Robert Lloyd Akerley, who died Monday at age 87, spent more than 52 years at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science and was so emblematic of the institution that colleagues still listen for the jangling keys that announced his presence long before he appeared in person.
Few knew so well the museum’s intricate labyrinth, a daunting maze of 10 buildings and countless renovations. On his belt, Akerley carried a climber’s carabiner bristling with keys to open virtually every locking door installed since 1955, the year he began as a volunteer.
Born and raised in what is now downtown Denver, Akerley aspired as a boy to work one day at what was then known as the Denver Museum of Natural History. The facility in City Park was much humbler then, without the wings and additions that added an imposing heft and exhibit space over the years.
“The trees in the park were a lot shorter than they are now,” Akerley recalled in a museum employee newsletter published in August 2004.
When he first showed up as a volunteer – he became a full-time paid employee two years later, leaving his day job at a Safeway store – Akerley joined a cadre of perhaps 60 staffers and volunteers.
“The old days, they were just a lot of fun,” he remarked in the same article.
“Everyone knew everyone else by their first name. You just kind of jumped in and helped.”
Jumping in and helping, and knowing everyone by name, became Akerley’s modus operandi. Over more than a half-century of work at the museum, Akerley set type for exhibit labels, helped with painting and carpentry, installed exhibits and went on collecting trips.
“Every time you find something interesting in the museum, there’s a little trail to Bob,” said Kirk Johnson, the museum’s chief curator.
“In the mid-1960s, there was a report of a fossil fish on the Forest Service land above Carbondale, and Bob was part of the crew that went up to collect it. This was a 13-foot-long, 85 million-year-old, late Cretaceous fish. Giant. Fantastic. He did so many things, all over the place here.”
Akerley worked in the museum’s anthropology department, but Matt Gargan, the museum’s security captain, considered him a de facto member of the security team.
“He was all over the place, literally an additional set of eyes and ears for the security department,” Gargan said.
Akerley set up the microphone, podium and other paraphernalia for visiting lecturers. When a fire broke out at the Phipps Auditorium on Nov. 2, 1961, Akerley rushed from his home, where he heard the fire reported on a police scanner, to the museum, hoping he could help quell the flames. The fire ruined the auditorium, a loss he took personally.
Unofficially, he served as the museum’s ambassador, alert to visitors who seemed lost or puzzled. Akerley suppressed his outgoing impulses only when he was working what museum staffers call “the trap line,” a phrase that suggests poet Robert Service and a tale of the Yukon but actually refers to the bait and live traps for bugs and mice.
“It’s kind of embarrassing to walk through the museum with a bag of dead mice,” Akerley said in the newsletter article.
“It doesn’t look good.”
Like any diligent scientist, he kept written records to document the species and locations of each insect and mouse he bagged. Though he was not tenderhearted about mice, which can ruin exhibits as well as health codes, Akerley conceded to a request from the museum’s sentimental publications staff, which instructed him to use only live traps in the department.
As he released one humanely trapped mouse outside in City Park, Akerley felt tiny paws scrambling up his leg. Akerley clapped his hands over his pants, preventing the mouse from entering what he delicately called “man land,” and stomped his foot.
The mouse fell to the ground. It sped off one way. Akerley went the other. The encounter became one of his favorite stories, always concluding with Akerley’s prediction that the mouse probably “beat me back into the building.”
Akerley’s career with the museum outlasted five directors and scores of curators. He returned to his job after recuperating from an accident in which his hip was broken. Akerley showed up, carrying his lunch, at the museum punctually at 5 a.m. every weekday, including the Friday before he died. About 10 years ago, in one of his few concessions to his age, Akerley began leaving the museum at noon.
He was legendary among museum staffers, who joke about the increasing percentage of employees born after Akerley’s tenure there began.
“If a building has a personality, Bob’s was ours,” Johnson said. “It’s hard to believe he’s gone.”
Museum staffers ceremoniously retired Akerley’s hefty carabiner of keys.
Survivors include his sons, Bob Akerley of Parker and Mark Akerley of Aurora; five grandchildren; and one great- grandchild. His wife, Ruth, preceded him in death.
Akerley died when he fell and hit his head as he was helping a neighbor with an outdoor chore.
A memorial service will be held from 5 to 8 p.m. Oct. 2 at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, 2001 Colorado Blvd.
Staff writer Claire Martin can be reached at 303-954-1477 or cmartin@denverpost.com.
