Yeah, sure, there’s the whole “exposure your kids to culture” reason. But perhaps the more important reason to take children to the museum is that if they go without adult supervision, they may embark on a short-lived but highly lucrative career of art theft. Seriously, it can happen. Take the case of 15-year-old Laurence McCall. He was fond of visiting the Alfred O. Deshong Museum in Chester, Pennsylvania—so much so that he felt compelled to start bringing the artwork home. This was a small museum in the 1970s, so its security system was limited to guards walking the floor. So all young Mr. McCall needed to do was wait until the guard had passed, take the painting off the wall and slide it out an open window. But McCall wasn’t just an art lover, he was also a reader, and when he read an article in the New York Times about how much art could sell for, his appreciation rose to whole new levels. In time, he started selling to private collectors. And then he started selling paintings through Sotheby’s auction house in New York. And if anyone found it suspicious that a teenager was depositing checks for $30,000, driving a Jaguar, and living in his own, 30th floor apartment, no one said anything about it. That is, until they did. By the time he was caught at age 19, it was believed he had stolen at least $400,000 art from the Deshong museum—nearly half of their collection. They couldn’t actually prove that he had stolen the paintings, but they were able to convict him for not paying his taxes. He was imprisoned for three years, and will probably be paying of his debt to the IRS for the rest of his life. And now, when you see those signs in the museum saying “No Unattended Children”, you will know why.
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