Using His Cranium

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.

She met Krantz in the early 1960s, when she was a Berkeley freshman and they both worked in the university's anthropology museum. Krantz was in his early thirties. Born in Utah in 1931, he grew up collecting animal skeletons, and as a lowly undergrad he published a scholarly paper on the subtle differences between the bones of dogs and coyotes. He earned bachelor's and master's degrees at Berkeley but dropped out of the doctoral program after some kind of beef with a professor.

"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.