So you want to buy a giant prehistoric cockroach for your museum, but you don’t know where to go. How about a Tyrannosaurus rex? The jaw of a mastodon? Maybe a nice bouquet of Permian Period ferns? If you’re looking for dioramas, coral reefs, medical models, human figures designed to complete anatomical accuracy, then there is really only one man to see. And it’s been the same man for more than 50 years.
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A small bluish-green plastic amphibian is staring out the window of Rush’s office at the traffic below. Rush is sitting behind his desk and eyeing the critter. He picks it up and pats it on the head with his index finger.
“I made him out of synthetic rubber,” he says. “This is one of those amphibian-type lizards that roamed the earth during the time when the earth was covered principally with swamps and tropical forests. That’s the time when coal was being made. This little guy was scampering all around and it turns out he was the beginning of a line of creatures that ended up as dinosaurs.”
“People said, ‘We do have occasional jobs, so why don’t you leave us your card and we’ll call you?’ I thought that was just some way to get rid of a college kid, so I wandered off and established myself as a one-man studio. I’d do anything that was three-dimensional. I did clocks for Marshall Field’s. I’d do toilet seats for Sears Roebuck, fronts of jukeboxes, anything. A sculptor is a person who can model an animal, a flower, any realistic sort of thing. I would really do anything.”
One of the studio’s specialties is transparent mannequins. “We got a call from a doctor in California who asked if we could do transparent figures,” says Rush. “I said certainly we could. He was the representative of a holy man from Bangalore, India. And this guru wanted an eight-foot-high transparent man with a circulatory system. So we went to Bangalore and negotiated with this holy man.
In 1967, the Shedd Aquarium asked Rush to help design their giant coral reef. “We went on a collecting trip to see what the real underwater world looked like. I learned how to scuba dive,” says Rush, a 77-year-old Eagle Scout who still dives on occasion. The coral reef was the first one of its kind, Rush says, and led to assignments designing similar reefs for museums all over the world.
“We made it on speculation,” he glowers. “We very seldom do that and it should be a lesson to me not to do it ever again. At the time he died, everyone thought it’d be a great idea to have a heroic sculpture of him because they thought everybody would want one. Well, Bilandic got in and he wasn’t too interested. Then Mayor Byrne got in and she didn’t like the idea at all.”
