William Clark Vreeland died Thursday, September 15, 2005, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts at the age of 89, after an extended illness. He was a US Navy combat veteran of WWII, during which 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.
Mr. Vreeland was born in New York City on February 20, 1916, the son of Techumsah Sherman Vreeland and Ella Hayes. He attended New York City schools and graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School, participated in the WPA Arts program, and attended the Art Institute in New York. After school, he started a sign painting and graphic arts business in Hartford, Connecticut, and in 1939 he began a 43 year career at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which was interrupted by wartime service. In 1947, Mr. Vreeland made the national news services as a hero, when he pulled the pilot of a crashed airplane to safety from the burning wreckage, in Yonkers, NY.
Mr Vreeland was a long time member of St. John's Episcopal Church in Yonkers, where he served as a Vestryman and as a Church Warden.
In his distinguished career at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, and at 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 which journalled 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 his retirement, for the last 30 years, in the Berkshires, living first in Hillsdale, and later in Copake, New York. Local subjects became the focus of his artwork. Several of his paintings are on permanent exhibition at the Copake Town Hall. Always inspired by flight, he celebrated his 70th birthday hang gliding at Kitty Hawk, NC, and flying in a sailplane and a balloon. During the 1980s he could be seen flying kites and launching his hang glider from various hilltops in Columbia County.
He is survived by his wife of 64 years, Hazeletta Florence Vreeland, a sister, Edna Mayer of Linwood, New Jersey, one son, Thomas, two grandchildren, Thomas and Kristie, and a great grandson, Stephen.