Southern faces

Southern Living, Nov 1996 by Rada, Joe

We went looking for slices of the South at the Smithsonian and met some neighbors absorbed in their work.

More than 140 million artifacts, artworks, and specimens in 16 museums and a zoo. A stream of events, publications, and exhibits. A reputation as the nation's premier research complex. Daunting, isn't it?

The Smithsonian Institution overwhelms many visitors to Washington, D.C., home of all but two of the museums. For 150 years this bastion of art, science, and history has been gathering storehouses of knowledge. Even with only fractions of the collections displayed, the task of exploring looms large.

Focusing on slices of home can help. A fossil from a Texas ranch, a painting by an Alabama artist, a country store from West Virginia, a sheet of Confederate postage stamps-such finds bring smiles of recognition to visitors from all corners of the South.

We took this idea a step further and set out to meet Southerners working at the Smithsonian, often behind the scenes. Let us introduce you to a few of them. Putting a hometown face to an overwhelming place might render your next visit a little less daunting.

SOUTHERN TO THE BONE

For 20 years Frank Braisted of Maryland has dusted displays at the National Museum of Natural History. You might see him with his long vacuum cleaner hose grooming the centerpiece African bush elephant, tickling dinosaur rib cages, or tidying up near the glittering Hope Diamond.

You're less likely to see paleoanthropologist Jennifer Clark, an Athens, Georgia, native who digs up bones to learn about ancient humans. Often in Africa on field trips, she's an example of how you can't take the country out of the girl.

"I grew up outdoors, playing in the woods and fishing with my grandparents," she says. "Now I camp in Kenya's Rift Valley, where I'm part of the food chain to animals that would eat me if given the chance. At first, my non-Southern colleagues warned me about strange foods. The names were different, but the food was familiar-fried okra, beans with corn, onions with greens, goat meat. A staple called ugali is basically boiled grits left out to dry and sliced like bread. I get along just fine."

Getting along fine is a trait the Natural History museum's Scott Wing attributes to his Southern heritage. Born in New Orleans and raised there and in Durham, North Carolina, the paleobotanist studies fossilized ferns to learn about the atmosphere of 55 million years ago.

"I never thought of myself as Southern until I went to Yale," Scott says. "I realize now how my upbringing helps me work with all kinds of people. We don't have an exclusive claim to politeness-to listening well and saying `yes sir' and `no sir'-but it's sure something we're accustomed to."

Even in Montana and Wyoming where Scott searches for specimens, he is ironically at home. "In the Eocene age I study, the Northern Rockies looked a lot like today's southern Louisiana," he says. "It was warm, humid, and in places swampy. For seafood you'd have to go back a few million years more to the Cretaceous Period, but there were no New Orleans chefs around."

FLYING HIGH

From Kitty Hawk to Cape Canaveral, the South has witnessed many advances in aviation. The popular National Air and Space Museum pieces together the story with airplanes, rockets, films, and even Barbie dolls dressed to fly.

The museum's lesser known Paul E. Garber Facility in a nearby Maryland suburb fascinates visitors who discover it. Tours through tool-strewn hangars allow close encounters with restoration work on airplanes, rockets, and satellites bound for exhibition or storage. Bob Padgett of Clinton, Maryland, is part of a team restoring the Enola Gay, the World War II B-29 bomber that dropped the first atomic weapon and whose nose section went on display last year.

Sitting on a wing with a sander in hand, Bob elaborates. "The Enola Gay was last flown in the early fifties, to Andrews Air Force Base. It sat in a field rusting until being disassembled and brought here. Birds were living in the engines and wings building nests. The idea is to preserve it for future generationsnot to fly it again, but to maintain its originality for posterity."

PLOWING DEEP

Posterity reigns supreme at the National Museum of American History. Here lie such telling chunks of our heritage as the original StarSpangled Banner, early air conditioners, Kermit the Frog, and a Woolworth lunch counter from Greensboro, North Carolina, where four African American students launched the sit-in movement.

The museum's most Southern presence isn't an object, but mildmannered curator Pete Daniel of Spring Hope, North Carolina. His devotion to Southern subjects shows in a litany of his books, articles, and exhibits exploring agriculture, music, and family life. Pete has helped acquire and document for the Smithsonian such artifacts as Richard Petty's 200th-win stock car and farming tools.

"The cotton gins are most significat," he says. "Between its invention in George Washington's day and the mechanical harvester's after World War II, a century and a half of Southern history is defined largely by that one crop."