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Almost as soon as War was declared, the War Department called for thin, small, dyspeptic Dr. Bashford Dean, made him a major, sent him to France to design body armor for U. S. troops. In France he slightly modified the saucer-shaped British trench helmet for U. S. use, then stood —a short, firm-jawed St. Sebastian in a suit of Dean's Body Armor, Light (9 lbs.) —while officers 10 ft. away fired automatic pistols at him. Dean's Body Armor, Heavy, withstood rifle fire at 50 yards, and though unwieldy was adopted by U. S. aviators.
Never robust, he died at Battle Creek Sanitarium in 1928. Apart from the panoplies which he bought, borrowed, persuaded art patrons to give to the Metropolitan, he left in his Riverdale home one of the three finest private collections of armor in the world, a collection appraised at over $650,000. The cream of this collection appeared last week in the Metropolitan's Bashford Dean Memorial Hall.
Bashford Dean had an Italian bravo's love of fine armor. He felt that a suit of armor on a museum rack is as dead as a fish's skeleton. Fine armor is meant to be worn. Its beauty is not alone in the lines of the steel, the delicacy of the engraving, but in the play of light on the moving body, the way pauldron and cuisse move with the wearer. Several years ago he took motion pictures of museum attendants walking, riding, fighting in some of the museum's most valuable suits. This is now the most popular film the Metropolitan owns. Many times he begged the museum authorities to set aside certain days on which the public could see men-at-arms walking about the museum floor. Children in Riverdale loved him for the cool afternoons when he would dress himself in 60 lbs. of 17th Century harness and stride about the lawns of his Riverdale home for their benefit.