To start, tell me where you're from.

Where were you born?

I was born in the Bronx in New York City.

This is Diane Patrick.

When I was a small child, I lived with my mom.

My mom was poor.

She was a single mom.

She was on welfare.

Growing up, Diane's mom never took her to museums.

But over the years, Diane would occasionally go on school field trips to the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan.

I've always hated that museum that used to take us there as kids in school and I hated that museum so

very much. Why? Because it was dark and it had animals and insects displaced. I was not interested

in that. Oh, it was awful. And I dreaded going there and I vowed I would never go there as an adult.

When Diane visited the Natural History Museum as a kid, she almost certainly wandered into the Akeley Hall of African Mammals.

It's the big room in the middle of the building.

It's dimly lit with a herd of taxidermied elephants standing in the center like they just wandered in off the savannah, frozen in time. Surrounding the elephants on each wall, there are big diaramas

behind glass built to look like real African landscapes, lions crouched in tall grass, a leopard

dragging its kill up into a tree, gorillas standing in a misty forest clearing. Whether you're compelled by these exhibits

or unsettled by them, one thing is clear. They're incredibly lifelike works of art and craftsmanship.

But young Diane was not impressed. Not because the exhibits in Akeley Hall weren't impressive.

It just wasn't her thing. Or at least that's what she thought at the time.

What she didn't know then was that her grandfather, who she'd never met, was famous in this museum. His name was Sinclair Clark, and he was a master taxidermy Tanner, who helped create many of the museum's most astonishing exhibits,

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