THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, August 25, 1996 TAG: 9608230244
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BILL RUEHLMANN
LENGTH: 76 lines
The Nation's Attic is 150 years old.
It's the exhibition that exploded.
The Smithsonian Institution, devoted by Act of Congress to ``the increase and diffusion of knowledge,'' started as a solitary building in the form of an unlikely red sandstone castle outside which bison once browsed in Washington.
A century and a half later, this mind-boggling cultural mastodon includes 16 museums, the National Zoological Park and research centers in eight states and Panama.
The place accounts for some 140 million objects, including Judy Garland's ruby dancing slippers from ``The Wizard of Oz,'' a Wright brothers' biplane, an Edison light bulb and Muhammad Ali's boxing gloves.
My favorite relics: the rubber gorilla masks from Ernie Kovacs' Nairobi Trio.
A close second: Tom Mix's hat.
This is the world's largest museum complex, and most of it is about three and a half hours up the automotive pike from Hampton Roads, if you abide by speed laws and the bridge-tunnel isn't too backed up.
You could spend a week in Washington and see nothing else.
Happily. Admission is free.
I'm talking about the National Air and Space Museum, the National Museum of American History, the Freer and Arthur M. Sackler galleries, the National Museum of African Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the National Portrait Gallery, the National Museum of American Art . . .
There's more, but I don't want to muffle too much thunder from one of the most interesting and useful new books around - Official Guide to the Smithsonian Institution (Smithsonian Institution Press, 192 pp., $7.95).
If you're going to D.C. - and no better time than the Smithsonian sesquicentennial - read this guide first.
If you're not, read it anyhow.
The Smithsonian Institution is the definitive theme park of the mind. It displays the best of civilization and human ingenuity. It is P. T. Barnum with a bibliography.
The guide book provides a menu. The main course comes in America's Smithsonian: Celebrating 150 Years (Smithsonian Institution Press, 288 pp., $24.95). This large-format paperback, effulgent with 342 color photographs, pictures items in a representative exhibit now touring Kansas City, Kansas, New York, Providence, R.I., Houston and other cities around the country.
Marvel here at everything from shard-sharp fossil shark teeth about 4.5 million years old to a mint-condition ``Star Trek'' phaser, circa 1966.
Resist if you can such accompanying exotica as this:
The Star of Bombay is one of the world's great star sapphires. The actor Douglas Fairbanks Sr. gave it to his wife, silent film actress Mary Pickford. Light reflecting off parallel bundles of tiny needles of the mineral rutile inside the sapphire's crystal structure produces the starlike effect. . . .
Or this:
Commander David Scott wore this space suit on the Apollo 15 lunar mission launched on July 26, 1971.
The fittings are - what else? - red, white and blue!
The Smithsonian presses your face to the glass of history.
Founded in 1846 with funds provided by the bequest of James Smithson, the illegitimate but undaunted Britisher who discovered a carbonate of zinc and became a Fellow of the Royal Society, the Smithsonian Institution is a priceless American treasure box, at once eccentric and systematic, scholarly and effervescent.
And yes, more than occasionally, kitschy. Never mind that the United States Postal Service has issued a commemorative stamp in honor of the Smithsonian's anniversary. The real distinction is that the game show ``Jeopardy!'' has added a ``Smithsonian'' category.
It's wonder-full.
The easiest way to acquire the aforementioned books is to order them by phone at 1-800-782-4612.
And while you're on the line, don't forget Kids' Guide to the Smithsonian by Ann Phillips Bay (Smithsonian Institution Press, 160 pp., $14.95) - we all qualify in the playground of the imagination. MEMO: Bill Ruehlmann is a mass communication professor at Virginia
Wesleyan College. by CNB