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"OH, THERE'S THAT BARYE BRONZE OF THESEUS AND THE centaur--it was in our garden . . ."
Olga Hirshhorn is strolling with me through the museum the Smithsonian built on the Mall to house her late husband's remarkable collection of art. She comes here a lot. It's like old times.
"The thing I notice is how nice the patina is here on the sculptures. We used to hire college kids to polish them, and they did their best. But it's so much nicer here," she said.
It has been a long trip from Olga Zatorsky's modest home in Greenwich, Connecticut, where she was the youngest of three children in a Ukrainian blue-collar family, to this spectacular museum. It's even a far cry from her second life as Mrs. Cunningham, the teenage wife of her high school English teacher, the mother of three sons at 25,
She helped support the family with a series of little businesses run from the house: a children's swimming class, then a day camp, nursery school and baby-sitting service. By the time she and her first husband separated, all this had evolved into Services Unlimited, an employment agency.
And one day in 1961 the phone rang in her office. She answered it herself It was Joseph Hirshhorn. "I've just bought the…