Using His Cranium

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.

The anthropologist and one of his Irish wolfhounds, whose bones are also preserved.(Family Photo)

"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."