Iowa City Press-Citizen from Iowa City, Iowa • Page 16

8 BTnve City Press-Clthen Friday, December 15, 1978 Tut fever grips New York City if wvn-. filter xSW weather like this, jj I furnaces run more and Tssx 1 filters clog faster. Clean jS I filters pay off in more By JANE SEE WHITE NEW YORK AP) Tutankhamen ruled fewer than 7 million subjects as pharoah of all Egypt 33 centuries ago. But in this nation the boy king has captured almost 6 million more souls. So far.

As if that weren't enough, the obscure Egyptian ruler has also spawned both legitimate and black market businesses that are cashing in on the epidemic of Tut-worship in the United States. Since November 1976, a total of 5.6 million people in five cities have viewed the touring exhibit of relics recovered from Tut's tomb. Before April 15, when Tut departs New York for San Francisco, an additional 1.3 million will see the relics here. When Tut played Los Angeles earlier this year, exhibit officials were told that scalpers were hawking admission tickets for as much as $45, so eager were Californians to lay eyes on the alabaster and gold objects from Tut's tomb. All the 1.3 million tickets offered by Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum of Art some free, some for a 60-cent service charge were snapped up three months ago.

But as the Tut fever soared in New York with the exhibit's arrival here this week, scalpers' were charging from $15 to $50 a ticket. Metropolitan Mueseum officials said Wednesday that they were -J relics had never before entered a museum. Tut drew them. But why? Tut ruled Egypt just nine years, before he died at the age of 18. Many scholars say the boy king's reign would merit barely a sentence in any tome on Egyptian history except that the eye-blinking gold and alabaster wealth of Tut's tomb was unearthed in 1922 virtually untouched since it was sealed more than 3,000 years earlier.

Richard Morsches, Metropolitan Museum vice president, believes much of Tut's modern appeal harks back to the tomb's discovery in 1922, "one of the great archeological finds intact of all time. It aroused enormous excitement at the time and it has become one of the great names of history, something that practically every schoolchild hears about." There's more to Tut fever than that, says Hoving: "The young boy has a magical magnetism. People have gone to see it and the word has gotten around that this exhibit is really something unique. "Most of the people I've talked with are extremely impressed with the nearly unbelievable craftsmanship that went into these objects. They look as if they were made last week, yet we know they're 3,200 years old," Hoving says.

He ticks off other theories for Tut fever: the appeal of the legend that those who unearthed Tut's tomb were cursed; fascination with the ancient Egyptians' concept of a life after death, ancient Egyptian embalming techniques and the mysteries of hieroglyphics. Word of mouth played a role in the Tut exhibit's swelling popularity, says Hoving. "The phenomenon just snowballed as the exhibit moved across the country." Bruce Ratner, the city's Consumer Affairs commissioner, warned Wednesday that it Is illegal to resell tickets to the exhibit and asked the city's newspapers not to accept advertisements for such sales. "Seeing Tut is the status symbol right now in this city," said a Metropolitan Museum official who declined to be named. "It's even superseded sex." Everyone, it seems, is cashing in on Tut fever here.

Manhattan bookshops feature separate Tutankhamen sections near best-selling fiction and non-fiction. Bloomingdale's department store is offering a host of objects ranging from Wedgwood china to a tote bag with "I Love New York" inscribed in heiroglyphics. The Metropolitan Museum reports that sales of its Tut relic reproductions and publications long ago totaled more than $12 million nationwide since 1976; profits will go to finance renovation of the Cairo Museum. An "astounding" 80,000 people have paid $12.95 for "Tutankhamen The Untold Story" by Thomas Hoving, says a spokesman for Simon Schuster, which published the book just two months ago. None of this surprises Hoving.

A former director of the Metropolitan and the man who masterminded the Tut exhibit's seven-city, three-year U.S. tour, Hoving says he knew all along precisely what he was doing. "After we concluded the negotiations to bring the exhibit here, I wrote down what I thought the attendance would be. I figured 1 million a city. It averages 1.2 million.

That's not bad," he says. If Tut attendance isn't impressive enough, consider this: Exhibit officials report that more than 25 percent of those who've seen the Tut AP luerplwto This golden mask of ancient Egypt's Pharoh Tutankhamen is among relics touring the United States. seeking an injunction to prevent a ticket agency in Union City, N.J., from selling tickets at $20 each. Callers answering a New York City newspaper advertisement were offered the tickets. added cb U.S.

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There was no indication when that would be. Butler said the bacon testing, which began Dec. 4, involves the initial collection of "presumptive" information that might not be substantiated by later, more exact tests. He said the test information was being withheld "because you place an economic hardship on a plant that may not deserve to have it." WASHINGTON (AP) The Agriculture Department is refusing to disclose preliminary results of its nationwide tests to determine whether frying bacon treated with nitrite results in dangerous levels of cancer-causing substances called nitrosamines. Officials say release of the initial test data could unjustifiably jeopardize some meat processing companies.

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