at the AMNH, the major halls were undergoing renovation, and only two taxidermists remained on staff. They were making artificial plants. One of them greeted David by saying, "Quit while you're ahead! Taxidermy's lousy." David changed out of his commuting clothes (a suit and tie), put on his khaki uniform, and got busy preserving study skins.

"It was the heyday of 'quality comes first,'" Bruce recalls. Up there, David quickly learned the difference between a commercial taxidermist's trophy and a museum taxidermist's scientific specimen. A trophy is a generalized depiction (it could be any zebra), whereas a museum specimen is a specific individual (that zebra). A commercial taxidermist must work quickly to turn a profit; a museum taxidermist must bring the latest phylogenetic information to life and receives all the time and scientific data he needs to achieve his goal. A museum taxidermist must know how to mount the rarest and most exotic species—even extinct prehistoric creatures. He has to "relax" (soften and rehydrate) one-hundred-year-old study skins and articulate intricate skeletons. A museum taxidermist's mounts must last indefinitely and will be seen by millions of people.

David relished every moment of every job. Mostly he loved the stimulating atmosphere. Up there, he met famous scientists and artists whose fidelity to nature was even more extreme than his own. One of those people was the landscape artist James Perry Wilson, who worked at the museum from 1934 to 1957 but never stopped visiting it after he retired. Wilson was a Columbia University-trained architect, an amateur meteorologist, and a self-taught artist who painted thirty-eight diorama backgrounds at the AMNH. He was