File:Bulletin (1966-1972) (20234008960).jpg

Title: Bulletin
Identifier: bulletin43fiel (find matches)
Year: 1966-1972 (1960s)
Authors: Field Museum of Natural History
Subjects: Natural history; Science
Publisher: (Chicago) : The Museum
Contributing Library: University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Digitizing Sponsor: University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

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were still on black cards: when I returned in 1946, as Curator of Fossil Invertebrates, they were all on buff ones. Case after case displayed a mosaic of the modular cards, confronting the visitor with thousands of examples in every category. But by now there was something rather old-fashioned about this exhibition technique. Already plans were afoot to remedy the matter. Some of the Mineralogy and Economic Geology exhibits were already being redesigned by Harry Changnon, Assistant in the Department. Printed cards were abolished, the number of specimens was drastically reduced to give oomph to the exhibits, and labels were painstakingly made in the Geology Department itself, built up of individual letters pasted directly to the background of the exhibit cases. In 1948 the Frederick J. V. Skiff Hall (Hall 37) was closed for reinstallation. Some of the specimens were brought upstairs to a large new storage room and others were placed temporarily in the blocked-off end of a neighboring exhibit hall. The displaced exhibits included Economic Geology from the east end of the hall—the displays that Dr. Nichols had personally installed in 1942—and fossil invertebrates and plants from the west end. Carpenters moved in and new exhibit cases, built immutably into the walls, arose. For three years, while I picked out specimens and wrote label texts, Changnon's assistants, Henry Horback and (from 1950) Henry Taylor, laid out the labels, spray-painted the letters, gummed them in place, and mounted the specimens on concealed hangers. Color was coming to the Museum. Each of the 54 cases in Hall 37 had its own combination of background color and two colors of letters. Each case, with Changnon's proposed colors and layout, was personally approved by Mr. Stanley Field, President of the Museum, before the installation proceeded. The absence of pink, which we hadn't seriously considered anyhow, reflects Mr. Field's judgment. One of the features of Hall 37 is the series of ten small habitat groups. A contract was made to have the restorations of extinct animals for these made by George Marchand, who had done similar reconstructions for some eastern museums. The actual installation of the models and the painting of the backgrounds was to be done by Art Rueckert, the same artist whom we last encountered in winter quarters in Hall 37 just before it was closed in 1948 for reinstallation. The dark mahogany cases were precisely spaced 12 feet apart.
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Labrador. But before Art had actually worked on the first of the groups, he dropped into my office to discuss the work and was abruptly felled by a fatal heart attack. The habitat groups were then completed by George Marchand on another contract. Hall 37 was the first Museum exhibit hall to be entirely re-done in one operation after the war. The achievement had to be signalized. Invitations were sent out and on October 1, 1951, the new hall was opened for the first Members' Night in Museum history. Laboratories and offices, strangely tidy, were open for inspection; members also had a chance to see Bushman, freshly mounted and just receiving his finishing touches in the Zoology Department's taxidermy workroom. More exhibits were updated. Harry Changnon, in charge of designing the new cases, now held the rank of Curator of Exhibits. He was studying geology at the University of Chicago and soon became the man to ask on matters of local geology. But until 1965, when he was transferred to the new Exhibition Department, the succession of new exhibits, eventually including almost every display in Geology, were all designed by him and executed under his supervision. Harry was not the only one on this staff destined to rise through the ranks. A teenager, Bryan Patterson, appeared in 1930 as "Assistant in Paleontology." In the same year Dr. Riggs returned from a season of collecting in Quinn Draw, Nebraska, bringing with him not only fossils but also Jim, one of the Quinn boys. Having left school early to work on the family ranch, Jim had managed to return later and complete the entire high school course in two years. While he worked with the paleontologists who came to the ranch he actually studied the fossils. Patterson, eventually our Curator of Fossil Mammals, left the Museum in 1955 for the Agassiz professorship that 12 October 1972

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