Using His Cranium
Grover Krantz's Last Wish Was to Remain With His Friends. And He Has.

By Peter Carlson - Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, July 5, 2006; Page C01

In a dim hallway in the Smithsonian's Museum of Natural History, anthropologist David Hunt opens a dingy green cabinet and pulls out a drawer full of human bones.

"This," he says, "is Grover Krantz."

The bones are arranged carefully, lovingly. In the front right corner is Krantz's skull, propped on his lower jaw. Next to that are the long bones of his legs and arms. Plastic bags hold the smaller bones of his ribs, hands and feet. They're gray and they smell a little musty.

Behind the skull is an old film canister. Hunt picks it up.

"Grover kept a lot of stuff," he says. "These are his baby teeth."

Dennis Stanford, the Smithsonian's curator of archaeology, walks by. He peeks into the drawer and notices a large heel bone.

"Look at that!" he says. "Grover was pretty big, wasn't he? I forgot how big he was."

Stanford sees JoAllyn Archambault, the director of the museum's American Indian program, coming down the hall. "This is Grover," Stanford says.

"Oh, hi, Grover!" Archambault says. She smiles broadly. "I've known Grover since I was 18 years old."

The folks at the Museum of Natural History are used to skeletons. They work with thousands of them -- dinosaur skeletons, mammal skeletons, human skeletons. But only one skeleton in the collection came from a human being who was a friend of many Smithsonian scientists. They studied with Grover Krantz, drank with him, laughed with him.

Krantz was a legend in anthropology circles -- and semi-famous in the wider world, too, as the eccentric professor who drove around the Pacific Northwest with a spotlight and a rifle, searching for Sasquatch.

Krantz didn't work at the museum, but his late brother, Victor, was a photographer there and Grover would periodically stop by to visit. Inevitably, fun would break out.

And then Grover got pancreatic cancer. Not long before he died in 2002, at age 70, he called Hunt and offered to donate his skeleton to the museum. That was unusual but not unprecedented: Anthropologists love skeletons and the museum is happy to get them, particularly if they come with medical records.

"He said, 'I've been a teacher all my life and I think I might as well be a teacher after I'm dead, so why don't I just give you my body,' " Hunt recalls. "I said, 'That's a really admirable thing to do, Grover.'


"And he said, 'Yeah, yeah, but there's one catch: You have to keep my dogs with me.' " Hunt laughs as he tells the story. "I said, 'Well, how many dogs are we talking about, Grover?' And he said, 'Just three -- maybe four.' "

Now, standing in the hallway, Hunt pulls out the drawer that sits above the drawer that holds Krantz's bones, thus revealing the bones of Clyde, Krantz's gigantic Irish wolfhound. The next shelf up holds the bones of two more wolfhounds, Icky and Yahoo.

"Grover wanted to be with his dogs because he loved them," says Laurie Burgess, another Smithsonian anthropologist.

In the drawer with Clyde's bones is one of the dozen books that Krantz authored. Titled "Only a Dog," it's a funny, moving memoir of Clyde that Krantz wrote eight years after the dog died in 1973. Inside the book is a photo of Clyde standing on his hind legs with his huge paws perched on Grover's shoulders. Shortly before his own death, Krantz tried to persuade Hunt to have his skeleton and Clyde's wired together in that exact position and displayed at the museum.

"I said to him, 'That's a neat idea but it's probably not something we could do,' " Hunt recalls.

Sitting between the book and the bones is a pewter bowl. "Is that a dog bowl?" Burgess asks.

"Yes," Hunt says. "It's a trophy from a dog show."

"See?" Burgess replies. "It's about love."

She's right. The tale of the anthropologist in the drawer is, among other things, a love story about a man and his dog.

A Man's Best Friend

"Grover was outrageous," Archambault says. "He was a legend in Berkeley in the '60s -- for parties, for wild ideas, for outrageous behavior, for real smart conversations."

She's sitting at a long table in the museum's physical anthropology lab, just a few steps from Krantz's bones, swapping stories about him with other scientists.

"He was always in trouble with his professors, because he was so smart and he challenged them," Archambault recalls. "As a grad student, you have to be politic, and that wasn't one of Grover's skills."

He was a big guy, 6 feet 3 with a huge head and hands, and everybody knew him. He was famous for his parties.

"They'd be 24- or 36-hour parties," she says. "And he had all these women around." Krantz had plenty of fun, but those were tough years. "My life at that time consisted of a part-time job and nearly full-time drinking," he wrote in his book on Clyde. "It was steadily downhill for me."

At 32, he'd already been married and divorced twice. Dropping out of the doctoral program had stalled his dream of becoming a professor, and he was working as a part-time museum technician. He was stuck in a rut and he needed something to shake him out of it.

And then he bought a puppy.

Irish wolfhounds are huge, friendly, gentle giants. Sort of like Grover himself. He named the puppy Clyde.

"Clyde was really a very sweet dog," Archambault says. "Kind of laid back and kind of goofy."

Clyde kept growing, and Krantz, being a scientist, kept meticulous records of his growth. Ultimately Clyde reached 160 pounds and, on his hind legs, stood more than seven feet high.

"Grover loved that dog," Archambault says. "Every place he went, he took Clyde. And Clyde would kind of bump into things because he was so big."

Clyde slept on an old sleeping bag on the floor at the foot of Krantz's bed. One night, Krantz came home drunk and flopped down on the sleeping bag with Clyde.

"In the morning, I woke on the floor alone and discovered him sleeping up on my bed," he wrote. "A fair trade in his mind, I suppose."

Working at the Berkeley museum, Krantz broke his big toe in a particularly memorable manner: He dropped the Dead Sea Scrolls on it. During his recuperation, a friendly woman named Eve Einstein took him and Clyde in. Soon she became his third wife.

In the mid-'60s, Grover and Eve and Clyde moved to the University of Minnesota, where Krantz finally got his PhD. In 1968 he began teaching at Washington State University.

He'd pulled his life together, and he gave the credit to Clyde, "the closest thing to a son I ever had." His love for Clyde had made the difference, he wrote, "between being a functioning human being and a drunken bum."

At Wazoo -- as everybody calls Washington State -- Grover and Clyde bounded around the campus, just as they'd done at Berkeley and Minnesota.

But wolfhounds tend to lead short lives, and Clyde got old. He shrank and shriveled. He suffered through recurrent bouts of pneumonia. In January 1973, he died.

"His death left me with the most empty, lonely feeling of my life, before or since," Krantz wrote.

With the help of a grad student, Krantz buried Clyde in the frozen ground of his lawn. He'd already buried many animals there, ranging from prosaic roadkill to an African lion. Anthropologists study skeletons, and the cheapest way to get them is to bury.

The Smithsonian's David Hunt with the bones of anthropologist and Bigfoot hunter Grover Krantz and his wolfhounds.
Photo Credit: By Gerald Martineau -- The Washington Post

Anatomy Lesson
Natural History Museum Fulfills a Scholar's Dying Wish: His Skeleton Is on Exhibit as a Teaching Specimen

By Michael E. RuaneWashington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, April 11, 2009

Diane Horton had last seen her late husband two days after his death in 2002, so when they were reunited at the Smithsonian's Museum of Natural History a few weeks ago she asked for a few private minutes with him.
He was standing under spotlights in a huge display case -- all 6 feet 3 inches of him except for a few bones missing here and there. His head was thrown back and his mouth was open, as if in a big laugh, and his arms were around one of his favorite dogs.
Here was professor Gordon S. "Grover" Krantz, and all, or almost all, of the phalanges, tarsals, metatarsals and the other 200 or so bones that made up his skeleton. Reassembled with wire, glue and metal.
It was an emotional moment, Horton, 66, said.
"Wow," she thought. "You had really [an] impossible last wish. And it's been granted."
Indeed, it has.
The skeletons of Krantz and his beloved Irish wolfhound, Clyde, make up the striking display that comes at the end of the museum's current forensic anthropology exhibit, "Written in Bone."
The two are depicted mimicking an old photograph, with the skeleton of Clyde up on his hind legs and Krantz cradling the dog's forelegs in his arms.
They make a startling sight -- cleansed of flesh and fur, revealed down to the bones in the dog's tail and the dental implants in Krantz's mouth.
Which is exactly what Krantz wanted.

"He looked happy," Horton said. "And Clyde looked happy."
It hadn't been so promising when Krantz announced eight years ago that he wanted to donate his bones to the Smithsonian, with the caveat that he, and maybe the bones of his dogs, be on display.

Krantz, who died of cancer at age 70, was an eccentric and revered teacher of osteology -- the study of bones -- at Washington State University.
A resident of Port Angeles, Wash., he had long been fascinated with human and animal skeletons, along with the lore of the legendary bigfoot creature, Sasquatch, of the Pacific Northwest. "He was just really curious about how things were put together," said former student John Cardinal, now with the FBI in Washington.
After he got sick, and he offered his bones for display, his wife told him he was crazy.
"It was an outlandish wish," she said recently. But "he wanted his bones someplace. . . . He thought he would be a good teaching specimen."
Krantz was in touch with several universities before the Smithsonian agreed to take the disassembled bones of man and dogs. The museum cautioned Krantz, however, that his "re-articulation," as it is called, and display would be a long shot.
"I said that would be a lot of money . . . and we would have to have justification to spend that kind of money," said David R. Hunt, a collections manager in the museum's department of anthropology.
Hunt told Krantz that he would remember his wishes if things changed.
Krantz's bones first went to the University of Tennessee's "body farm," where scientists study the postmortem breakdown of human remains, and where the scholar's skeleton was cleansed.
It came to the Smithsonian in 2003. The bones of Clyde and two more of Krantz's dogs, who died before him, had already arrived at the museum. All went into storage drawers, where it seemed they were likely to stay.

Then came the proposal for "Written in Bone," which opened earlier this year. Spurred by the field research of museum forensic anthropologist Doug Owsley, the exhibit was planned as a study of Colonial-era grave sites in the Chesapeake region.
Owsley saw an opportunity to include Krantz as a kind of finale that would grab museumgoers just as they were leaving the exhibit. "I just wanted something they might remember," he said. But he faced the cost of reassembling Krantz, a job that would need to be farmed out to an expensive specialist.
Owsley wondered, however, if the museum's taxidermist, Paul Rhymer, might be able to tackle the job in-house, and save money. The idea, which originated with Krantz, would be to reassemble him and Clyde together along the lines of the old photograph.

Rhymer, 46, who is also a sculptor and usually works on such animals as foxes, monkeys and penguins, agreed to try. He taped up a copy of the photo of Krantz and Clyde, and took the bones, which were in boxes and plastic bags, to his museum workshop. And over several months last fall and winter he brought them to life.
He used power tools, hacksaws and a thick book on human anatomy. He got and took lots of advice. He drilled minute holes in the bones, wired ribs together and constructed the delicate, almost invisible, scaffolding on which the skeletons rest.
"It was like a jigsaw puzzle," he said. "But it was like putting two together at the same time and having them meet somewhere in the middle."
He altered the two poses slightly from the photograph to avoid any impression that Krantz was being attacked by the dog, and to more clearly suggest a "joyful interchange."
Clyde, being a familiar "four-footer" to the taxidermist, was easier to assemble. Rhymer started with Krantz.
He began with the bones and scaffolding of the spine, and worked his way out. The skull was easy. The ribs wouldn't cooperate. Bones were missing in the hands and feet.
Rhymer soon realized that the bones all fit together in a logical way. "It takes a while to figure out, after you've messed with these things, which notches fit in with what notch," he said. "There's no way I could have put the vertebrae in the wrong order. It just wouldn't have fit."
Gradually Krantz took shape.
"Once I had him from his pelvis, and I had his head on, and I had him at what I thought was going to be the right height, I thought, 'Okay, this is going to work,' " Rhymer said.

Earlier this month, with the museum thronged with spring tourists, there was an array of reactions to Krantz and Clyde.

"Freaky!" said one young visitor.

"Amazing," said a fifth-grade teacher.

"That is a big dog," said a woman.

"That is a big person," said a little girl. "Looks like he's smiling.

Thought I’d add something to this. Not sure if this was posted anywhere else since this article is a couple months old.