Harold Van Buskirk
American fencer (1894–1980)
Harold Van Buskirk (February 20, 1894 – October 25, 1980) was an American architect and fencing champion, and a three-time member of the US Olympic fencing team. During World War I, he was the officer in charge of the US Navy Camouflage Section, which designed and tested camouflage for American ships, both military and civilian (Van Buskirk 1919).
Early years
Born in Brooklyn, New York, his birth name was Charles Harold Van Buskirk. He attended college at the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned a BS in architecture in 1915, and fenced for the University of Pennsylvania Quakers.
Camouflage service
During World War I, Van Buskirk was a lieutenant in the US Naval Reserve Force. Initially connected with the Submarine Defense Association, in March 1918 he was put in charge of the Camouflage Section, a newly formed government unit within the Bureau of Construction and Repair (Skerrett 1919:101). The Camouflage Section had two subsections, the Design Subsection (located in Washington DC) and the Research Subsection (located at Eastman Kodak Laboratories in Rochester, New York). The former, which was largely made up of artists, was led by a painter named Everett L. Warner, while the latter, whose members where mostly scientists, was under the direction of Eastman Kodak's head physicist, Loyd A. Jones (Warner 1919:105-106). Van Buskirk was the executive head of the two subsections, which included making certain that the patterns produced by these units were being correctly adapted to merchant ships by civilian painters. The task of commissioning painters to apply dazzle camouflage patterns to the ships was given to a civilian agency, the Emergency Fleet Corporation (Van Buskirk 1919:227).
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This entry incorporates text from “Harold Van Buskirk” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.