DR. PAUL PARKMAN: I’m Dr. Paul Parkman.
ELMERINA PARKMAN: I’m Elmerina Parkman, and we have been married – I’ll add this – 62 years.
We are from a very small town in upstate New York, and we’re the same age. We went to school together, started kindergarten together, and graduated together.
PP: We started going together when we were seniors in high school.
EP: So we have a long, long time that we’ve been together, and we’re still counting.
We started going to the Renwick when the museum opened because we were very much interested in contemporary American crafts.
PP: We collected glass. Dan Daly was a glass maker, so we bought a piece of his, and so a few years went by and we thought, well, maybe we ought to have a second one.
So we had a friend in Corning whose name was Bill Warmus, the Curator of Contemporary Glass. So he had a bunch of pieces of Gallé’s work in Corning, and then one of them was a piece that he had made for Louis Pasteur. This piece was made to celebrate Louis’s 70th birthday, and the idea that Gallé had was on the one hand there was myazims and things that people used to imagine caused disease, and the other half of the base was what really caused disease.
Like a rabid dog – that was Pasteur’s greatest invention was a vaccine for rabies.
I was interested in infectious diseases when I was in medical school. We were working in Washington, and they had a project at Fort Dix in New Jersey. An amazing number of these young 19 year-old kids, soldiers, had German measles.
The problem with German measles – when a woman who is pregnant caught the virus, it caused her baby to have congenital defects. We said we ought to maybe take some specimens. We took some throat swabs.
It was one day I had an idea – maybe you could use a technique to see if the viruses produced interferon, and that did. Eventually we moved over to the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda. Of course, the important thing we did was to see if we could make an experimental vaccine for German measles, and we did that.
The coupe that was made by Dan for us has imagery on it, a representation of me holding a flask full of the vaccine, you know. Dan called it the “Aha!” moment, and it has a picture of me earlier writing in my notebook. It has a picture of Dr. Harry Meyer. He’s immunizing a child. Around the top of the vase is a quotation from Lyndon Johnson. At the base are some animals.
EP: He was very good about keeping in touch with us and would send faxes – that was before emails – and he was very detail-oriented and very particular about the accuracy and what he was going to include in the coupe.
It was about three years in the making, but we were very excited and happy when he had finished it and sent it to us, and we were very pleased with it.
PP: This is the letter that she just gave me I received from the White House on May 5th, 1966. It’s an old letter. It was a congratulatory letter, really, to me from a Lyndon Baines Johnson. It’s really a very nice thing to have.
EP: It’s been really important to us, our interest in the Smithsonian Museums. I mean, we focused on the Renwick Gallery – we always have – and it’s been a really important part of our lives.
