Chapter 1 1 



New Faces, New Funds, 

 New Exhibits 



JUST AS THERE WAS NO post-World War I increase in 

 staff at the Museum, there was no significant change 

 for at least a decade after World War II. If one counts 

 the scientific staff members listed for the three Museum 

 departments in 1946, the tally is: Anthropology, eleven; 

 Geology, ten; Biology, twenty-eight. Of the twenty-eight 

 in Biology, seven were botanists and one was Secretary 

 Wetmore. In 1956 the figures were: Anthropology, ten; 

 Geology, eight; and Zoology, twenty. Over in the Castle, 

 the Department of Botany listed eleven on the staff. 

 The number of aides in both years is unclear, but more 

 exhibits specialists were listed in 1956. 



Students of administration like to compile tables of 

 age and grade distribution, but such exercises would 

 reveal very little about the Museum. During its first 

 four decades especially, the rate of change was slow. 

 In 1930, for example, G. Arthur Cooper was hired as 

 a bright young man of promise, and while he more 

 than lived up to expectations, his first raise came thir- 

 teen years later. When C. E. Resser died in 1944, Cooper 

 finally was promoted from the old Civil Service grade 

 P-3 to P-5. 



It is equally hard to define generations of scientific 

 workers, since many scientists within the Museum had 

 careers of forty to fifty years. Paul Bartsch retired in 

 1946 after fifty years' service; he died fourteen years 

 later. After forty-seven years, R. S. Bassler retired as 

 head curator of geology in 1948, but stayed around for 

 thirteen years more. Nevertheless, by the 1950s there 

 was scarcely anyone still working who recalled the old 

 days of the Museum before World War I, with the 

 exception of Waldo Schmitt. Schmitt was definitely not 

 a stick-in-the-mud when it came to new ideas. It was 

 he who in 1947 instituted the separation of Biology into 



Edgar C. Laybourne painting the scales on a thin, 

 transparent layer inside the cast of a python (Python) in 

 the late 1 950s or early 1 96()s. 1 he model ivill he 

 strengthened by additional f iberglass; this tedious technique 

 gives iridescence to the scales. Chopped up by a visitor in 

 1969, the specimen was repaired and is back on display in 

 Hall 29, near the Insect Zoo. 



departments of Botany and Zoology; as last head cu- 

 rator of biology, he became the first head curator of 

 zoology. It was long past time that botany was given a 

 voice of its own. 



A Brief Change from the Norm 



It was a rare event in the 1920s and 1930s for anyone 

 to be hired, but even rarer for anyone to depart. During 

 the first decade or so after World War II, a strange 

 thing happened: Some scientists left the Museum staff. 

 Those in the shops, char force, and guards had come 

 and gone, but the turnover rate of scientific staff from 

 the inception of the Museum until World War II was 

 essentially zero; no one ever left, whether he was paid 

 or not. 



Again in the 1960s and 1970s, very few of the per- 

 manent scientific staff left for greener pastures. It is a 

 little hard to account for what happened in between. 

 The war was followed by a tremendous boom in aca- 

 demic science, which led in turn to new opportunities 

 in industry and greater mobility of society at large. 

 Perhaps the stodginess and stinginess of the Museum 

 and the life of a curator no longer appealed to those 

 who had seen a lot of the world. Certainly the "young 

 tigers" who joined the staff in the late 1940s were far 

 more outspoken than their predecessors in their efforts 

 to institute change. 



Cramped, Hot, Noisy Offices 



It was not the Museum proper, but its affiliated or- 

 ganizations that showed the biggest growth in scientific 

 staff during the decade after the war. Rock and fossil 

 collections were moved once more, and in 1950 the 

 Geological Survey modified the closed-off "Stone Hall" 

 into office space. Noise droned in from the rotunda 

 and from the balconies overlooking the dinosaur ex- 

 hibit on the floor below. Specimen cases served as office 

 partitions, and in summer it was miserably hot. Lloyd 

 Henbest, who studied microfossils, kepi a rat trap and 

 obtained enormous specimens. Roland W. Brown, an 

 eminent paleobotanist, used to come to the Museum 

 on weekends when it was quieter. The Museum in- 



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