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Volunteering at the Museum of Natural History of the Smithsonian institution (Washington, D.C.) one summer during high school, I had jobs included unwrapping thousands of very small and unattractive fossils and putting them in little cardboard trays. We had to make our own fun. Two of us took a large rolling cart, put one very small empty box on it, and in what we thought was a business-like fashion, rolled it through one of the display areas of the museum. Every day when I came to work I walked by the Yat money, a gigantic stone doughnut that, in my memory, was about 7 ft tall. We also walked through a Pleistocene exhibit that was then under construction. A stone-age family with a fire pit made of Styrofoam stones was always fun to play with. The most impressive thing in the exhibit was an upright skeleton of a ground sloth some 8 ft tall. In the back, hundreds of steel cabinets were filled with specimens. On their tops were fossil skulls and other things that wouldn't fit in the drawers.

I went back to that museum many times, but never had the nerve to try to go into the back and visit my old boss. His wife was a bank teller and they collected any unusual coins that came across her desk. Amazing the stuff that people will just spend or turn in for an electronic number. Silver dollars, and other silver coins worth several times their face value, buffalo nickels, indian-head cents, etc. I was envious! Now what I think about those pennies and nickels is that they commemorated two things that our country had tried to destroy. In the case of the buffalo, the American bison, we almost succeeded.

One week while I was working there the American folklife festival was held on the Washington Mall, that grassy strip surrounded by museums, the Capitol, and the White House, and impaled in its center by the Washington Monument. Back in those days, the early 70s, things were not regulated as they are now. We wandered around the festival, getting free samples of wine and ouzo from the ethnic booths, and no one asked us how old we were. We were all under the drinking age I think. I at least was 16 at the time. The good old days!