Link Love: 7/14/2017
- Perfect fodder for animated gifs; zootropes. [via Unfunk]
- Send SFMOMA a text and it will respond with art! [via SFMOMA]
- Eerie plaster casts of people and animals in their final moments before being buried in Pompeii. [via Atlas Obscura]
- Weighing newborn babies wasn't "a thing" until the 20th century. [via O Say Can You See, National Museum of American History]
- Archives Unleashed was awarded a new grant from the Mellon Foundation to develop web archive search and data analysis tools. [via York University]
- The provenance of major artworks is mapped with open source software. [via hyperallergic]
- Stanford researchers helped digitize 1000s of images of Rome which are now online. [via Stanford News]
- Calling all archivists, musicians, dancers, storytellers, and visual and performing artists! We need you to collaborate with us on the 2017 Archives Fair.
- Anxious about the total solar eclipse on August 21? You can find out how many eclipses there will be in your lifetime. [via Smithsonian Magazine and WAPO]
- Oh, Bei Bei. [via WAPO]
Scientific Snack Breaks: Picnics in the Field Books
July is National Picnic Month, but when you are a Smithsonian scientist on expedition, enjoying a meal in the great outdoors is a year-round occurrence. Like other daily happenings, stopping for a picnic was something worth recording in a field book. Thanks to the Smithsonian Transcription Center, the details of these field books—from the big discoveries, to a more mundane break for a picnic lunch—are searchable and easily navigable. So, pack your favorite snack and let’s take a picnic trip through the field books!
While occasionally a picnic area or table was used as a land-marker in scientific notes (like in paleobiologist G. Arthur Cooper’s, or in bird observations written by James W. Eike), stopping for a break to eat was often part of the day-to-day narratives of the field books.
For example, entomologist Richard Blackwelder often noted his favorite picnic spots while traveling for research (in the West Indies, it was High Point in St. Johns on the island of Antigua), or taking a Studebaker out with colleagues to find a picnic spot with a good view.
The same was true for naturalist and collector David Crockett Graham, who emphasized the social aspect of a picnic outing. While collecting birds, insects, mammals, and reptiles throughout China in 1924, he mentions enjoying a “picnic supper” with his family on a hot August evening.
For others, stopping for a picnic meant stopping to collect natural history specimens along the way. On National Zoo Director William Mann’s 1937 expedition to the Dutch East Indies, with his wife, Lucile, picnics were frequent. Often, the team would stop for a picnic by the side of the road, or by a pool or stream, as they trekked through the mountains. Lucile’s descriptions of the picnics offer a unique insight into the expedition’s travel conditions:
“At noon we were near another train into the same jungle, and stopped by the roadside to have a picnic lunch before we started working again. The only place where we could sit down off the road and out of the swamp, was a gravel pit, so there we sat, in the broiling heat, only a few miles from the Equator and almost at sea level, and wondered why so many of our tinned supplies and cheeses had gone bad. Anything that rides on the back of our car must be simply cooked and re-cooked long before we get it. We had our canteens filled, fortunately, and divided the drinking water. Also we had two coconuts to drink, for we were all more thirsty and hungry.”
The Mann expedition group often collected or observed species as they picnicked, as did the National History Museum’s Robert Gibbs, who took a lunch break while taking notes on dragonflies. After his picnic, he details an elaborate, 2.5 hour “chase” and triumphant capture of a dragonfly:
Now that you are ready for a lunch break, what do you pack? Take some sandwich inspiration from this menu from a Buenos Aires restaurant, visited by the Mann’s in 1939.
Related Resources
Where in the World Is That Field Book?, The Bigger Picture, Smithsonian Institution Archives
Scientific field work and food, Field Book Project
Smithsonian Institution Archives projects, Smithsonian Transcription Center
Care Package from Home
If the typical museum curator and taxonomist is an individual who shuns controversy and even the company of others in order to preserve the tranquility conducive to complex cogitation, Waldo Schmitt did not fit the image.
Hard-nosed, hard-headed, and hard of hearing, Dr. Waldo L. Schmitt was an influential marine biologist for much of the 20th century. He specialized in carcinology (the study of crustaceans), first joining the Smithsonian as an assistant curator in the Division of Marine Invertebrates in 1914. A tireless collector, he is credited with orchestrating the collection of over 15,000 specimens at the Carnegie Marine Laboratory at Dry Tortugas in Florida beginning in 1924. In addition to this effort, Schmitt conducted research and collection expeditions in South America, the Galapagos Islands, the West Indies, and Alaska from about 1925 to 1945.
And yet, even proud explorers sometimes miss home.
Schmitt was born in Washington D.C. and called the district home for most of his life. He married Alvina Stumm in 1914. Together they had two children, Waldo Jr. and Barbara. His children were a soft spot within his otherwise formidable façade – “his affection for the underdog was most apparent where children were concerned,” one colleague wrote of him. “Even after attaining the age of four-score years, he would have eagerly adopted a new family, if it could have been arranged.”
Alvina wrote frequently to Schmitt during his travels. She often bundled in a few letters and drawings from their children (which she captioned to make the drawings more recognizable). Schmitt consistently kept these letters and drawings, bringing them home from his expeditions to file with his other correspondences. These documents were ultimately placed with his research papers in the Archives (SIA RU007231). Included in this post is one envelope and its contents, which Alvina sent in 1925. Schmitt was on a collection trip in Uruguay at the time. Upon opening the envelope, he found:
- A letter from his wife Alvina, recounting the week
- A note from Waldo Jr. (“Written without help except to spell Rudolf”)
- Three drawings from Barbara: “A fat snake," and two portraits (one of “Mother” and another of “Daddy”)
For context, here is a photograph of “Daddy” Schmitt himself. Note the bow tie and spikey hair:
Waldo Jr. served during World War II and was killed in Europe in 1944. In public, Schmitt’s career continued undaunted, and he became the head curator of the Department of Zoology soon after the war’s end. Privately, the loss devastated him. Remarked a colleague in a short biography after Schmitt’s death in 1978: “the death of his only son, the elder of the two Schmitt children, on the German front in 1944, creat[ed] a void that could never be reconciled.”
These letters and others from the Schmitt papers are being made available online through the Internet Archive, and you can help transcribe these letters with the Smithsonian Transcription Center.
Related Resources
- Waldo Schmitt -Expeditions to South America, Correspondence, 1925-1930, Smithsonain Transcription Center
- Where’s Waldo . . . L. Schmitt?, The Bigger Picture, Smithsonian Institution Archives
- Season's Greetings from the Archives, The Bigger Picture, Smithsonian Institution Archives
- “Waldo L. Schmitt. 25 June 1887-5 August 1977.” Crustaceana, vol. 34, no. 1, 1978, pp. 83–90, Fenner A. Chace, JSTOR
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