S. Dillon Ripley, The Muse in The Museum – By Ken Ringle, Washington Post, March 12, 2001

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In the spring of 1967, with the nation increasingly polarized by race, class, region and the Vietnam War, and by a baby-boom generation loudly pronouncing the "irrelevance" of American values, S. Dillon Ripley -- the patrician ornithologist who headed the Smithsonian Institution -- did a marvelous thing.

He put a carousel on the Mall.

The Mall had been an austere place, scenic but somewhat authoritarian. The carousel changed all that. Graceful and archaic, it whirled and tinkled, reminding the warring factions that beauty and wonder were still there to be experienced.

Longhaired hippies rode the carousel alongside elderly tourists from the country; Vietnam veterans and kids with peace medals rode it, Northern blacks and Southern whites. In the seriously politicized Washington of 1967, Ripley's carousel made it okay to smile.

When he died yesterday at age 87, the wealthy, WASPier-than-thou stockbroker's son from Litchfield, Conn., left behind much more than a legacy of learning. He left us a way of looking at life.

For 20 years he headed the Smithsonian, turning it, by the time he left in 1984, from a dusty collection of display cases into a $250 million, 18-institution empire, the most popular such complex in the world, with 30 million visitors a year.

Yet his greatest gift was the defanging of intellectual discovery. When he took office in 1964, our national museum was widely looked upon as something good for you but mildly unpleasant, rather like liver or broccoli.

"It was essentially very boring," he used to say. "You did it on Sunday afternoon after a big lunch."

But Ripley didn't think of museums that way. However reserved his demeanor, he saw life and knowledge as a banquet. He wanted everybody to dig in, not because it was healthful, but because it was fun.

Born to wealth in New York City just before World War I, he discovered science and nature at the family estate in Connecticut and culture in France, both as a small child. He remembered playing in the Tuileries gardens in Paris when he was 10, riding a carousel one minute, and the next wandering through the Louvre, "where you could . . . look at Reubens and Tintoretto . . . or ship models of Louis XIV's fleet."

Discovering the joy of learning there, he remembered, "was easy as breathing." He wanted the Smithsonian to be just as varied, just as welcoming, just as rich.

He had studied history at Yale, and in the great tradition of the liberal arts between the wars, sought his true postgraduate education in the wider world. He spent 18 months exploring the South Seas aboard a 59-foot schooner, spent almost a year with the Karoon cannibals of New Guinea and returned with 1,300 rare bird specimens for museums and dealers.

He had become fascinated with birds during boarding school in Massachusetts and never stopped studying and writing about them, trailing them around the world from Patagonia to Pakistan. His doctorate in zoology from Harvard was almost beside the point; his subsequent three months as the Smithsonian's assistant curator of birds, perhaps not.

With his wealth, academic and social credentials (his great-grandfather was chairman of Union Pacific Railroad), Ripley was also one of a generation of establishment "Wise Men" who gravitated to the more cerebral aspects of America's hot and cold wars. He joined the Office of Strategic Services in 1942 and spent most of World War II cloak-and-daggering in India, Thailand and Burma, where he had searched out birds before the war.

During the war, the nation's intelligence services drew heavily on scientists with links to the Smithsonian and knowledge of South Pacific and Southeast Asia, which the Japanese were making part of their empire.

In later years the aroma of secret-gathering would follow him to the Smithsonian, among whose appropriations and personnel the Central Intelligence Agency was rumored to hide some of its Cold War activities. In 1977 he was found to have installed in his Smithsonian office an elaborate electronic security system that was never satisfactorily explained.

But whatever the legacy of his covert activities, it was his overt ones that most changed our lives. Ripley was supremely confident in what he believed.

Populists suspicious of his privileged background were often startled to find him an ally within the musty corridors of Smithsonian traditionalism.

"Dillon was able to open the Mall the way Nixon opened up China," explained the late Ralph Rinzler, whom Ripley tapped to direct the annual Festival of American Folklife. The Ripley Revolution took many forms. Artifacts were displayed in context so people could see how they'd been used. Films, tapes and even smells were introduced to bring exhibits to life. One of his most memorable innovations was to have the Museum of Natural History's famous stuffed elephant sound a ferocious, lifelike charge at periodic intervals. Unhappily for the many who loved it, that innovation was dropped after terrifying a small but unfortunate number of tiny visitors. When museum officials panicked at the approach of the Poor People's March after Martin Luther King's assassination, Ripley directed that "above all, we must remember that the people who are coming here following the death of their tragically slain leader are citizens of the United States and are welcome in our museums."

Instead of resisting those, and other marchers, the Smithsonian welcomed them. And with that welcome, and with its summer festival featuring Navajo sand painters, Alabama quilters, Blue Ridge cloggers, Chinese American lion dancers and a Czech American polka band from Texas, the Smithsonian reminded America in a time of fragmentation that the differences within our society were not a weakness but a strength.

The Folklife Festival, Ripley said, "came from my philosophy of bringing the museum out of glass cages into real life. Urban people nowadays have no idea where milk comes from. They think it comes from a carton. So in the beginning we had cows being milked."

But unforeseen consequences were inevitable. In 1970, a faceoff between yippies and Park Police sent tear gas drifting into the festival, enveloping several cows and spoiling their milk.

There was also the mule that fled a molasses-making demonstration one year and climbed the steps of the National Gallery. And in 1976, a 400-pound bull calf escaped from a corral and fled down Constitution Avenue, disrupting morning traffic. It ended up in the Kennedy Center parking lot, where after trying to butt a Fiat it was captured by an Ethiopian student who caught it by the tail, explaining, "I know about livestock."

All that was in some way a product of the whimsical, muscular mind of the balding, bird-watching ex-spy who built our museum empire. It is easy, when remembering him, to sum him up in terms of books written, buildings built and budgets ballooned over the years. But perhaps the best portrait of Ripley lies in a story recorded in 1989 by the late Henry Mitchell of The Washington Post.

It seems a Foreign Service wife, unnaturally fond of lemurs, was volunteering to help care for a Madagascar lemur called an aye-aye at a zoo in Paris when the globe-trotting Smithsonian director dropped by, ever curious.

"I should say the aye-ayes love green coconuts," the wife explained, "the unripe nuts before the outer shell gets tough. They drill down with their amazing fingers and get the milk out. They can tell by tapping the best place to drill in.

"Mr. Ripley is quite smooth on top of the head, and the young aye-aye, Humphrey, leapt from my shoulder over to him to investigate . . . I am not sure he had seen such a distinguished head before. Anyway, he started tapping on Mr. Ripley's bald spot and I was terrified he thought it was a green coconut. I certainly didn't want to take any chances and snatched Humphrey off. I think Mr. Ripley thought that was abrupt, and I didn't dare tell him why I acted so abruptly, but I think he should know, now that it's over with."

Ripley doubtless recalled the incident with profound satisfaction. The lemur, after all, was learning something real.