Word: smithsonian
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Raiders' Lost Ark is there, it should turn up soon. Wilcox and the Smithsonian's 266 other curators are giving "the nation's attic" its first good cleaning, a task that ranks as one of the most ambitious museum inventories ever undertaken. They expect to catalogue and computerize 78 million different items by the time the "Great Counting," as they call it, has been completed...
...started, as many important things do in Washington, as cocktail-party chatter. At a museum reception in 1978, Representative Sidney Yates good-naturedly challenged Paul Perrot, an assistant secretary at the Smithsonian, to prove that he could produce every object listed in the records. Yates, an Illinois Democrat whose subcommittee oversees Smithsonian funding, was curious about how many items had been lost or stolen over the years...
...appropriated $2.4 million for an undertaking that the curators had always regarded as impossible, if not downright laughable. The nation's attic was as badly organized as the average homeowner's; junk and jewels had been piling up helter-skelter since 1846, when Congress founded the Smithsonian with a $500,000 bequest from James Smithson, an Englishman who left his estate to establish a national museum...
...million tourists who flock to the Smithsonian's ten museums every year are familiar with the big draws: the Wright brothers' Kitty Hawk, the moon rocks, Archie Bunker's chair, the Hope diamond, the First Ladies' dresses, Fonzie's leather jacket, the ruby slippers that took Judy Garland back to Aunt Em in The Wizard...
...these and other objects on display represent only 3% of the Smithsonian's holdings. Out of sight, filling every nook and cranny of space, is a decidedly odder assortment of things-100,000 bats (including 6,629 vampires), 2,300 spark plugs, 24,797 woodpeckers, 718,605 pieces of pottery, 16,694 baskets, 82,615 fleas, 12,000 arctic fishing tools, 14,300 sea sponges, 6,012 animal pelts, 2,587 musical instruments, ten specimens of dinosaur excrement and a male gorilla preserved in formaldehyde...