{"value"=>"<p>William B. Osgood Field was born in 1870 in Geneva, Switzerland to Augusta Currie Bradhurst Field and William Hazard Field. He was educated in Dresden, Germany and at the Berkeley School in New York City. He attended the Stevens Institute of Technology and graduated in 1894 with a degree in mechanical engineering. In 1902 he married Lila Vanderbilt Sloane and between 1904 and 1911 they had four children: William Osgood, Frederick Vanderbilt, Marjorie Lila, and Mary Augusta. Lila's parents, William Douglas Sloane and Emily Vanderbilt Sloane, gave the couple two houses as wedding presents; a town house at Fifth Avenue and 51st St. and land in Lenox, Massachusetts. The architecture firm of Delano & Aldrich designed their house, High Lawn, for the Lenox land. It was completed in 1909. The family divided its time between these two homes, spending January through June in Manhattan and July through December at High Lawn. The Fields also spent some time at Westfield, Field's farm in Mohegan Lake, N.Y.</p> <p>After his graduation, Field worked as a member of the engineer corps of the New York Central and Hudson River Railroad. Between 1898 and 1902 he worked with Stevens Institute classmates Morris W. Kellogg and Otis A. Mygatt to establish their respective companies, the M.W. Kellogg Company and the Holophane Glass Company. He served as Kellogg's vice-president between 1903-1909 and remained financially interested in both companies throughout his life. From 1903-1905, he attended Columbia University, taking courses in biology and zoology.</p> <p>In 1900, his uncle, Osgood Field, died and left the majority of his estate to his wife, Katharine Roxana Parker Field, who died the following year. The estate then passed to Field. He retired from business, returning to full-time work only during World War I.</p> <p>During the war he served as Quartermaster of the Columbia War Hospital (U.S. Army General Hospital No.1) in the United States Army Officers' Reserve Corps and for the United States Army Base Hospital No. 2, the Presbyterian Hospital's unit in France. In January of 1918, Field was assigned as a lieutenant to the Signal Officers' Reserve Corps to attend the School of Aerial Photography at Cornell University. In October he was promoted to captain and moved to Washington, D.C. to become assistant to the Chief of the Military Intelligence Division (MID). He was promoted to the rank of major in June of 1919, one month before he was discharged. Field became a member of the MID's Reserve Corps in 1921 and remained active in the Reserve until 1929.</p> <p>Field's charitable and philanthropic interests included the Big Brother Movement, the House of Refuge on Randall's Island in New York City, and the Sloane Hospital for Women. He donated time and money to a number of organizations, but was most involved with the House of Refuge. He was appointed to the Board of Managers for the Society for the Reformation of Juvenile Delinquents in the City of New York (commonly known as the House of Refuge) in 1907 and served on a number of committees and as an inspector until his resignation in 1924. As a member of the parole board, he took a personal interest in at least two of the inmates with whom he maintained a correspondence that lasted for a number of years.</p> <p>Field was a serious bibliophile. Although he amassed distinguished collections of prints, stamps, coins, crucifixes, and other items, books were his passion. In 1904 he began a forty-year membership in the Grolier Club, serving as president from 1925-1928. He organized exhibits, made gifts and loans of books to the Club, and arranged for the private printings of books for its members. Field also published two catalogs of material from major areas of his own collections: <span class=\"title\">Edward Lear On My Shelves</span> and <span class=\"title\">John Leech on My Shelves</span>. In addition to his collections of Leech and Lear, Field created one of the largest collections of Rudyard Kipling first editions. In 1942, he bequeathed parts of his collection to the Harvard College Library, including his books and Lear drawings.</p> <p>Field and his family traveled extensively. He toured Europe as a child and young man, with his family and on his own. In 1897-1898 he traveled to India with George Washington Vanderbilt and kept a diary in the form of letters that he sent regularly to his mother and sister. Early in his marriage, he and Lila spent winters in Florida fishing for tarpon and Lila recorded their catches in her diaries. The couple were members of the Little Cascapedia Fish and Game Club, a group of ten members that leased the Little Cascapedia River and 100 square miles of land around it from the provincial government of Quebec with exclusive fishing and hunting rights to the area. Throughout his thirty-year membership, Field served as secretary, vice-president, and president of the Club. The family would fish there during the summers for trout and salmon and hunt for moose and other game in the fall. Field also traveled frequently to Germany. He visited the spa town Marienbad throughout the 1920s and 1930s and also visited Berlin, Hamburg, and Munich.</p> <p>When Lila died in 1934, Field retreated to Westfield and away from the busy life he had led with his family. He married a young German woman, Erika Segnitz, in 1936. Their marriage was a surprise to his family and to society at large, both of which disapproved of the match. The disapproval led him to withdraw further, and he and Erika divorced in 1940. He was married again in 1944 to Mary Hemenway, his nurse and companion. They lived together at Westfield until his death in 1949.</p> <p>Sources:</p> <p>Field, Frederick Vanderbilt. <span class=\"title\">From Right to Left: An Autobiography</span>. Westport, Conn.: L. Hill, 1983.</p> <p>Field, <span class=\"title\">William O. With a Camera in My Hands: A Life History</span>. Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, c2004.</p>"}