Our friend Gretchen Worden, the director and soul of the Mutter Museum, has died. We and the world will miss her and her view of the world very much. Here is a passage from Gretchen’s obituary in the Philadelphia Inquirer:
“In most museums you go to look at objects,” she wrote in [her] book’s [The Mutter Museum] preface. “In the Mutter Museum, sometimes the objects seem to be looking at you.”
Ms. Worden worked her way up in the museum – the only place she ever worked – first as curator in 1982 and finally as its director in 1988. She worked until a few weeks before her death.
“It was the only job she ever wanted,” recalls her cousin, Nina Tafel.
Ms. Worden’s fascination with the weird began when she was a little girl growing up in Media, where her family had settled after living in Shanghai, China, and Moncilieri, Italy.
She started collecting conjoined objects such as M&Ms and dolls, and odd or suggestive food items, said her friend Janice Wilson Stridick.
As a young woman, she started collecting cow creamers, and as an adult she amassed an international toilet-paper collection. She also collected model and stuffed rats.
She graduated from Penncrest High School in 1965, earned a bachelor’s degree in physical anthropology in 1970 from Temple University, and then set her eyes on working at the Mutter Museum.
“She worked among the artifacts of death and had fun with it – it was perfect for her,” said her friend Christine Ruggere, associate director of the Institute of History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University.
Thanks to Gretchen, one of the Museum’s most memorable photographs appeared on the cover of the September/October 1998 issue of the Annals of Improbable Research.