Word: meryman
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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ANDREW WYETH by Richard Meryman. 174 pages. Houghton Mifflin...
From New York to Puerto Vallarta to Big Sur to Paris, LIFE Magazine Reporter Richard Meryman Jr. traveled with Elizabeth Taylor, tape-recording her story in automobiles, hotels, restaurants. From nearly 40 hours of tape came a 6,000-word first-person article, published last week in LIFE. Some passages from her apologia...
...Meryman's office now looks like a wildlife refuge. A red fox poses hungrily on a bookcase. A black crow, wings outstretched, sits on a windowsill. Brightly colored small birds perch on pencil tops, and a brown bat swings malevolently from the ceiling, suspended by a nearly invisible wire. All look amazingly lifelike, preserved by Meryman's "freeze-dry" process and apparently able to stay in good condition indefinitely. The fox was shot by Meryman when it invaded his hen house. "He accounted for 27 hens," says Meryman, "before I freeze-dried him." The other specimens were collected...
...freeze-dry technique is not new; it has commonly been used to preserve water-soluble drugs and blood plasma. But Meryman was first to apply it to taxidermy, and he has accumulated abundant data on the drying time of various animals. Small insects take only 24 hours to freeze-dry. A garter snake needs eight days, and a red squirrel requires four to six weeks in the vacuum chamber. From the scientist's point of view, freeze-drying has one big advantage over standard commercial taxidermy: the animals' internal organs remain intact, can be reconstituted for study...
...Meryman has been retained as a Smithsonian consultant, is in Europe now to lecture on freeze-drying. In the meantime, he is looking for new applications of the freeze-dry technique. One possibility: embalming. "What I really need," says Meryman, "is volunteers...