Fniiik Bxiislt'tl (leaning the wall nrai the livnio mial nrj 

 at the entrance to Hall 16. July 19S4. 



just liow many cases of paper towels are likely to be 

 needed? There is a lot of building to be cleaned every 

 single day. Public areas are cleaned before 1U:U0 a.m.. 

 and then of fices and nonpublic areas are taken care of . 



A couple of amenities have faded out. Until at least 

 the mid-1950s, nickel-plated spittoons were regularly 

 delivered to many of the of fices, and the men's public 

 toilet had one. There were none in the exhibit halls, 

 and as late as the 194()s some guards had to go to a 

 window and spit before answering a tourist's inquiry. 

 One of the people who delivered the spittoons walked 

 in a stately manner from office to office, holding each 

 vessel daintily between two fingers; he was a church 

 deacon, and that was the way he held the collection 

 plate. Towel service, a weekly ritual, was run by the 

 Smithsonian in cooperation with the D.C. Prison laun- 

 dry. In the early 1960s the jail doubled its prices, and 

 the service was discontinued. A few hardy towels — white, 

 with a blue stripe — are still in the hands of staff old- 

 timers who launder them at home. In at least two di- 

 visions, they are laundered and distributed regularly. 



"There was a time," Judd wrote nostalgically, "when 



the National Museum prided itself on spotless exhibi- 

 tion cases, free from the imprints of sticky little hands 

 and adult noses. In the archaeological halls, at least, 

 this cleaning job was one for the 'bull gang', five husky 

 Negroes who worked as a unit and found justifiable 

 self-satisfaction in their results. Our big floor cases, each 

 with its three-hundred-pound plate-glass side panels 

 offered individual challenges despite their similarity. 

 Two men would lift out the heavy glass and support it 

 while the others cleaned. As they went about their day- 

 long task these men frequently broke into song, country 

 hymns sung with all the rich resonance and harmony 

 of a church organ. Museum visitors stopped at a dis- 

 tance to listen, and I shall always believe we lost some- 

 thing unique and distinctive when 'the bull gang' was 

 discontinued.'"^ 



The Museum still prides itself on being spotless. The 

 exhibit halls still contain plenty of glass that needs daily 

 wiping, if not the acres of glass they presented in the 

 past. Other changes besides the glass have been good 

 news to the cleaning force. The big event, for them, 

 was not the addition of the wings, but the replacement 

 by terrazzo of the wooden floors, which had been made 

 worse in some areas by cork coverings. 



One last housekeeping tale is the story of the yellow 

 wastebaskets. As a result of "Earth Day" in 1970, aware- 

 ness of the environment and concern for conservation 

 began to trickle through the nation, reaching even the 

 General Services Administration. This agency an- 

 nounced, in some very obscure place, a program to 

 salvage paper. One of the scientists in the building hap- 

 pened to see it, and suggested that the Museum might 

 save a fair number of trees if a paper-salvage program 

 were instituted. 



The Museum had sponsored scrap-metal and news- 

 paper collections during World War II, but the tradi- 

 tion of these had long since vanished. The new notion 

 was for each office to have two wastebaskets, one for 

 trash and a yellow one for salvage. It took an enormous 

 amount of time to train some curators on the difference 

 between carbon paper, which was not saved, and en- 

 velopes, which were, but eventually they got it. After 

 a few weeks there was never an apple core in with the 

 paper to be salvaged. 



The only drawback was that this made extra work 

 for the cleaning people, requiring them to carry two 

 bags on their carts, one for regular trash and one for 

 the salvage paper. It would have been easy enough 

 simply not to bother, but when the program was ex- 

 plained to the maintenance crews, they agreed to do 

 it. Not only did they agree, they did it for years. Long 

 after the General Services Administration lost interest 

 in the environment, the Museum continued to salvage 

 paper until the GSA just stopped accepting it. Very few 

 groups willingly make their dailyjob a bit harder. There 

 are still a few yellow wastebaskets around, and the newer 

 staff have no idea what they once meant. □ 



162 



The Museum 



