WASHINGTON — Robert W. Fri, an expert on environmental and energy policy who became director of the National Museum of Natural History and helped steer it through a period of renovation and rapid growth, died Oct. 10 at a hospital in Washington. He was 78.
The cause was lung cancer, said his son Sean Fri.
Fri (pronounced “fry”) was named director of the museum in 1996 after a decade as president of Resources for the Future, a Washington-based think tank studying environmental policy.
During his five years as director, he guided the remodeling of the gem and mammal exhibition halls and in 1999 opened the museum’s IMAX theater. Attendance grew from 5.3 million visitors in 1996 to 9.5 million in 2000 — the most of any museum in the world, according to news accounts.
“The idea is to bring it up to date, to make the whole experience much more of an immersion experience,” Fri told The Washington Post in 1998, explaining a series of renovations. “That means getting rid of the glass partition between you and the figures.”
He said several decades-old animal dioramas would be replaced because “some are mangy.”
Fri had left the museum in 2001, when the Smithsonian’s new secretary, Lawrence Small, announced plans to eliminate several departments and strip the museum of many of its traditional roles in scientific research. “I do not feel that I can make that commitment enthusiastically,” Fri said in his resignation letter.
Fri was the fourth museum director to leave the Smithsonian during the first year of Small’s tumultuous leadership. Small resigned under pressure in 2007.
Robert Wheeler Fri was born in Kansas City, Kansas, on Nov. 16, 1935. He was a 1957 physics graduate of Rice University in Houston and received a master’s degree in business administration from Harvard University in 1959.
After Navy service, he came to Washington in 1963 to work for McKinsey & Co., a management consultant firm. In 1971, Fri became the first deputy administrator of the newly formed Environmental Protection Agency and was interim administrator in 1973. He held a similar role at the Energy Research and Development Administration, a forerunner of the Department of Energy, from 1975 to 1977.
He was president of a company seeking to market alternative fuels before joining Resources for the Future in 1985.
In later years, Fri served on advisory boards studying the future of energy and climate change. He lived in Bethesda, Maryland, and was an elder and trustee of Georgetown Presbyterian Church and a member of the Cosmos Club.
Survivors include his wife of 49 years, Jean Landon “Jill” Fri of Bethesda; three sons, Perry Fri of Herndon, Virginia, Sean Fri of Takoma Park, Maryland, and Kirk Fri of Centreville, Virginia; and two granddaughters.