Episode 176: The Air and the Sea and the Land

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This episode was originally released four years ago in February of 2021

into what feels like a very different world. It's called the air and the sea and the land.

This is the Memory Palace. I'm Nate DeMao.

During the 300 million or so years of the Paleozoic era, life thrived, largely in the oceans, though later periods within it did see the first development of terrestrial life.

Your ferns, your extra-large dragonflies.

But the ocean was where the action was.

Proto-crustaceans and arthropods, and evolution's first stabs at a workable fish. The apex predators were the nautiloids.
We still have them today.

You may have seen them at the aquarium in a darkened tank, cast in an eerie blue light to simulate their deep-sea homes.

They are so strange, like ambulatory ram's horns, with a peculiar white eye and a beard of tentacles.

They are among the most alien-looking creatures we have,

a remnant of a time when the Earth was a very different place.

There are six species of nautiloids now, but paleontologists tell us that in the Paleozoic, there were many more, varying significantly, some tiny, some gargantuan gargantuan relatively as far as mollusks go, some in that spiral shape familiar from natural history museums or other gift shops, others oblong or dagger-like, depending on whatever conditions, whatever available resources, whatever competitive necessity shaped their evolution a quarter of a billion years ago, some 2,500 different species.

Lewis Purnell noticed some were missing.

He was crouching in the attic of the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.

Years later, he wouldn't be able to remember why he'd wandered in. Just that it was fun to poke around.

It must have been fun to merely move around, after his last job, just across the mall at the National Gallery of Art.

He'd applied for several government positions, commensurate with his education and experience. He was a college graduate, a decorated veteran of World War II.

And he'd already held a couple of temp jobs in the federal bureaucracy. But it was the late 1950s, and he was African

And the only job he could get was as a guard.

So for eight hours a day he just stood around. Told people not to touch things.

I'm about to tell you something about Louis Purnell that will change whatever image you've constructed of him so far. When he is in his late 30s, thin mustache.

Handsome, but with one of those round faces that makes you seem a little soft even when you aren't at all.

Standing around in his guard's uniform.

Besides some third-tier painting by a second-tier old master, whatever wonder the art might have held for him when he first stood still all day in its presence having long since faded.

And when I do tell you, I want you to know that I'm not doing it so you'll feel badly for him. There beside the Titian or Van Eyck or Tintoretto.

He is doing this boring thing when once he did this other thing, because it is a hell of a thing.

That here he is living this life when he used to live that other life.

And I ask you to resist that urge because Louis Purnell would want you to, because it is all the same life.

There are hours and hours of oral history interviews with Purnell. The transcript runs nearly 300 pages.

He lived a long time and he did many things in the time he had, before he died in 2001 at 81 years old.

And what strikes you reading all those pages, that each of those things, with few exceptions, seems to hold equal weight in his memory.

And there are accomplishments of which he is particularly proud, things which he takes clear pleasure in being asked to recall, but he seems to have brought himself equally to whatever task was before him, made the most of whatever conditions surrounded him, whatever resources he had available, even when those conditions worked against him, and those resources weren't fairly distributed.

And so he was proud of working in the magazine department at the Library of Congress, in which he liaised with local libraries and library associations in order to help them fill their own collections by supplying them with individual back issues they might be missing.

And he was proud of being a Tuskegee airman. In which he did barrel rolls and pitchbacks and loops and took the plane up and up until Alabama curved away from him.

Until the all-white schools, the whites-only hotels, the gas stations where he wasn't allowed to fill up his car even though he was wearing the uniform of the United States of America, all looked so small.

In which he traveled to New York to get ready to ship out.

He'd been there before, he'd grown up in New Jersey, but he'd never walked its streets with pilots' wings pinned to his chest, turning heads, one of those colored airmen they'd read about in the paper.

Never gotten to go to a fancy nightclub to hear Lionel Hampton play the vibes and have the man himself stop the show. Ask the patrons to rise and applaud the heroes in town from Tuskegee.

In which he'd crossed the Atlantic on a cruise ship retrofitted with bunks to accommodate hundreds of troops. as well as a rope that divided the white ones from the black ones.

In which he flew dozens and dozens of combat missions during two tours of duty, dive bombing runs in North Africa when he would get so close to the ground he could see the fear on the Nazis' faces looking up from the trenches, dogfights over the Mediterranean, missions providing cover, drawing fire, protecting long-distance bombers, flown by white pilots over Italy.

The Axis never took one out.

His parents wanted him to be a doctor. And if not a doctor, then just something with a specialized degree.
His mother and father had both gone to college. Mom was a teacher.

Dad worked for DuPont for a while, painted train cars for the Pullman Company.

They knew their son was bright, knew he loved school, but they wanted something safe and steady.

Some focused course of study that would yield some concrete thing, some dignified job in a field in which an African-American man could find his place. even if he were asked to stay in it.

But Lewis wanted to study everything.

He wanted everything.

The sky, the sea, the earth. Wanted to understand people, their bodies, their behaviors.
In elementary school, he fell in love with Latin of all things. Loved the puzzle of it.

It led him to French, and he loved French. He had never met anyone French.

At every turn told to specialize by a well-intended teacher, by a guidance counselor just doing their job, he would politely decline.

He went to Lincoln University, an HBCU in in Pennsylvania, devised the widest course of study he could. Ethics, philosophy, linguistics, the sciences.

When he was finally forced to pick a major, while his advisors were pushing dentistry, he chose psychology. He figured people were the biggest subject of all.

But the war came, and when recruiters came to campus talking about an initiative pushed by Eleanor Roosevelt that would train the Army Air Corps' first black pilots, He jumped at the chance.

He already knew a lot about planes, used to hang out by an airfield near his house when he was a teenager. Sometimes he would convince the pilots to take him up and he'd ask them questions.

He was interested in everything, and he wanted to learn about the sky. After the war, he went back to school to learn more things, ask more questions.

He was tapped by the Air Force to work on a team identifying unknown soldiers, dead airmen, and flight crews. They hired him because he knew the planes and military methodologies.

But they promoted him because he knew so much more.

About anatomy and physics. all those skills that came from not specializing.

He went on to get a job as a speech therapist in a special school for Jewish kids who had struggled in public school. Some had learning disabilities or mental illness or came from abusive homes.

Any number of conditions that got a kid labeled wayward back then.

But when the people who had hired him learned just how much he knew, they had him work with all of the kids. even if they didn't need speech therapy.
There were 37 students in the program.

By the time he left three years later, he had been able to get all of them back in public school. He would say decades later, that achievement added 15 years to his life because it made him so happy.

He said he could have lived the rest of his days just thinking about those kids. But there were bills to pay and more things to learn about.

He heard they were desperate for air traffic controllers, were hiring ex-fighter pilots, so he applied. But they were only looking for white ones.
He thought he could work at the Smithsonian.

He had all sorts of experience, a broad education, any number of things he could do. Research, curation, acquisitions, administration.

But they made him a guard, standing around telling people not to touch things. And on lunch breaks, or heading back home for the day.

Walking down the marble steps as the sun dipped low behind the Lincoln Memorial. He would look out across the lawn to the Natural History Museum.
He wanted to be in there.

He had learned about the sky and the war. He wanted to know about the earth and the sea.

He thought if he could get in the door as a guard, maybe it would be like his other jobs. Someone would realize what he could do and let him do it.
He sent it in his resume.

But the captain of the guard at the museum sent it back to personnel with a note attached, telling them to stop sending all of these N-words.

But that person and personnel had another job to fill.

Louis Purnell became an assistant to the paleontology department at the National Museum of Natural History in 1961. He found it fascinating.
But he found everything fascinating. And he was good at it.

And he was determined to rise up in the department. But he was told he wasn't a specialist.
He didn't have a graduate degree in the field. So he could only rise so far.

But one day he was wandering around in the attic, and he found a nautiloid.

One of the many hundreds of fossil specimens at the museum.

He thought it was beautiful. And he loved this feeling that it brought out in him.
That he was holding millions.

hundreds of millions of years of history in his hands.

He liked to think about how much the world changed over time, how the different eras laid out in their different strata had created different conditions for life to develop.

But when he looked for the tag, to learn just when in the Paleozoic this particular nautiloid once swam, he found that the tag was incomplete. And that was pretty common.

Some specimens had no tags at all. He went to the catalog and he kept noticing all sorts of problems.
So he set out to fix them. He told his bosses and they told him he shouldn't do that.

It was too big of an undertaking. He wasn't a specialist.
But for the next three years, in his off hours he would scour the collection, enjoying the detective work of it all.

And every night after work, he'd meticulously fill out the catalog cards, tapping into skills he'd learned at the Library of Congress, using the penmanship he'd honed working for the military.

And during business hours, he learned about the Earth, and even the sea, assisting expeditions to every corner of the Atlantic.

pulling up creatures from the ocean floor in the Caribbean, gathering sediment near the South Pole, on ships with no rope to separate the races. But there were still invisible ones at the museum.

Even as he completed his catalog, even as it was published by the Smithsonian Institution's press, he was the only person without a graduate degree it had ever published.

Even as his bosses had so warmed up to the idea of him publishing that they managed to get their names in it.

And even as they assured him he was really going places in the museum, he was still an assistant.

So he looked around again, during lunch, walking down the front steps, looking around the mall, sunsetting, yada yada.

And he applied for a job at the National Air and Space Museum, in the Department of Aeronautics, where he was a shoe-in.

He crushed it as a paleontology assistant, and he was a legit expert in aeronautics. He had flown just about every type of plane they had hanging in the museum's rafters.

But when he applied, its director of aeronautics was said to have responded that he wasn't interested in hiring any uppity blacks and sent Purnell's resume back to personnel,

where the astronautics department department took it off the pile.

It was 1968. Apollo 8 had just circumnavigated the moon.
It was a good time to get into the field.

Lewis Purnell spent the next two decades at the National Air and Space Museum. He had wanted to learn about the air and the sea and the land.
He wound up adding space, too.

He learned about every vehicle, every piece of equipment, worked directly with NASA, with every museum in in the country that wanted a piece of the space program of their own.

He convinced Aaron Space to hang an Apollo capsule right up there with the Wright Brothers plane in the Spirit of St.

Louis, got them to put a display of spacesuits right in the main hall, laid out the case himself. He was proud of it.
It was his first public act of curation, and it is still there just as it was.

He worked under Michael Collins, who had stayed in the module while Neil and Buzz were out walking on the moon.

He taught classes to kids, who saw in his lectures a vision of space travel in which they could see themselves. He taught some kids who saw themselves in him.

The work environment wasn't free of prejudice. He was qualified to be a curator from day one, but he didn't get the title for 11 years.

At one point in the late 70s, when an activist complained about a lack of representation of black aviators in the exhibit hall, they decided to make one of the dummies used in the displays African-American.

They needed a model, so they used Louis Purnell.

The face of the former Tuskegee airman, then assistant curator, became the face of one of the guys who waves the flags to assist pilots landing on the deck of an aircraft carrier.

But the bosses complained that Purnell's face wasn't black enough, and they darkened it with shoe polish.

And there was another time that a congressman echoed these calls to do more, to include the stories of African-American aviators. Purnell got pulled in to curate a small corner, a couple of plaques.

A couple of artifacts. He called it tokenism.
It was tokenism.

But he knew times would change, that there would be other exhibits, and there were before his retirement and after.

But he said that he knew there would always be those who wanted to keep black people out of the picture. There were always efforts, he said, to eradicate people like him.
But history is history.

He was there,

and people in the present need to know it.

The scarf he used to wear in the cockpit is there on display. The wings he wore on his uniform.

They are preserved there for people in the future to find.

This episode of The Memory Palace was written and produced by me in February of 2021. The show gets research assistance from Eliza McGraw.

Eliza McGraw, I will say, here in February 2025, is the author of the recently released book, Astride, Horses, Women, and a Partnership That Shaped America, which is a book that any history or horse buff in your life will love.

The show is a proud member of Radiotopia, a network of listener-supported, independent, artist-owned podcasts from PRX, a not-for-profit public media company.

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Radio Diaries is a national treasure.

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You can buy my new book, The Memory Palace, two short stories of the past wherever you buy books. Which I really have learned is a total achievement.

Listeners and readers like you have been buying this book and getting it and keeping it on shelves, which has just been wonderful.

It really has.

I'm going to be announcing some book events

in this space and the usual spaces soon.

Probably like the goal is a stretch of events

in April and then again in May and then in June and maybe even in July if there's still appetite.

I will be down in the deep south in April, and I'm about to announce that itinerary soon.

There is an open date, by the way, on Wednesday, April 16th, 2025, between dates that I'm doing in Mobile, Alabama, and Oxford, Mississippi.

And if you happen to be in the book events business in that general area, if you own a bookstore or library or the like,

let me know. And I really have no fear of long drives.
So truly, just the general area. You can find me via email or the like.

New episode in a week or so, and I will talk to you then.

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