William Clark Vreeland

09/15/2005

William Clark Vreeland, 89, died Thursday at Timberlyn Heights Nursing Home after an extended illness. Born in Bronx, N.Y., on Feb. 20, 1916, son of Techumsah Sherman and Ella Hayes Vreeland, he graduated from Stuyvesant High School. He participated in the WPA Arts program and attended the Art Institute in New York. A Navy combat veteran of World War II, he served on Guadalcanal, Vela Lavella and Bougainville in the South Pacific as a radar operator aboard submarine chasers, and deployed with the OSS, setting up transportable field radar units in advanced positions. In 1939, Mr. Vreeland began a 43-year career at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which was interrupted by wartime service. After his education, he had started a sign-painting and graphic arts business in Hartford, Conn. In 1947, Mr. Vreeland made national news when he pulled the pilot of a crashed airplane to safety from the burning wreckage in Yonkers, N.Y. He was a longtime member of St. John's Episcopal Church in Yonkers, where he served as a vestryman and church warden. In his career at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and the Cloisters in the Bronx, he was an exhibition designer, graphic artist, restorer, serigrapher and master calligrapher. He displayed his own artwork at employee museum exhibitions, where he frequently won awards. Throughout his wartime service, he produced paintings, prints, illustrations, and sketches that journaled his experiences. Returning from the war, he was prolific over the next three decades in his production of watercolors, oil paintings, sculptures and serigraphs. He spent the last 30 years in Hillsdale, N.Y., and later in Copake, N.Y. Local subjects became the focus of his art. Several of his paintings are on exhibition at the Copake Town Hall. He was inspired by flight; he celebrated his 70th birthday hang-gliding at Kitty Hawk, N.C., and flying in a sailplane and a balloon. During the 1980s, he flew kites and launched his hang-glider from various hilltops in Columbia County. He leaves his wife of 64 years, the former Hazeletta Florence Patton of Copake; a son, Thomas Vreeland of Copake; a sister, Edna Mayer of Linwood, N.J.; two grandchildren and a great grandson. FUNERAL NOTICE -- Mr. Vreeland will be remembered at a private burial in the Hillsdale Rural Cemetery, in Hillsdale, N.Y. In lieu of flowers, memorial contributions are requested to the American Red Cross Hurricane Katrina Relief Fund. Arrangements by the PECK & PECK FUNERAL HOME, Route 22, Copake, NY 12516. To sign the online register, www.peckandpeck.net. He leaves his two grandchildren, Thomas and Kristie, and a great-grandson, Stephen.

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